17. Cory
17
CORY
“ Y ou can’t be serious,” Min said. She took another bite of the lamb-shaped sugar cookie she was eating, staring at me like I was nuts. “You’re going on the hunt?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I don’t know why—” I paused as two sophomores jostled past our group on their way to the bonfire “—why it’s such a big deal.”
We were standing in a little circle to the side of the fire in the center of the ballroom, Ash, Felix and I on one side, Erika, Min, and Keelan on the other. We’d eaten our fill and were watching the dancers now as the crowd swirled around us. Keelan had a cookie too, and Ash was drinking a glass of rosemary lemonade that I was pretty sure was mostly vodka.
“Because you were attacked by moraghin?” Min said. “And we still don’t know how they got through the wards, or who sent them, or if they’re going to come back?”
“Not to mention the tenelkiri,” Felix said under his breath—but not so quietly that I didn’t hear it.
“The moraghin attacked our whole class,” I objected.
“Yeah, but they singled you out,” Min said.
“That was just because I was already standing on my own.”
That was what I’d been telling myself, anyway.
Ash made a face. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Min and Felix might have a point. Someone tried to hurt you.”
“Twice now,” Felix said, even louder this time.
“And they might try it again if you give them a chance,” Ash continued. “Usually, I’m a big supporter of bad decisions, but it probably wouldn’t be the worst idea to give this one a miss.”
I looked around the circle. Min and Felix were nodding emphatically. Keelan looked like he was on the fence. Erika stood on my right side, and she hadn’t chimed in to say this was the dumbest plan she’d ever heard, but she hadn’t exactly defended me either.
Actually, she’d been a little quiet all evening. Her eyes were staring off into the distance as I looked at her. I hoped she was feeling okay. Maybe she was just a little overwhelmed with all the noise and bustle around us.
I tried to follow her gaze, and for a second, I caught sight of Noah. Our eyes met across the sea of people between us. He froze, his body coming to a standstill in the middle of the crowd surging to and fro. My insides twisted. He held my gaze for a long moment, then looked away, letting himself be dragged off by the crowd.
My stomach sank. It was stupid, aching every time I looked at him. I didn’t want to want him, and he was never going to want me, so the whole thing was pointless.
I’d thought we had a moment up there on the roof. But then, there had been so many almost-moments with Noah, and none of them ever meant anything. He still stared at me as coldly as ever.
Unfortunately, as soon as Noah moved on, I could see Sean standing with Rekha and Tim on the far side of the room. Sean caught me looking and smirked. If I’d been having any second thoughts about my decision tonight, they were gone now. I wasn’t backing down, not after I’d told Sean my plans.
“Well, I’m doing it,” I said to my friends. “Maybe it is dumb, but I’m doing it anyway. No one has to come with me, though.”
Ash laughed. “But that’s exactly why we have to come with you. I’ve done so much stupid stuff since coming to Vesperwood, and Felix has always stuck by me. It’s time for me to pay some of that back.”
“You’re not paying it back if I’m still getting dragged along,” Felix objected.
“Paying it forward, then.”
“You don’t have to get dragged along, though,” I insisted. “None of you do.”
Min snorted. “Yeah, thanks. I wasn’t planning on it. Someone has to be here when this all goes pear-shaped, and if Felix is going out with you, it looks like that has to be me.” She looked at Keelan and Erika. “If you two are smart, you’ll stay behind too.”
Keelan looked torn. “On the one hand, I know this is an objectively stupid idea. I’m the only one of us who actually celebrates Imbolc, and even I don’t think the spring exists. On the other hand…all responsibility and no hijinks makes for a terribly boring life.”
Min rolled her eyes. “I should have known better. At least Erika can keep me company. Right, Erika?”
Erika didn’t respond that time, or the second time Min said her name. It wasn’t until Min reached out and poked her that she seemed to remember where she was, and realized that someone was talking to her.
“Where were you, Mars?” Min asked.
“No,” Erika said. “Just…thinking.”
Min frowned. “I’d say you’ve had too much of Ash’s lemonade concoction, but I know for a fact I’ve had more than you.”
“I haven’t had any,” Erika said.
“Well, we need to change that.” Min frowned. “If we’re getting left behind while these morons go and freeze their asses off, we’re at least going to need more refreshments.”
Erika shook her head. “Actually, I was thinking of joining the hunt too.”
Min stared at her. “When did all my friends become idiots?”
“Joke’s on you,” Keelan said with a smile. “We always were.”
She looked around the circle at the lot of us. “You’re really all that eager to go stumbling around in the dark, freezing cold, ready to get frostbite or walk into a tree or fall off a cliff and break all the bones in your bodies? That is, if nothing shows up to eat you first?”
“Well, when you put it like that, how could we not be?” Ash grinned. “And the cliffs out here aren’t that high. We’d probably only break half the bones in our bodies. Not all of them.”
“How do you know you’re not just going to wander off of Vesperwood’s grounds and end up in Canada?” she said.
“Well, for one thing, there’s a giant lake between us and Canada,” Felix said. “And for another, there are the wards.”
“I thought those stopped things from getting in.”
“They also stop us—undergrads, that is—from getting out unattended. I asked Professor Kazansky about it once. If you walk far enough across the grounds in any direction, eventually you’ll hit the border between Vesperwood and the regular world that surrounds us, and you’ll feel a shock, strong enough that you won’t be able to push through it.”
“Like an electric fence?” Ash said. Felix nodded, and Ash laughed. “So we’re dogs, basically. Nice.”
“Not just any dog, in your case,” Keelan said. “You’d be a chihuahua for sure. Small, cute, doesn’t know when to shut up…”
“Excuse me,” Ash said, looking indignant. “This is Jack Russell Terrier erasure, and I won’t stand for it.”
“You’re one to talk,” Min told Keelan. “You’re basically a golden retriever come to life.”
“Aren’t golden retrievers usually alive?” Ash said.
“You know what I mean.”
“What kind of dog would I be?” Felix asked.
Ash stared at him for a moment, then said, “Saluki.”
Felix frowned. “I don’t even know what kind of dog that is.”
“Oh, my days. We’ve found something Felix doesn’t know.”
“Very funny.”
“A Saluki is a string bean dog,” Ash said, grinning. “Very long, very tall, very dignified. Kind of judgey. Remind you of anyone?”
He reached up to pinch Felix’s cheek. Felix huffed and slapped his hand away. I still thought my mistaking them for a couple was a mistake anyone could have made. But I had more important things on my mind at the moment.
“How come no one in the regular world has noticed there’s a big chunk of land up here that they can’t get into?” I asked.
“The wards guide you away from it,” Felix said, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. “You can pass right by the front gates and never know the university is here.”
“Aren’t there maps, though?”
“On maps, it either looks like uninhabited forest or rocky coastline, depending on your perspective. And a perpetual, autoregenerative mapping enchantment ensures that no one feels curious enough to insist on further investigation.”
“Salukis are also fond of long, fancy words,” Ash said with a snicker. “Never use one syllable when six will do.”
It felt like it took forever, and no time at all, for it to be time to slip outside and meet up for the hunt. My stomach tightened as the time to leave drew closer. Though some of that might just have been the tugging at my core that arose any night I was due for a lesson with Professor Romero.
I felt guilty about skipping it tonight. That might have been the most dangerous part of all of this, not the possibility of moraghin or tenelkiri or death by idiocy and frostbite. But surely skipping just one night wouldn’t hurt? After all, I’d been through weeks of lessons with Romero. Shouldn’t my tolerance have increased a little bit by now?
When it was time to leave, we slipped out of the ballroom in twos and threes, so as not to attract attention. I walked out with Keelan, while Felix and Ash went with Erika.
“Have fun freezing your balls off,” Min said, raising the glass of lemonade she’d gotten from Ash. “Try not to get eaten by a bear!”
“So you celebrate Imbolc?” I asked as Keelan and I walked through the deserted hallway towards the foyer.
I lowered my voice. Not because anyone else was around, but because sneaking outside when we’d explicitly been told not to seemed to suggest that whispering was appropriate.
Keelan paused when we reached the foyer, sticking his head out, then waving a hand to hurry me after him. We turned down the hall that led to the back entrance of the manor, the same one we used every time we went to Combat.
“I did growing up,” Keelan said when I caught up to him. “My mom’s big into that kind of stuff. Getting in touch with her Irish roots. Mostly I think it was an excuse to break out some magic and have a party.”
“What do you mean, break out some magic?”
He shrugged. “Well, you know what it’s like. When you live in the regular world, trying to get along with regular people, you can’t do big, showy magic. It might interact weirdly with people’s cell phones and computers and wifi and all. And there are only so many times you can chalk an explosion up to a gas leak before the authorities start to get suspicious. So you have to keep your magic small, most of the time. But for Imbolc, we’d gather outside, away from town, and let loose.”
We grabbed our jackets from a storage closet where we’d stashed them, and I pulled mine on.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, as I stuffed an arm down my sleeve. “But it makes sense, I guess. Do most witches do that? Try to live like normal people—I mean, non-witches?”
Keelan shrugged again. “Some do. Some live in little enclaves, or try to separate themselves from the world, so they can do magic more openly. My uncle’s like that. His philosophy is, why bother to learn magic at all, if you’re just going to hide it? But my mom doesn’t think that’s right. She thinks living away from the mundane world gives witches a superiority complex. So we live in a regular town, and she just keeps her magic very subtle.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Though I can kind of see your uncle’s point. Magic is…I mean, it’s magic, you know? It’s this amazing thing, and once you know it’s there, why wouldn’t you want to be around it all the time? Use it all the time? It feels like choosing to live in black and white, once you know you can see in color.”
“Maybe,” Keelan said, and I could hear the shrug in his words. “But I don’t think magic’s the only thing that gives color to the world. It would be kind of a sad life if it were, you know?”
A rough circle had formed in the woods behind the gym when we arrived. Sean and his friends were already there. Sean was leaning back against a tree, arms crossed. Tim was kicking the trunk with his boots, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to get snow off them, or if he just felt like kicking something. Rekha stood farther forward, hands jammed in her pockets, coolly surveying the others in the circle.
“I think Sean’s staring at you,” Keelan said after a minute.
I tried for nonchalance. “Yeah, he doesn’t like me for some reason.”
Keelan shrugged inside his soul, I was sure. “His type gives Hunters a bad name. I’ve never been a big fan of him either.”
I laughed bitterly. “Well, that makes two of us.”
We waited a few more minutes in the snow as the last students joined the circle. Finally, a senior girl named Monica stepped into the middle.
“Alright, everyone. You all know why you’re here. Legend says that the Spring of Irylis will reappear tonight. Water from the spring has the power to heal any wound. A single flower from the spring’s glade will grant a wish. And for those of you who are freshmen, your conduct tonight will be noted by your upperclassmen peers when the time comes for you to apply for a haven. You don’t want to disappoint.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, and I shivered. Felix and Ash hadn’t said anything about that part. They didn’t even think the spring existed. And clearly neither did most of the freshman class. Out of fifty of us, only fifteen or so stood in the circle with other, older students.
What kind of conduct were they expecting? Was it worse to try to look for the spring and fail, than not to try at all? I looked around the circle, but none of the upperclassmen’s faces gave anything away.
“Remember the rules,” Monica said. “Each hunter stays out ‘til dawn. And everyone hunts alone.”
That quieted the crowd.
Monica held out a hand and a tiny ball of light appeared above it, just like I’d seen my classmates do in Spellwork. But her light glowed red, then orange, then yellow, and proceeded through all the colors of the rainbow until it reached purple.
“You’ll see this light again when it’s time to come inside in the morning,” she said, sending the light high into the air, above the treetops . It contracted, then exploded in a shower of shimmering violet sparks. “Good luck. Your hunt begins now.”
Everyone began shuffling towards the woods, and Ash and Felix caught up to Keelan and me before we’d gone more than a couple of steps. Erika must have already gone on without them.
“Can you imagine staying out here all night?” Ash said with a snort.
“Or hunting alone?” Felix added with a shudder.
“Come on,” Ash said to me. “The sooner we get into the trees, the sooner people will lose sight of us. Then we can wander around until you get cold, and go inside.”
“No,” I said, continuing my slog through the snow. “I’m really doing this. By myself, until dawn. I meant what I said.”
“Oh, come on,. Ash cast a glance over his shoulder at Monica, still standing in place, watching the circle of students disperse. “You can’t be serious, Cory. Literally no one will care if we stick together. And I think most people will give up after a few hours.”
I saw Sean’s back disappearing into the trees in front of us, his dirty blond hair bobbing through the darkness—alone. Heat rose in my chest.
“Sean’s not sticking with his friends all night,” I said. “So I’m not either. I’m not a coward.”
“Sticking with your friends doesn’t make you a coward,” Felix said. “It makes you smart.”
“So you do it, then,” I told him. “I’m going by myself.”