Chapter Twenty-Two
“Bastian!” I exclaim as Carl staggers back, falling to the floor. Students around us start yelling and panicking, and I’m sure I can hear Professor Wallace shouting something in the library.
“Fuck me, that hurt,” Bastian gasps, and I get the sense that this might be the first time he has ever punched someone.
He shakes out his trembling hand and I try to grab him, to pull him back, but Carl is scrambling to his feet with a particularly ugly look on his face before launching himself at Bastian with a guttural growl.
I’ve never seen a sober fight up close and I’m distantly surprised by the lack of finesse in the whole thing, and how it just seems to be two people with their bodies locked together trying to get out of one another’s grip long enough to throw a punch.
“What the hell is happening?” someone yells, and suddenly Kira is there, trying to pull Carl away as I grab the back of Bastian’s jacket, dragging him out of reach. Somehow, he’s come away with a cut lip and a bruised eyebrow. “Carl, stop it!”
“He started it!” Carl yells, and then he’s twisting his fingers; the particular smell of his magic, which always reminds me of overripe bananas, is pungent as his ring glows pink and a directional blast of heat, sharp and scorching, pushes through the air toward us.
“Because he’s fucking obsessed with that bloody shifter—”
“Fuck OFF, Lord!” Bastian yells back, and he raises his hands above his head in a quick sequence that I recognize from our night with the boggart.
There is a blinding blast of ancient Cornish magic, so bright it’s physical, knocking Carl and Kira and me off our feet and sending students screaming into the library and running down the hallway.
The air is thick with the scent of bonfires at their peak, and I struggle to my feet, grabbing Bastian’s arm and pulling it down.
“Bastian, no!” I yell. I’ve never touched a witch in the middle of a spell before and something weird happens when I do.
My own hands glow, not with Bastian’s blue light from his ring, but with a pearly white sheen, the same as I do before I shapeshift.
Bastian and I both stare down at my hand, utterly distracted by it.
“Your magic,” he whispers. “It’s—it’s right there.”
“Yeah, I—I don’t—”
“CHEVRET!” a voice bellows, interrupting my confusion, and we both turn to see Professor Wallace standing at the doorway of the library.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s mother is standing beside him.
Her eyes are fixed on my slightly glowing fingers and I quickly let go of Bastian, stuffing my hands into my pockets.
“You and Lord, in my office, now! Everyone else, get in the seminar!”
Carl is groaning, cradling his face where Bastian punched him, and Elizabeth’s mother immediately steps back into the library.
“Message me,” I tell Bastian urgently, as he moves to follow Professor Wallace and Carl.
He nods, squeezing my wrist before walking away, running a hand through his hair.
The other students are giving me a wide berth, staring at me with terrified eyes as if I’m the one who produced the colossal blast of magic and not Bastian.
“Come with me,” Kira says, abruptly grabbing my arm.
I’m shocked when she pulls me around the corner to the toilets rather than pushing me into the seminar.
It must be serious if Kira Tavi is ducking out of a college-mandated activity.
She’s breathing hard, her hands trembling as the door closes behind us.
“Is this about peer mentoring?” I ask blandly.
“You need to stop hanging out with Bastian,” she says. “He’s dangerous.”
“What, because he beat up Carl?” I exclaim, and then, when someone comes out of a cubicle and looks at us curiously, I drop my voice to a whisper. “I can’t believe you’re defending that bigot.”
“I’m not defending him! Bastian literally just shot a dangerous spell at me!” Kira doesn’t seem to care about being overheard. Her voice is getting louder and higher and she’s trembling. “He’ll be lucky if he isn’t thrown out!”
“If he is, it would be a complete overreaction,” I say, trying to brazen it out. “It’s not a spell designed to hurt anyone; his coven is just different from yours.”
“You mean dangerous.” Kira pushes her purple glasses up her nose, angrily. “I heard he used to be part of a Nimue coven!”
“It’s called Arlodhes an lynn,” I correct her, utterly butchering the Cornish, but I want her to realize I know more about Bastian than she does. “And so what? You and Elizabeth were part of an Artemis coven, it’s not like they don’t have some dodgy views.”
“If you knew anything, you’d know witch communities are diverse; covens that follow life cycles often celebrate and meet together, but it doesn’t mean we’re identical,” she snaps.
“At home, my family follow Tafukt. We celebrate the same seasons, but we don’t have the same beliefs as Dr. Toppings, and unlike a Nimue coven, we definitely don’t have a reputation for wanting witches to be superpowered! ”
That might be her way of telling me she’s less homophobic than Elizabeth’s mum, but it doesn’t exactly endear me to her right now.
“You don’t know anything about what Bastian wants!”
“I know that people who do that kind of magic are reckless!” Kira points to the closed door. “They shouldn’t be trusted!”
“Like shapeshifters, you mean?” I say harshly. “Witches shouldn’t be friends with shifters, right? Shouldn’t go out with them?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” Her brown eyes are flashing angrily.
“Honestly, Lando, you act like you’re the first bloody shapeshifter to have ever been in a relationship with a witch!
You know it’s not true, I keep telling you I wasn’t against your relationship, what’s it going to take for you to hear me? ”
“It’s going to take you getting out of my life and actually respecting my privacy,” I say coldly. “You keep trying to pull me and Bastian apart. It’s none of your business.”
“Elizabeth made it my business.” She steps closer and I can feel how wound up she is.
Her ring is glowing softly, and her magic, which I hadn’t noticed until now smells like ripe plums, is rising off her skin.
“She would want me to look out for you, she worried about you all the time. The last thing she’d want is you hanging out with someone like Bastian Chevret. ”
I laugh in her face. I can’t help it, because it’s too absurd to think about what Elizabeth would want in this situation, especially when Kira has no idea how complicated it really is, that Bastian is the only one helping me get Elizabeth back to the land of the living.
“I’m sorry, but that’s absolute crap,” I say. “Don’t tell me what she wanted for me. You sound like an idiot.”
Kira’s lips purse into a line and her eyes gleam.
“I know a dangerous witch when I see one. I know what happens when a witch loses control of their power,” she says. “He’s right on the edge. If you’re smart, you’ll stay away from him.”
“Guess I’m not smart, then.” I turn to open the door but she pushes her hand against it.
“Has he asked you to do anything?” she asks me urgently. “Any spells?”
I stare at her, thinking, How does she know? Then I realize Bastian must have been right on the money about how my extra questions in class would draw suspicion. I decide sarcasm is the way to go.
“Yeah, totally, he’s tricked me into a spell that’s going to drain all of my magic so he can use it for himself, like a fucking supervillain,” I say. “And I’m going along with it because I’m just a lonely, gullible shifter who can’t look after themself, right?”
“That’s not what I mean!” she says, almost desperately. “Just … don’t do any magic with him!”
“I can’t do magic, remember?”
With that, I slam my way out of the bathroom.
I can hear the lilting tone of Elizabeth’s mother’s voice as she gives her seminar from the library, and deliberately walk in the opposite direction.
I message Bastian and tell him I’ll be waiting for him, and stand outside college, my back pressed against the graffiti on the walls.
I stare down at my hand that glowed when Bastian was doing his spell.
It looks exactly the same as it did that morning, long fingers, a bit of gingery hair coming down from the wrists, freckles and blunt nails.
Tentatively, I take a deep breath and put my hands in the preparatory triangle, then slowly twist them through the heating spell that Bastian’s been teaching me—a Neptune’s Rise and a Logi’s Spear—but nothing happens except that some passersby look at me curiously.
I blush and stuff my hands into my coat pockets.
“Hey.” Bastian slumps against the wall next to me. One of his eyes is swelling up, looking puffy and uncomfortable, probably from a rogue elbow of Carl’s.
“Are you okay?” Without thinking, I trace my fingers over his cheekbone underneath the swelling. “It looks right grim.”
“I’m fine—it was worth it.” Bastian smiles, gently batting my hand away. He squeezes my finger for a moment and there’s a fluttering in my chest, like a bat has got loose inside my rib cage.
“You didn’t have to do it for me,” I say, feeling awkward as our hands drop apart. I want to keep touching him, to assure myself he is all in one piece, but I content myself with leaning against the wall beside him, our shoulders pressed together.
“I didn’t do it for you, I did it because he’s a wanker and it was the right thing to do,” Bastian says, his eyes sharp. When he looks at me like this, I feel very … watched. Noticed. It’s the first time it’s ever been pleasant for me.
“Well, it was still kind of … gallant.”
“Gallant?” He smiles.