Strength of Desire (Vesperwood Academy: Incubus #2)

6. Noah

6

NOAH

M orning came, and I met Hans and Eddie in the gym. Neither of them was thrilled to be—fine, I’ll say it— helping me , but they were there. It was hard to say ‘ no ’ when Isaac asked you to do something. His asks weren’t actually requests. Not really.

All my students were high-strung, jumping at the sound of Eddie closing the gym door as the last few arrived from the manor. I was glad I’d planned to go back to basics with them. They wouldn’t have the focus to run through complicated exercises without hurting themselves. And the five mile run did tire them out wonderfully.

The next day was more of the same, though some of the Hunters were getting fractious, just as I’d predicted. Some of my juniors asked if Vesperwood was sending out any hunting parties for moraghin in the surroundings. Another asked if the campus needed more guards. A senior Hunter asked if we could work on moraghin-specific fighting techniques—and then proceeded to trip over his own feet in the agility drill I’d set for them.

All of them were disappointed when my answer was negative. The fact of the matter was that I did have a moraghin-specific fighting style that I could have worked with them on any other time of the year. Moraghin’s long limbs and razor-sharp claws required long-range weaponry and spellcraft. Exactly the opposite of what I’d done on the day they’d attacked. But the students were too eager, too giddy, to teach them that yet. And I didn’t want to give them ideas.

The underclassmen, at least, seemed less desperate to hunt moraghin themselves, especially since there was still no official word on how the attack had occurred. Some of them looked like they would have been glad to have extra faculty accompany them on the walk to and from the gym, and not just on our runs around campus.

The freshmen who’d seen the attack were holding up better than I expected. Cinda was undoubtedly right. They would have mental images, flashbacks even, to what happened in the gym that afternoon. But as the next week wore on, and I continued to put them through punishing endurance workouts, I hoped I was giving them new, vivid memories to overwrite the old ones.

I couldn’t take away what had happened, and I wouldn’t coddle them, lying about what a safe place the world was. But if I could make them tired enough, and annoyed enough with me, maybe that would push out the fear.

Most knew better than to complain. Even Sean and his clique were mostly silent on the matter. I heard Sean mutter, “treated like we know nothing,” as I walked by him during wall-sits, but he had the sense to shut up once he realized I was within earshot.

I let it go, turning to walk down the line in the other direction. Felix, Ash, and Cory were at the far end, and I stiffened when I saw them, in spite of myself. I took a deep breath and forced myself to keep walking normally. I couldn’t tense up every time I saw the kid. I was better than that.

Cory was fine. Cinda had cleared him to participate, so he had to be. And if he had any troubling memories of the attack, at least he wasn’t making them my problem. Wasn’t testing my patience the way so many other students were.

He was far from the strongest student in the class. He might, in fact, have been the weakest. I wondered if he’d ever run a single mile before, let alone a five-mile loop around the grounds. He didn’t have much muscle definition, and while he was flexible, his balance and agility needed work.

But there he was, bracing against the wall like everyone else, thighs shaking, gutting it out.

He’d fallen numerous times over the last week. Been the last to finish in both our distance runs and sprints. His muscles had given out in the middle of a plank two days ago, landing him flat on his face. But he hadn’t complained once. He’d just dragged himself back into position and tried again, until I called time.

Sean could learn a thing or two from him , whispered the voice at the back of my mind.

I grunted.

Cory had been completely frozen in front of that moragh. Mostly frozen, anyway. He had no strength to speak of. Needed constant looking after. And that wasn’t my job. I could instruct, but I wasn’t the kid’s protector.

So why couldn’t I get his face out of my mind when I lay down to sleep? And why did my body feel electrified, drawn to his like a magnet, any time he was in sight?

No one else knew what to do with the moraghin either, whispered that traitorous voice. You yelled at Sean and Tim for trying to jump in with weapons. Is that what you wanted Cory to do ?

I shoved the thought away. I didn’t want Cory to do anything.

It was a week after the attack before I had any free time to work on Isaac’s spy mission. I felt ridiculous. I wasn’t cut out for subtlety. But Isaac clearly felt the attack had been an inside job. I agreed, and the thought made my blood boil. I could do a little spying if that was what it took to catch whoever had been behind it.

After Second Hour, I walked with Hans, Eddie, and the students back to the manor, then followed Hans into the staff room. He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and flopped down on the sofa, stretching his legs out.

“Whew.” He twisted the top off the bottle. “I don’t know how you do that day in, day out. I think I’ve lost twenty pounds in the past week.”

Aside from accompanying the students on runs, Hans hadn’t been doing anything, but I didn’t point that out. The idea was to make nice with him.

“It keeps me busy,” I said with a shrug.

I sat down in the chair to the left of the sofa and drummed my fingers on the ratty green fabric covering the arm. Hans gave me a quizzical look. So much for my attempt to look relaxed. I wasn’t usually one for casual conversation. He had to know something was up.

Maybe I could use that to my advantage. I paused, letting silence stretch out between us until I judged Hans was on tenterhooks. Right when he opened his mouth to speak, I said, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

His eyes widened. Me asking for a favor was even weirder than me attempting low-stakes chit-chat. I knew I had a reputation for being stand-offish. I hoped that would just make him more curious.

“Of course,” Hans said, leaning forward. “I mean, assuming—well, you know.”

I made myself laugh, nice and easy. It felt foreign in my mouth. “All above board, don’t worry. I was just wondering if you could walk me through how the wards work. Especially this new bit that you all added.”

I’d heard they’d done some tinkering to make the spell more effective. But Hans’s eyes narrowed. Had I sounded too accusatory?

I shook my head, and decided to try channeling Seb. Everyone liked him. How would he handle this?

“Most of this stuff just goes over my head,” I said, doing my best to sound apologetic. “But I can’t help worrying. Not about you guys, obviously. I know you’re doing everything you can. It’s just—those freshmen who were in class when the moraghin attacked. They’re a wreck. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’d just feel a lot better if someone would walk me through how the wards work. Treat me like an idiot—because I am one when it comes to this stuff.”

“Oh.” Hans blinked, then nodded to himself. “Yeah. Of course. That’s no problem. You see, the basic enchantment principle is predicated on the functionality of the invisibility matrix woven into the fabric of Vesperwood’s physical manifestation on this plane of reality. Given the inherent modularity of the—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, rushing to forestall him before he really got going, “but—another request. Do you think you could show me the ward room, too? Like I said, this isn’t my area of expertise. It might help me grasp it better if I could see it, too.”

He nodded again. “Of course. Yes. I think. Well, I’m sure no one would mind if—that is, it’s just to explain to you how the spell works, right? I don’t see how anyone could object to that.”

“I promise I won’t touch anything,” I said, giving my best self-deprecating grin. God, how did Seb do this every day? I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. “Could you show me now?”

It seemed best not to give Hans too much time to second-guess himself, and five minutes later, we were on the fourth floor of the manor, standing in front of the door to the ward room. Hans had blathered about moon phases and the effects of minute shifts in gravity on human spellwork on our walk, but now he fell silent.

I’d passed by the ward room before, but had never had cause to look inside. As I watched Hans approach the door, I realized I couldn’t have looked, even if I had wanted to. It was locked to all except the wardkeepers themselves.

He murmured a spell too low for me to hear and passed his hand in front of the door in a complicated motion. I tried to clock it—up, then right to left, back up again, then down, finished with a pulling motion and a flick of the wrist to the right as though he were brushing away a gnat.

Memorizing the motion wouldn’t make any difference if I hadn’t heard the spell, and it wasn’t like I could do magic anyway. But Isaac had told me to watch as well as listen, so I did the best I could.

Finally, Hans opened the door and ushered me inside. I walked three steps into the room and stopped, staring at the scene before me.

The room itself wasn’t large. Maybe fifteen by fifteen feet, with a bay window opposite the door that pushed out and added a few extra feet on that side. That entire wall was filled with windows, through which I could see the cool blue of the winter sky.

The floor was covered with an eight-pointed star, drawn directly on the wood in something liquid and crimson. A glowing green jewel hovered above the middle of the star, just floating in mid-air. Thin lines of light, golden and sparkling, emanated from the jewel, retracing the star pattern in the air. Every few seconds, a bright comet of light shot from one point of the star to another, both in the air and along the crimson pattern on the ground.

This wasn’t subtle magic, and it wasn’t a quick battle spell either. The whole room radiated power, and the air smelled like ozone. The star was massive, taking up most of the floor. I slid sideways around it to the right. I didn’t know what would happen if I crossed into the pattern, and I didn’t want to find out.

Hans closed the door behind us and walked around the star to the left, not even glancing at it. I supposed the sight was ordinary for him, as a wardkeeper. He pulled a heavy book off a shelf beneath the bay window and continued his circuit until he reached me.

He opened the book to a page about two-thirds of the way through, filled with minute, cursive writing in various colors of ink. I squinted. The text was hard to read due to its size, but I also wasn’t sure it was written in English. I looked at Hans.

“Vesperwood’s grimoire,” he said, seeing the question in my eyes.

That was another surprise. Individual witches were supposed to have grimoires. Occasionally large families or clans had them. But not institutions. I was learning more about magic than I’d expected today.

I did my best to focus on Hans’s explanation of how the ward worked. The power that had gone into it, the ritual used to invoke it, the magical theory underlying its mechanism, and, ‘ the delicacy of the otherworld-lattice that knits the filaments of spectral energy into the finest lace of double-matrix spellwork .’

That last bit was a direct quote, though God help me if I had any idea what it meant.

Hans flipped through additional pages of the grimoire, filled with yet more minute text, until he reached a page with a diagram that looked roughly like the star pattern filling the room. With a final disquisition on the importance of synchronizing magical coordinates, he flipped the book closed.

“Simple enough, right?” he said, his eyes bright. He no longer seemed suspicious of me. Rather, he was enthralled with his subject matter. “It’s an incredible piece of spellcasting. And it is, of course, an honor to be asked to be one of the wardkeepers. If only it didn’t take—”

He cut off abruptly and shook himself, like he’d only just realized what he was about to say.

“If only it didn’t take what?” I asked.

“What? Oh, nothing. No, I just meant, um—well, it’s not important, just a small detail of the spell.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him. After all, he’d just spent the past fifteen minutes telling me every detail he could think of about the spell. Why clam up now? But he clearly wasn’t going to tell me.

“Right,” I said, nodding towards the book. “So, the additional layer of enchantment you added this week. Was that…covered somewhere…in all of that?”

“Ah! Yes. Well, no. I merely meant—that is—I was simply—”

“Hans, take a breath,” I told him. “It’s okay. You don’t have to explain everything perfectly. I’m not going to judge you.”

“Right. Yeah. Of course.” He shook his head. Sometimes he seemed as young as the students. “I was just excited. I don’t get too many chances to talk about advanced spellwork, especially since I’m stuck teaching underclassmen. I never thought you’d be interested.”

“And I never thought I’d have four moraghin pay a visit to one of my freshmen combat classes,” I said wryly. “We’re living in unprecedented times.”

“You can say that again. Well, as I was saying, no, I didn’t describe the additional layer yet.”

“Is it going to take another thirty pages in that thing to do so?” I asked, looking at the grimoire.

“No, this one’s even simpler. As you know, Autumn, Teresa, Sheridan, and I are wardkeepers. Traditionally, this has meant that we maintain the wards through regular ritual, perform periodic assessments, and keep everything in good working order. And until now, there’s never been a problem. But until now, everyone also assumed that the wards were impregnable. The fact that the wards could be breached without our direct knowledge is worrisome.”

I nodded. So far, so good. I had actually understood all of that.

“To avoid that occurring again, we decided it made the most sense to add four additional nodes within the enchantment for capacity stimulus, artifact debugging, and energetic cleansing, and to connect those nodes to this planar instantiation via in vivo implantation. This should not only augment the potency of the enchantment and assist in perpetuating the soundness of the instrument, but also ensure instantaneous cognizance of any malefic intent or supernatural rifts in the fabric of the incantation.”

I sighed. He’d been doing so well.

“So that means—”

“It means that the spell now flows through each of the wardkeepers themselves,” said a voice behind us.

Hans and I turned to see Autumn standing in the doorway.

“The spell gains power and keeps itself in proper working order by using our bodies as focal points,” she continued. “And if there’s another attack, our bodies will be attacked as well.”

That sounded gruesome. But maybe that was what it took to strengthen the wards.

“Autumn!” Hans said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Of course you didn’t, I just got here.” She grinned. “Besides, you wouldn’t notice a herd of elephants walking right in front of you if you were in the middle of explaining a spell.” She walked around the star to join us. “Hey, Noah. What brings you up here?”

“Hans was just showing me how the wards work,” I said, doing my best to sound innocent.

And I was innocent. I wasn’t doing anything. It was all perfectly reasonable, me being up here with Hans. And Autumn didn’t seem suspicious…did she?

I suppressed a sigh. I really wasn’t cut out for this spying thing. I was much better at dealing with straightforward violence. Not playing around with secrets and lies.

“Yeah,” Hans chimed in. “Noah just wondered, what with the moraghin going to his class and all. I figured it couldn’t hurt to tell him.”

He sounded as nervous as I felt. Moreso, actually. He’d been perfectly normal, if confusing, until Autumn arrived. Now he looked like he expected a firing squad to pop up behind her and take him out.

“Completely understandable,” Autumn said. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“Count yourself lucky,” I told her. I glanced over at Hans, who was clutching the grimoire with both hands like a shield. Were those beads of sweat on his brow?

I considered my words for a moment before saying to Autumn, “You said you were with students during the attack?”

“Yes,” she said, with a confident nod. “Advanced Artifice. Room 207.”

No defensiveness there.

I looked over at Hans. “And you were…”

“I was in the faculty lounge,” he said quickly. His knuckles were white as he gripped the grimoire. “I told Isaac that already. Do you want to talk to any of the other faculty who were there? I’m sure I could ask them to—”

“No, no, not at all.” I held up my hands, trying to calm Hans down. “No, I’m just trying to figure out how long it took for word of the attack to spread. As soon as the moraghin were dead, I went to Isaac’s office to inform him. But it sounds like you guys knew about the attack before that.”

“Well, yeah.” Autumn wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know what Hans explained to you, but as a wardkeeper, you’re looped into the matrix of the spell, and if it’s breached, you’re alerted. It’s like a little chime going off in your mind. Well, that’s what it was like. Now, with the changes to the spell, we’ll feel it physically if they fail.”

“I did explain that,” Hans said quickly. “It was right when I was telling him about—”

“It’s okay,” I said, holding my hands up again. “I’m sure you did. I’m just a little dense about this stuff.”

In fact, I’d gathered that they were immediately alerted to the wards’ failure back at the faculty meeting, but I was curious how they’d react if I pushed them on their whereabouts.

“So you guys got here pretty quickly,” I continued. “And then Teresa and Sheridan came later?”

“Yeah, but not much later,” Autumn said. “I think Teresa was finishing up a class as well, down on the first floor. And Sheridan said he was in his rooms.”

“He was the last to arrive,” Hans said emphatically. “For what it’s worth.”

Autumn gave him a look that clearly said, ‘ So what ?’

Hans shrank, hugging the grimoire to his chest. “I’m just saying, it took him longer to get here than the rest of us. We were already checking the spell to find where it had broken when he showed up. Teresa had just found the breach between the fifth and sixth grid coalescences. Remember? You and I were running the south perimeter circlet through the scrubbing manifestor when Teresa said, ‘ Wait, what’s this ?’ And then you turned to look at her, and I was still holding the threads when Sheridan came in and asked, ‘ What the hell happened to the damn wards ?’”

When he finished speaking, he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Autumn looked at him, equal parts baffled and amazed.

“If you say so,” she said. “To be honest, my memory of that day is a little fuzzy. There was a lot of panic in the air.”

“I wish mine were fuzzy,” Hans said glumly. “I keep having nightmares about the wards breaking again.”

I considered the two of them. Was Hans laying it on a little thick with his suspicion of Sheridan? Was Autumn a little too quick to dismiss his concerns? Would it be worth looking into why Sheridan took so long to arrive? And what about Teresa?

There was just no way to know. I’d have to investigate all of them. Dammit. I hadn’t narrowed anything down today at all.

“Well, I should be getting back.” I jutted a thumb over my shoulder vaguely. “I appreciate you showing this to me, though.” I clapped Hans on the arm, and he jumped. “It puts my mind at ease.”

“Happy to—happy to help,” he stammered.

I nodded at Autumn, then headed for the door. I was careful not to touch the spell as I circled the room, and was relieved to get out into the hallway.

Magic didn’t make me nervous, exactly, but the spells I was used to were battle spells, hexes and curses. They were sharp and strong, but short, flashing through the air, then disappearing. Nothing like that web of power holding up the green jewel—or held up by it. I still wasn’t clear on Hans’s explanation.

I closed the door, and the spell, firmly behind me, and went to get ready for my next class.