Chapter 4 Sam
Sam
Peace lasts almost a week before a girl at school asks me to slip her number to Rook.
This is, for what it’s worth, a new record.
Blythe Davison corners me in the girls’ bathroom on the third floor as I’m escaping from study hall.
She makes it look innocuous at first, peering at her reflection in one of the mirrors as she touches up her lipstick.
It’s a gorgeous coral shade that brings out the gold in the movie star blond waves that billow over her shoulders.
I know what I’m in for when she smiles wide at my reflection over the sink. Smiles like those are never really meant for me—not when the giver knows who I spend most of my waking hours with. “Hey, Sammy. Long practice the other night?”
I smile back. It’s actually mostly genuine.
I’m very well versed in the steps of this particular dance these days, but even if I wasn’t, it would be hard not to smile back at Blythe.
Girls like Blythe have this weird, effervescent magnetism.
They’re probably the reason men used to make up stories about sirens and succubi and beautiful women who gave up feathers or wings or seal skins to marry their mortal husbands.
“It’s always a long practice, Blythe,” I tell her, shrugging. “That’s practicing magic in a nutshell. Long and hard and thankless.” I laugh a bit to take the sting out of the complaint. “But hey, when it’s spectacular, it’s spectacular, am I right?”
“When you’re Lysander Rook’s second?” Blythe whistles, long and low. Her china-blue eyes go low-lashed as she purses her lips at her reflection. “I can’t imagine magic being anything else.”
I shut down the familiar pang of annoyance at yet another fan fawning over Rook.
I get it: He’s the most talented magician our age, he’s classically hot, and he has this whole tortured, brooding Byronic soul vibe to him.
All the ingredients for lady bait. Also, incidentally, all the ingredients that make him my perfect weapon against Mateus Blackwood.
Still, that doesn’t mean playing bouncer for his endless parade of fan club members doesn’t get old for me. Instead of snapping at Blythe, I just shrug again—hopefully with the air of nonchalance I’m aiming for. “It’s a lot of work.”
“He must get lonely,” muses Blythe, pouting at herself. “Rook, I mean.”
“I don’t think he notices.”
“Are you sure? Maybe he just needs more…friends. Besides you, I mean.” She studies our reflections.
I wonder what she must see, looking at our faces side by side.
Blythe, all pretty-blond-white-girl features and kind smile and expertly chosen makeup palette.
Me, the Chinese girl with resting bitch face, looking vaguely sweaty and rumpled with baby hairs sticking out of my too-tight chignon, which is probably going to give me a receding hairline one day.
Also, I’m pretty sure there’s a zit coming in on the tip of my nose. Goddammit.
My brother, Jamie, was the pretty one, the chiseled, striking first-born son that all our aunties used to coo over.
Despite spending most of his time sweating in worn-out dueling robes, Jamie always had these well-coifed Asian-boy-band looks and dimpled smiles.
Blythe probably would have loved him. They would have been one of those infuriatingly stunning couples, Blythe and Jamie, smiling side by side, pearly-toothed in social media reels, going viral for their blinding combined charisma.
Too bad Jamie’s four years dead.
“I’m damn well sure,” I tell Blythe, then wince at how harsh I sound. It’s not Blythe’s fault that my brother is dead, or that she’s beautiful and charming, or that she’s the fifteenth person this year who’s tried to get into Rook’s pants.
Sure enough, I immediately clock the surprised hurt in her eyes.
I sigh, relenting. “Look, I know what you’re getting at.
Rook’s a great magician, but all great magicians are goddamn weirdos.
The younger they get good, the weirder they are.
You’d do better trying to date some normie guy who’s good at like, the guitar, or soccer, or something. Trust.”
She laughs nervously. “Nah, it’s not like that,” she backpedals. “I’m just…Well, if he ever wants to hang out. If either of you do! We can trade numbers.” She makes a big show of checking her phone and tosses in an, “Oh crap, late for AP Chem already. I’ll see you later, Sammy.”
I sigh again. “I’m sure you will.” I don’t look away from the mirror, even as Blythe’s reflection scurries off, practically letting the bathroom door slam on her back. I’m left behind with nothing but myself and my own cranky face staring back at me in that mirror.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I tell my reflection. “You can’t afford distractions. Which means that neither can Rook.”
I can’t blame poor, gorgeous Blythe for acting or feeling how she does about me and Rook.
She’s in good company. My friendship with Rook—if you can really even call it a friendship—confuses a lot of people.
Granted, those people rarely say so to my face directly, but I see hints of it all the time.
They make all these carefully veiled comments:
“No offense, but you’re not what I picture when I imagine Lysander Rook’s second.”
“You two are quite the odd couple, but I guess it’s working for you both!”
“Hey, I bet no one expects a guy like Rook to take advice from you, am I right?”
I know what they’re all really saying, behind the awkward jokes and hasty “no offense”–laden observations and backhanded compliments. Every one of those comments is just a euphemism for “Rook is too good for you. So why does he bother with you instead of picking someone cooler, hotter, better?”
I get it, optics-wise. Rook could have had anyone for his second: a grizzled veteran magician turned master instructor, known for creating champion duelists, or another famous young prodigy, or hell, even a girl that he’d actually look at twice in the hallways at school.
But Lysander Rook picked me. I made sure he would, just like I picked him.
He was a local boy, lucky for me. We even practiced magic in the same training arenas. His dueling partners rarely lasted longer than a week. The ones who lasted more than a month were practically legendary. We all talked about it. Some of the other trainees even started a betting pool.
Lysander Rook was, in other words, perfect for me.
I’ve never been naive, not even before my world fell apart four years ago.
If you want to ensure access to the glittering world of the magical elite, you can’t simply be good at magic, like I am.
You need talent, sure, but you also need charisma, looks, the building blocks of a sellable brand. You need to be a guy like Rook.
If I played my cards right, I could ride Lysander Rook’s coattails right into the most exclusive arcane circles—the same circles where the Blackwood family resided.
But I didn’t just need someone who’d be my entry ticket.
I needed someone who’d be my weapon. Someone nasty and violent enough to carry out my plan in the arena.
When I saw Rook putting away dueling partner after dueling partner, I knew I’d found my boy.
The riddle for me was this: How the hell do you get one of the biggest young stars on the magicians’ dueling circuit to look twice at you when you are, comparatively speaking, nobody?
The answer, naturally, is completely unhinged.
“You don’t want this job,” said Master Silverstein immediately, as soon as I broached it with him. “Have you lost your mind, Chan? No one wants this job. It’s not even a job.” He snorted. “Not like we’re paying the poor suckers.”
I smiled sweetly at him. Master Noah Silverstein’s a classic old timer magician: a retired duelist with a reasonably respectable record and impressively little permanent physical or emotional damage.
He’s owned the local magicians’ training arena for as long as anyone in town can remember, and he’s produced his fair share of champions for mid-sized magic shows peppered throughout the East Coast. Jamie probably would have wound up as one of those champions, if he’d lived—old Silverstein was my brother’s first real instructor.
Silverstein is a veteran magic teacher, a learned master of the arcane arts, and a steady-minded businessman. Nothing fazes him.
Or, at least, nothing fazed him until Lysander Rook’s existence made itself known.
“You can pay us in experience. Isn’t that the party line you trot out whenever some poor wide-eyed kid with great big dreams gets suckered into a star magician’s training camp?”
Silverstein didn’t smile. “You can’t tell me you seriously want to spend your training hours here playing glorified punching bag to our savage little prima donna?”
I felt my lips twitch. “Is that really what you call Lysander Rook?”
“It’s what he is.” Silverstein was utterly unrepentant. “The kid’s got talent. A rare talent. I won’t deny that. That doesn’t mean he’s not also a little shit. I’d even venture to say that talent has made him more of a shit than he’d otherwise get away with.”
I hummed noncommittally. “Probably. He sounds like a real princess.”
“So why do you want to step into an arena with him?”
“Because our princess needs someone like me.” I looked Silverstein right in the eye.
To his credit, he stared me back down with aplomb.
Then again, I guess you don’t get to be an old master at a magicians’ dueling center without being tough to rattle.
“Think about it, Master Silverstein. You’ve been throwing cannon fodder at Rook.
Clueless, wide-eyed baby magicians who think they’re hot shit and want to have a go at the champion for some delusional shot at glory. ”
“Yes.”
I sighed. “They’re a poor match for each other. It’s not fair to Rook any more than it is to those poor idiot kids. The idiot kids need a gentler hand that can dole out tough love instead of no holds barred beatdowns, and Rook needs—”