1. Lily
LILY
While she was at Windermere College for the AEtheric Arts, Magnolia Bellarius—the only heir to House Bellarius—fell in love with a busboy.
A regular human. Worse than nobody. Not even a Magician.
No one was entirely sure how the affair started, but everyone knew how it ended.
It ended with blood, a dead townie, a curse, and a child.
The most foundational law of the Covenant was to keep magic a secret from the mundane world; to do anything else had catastrophic consequences.
The rules were so simple they seemed impossible to break.
The rules were so simple because they were impossible to break.
And yet, here was proof to the contrary: Lily Perkins—nineteen, half-Magic—a freak of nature who belonged fully in neither the mundane nor the hidden, Magical world.
As far as Lily knew, no one had broken the law of secrecy for hundreds of years—until her mother had somehow managed to fall in love with the last person on earth she was supposed to.
Dallying with non-Magicians was, if not strictly illegal, deeply distasteful.
What was illegal, and supposedly impossible, was telling them about Magic.
Diluting magical bloodlines with mundanity was also unsurprisingly illegal.
Lily stopped outside the door to the alchemy lab and tried to ignore the way the other students in the mostly empty hallway veered away from her.
She pressed her palm to the brass plate next to the door and shivered as current ran up her arm; the mildest, most pleasant of shocks.
There was a hum so low that she could only feel it as the wards meant to protect the valuable and dangerous contents within admitted her and the door swung open.
The trace of magic left a faintly metallic taste on her tongue.
She was here, at Windermere, in Fundamentals of Alchemy—a competitive upper-level class as just a sophomore.
No one else had arrived yet, so she took a languorous moment to savor her surroundings.
The alchemy theater was a vast, circular room jutting off the back of Paracelsus Hall that smelled of chalk, and smoke, and antiseptic.
At the head of the room, in front of the blackboards and cabinets filled with instruments, was a raised dais and lab bench for demonstrations.
Desks occupied the majority of the classroom, some of them splintery, all of them squeaky.
A ring of lab tables traced the room’s circumference.
The afternoon sun spilled through the windows, catching motes of lazy dust and making the old varnish on every surface gleam gold.
She could almost see the AEther in the air.
Lily claimed a desk in shadow, in the back row.
She always got to class early to try and find an out-of-the-way spot so that she would be more likely to blend into the scenery.
She hadn’t figured out how to make herself invisible yet—it was hugely difficult magic—but she worked hard at being unnoticeable, and that was almost as good, plus a great deal more practical.
When most of your classmates thought you were an abomination, deflection was a necessary means of survival.
Of the classmates who loathed her, most did so silently, with cold shoulders and unextended invitations, or sudden avoidance like the students in the hall.
A few, however, always did so boisterously, and those were the ones she hid from.
Lily couldn’t even hate all of them properly because all of them were right.
Lily was an abomination.
Her mother had gifted Lily her slight stature, her freckles, and her curse. Though she herself couldn’t see it, the aura of the curse ebbed around her like a dark mirage for any Magician to see—to know that someone had broken the rules and Lily was paying the price.
On any given day, it was hard to say who she woke up hating more—her peers for being jackals disguised as humans, her mother for getting pregnant, her dead father for being non-magical and dead, or herself for being at the root of it all.
Hidden behind a textbook, as if it would obscure her curse aura, Lily took note of every student who entered.
She watched them notice her, or not; watched the buffer of desks around her remain as the room filled.
Absently, she fiddled with the thin, twin bracelets she wore on each wrist. She pretended to work on sketching a basic polyhedral ward for Environmental Aegistics* and flubbed the AEtheric geometry.
She heard her name whispered in a low titter.
She didn’t look up. She’d spent her whole life waiting for it to get easier, to stop caring, but it hadn’t gotten any easier and she always, always cared.
The only thing she’d gotten good at was pretending.
Professor Chant entered through the arched double doors, leather satchel over his shoulder, travel coffee mug in his hand, and dark hair flopping into his eyes.
He was fashionably bookish—as if he’d looked up “dashing professor” and dressed accordingly—with a tweed blazer patched at the elbows over a sweater.
He surveyed the classroom with sparkling good nature.
Lily tried not to stare at him too hard, which was difficult as he was standing at the head of the room and also young and very good-looking.
This was only his second year at Windermere, and that knowledge automatically endeared him to Lily, as that—plus his British accent—made him something of an outsider himself.
Among the last to arrive were Sebastian Allsaires and most of his pack.
Allsaires sauntered in as if he owned the building (not impossible), flanked by Asher Vis and Victoria Beaumont.
All three of them were rich as kings, more elitist than a secret society, and sharp as steel.
Each of them knew multiple languages, and rumor had it that Allsaires was fluent in five.
They were all tall, dark-haired, and slim, with Vis being both the tallest and the slimmest. Currently he was wearing a plaid purple waistcoat over an equally purple paisley shirt.
It should have been a travesty. It wasn’t.
Allsaires and Beaumont were more sedate in their attire but no less striking.
Beaumont wore a black turtleneck dress and knee-high boots that pushed her close to six feet.
Her brunette hair fell in a cascade to her mid-back, so sleek that it reflected light.
She belonged on a runway, not in a classroom.
Allsaires had taken a page out of Professor Chant’s Style Guide and then taken it to the furthest degree.
He wore a navy blazer over a crisp, pale blue oxford tucked with great precision into surgically pressed chinos.
On anyone else it would have looked patently ridiculous, but the year’s presumed valedictorian was not anyone else.
Taken together, they were the club that everyone wanted to be in, but membership was restricted to four: Allsaires, Vis, Beaumont, and Hawleyhurst.
Conrad Hawleyhurst, however, was conspicuously missing. Lily wondered about the rumors surrounding his continued absence from the group, then banished the thought just as quickly. She knew better than anyone the damage a rumor could do and refused to put any stock in them.
It was possible that Hawleyhurst had simply not applied for the class.
Hawleyhurst, the captain of the lacrosse team and heir to a Boston fortune as old as the country, was not widely known for his love of academic rigor.
In many ways, it was stranger to Lily that he and Sebastian Allsaires had ever been friends, rather than their having had a falling out.
The facts were thus: Allsaires and Hawleyhurst had been inseparable for years. Last year, it had been impossible to see one without the other. Now, Lily couldn’t remember if she’d seen them together once these last two weeks.
From beneath her rust-colored bangs, Lily watched Allsaires stop at the dais and say something, mouth sly, that made Professor Chant chuckle and shake his head.
Allsaires grinned then, almost sheepish, and pushed a hand through his wavy hair.
It fell softly back onto his forehead, blurring the line between prep and hip, as he led the way to three of the last empty desks.
It wasn’t that Lily didn’t understand the general obsession with him—she did.
Allsaires was a home run on paper. He would look fantastic on the cover of a men’s magazine that included think pieces about the hidden cost of dairy alternatives.
He was by all accounts brilliant, a nationally ranked athlete, and had won the Elumnara two years in a row.
He was also an unmitigated asshole.
He had never bullied her himself, but he’d stood by with practiced disinterest while others had, which was nearly just as bad.
Behind his hooded eyes and Byronic pout was a trail of discarded women so long that they could probably form their own voting body.
He had no regard for anyone not in his inner circle, and his disregard for her was so total that they might have existed in different galaxies.
Sebastian Allsaires was an elitist man-child in possession of too much blue blood, talent, brains, and Magic.
It was this muchness that infuriated Lily most. He couldn’t be content with being the pinnacle of youthful achievement in any one or two categories—no, he had to have them all.
His accomplishments were stars in a constellation bearing his name, but for all that, the outline remained empty.
He seemed evolved enough, smart enough, to see the cracks in the system, and yet he was content to reap the benefits of a thousand years of unearned privilege as if it were his birthright.
He was Magic’s prince, the poster child of the status quo, and that made him the worst one of them all.