8. Cory
8
CORY
S calding water cascaded down my back.
The little bathroom in the infirmary at Vesperwood filled with steam and the scent of eucalyptus shampoo. It felt so good to wash off the past few days of grime, but the longer I stood under the water, the more I wished I could wash off my memories too. Wash out the facts of what I’d done. Of what I was .
An incubus.
I was still wrapping my head around that. I had no reason to doubt what the dean had told me. Well, other than the fact that it sounded utterly insane. But no matter how hot I ran the water, I couldn’t convince myself that he was lying, or that this was all some creepy hallucination.
No, I’d experienced too much now to believe the world was the mundane, quotidian place I’d thought it was back in Churchill. There was magic in the world. I couldn’t hide from it anymore.
With a sigh, I turned the shower off and stepped out into a world of mist. I couldn’t see anything in the mirror, could barely even see a foot in front of my face. I felt for my towel and was in the middle of rubbing myself dry when I heard sounds in the infirmary.
There was the telltale creak of the door to the hall, followed by footsteps. Then the hushed tones of speech, like two people were having an argument while trying to sneak up on me.
My heart stopped. Logic told me it was probably just the dean and that woman, Cinda, who’d woken me up at three a.m. to give me another tonic. But I’d had way too many close calls to trust that logic.
I wrapped the towel around my waist and looked around for a weapon. Shampoo bottle, washcloth, toothpaste—not a lot of options. With a grimace, I grabbed the toothbrush lying on the edge of the sink. Brandishing it like a knife, I walked to the bathroom door and threw it open.
Oh.
It was Ash. Of course. The dean had said he’d come find me in the morning. I felt like an idiot.
“You are still here!” Ash said brightly. “We were just wondering if you’d left already. Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt your brushing.”
Ash wasn’t alone. Standing half a pace to the right and looking apologetic was a second man. He looked about Ash’s age, and was tall and thin with medium brown skin. His curly black hair was cut short, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He had a leather bag filled with cloth-bound books hanging over one shoulder, and his right arm cradled five more to his chest. He looked like a stork who’d grown up to become a librarian.
The effect was intensified by the fact that Felix wore a crisp white button-up shirt with gray wool trousers. Ash, on the other hand, wore a dark green sweater that was too big for him, with visible darning and patches, over a pair of flared bluejeans that hadn’t been in style since the 1970s. A yellow and purple striped scarf was draped around his neck.
“This is Felix.” Ash nodded at the stork. “He’s another student here.”
“Um, hi.” I lowered my hand. What was I going to do with that toothbrush anyway? De-tartar them to death? “It’s nice to meet you.”
Felix met my eyes briefly, then went back to staring at the books in his arm, as though their spines contained fascinating information. He didn’t speak until we’d broken eye contact, and his, “Hey,” was barely audible.
“He’s not a big talker,” Ash said with a shrug and a smile. “Anyway, we thought we’d show you around Vesperwood today, help you figure out where your classes are, your room, the refectory, all that stuff. Well, I guess technically Dean Mansur told us to do that, but that’s okay, we don’t mind. This place is a maze, and there are definitely some parts you don’t want to wander into by mistake. I swear I still get lost sometimes. I can’t imagine trying to get the hang of it on my own.”
“Those parts are pretty clearly marked,” Felix said softly, as if he were addressing his books. His left wrist was encircled by another twisting cuff of metal and crystal, more restrained and elegant than the wild one that Ash wore.
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard them correctly. “I thought this place was a university. Why would any parts be dangerous for students?”
“One wonders, doesn’t one?” Ash said cryptically.
“It’s not that bad,” Felix said. “Just steer clear, anytime you see a symbol with crossed wands and stars, or a crossed arrow and axe, and you’ll be alright.”
“ That’s optimistic.” Ash’s voice was dour, but the grin he gave me was bright. “Anyway, are you ready to go?”
Neither of them had actually answered my question, but they’d definitely managed to make me even more anxious than I’d already been, so that was fun. Ash jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, then started for the door.
“I, um—I’m kind of…” I trailed off, pointing to my waist, and the damp towel still wrapped around it.
“Oh my God, of course.” Ash laughed. “I’m an idiot. Yeah, no, go ahead and change.”
“Thanks.” I looked at Ash and Felix, waiting for them to offer to meet me out in the hall. Neither of them said anything, though, and neither one moved. After a moment, I said, “I guess I’ll just go change in the bathroom, then.”
“Why?” Ash sounded puzzled.
“Well, because I’m…um…naked? Under here?” I gestured to my towel again.
“Yeah, but—oh, I get it,” Ash said as I grabbed the change of clothes lying on the bed. “You can change in there if you want, but really, we don’t care.”
Felix darted another glance over at me. “You’ll have to forgive Ash. Modesty is a foreign concept to him.”
“But neither of us is interested in him.” Ash frowned at Felix, then looked at me. “I mean, not like, interested interested. I promise, I think you’re very interesting in a general sense. One of the more interesting people I’ve met, and I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I moved a lot as a kid, and some of the places we went, I was—”
“People don’t have to be afraid of your intentions to not want to change in front of you,” Felix said. “He barely knows either of us.”
“Fine, fine. I’m just saying, you’re not my type. Or Felix’s. Not that you’re not attractive.” He flicked a finger back and forth between himself and Felix. “But we’re actually—”
“This is ridiculous.” Felix threw me another apologetic look. “We’ll go out to the hall and wait for you there. Take your time.”
He dragged a still protesting Ash out the door, closing it firmly behind them.
The first time I’d entered the academy, it had been dark, and I was nearly unconscious, so I didn’t have much sense of the building other than: big . But as Ash and Felix led me through a spider’s web of twisting corridors, sudden staircases, and rooms within rooms, I began to realize that big had been a big understatement.
One symbol kept appearing, carved into wood panels, set in stained glass, and woven into tapestries—a tall tree with many twisted branches, a crescent moon suspended in between them. One door we passed displayed the symbol, but each leaf on the tree was inlaid with emerald, and the crescent moon was worked in diamond. It was beautiful, and just a tiny bit spooky.
“This place is huge,” I said as we climbed what had to be our third set of stairs.
“I know, right?” Ash threw a glance over his shoulder. “It used to be a castle or something—”
“Manor,” Felix corrected.
“—Built by exiled European royalty—”
“Timber magnate,” said Felix.
“—In the sixteen hundreds—”
“Eighteen hundreds. White colonizers were present in the area before that, but the coureurs des bois were hardly building mansions.”
“—And he made it super confusing with secret passages and stuff because he was this crazy magician who was paranoid about his rivals stealing his secrets.”
“Or, he was just an old man who didn’t like his inlaws,” Felix said. “There’s no actual evidence that he had any magical abilities at all. What we do know is that at the time, his entire extended family, and his wife’s family, lived here with him, and his journals suggest he wasn’t too pleased about that. From what we can tell, he designed Vesperwood so that he wouldn’t have to encounter any relatives he didn’t like. He hoped the structure would be too confusing for them, and he wanted to be able to disappear through hidden doorways if he saw someone coming down the hall who he didn’t want to talk to.”
It was the longest speech I’d heard out of Felix thus far, and he looked vaguely embarrassed to have talked for so long.
“Anyway,” Ash continued, “one of his relatives was definitely a witch, and she’s the one who turned Vesperwood into an academy, to train and organize human spellcasters in their fight to defend the earth from us terrible, horrible, evil monsters.”
I blinked. “Monsters? What do you mean?”
Ash snorted and stopped walking. Morning sunlight slanted in from a casement window, bathing him and Felix in warm amber tones.
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” He pointed to his chest. “I’m an untrustworthy changeling, here to ensnare you in my nefarious plots.” He pointed at Felix. “And he’s no better.”
Felix looked up from the worn navy and cream carpet and raised his free hand in a claw-like motion. “Demon. Rarr.”
“Well, technically, he’s a fallen angel,” Ash said. “One of the nephilim.”
“Otherwise known as a demon.” Felix shrugged. “The difference is one of vocabulary, not semantics.”
“Fallen angel?” I blinked. “Does that mean God is real? Wait, do you have wings?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “And your guess is as good as mine on the God thing.”
I looked at Ash. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but…what is a changeling?”
“It’s okay, you can be rude. I usually am. A changeling is just a fancy word for ‘ faerie that nobody wanted .’ Which is kind of fitting, when you think about it. First my family didn’t want me, and now I’m at Vesperwood, which doesn’t want me either.”
“It’s not that bad,” Felix said.
“Oh come on, you know they don’t want us here,” Ash retorted.
“They?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around these revelations.
“You know. The pure, pristine, beautiful, and good witches who are just trying to protect their homeland and definitely aren’t actively persecuting paranormal beings who are minding their own business. Beautiful and good human witches, who are endowed with their own magical abilities but are totally, completely, and absolutely nothing like us dirty supernatural creatures. Beautiful and good humans who for sure don’t want to round us up and kill us or anything.”
Felix sighed. “Ash is exaggerating a bit.”
“Did they or did they not hunt the Trieste Vampire Collective into extinction in 1896? Did they or did they not force the entire shifter world into hiding after 1947? Did they or did they not issue the Proclamation of Proactive Defense, essentially putting a price on the head of any paranormal being found within the territories of the United States?”
“That’s been rescinded.”
“Only partially.”
Felix sighed again. I got the feeling he did that a lot. “You have to remember the environment from which each of those movements arose.”
“Yeah, an environment of witches being terrified of anything they don’t understand,” Ash said, his voice bitter. “They murdered an entire family of selkies on Vesperwood’s own grounds in 1961, you know.”
“I thought I was the Historian.”
“Well, then do a better job of it! Stop apologizing for witches just because you want them to be nice to you.”
“I’m not apologizing for anyone. I’m just saying it’s more nuanced than most people—witches or paranormal beings—want to admit. No one’s hands are clean.” Felix turned to me. “Sorry, you didn’t ask for a dissertation on the magical history of the past four centuries.”
“No, but I’m starting to think I might need one,” I said, my stomach tight. “I thought Vesperwood was supposed to be a safe place for people like—like us.”
I hadn’t told Ash or Felix what I was, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I just needed more time to get used to the idea of being an incubus myself, before I shared it with anyone else. I was beginning to feel a bit guilty about referring to the tenelkiri as monsters, though. I hadn’t realized it was such a touchy subject.
“Well, of course it’s safe for you ,” Ash said, at the same time that Felix said, “Vesperwood is safe. Now, at least.”
“Mostly,” Ash added darkly.
“It is .” Felix looked at me. “The Cliff’s Notes version is that Earth is supposed to be a neutral zone, a world in which everyone—witches, paranormal beings, and mundane humans—can exist in peace. But a long time ago, various supernatural beings broke that peace and attempted to oppress humanity and make Earth their own dominion. Witches, naturally, weren’t big fans of that, so they founded schools like Vesperwood Academy to learn how to protect their lives, and those of mundane humans, and to keep Earth a free and peaceful place.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Ash said.
Felix gave him a pointed look. “Both sides have committed excesses in the name of defense, and neither side is as much a monolith as anyone would like to believe. There have always been paranormal beings who fought alongside witches, and there have always been witches with dreams of dominion and enslavement. These days, Vesperwood Academy admits any student who wants to further their understanding of magic and the paranormal, as long as they’re committed to maintaining peace and freedom among all beings on Earth.”
“Yeah, but only because Dean Mansur instituted that rule when he reopened the academy,” Ash said stubbornly. “If he ever left Vesperwood, how long do you think that rule would stay in place?”
“It’s pointless to argue about hypotheticals.” Felix glanced at his watch. “Besides, we’re going to be late to class if we stand around any longer. First Hour’s about to start.”
They continued down the corridor, and I followed in silence. This was a lot to take in. I was having enough trouble getting used to being an incubus. I hadn’t reckoned on prejudice from other students too.
We got to our first class with a minute to spare, and Ash hurried to the back of the room. He pointed to an empty desk beside him, giving me a questioning look. I turned to Felix, who was slipping into a desk in the front row.
“Sit wherever you want,” he said. “Nothing’s assigned. Ash just likes to sit back there so he can launch spitballs. I like it better up here. It’s easier for note-taking. Oh. Here.” He held out the five books he’d carried in his arms. “These are for you.”
I grunted as he placed the stack in my hands. They were heavier than they looked, and a tiny cloud of dust rose around me. I fought the urge to sneeze.
I inspected the titles. Spellwork II: Theory and Casting for the Modern Witch ; Environmental Magic: Principles and Purposes ; Alchemical Approaches to the Preternatural, Seventh Edition; Supernatural Relations and Communication ; and Fundamentals of Magical Healing .
“Shit,” I said, looking around frantically. Spellwork II? That implied the existence of a Spellwork I class that I’d obviously missed. Could I even do spells? The dean hadn’t said anything about that last night. I felt deeply unprepared for all of this.
I glanced back at Felix, wanting to explain my mounting panic, but all that came out of my mouth was, “I didn’t even think about like, notes, or a pen, or anything.”
“It’s okay. I have extras.” Felix dug into his bag and handed me a yellow legal pad and a chunky push-pen with the name Angler’s Rest printed on it in curling blue letters, with a green fish arcing over the top.
In the time we’d been talking, the seats around him had filled up. So I thanked Felix and headed towards Ash in the back, right as a deep bell boomed four times, a heavy sound that reverberated through the building.
I felt the eyes of the classroom on me and heard a murmured, “Who’s that?” as I threaded my way through the desks. Ash patted the empty seat next to him and I sank into it gratefully before looking around.
Vesperwood might be a university, but this room felt like nothing so much as a middle school classroom from the 1950s. The desk-and-chair combinations were arranged in rows facing a big blackboard at the front of the room, with two bulletin boards on either side. I half expected to see book reports and art projects adorning the walls.
The floor was planks of warm oak, worn pale in places where countless feet had tread. The windows were framed in the same wood, letting in such bright morning sunshine that it felt like summer rather than January. Other students, male and female, exchanged quiet words and laughs in the lively light.
A massive wooden desk sat in front of the blackboard with a globe on one corner and a small, potted jade plant on the other. The globe was the only thing that didn’t fit the middle school vibe. It looked like it had been transported from a Victorian academic’s study. The oceans were a faded brown, the continents a dusty green, and gold script dotted the surface. I thought I could see a sea monster lurking down near Antarctica. A student walked by the desk and her movement set the globe in motion. Was I imagining it, or were the letters changing, words appearing and disappearing as the globe spun?
I was still frowning at the globe when another figure walked to the front, and the room fell silent. I looked up to see a statuesque woman with blond hair curling loosely over her shoulders as she leaned back against the desk. She wore a sweater vest over a frilly pink blouse, with herringbone tweed pants.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said, her tones cool and mellifluous. “I understand we have a new student joining us today.”
The room grew even quieter, and twenty-four heads turned to stare at me and Ash in the back corner. The woman at the front gestured at me to stand, and I swallowed.
Now I really felt like I was back in middle school. I’d always hated being the center of attention. It was a lot harder to avoid bullying when the teacher put you in the spotlight, reminding the bullies that you existed, and that it had been three whole days since they’d last beaten you up at lunch.
Reminding myself that I wasn’t twelve anymore, I stood up. The woman at the front of the room folded her arms across her chest and looked at me expectantly.
Unsure of what to say, I settled for a wave and a weak smile. “Um. Hi. I’m Cory. It’s nice to meet all of you.”
I swept my gaze quickly over the room, trying to feign comfort. Most of the faces I saw looked bored to mildly interested, but I couldn’t help noticing three that didn’t. A guy with brown hair who was almost too muscular to fit into his desk, a girl with long black hair and cat-eye mascara, and a guy with sandy blond hair who looked like a live-action Ken doll. All three of them were watching me with narrowed eyes.
When the blond guy saw me looking at him, his expression went from disdainful to amused, his lip curling into a smile that looked almost predatory. I jerked my gaze away and saw his smile broaden from the corner of my eye.
I looked back at the woman in the front of the room. After a moment, she smiled and said, “Welcome, Cory. I’m Professor Kazansky. We’re happy to have you here. You’re joining us midway through the year, of course, so I’m afraid you’ll have some catching up to do, but I have every confidence that you’ll meet my expectations.”
That didn’t sound ominous or anything. I nodded uncertainly, and she motioned for me to sit down as she turned to the blackboard, picking up a piece of chalk. I sat down with relief as she scrawled the words, ‘ Influencing Your Light - Growth Versus Motion ,’ on the board. It sounded like the title of a multi-level marketing seminar, but I had a feeling it meant something different here.
“What did she mean, catching up?” I asked Ash under my breath. “Do the courses run year-round here?”
“No, but this is a distribution requirement. Spellwork II. You missed Spellwork I. But it’s okay. We’ll help you get up to speed.” He laughed softly. “Or, well, Felix will. I’m not sure you want my notes.”
I realized that in contrast to everyone else in the room, he didn’t even have a paper and pen on his desk. I opened my mouth to ask him about that when Professor Kazansky moved back to her perch at the front of the desk and began talking again.
“Now, we left off our previous lecture discussing the different ways to manipulate your basic illumination spell. Last semester, you learned how to expand and contract the output of your incantation by absorbing or releasing more or less energy from the network.”
None of that made any sense to me, but a moment later, she held up the palm of her hand, whispered the word, “ Light .”
A tiny globe of pure white light appeared in the air above her hand. The class watched in silence as she closed and opened her fingers below the light, which seemed to make it expand and contact in size.
My stomach did a little roller coaster dance as I watched. I felt like I was in free-fall. Magic. She was doing magic. It was real .
You might think I’d have accepted that by now, what with the tenelkiri and talking raven and you’re-an-incubus of it all, but I couldn’t stop a thrill from running through me. My chest felt filled to bursting with a bright, kinetic glow, and I thought I might explode with excitement and wonder.
When I was a kid, I used to love fantasy books. Dragons, knights, wizards—I’d imagine myself as a different person or creature with each new book I checked out from the library. It didn’t matter to me, as long as they had power.
I yearned to live in a world where magic was real. To be taken away from the dull and painful reality of my life. Or, if that couldn’t happen, to have some of that magical power back in the real world. To be able to stand up for myself. To fight back when my dad got angry. To take control of my life.
I knew it couldn’t really happen. I gave up on youthful wishes long ago. Life was what it was, and you had to take the hand you’d been dealt and make the best of it, even if the best meant just surviving, just living through another day.
And suddenly, years after I’d surrendered any hope that my life would change, here I was at a magical university, finding out all the things I’d dreamed of were real. Well…maybe not dragons, but magic, at the very least. I bit down hard on my lip to keep back the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes.
What would a place like this have meant to a twelve-year-old Cory? Even if he couldn’t come here yet. Just knowing it existed, knowing there was a way out…
I pressed my lips tight and closed my eyes firmly until I was sure I could open them without crying. That was definitely not the first impression I was hoping to make on my peers here. I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes, letting them flick back to the board. I guess Professor Kazansky had meant ‘ Influencing Your Light ’ literally. My attention snapped back to her as she spoke.
“Your first practical assessment this semester will ask you to move your output further from and closer to yourself and other objects. Who can tell me one of the primary differences between manipulating size versus motion?”
The girl with black hair who’d glared at me earlier raised her hand, and Professor Kazansky called on her. “Yes, Rekha?”
“The difficulty of controlling the output increases exponentially rather than linearly as distance from the body grows,” she said, “requiring more precise control of the flows called from the network, and therefore more strength.”
“Indeed,” Kazansky said, and the girl smiled, pleased with herself.
The ball of light disappeared from above Professor Kazansky’s hand, only to reappear four feet away from me, hovering at the back of the room, above the head of a girl with two long, brown braids sitting on my right.
“That,” Kazansky said, indicating the ball of light with a nod, “is much more difficult than this .” The light reappeared above her palm. “Last semester, you worked to sense and control filaments from the network close to your own body. As Rekha says, you will find it considerably more difficult to maintain that control at a distance, enabling your light to appear at a remove from your body. And increasing and decreasing that distance while displaying your light continuously will tax each of you beyond your current capabilities.”
She paused to allow her light to zoom back to its place at the back of the classroom, speeding across the room like a dragonfly. The class watched, rapt, as it completed a pirouette and three little loops, then swooped and spun its way around the room like a figure skater before returning to hover above Kazansky’s hand.
“ Out ,” she said, closing her hand into a fist. The light disappeared, and a tiny part of me sighed in regret.
She smiled at the class. “This semester will be more challenging than your last in multiple ways. Not only will your spellwork grow more complex, but as you will have noted on your schedules, your lab time is dedicated to an exploration of the havens, to help you choose the one you’ll apply to in May. So, you’ll have to practice most of your casting on your own time.”
She lifted her hand again, but instead of a globe of light appearing, she snapped and said, “ Erase .” She didn’t look over her shoulder at all, but behind her, an eraser rose in the air and swiped over the words she’d chalked onto the board behind her. No sooner had the writing disappeared than a piece of chalk winged its way up the board and wrote, ‘ Yang and Leizenbock’s Principles of Matrix Manipulation ,’ before enumerating four points below it.
Wow. I did have a lot of catching up to do. Everyone around me began copying what the chalk scrawled across the board, and with a jolt, I realized that I’d better do the same. It was time to stop being wonderstruck.
I grabbed the pen Felix had given me and began copying. It felt a little funny, using such mundane implements to write about magic , but then again, it wasn’t like I had any idea how to make a piece of chalk write on its own.
But maybe, if I worked hard, I’d learn.
I grinned, and got to work.