Chapter 4 Sam #3
“Magic used to be all that mattered to anyone. Before we declawed it and confined the same stale old repertoire of permissible spells to some sanitized arena.” He closes his eyes, sucking on the cigarette.
“Can you imagine what the world was like?” Another cloud of smoke, even bigger than the first, fills the air between us, fog-like.
“Back when magic was everywhere. Back in the old days.”
“The old days,” I echo, my voice dry, “before regulations were set in place to keep magicians from blowing the whole world to hell. Yeah, I can imagine those old days all right. The good old days, before the rest of the world woke up and figured out that maybe being good at casting a spell shouldn’t mean that you get to play god with everyone else. ”
Rook takes another puff on the cigarette.
Discontentment continues to drape over him like a cloak.
“Say what you like, Sammy. But you and I were born in the wrong era. After I saw the way you fight, I knew you were just like me. Once you tasted magic, you knew nothing else would ever matter the same way again. Once you tasted magic, it meant everything to you. In the old days, we’d have been generals, royalty, gods even.
Hell, we could have run this whole sorry world if we wanted to. ”
“Well, I don’t want to run the world. And neither do you—you’d hate running the world. You’d chafe under the sheer weight of responsibility.”
“Would not!”
“Would so. You’d throw a tantrum the first time you had to actually sit through a meeting with your world domination cabinet of ministers, or whatever, and that would be the end of that.
So, no, princess, you don’t want to run the world.
” I pluck the cigarette from Rook’s fingers before he can take another drag.
I pitch my voice to speak over his undignified squawk of protest: “Also, not for nothing, it’s pretty hard to run a world with magic when nuclear warfare and machine guns and all that crap exist. Can you imagine how much energy a few puny human magicians would have to expend to match the power of even, like, the cheapest automatic rifle?
When most magicians are gassed after trading blows with each other in the arena after five minutes? ”
Rook doesn’t look convinced. “Maybe if we were allowed to develop more advanced curses, we could adapt—”
“But that’s not what you want,” I interrupt. “What you do want—what I know you always want—is to beat your next opponent. And you’re not going to get there by speculating on kooky ideas about out-magicking the global arms race or giving yourself lung cancer.”
My champion glowers at me as I grind his cigarette beneath my heel. “Ah, Sammy. You’re no fun. No fun at all.”
“It’s not my job to be fun. It’s my job to be your second.
And a second’s job is to secure victory for their champion.
” I clap a hand on Rook’s elbow and drag him back to his feet so I can look him properly in the eye.
“So like it or not, you’re going to duel Tamsin Blackwood. And you’re going to win.”
Of course, now that I’ve promised my champion a victory against Tamsin, I need to make sure I deliver.
Rook could almost certainly take Tamsin without my help.
The oddsmakers currently favor her, but that’s largely because of who her father is.
Rook’s the one with real skill—a freakish combination of natural-born talent with an obsession he’s used to hone that talent into a weapon that started turning promoters’ heads before his fifteenth birthday.
And he didn’t need a famous surname to do it.
You can’t exactly sleep on Tamsin Blackwood either, though.
I’m not so consumed by hatred of the Blackwood family that I can’t see Master Mateus’s darling daughter for the threat she is.
Being the magical world’s nepo baby to end all nepo babies, little Tamsin’s been trained in the arcane arts since she was old enough to toddle.
The Blackwood name may be the reason promoters salivate over her, and dueling fans hype her up so hard—but that’s not the reason I’m wary of her.
Unfortunately for me and Rook both, Tamsin is, in fact, good at what she does. Which means that I can’t take any chances. Not even with Rook in the arena with her. I need to find her weakness—her Achilles’ heel. Every duelist has one, even Rook.
I just need to find Tamsin’s before she can figure out his.
So when I get home, the first thing I do after my post-training shower is hop online.
At this point, my laptop looks like a serial killer’s, and I know it.
I’ve got my main account on all the magicians’ forums, but like any decent amateur stalker, I also use sock-puppet accounts: fake online identities that I always log on to from scrambled IP addresses so I can gain access to Internet discourse that the public persona of Samantha Chan, designated second to Lysander Rook, can’t afford to dirty herself up with.
Lucky for me, so far as targets go, Mateus Blackwood’s darling daughter slash protégé is a pretty easy mark.
Like most kids in our generation—and teen magicians especially—when she’s not practicing magic, she’s terminally online, which gives me a wealth of material to work with.
I don’t take that for granted. I attack the tome of Tamsin Blackwood’s online persona with all the scholarly, detail-obsessed gusto I’ve used to study actual magic.
I examine her online footprint—her social media feeds, her forum posts, even semi-private group chats when I can snag an invite under a sock-puppet account—until I know the online version of Tamsin almost as well as I know my own champion.
I know that she publicly credits her dad with her success in the dueling arena but never smiles with her teeth in photos with him.
I know she was homeschooled her entire life, no doubt so she could focus on studying magic.
I know that—unless you count a few training partners here and there—she doesn’t have many real friends her own age.
And I know that she talks openly about her famous father’s messy split from her mom, who didn’t give a crap about magic, gave less than a crap about her kid, and took off before the ink on the divorce papers was dry—leaving an infant Tamsin in the sole care of one Master Mateus Blackwood.
While I scroll carefully through all my Tamsin-stalking tabs tonight, I scribble absently on a Post-it note. Potential Tamsin Blackwood weaknesses: Daddy issues galore? More likely than we’d think.
It’s a start, at least.
Now, unlike Rook—who has an absurd number of followers on all his platforms, despite his stubborn refusal to put a modicum of effort into his online presence—Tamsin Blackwood curates her appearance carefully on social media, no doubt under instructions from her father.
While she isn’t the head-turning beauty that Rook is, she’s got nice features to work with; she’s undeniably a pretty girl, albeit in an unconventional kind of way.
She was born Chinese like me, thanks to the estranged former Mrs. Blackwood’s genetics, but her face is a paler shade of peach-gold than mine and freckled across the tops of her high cheekbones.
She wears her curly auburn hair in a variety of styles, sometimes twisting it into a severe chignon at the nape of her neck like a ballerina’s, other times letting the curls flow wildly in colorful-scrunchie-adorned half ponytail styles.
For a while, I flip through her photos, which isn’t especially productive.
She looks good in all of them, obviously, because that’s what happens when you’re an eighteen-year-old nepo baby who’s either good at photo editing or pays someone else to be.
Still, it’s hard to pin down her vibe. I play a game with myself as I flick through one picture after another.
Which version of Tamsin Blackwood will I see next on my browser?
The cool, composed ballerina type with her sleek updos and collection of no-nonsense, neutral-toned athleisure-style uniforms?
Or the carefree, bright-grinned girl with the free-flowing, wild red hair, dressed in fit-and-flare sundresses and strappy platform sandals?
I wonder if either of those girls are even the real her. Probably not. It’s social media, after all.
But, as with most things you observe for long enough, eventually, a pattern emerges.
At first, I think I might be imagining things.
I pause on the picture I’m currently staring listlessly at: a high-effort (and therefore effortless-looking) selfie of Tamsin looking contemplative against the backdrop of an old-school, mid-twentieth-century-style jukebox diner.
I squint at the booths, the chairs, the décor.
She hasn’t tagged a location, but something’s pinged the back of my mind.
Frowning, I flip back through her pictures. I speed-scroll through a few months, then a year, then another. I take a few screenshots. I zoom in. I stare some more. I squint and compare.
And then I start to smile.
Do any of you guys have a place that’s just yours?
writes a fifteen-year-old Tamsin in one of her old captions.
That’s what this diner is to me. I go every time I’m in New York, just me.
I never feel more peaceful than when I’m sitting in my favorite booth alone, with a milkshake flavor of the week and a new sandwich off the specials menu.
Innocuous enough. Tamsin doesn’t tag the name or location of the diner she’s waxing poetic about, but I see the same pattern on the booth seats appear over and over again in the background of her photos throughout the years.
Call it luck or providence if you want to.
But Tamsin Blackwood and I have, apparently, been haunting the same diner on and off for the past three years.
Agatha’s, a hole-in-the-wall joint nestled in the heart of Arcane New York, the intersection of streets where all the magic shops are.
Tamsin’s right about one thing: Agatha’s does serve up a damn good milkshake.
According to the last three years of Tamsin’s social media trail, she has stopped at Agatha’s for a solo lunch on her first day in New York on every visit she’s ever made to the Big Apple.
She’s got a favorite go-to booth and everything.
She’s turned her little pilgrimage to Agatha’s into tradition. Ritual, even.
I pull up the itinerary of events leading up to Rook’s duel against Tamsin. Both duelists are expected to arrive in New York about three weeks early for press obligations. I check Tamsin’s feeds again, just to be thorough. I do some quick mental math on logistics.
In a week, Tamsin Blackwood’s going to arrive in New York City.
She’ll sneak out from under her father’s watchful eye that Monday—my guess would be sometime between eleven a.m. and one p.m., ish.
And she’ll spend at least an hour in the far-left corner booth at Agatha’s, cheating on her very strict pre-duel diet with her one indulgence for the month before returning to her usual prescription meals of unsalted chicken and broccoli: a diner milkshake and a greasy, delicious sandwich.
It just so happens that this time, she won’t be alone.