Chapter 2 #2
Avery should bill her for this conversation.
It was tacking on another meal to a restaurant of trauma.
Unfortunately, it was true. She was an utter failure according to her mother, the university, and hell, probably the whole world at this point.
She had even disappointed the singular plant by her windowsill.
Its drooping, yellowing leaves yearned for a drop of water.
She hadn’t bothered to take care of it because the rest of her life was falling apart.
“I’ve been trying.”
“Trying is not a word in the vocabulary of Caerwyn, Avery.” Her mother leaned forward in her chair, its spires twisting into a snarl that matched her terrifying energy. “You either do, or you don’t.”
“Let me try again,” Avery begged. She was not above getting down on her knees and pleading. Although her knees might suffer for it; being the ripe age of twenty-two had done numbers on her joints.
Her mother sighed. “Why, to fail again? Embarrass this family further like your aunt did?”
She’d always heard about her Aunt Alys, and how terrible she was, but she’d never met her to see that for herself. For some reason, she hadn’t been able to summon a familiar either.
Shame scorched Avery’s cheeks; the familiar feeling engraved itself in her body like a brand she constantly carried. Failure may as well be tattooed across her forehead. She knew she was running out of time, that it would come to this.
“I just need one more day,” Avery begged.
Her mother looked unconvinced, eyes narrowed. It was almost a challenge, almost like she was waiting for her to fail, like she wanted her to.
“Please, Mother.”
She relented. “Fine, you get one more day. After that, I will file this expulsion, and you will cease to be a part of this prestigious institution.” She took a deep breath, as if chiding her child was a strenuous activity, when for her it was more of a hobby.
Avery’s hobbies were swimming and scanning the internet for increasingly harder riddles and freaky shifter porn, apparently.
She wouldn’t be surprised if her mother dabbled in killing innocent animals as a hobby.
“I won’t let you down, Councilor.” Avery used her mother’s official title, not bothering with the familiarities of addressing her.
In reality, this was as far as their relationship went.
Apart from the occasional and awkward mandatory family dinners, there wasn’t a single drop of interest in being a mother.
There never really was. Before, when Avery had been an exemplary student, if she wasn’t as good as Wren or Gwyn, she was still a failure.
Her mother’s phone vibrated on the table, her glare finally breaking away to look at who texted her. She looked at Wren and gave her a nod. “We have something to attend to. See yourself out, Avery.”
When the door shut behind her, like the well-adjusted, mature adult she was, Avery mimicked “See yourself out, Avery” like a cantankerous four-year-old as the tears streamed down her face.
One more day. That was all she had to summon a familiar.
Something she had failed to do for the last year.
She had tried everything: obscure phases of the moon, following ley lines, fucking getting down on her knees and begging for the grace of the goddess to grant her a rat.
She wondered if one would give her special powers.
A cheese connoisseur? A world-famous French chef, perhaps? So many possibilities.
Part of her wanted to collapse into it, to become the very thing that her mother envisioned for her. It would be easy, so easy to climb back into her bed for another day, to hide under the covers and watch the world go by.
“Fuck that,” she whispered to herself.
The library greeted her with its familiar warmth.
Stained-glass windows showered the double-story hall in puddles of crimson.
The domed ceiling displayed an intricate artwork of their goddess spearing a bull shifter through the heart, as she should.
Although Avery must say the artist did a fine job on his muscles. Damn that website.
Before she headed to her usual spot, she poured herself a cup of tea from the library kitchen and tried not to let it spill as she headed to the back of the library.
She passed groups of students, mostly sitting together studying, or at least trying to study.
Trying being a very optimistic word for it.
A fourth-year student from her class sat in a nook.
He pretended to look at an open book while another student sat on his knees underneath the desk.
Avery looked away quickly, her cheeks heating.
It had been a while since she’d had any sort of debauchery.
She tried not to think about the memory that was like an incessant fly in desperate need of swatting.
Where the shifters got her wet, the memory of the dubious choices she had made over the years got her drier than the Sahara now.
Maybe she should pray to the goddess for some good dick.
Anything would be better than a balls-deep loser who didn’t know where the clit was.
When she reached the back of the library, she took her seat.
Shelves on each side surrounded the table, with a small gap between them to make an entryway.
It was secluded, cozy, and she was hardly ever bothered apart from the occasional visit of the librarian or her white owl, who sometimes came to peer at what she was doing.
She had spent an ungoddessly amount of time in this section, poring over the books about familiar bonds and how to summon them.
For most witches, it was easy. Some had to try a few times; maybe they read a word or two wrong, but they always got a familiar.
For some reason, biological, psychological, metaphysical, and spiritual, she was inept.
It happened from time to time when a witch failed to manifest their familiar.
Witch culture saw it as a sign from the goddess that the culprit was not meant to be a witch.
Avery, however, did not believe that the goddess was even real.
Had she ever seen her? Had anyone ever brought forward tangible proof that she exists?
If she did exist, she was a bitch—respectfully, of course.
People and animals died in such a horrific manner that she couldn’t believe a benevolent goddess would ever allow such things to happen.
The Tomes said it was for balance. Avery said it was for sadistic pleasure.
What other things would you have to do with an immortal life?
In some ways, she understood, though. There was that one time where she removed the ladder from the pool in her Sims game and let them drown just for the fuck of it. Perhaps they had more in common than she thought.
The owl hooted over her shoulder, its talons gripping her as it found a painful perch on her collarbone.
“Shoo!” Avery waved her hand at it. It did nothing but flap its wings unceremoniously.
“Don’t you have better places to be?” she asked it, as if she expected it to talk back.
If a familiar could talk, she wondered what they would say.
A theater played out inside her mind of an owl.
One of them was intelligent, a true savant of literature; it would say something like “I find your lack of knowledge disturbing.” The other one would bob its head up and down and screech.
The librarian’s owl was always a stickybeak, literally always getting up in her business and distracting her. It was its full-time job.
Using her collarbone as a launchpad, it flung itself off her shoulder and onto the towering bookshelf. It hooted from the top, almost beckoning her to follow. Or was it all an elaborate plot to take her eyeballs from their sockets once she reached the top of the shelf?
She sighed and climbed the nearby ladder, the rickety wood straining under her weight. Please don’t collapse. Please don’t collapse.
When she made it to the top, dust bunnies hopped around collecting dust for their nests.
They were strange little creatures, so unbearably cute.
An old book lay on its side, where a few bunnies grazed on top of it like a sprawling field.
She wondered if they had little dust ranches, where one wore a cowboy hat and sat down with his wife on their dusty porch swing at the end of the day and said, “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
” The thought brought a smile to her face as she reached her hand out to examine the book.
One of them hissed at her. Bitch. She took everything she said back, and she took it back with pride. May their nests never be filled with dust. May their children never experience a bountiful dust harvest.
She curled the book into her arm and made her way down the ladder. As she dropped it on the table, the owl once again came to join her, nudging its little black beak between the pages, trying to use it as some sort of chew toy.
The book was old; the edges were yellowed, its spine cracked from years of use.
It would have been hand-bound, a rarity in books nowadays.
She hadn’t seen it before in the library, which seemed impossible given that she had pretty much read everything in this section.
There was always the chance that someone had mislabeled something or put it somewhere else.
Maybe if the owl didn’t spend so long harassing its students, perhaps it would do its actual full-time job, which was organizing the damn books, or technically giving the librarian the power to organize the books, which she didn’t do either.
His beak was trying to turn the pages, using his little talons to scratch as if that would change anything at all.
The owl was far more animated than usual, and now that she looked at it, its feathers were darker than usual, its eyes a different shade.
She was probably just drunk, though—actually, she was still very drunk.
She put the owl out of its misery and opened the page it was trying to get to.
Her heart skipped when she deciphered the title written in the old language.
“Familiar Bonding Ritual.” It took her about ten minutes to translate the language because linguistic classes were never her strong suit, and unfortunately for her, the witches would never allow the sacred old language to be Googleable, so she had to rely on her good ole noggin to decipher what it was actually going on about, and that noggin was fighting for its life, given she had doused it in alcohol a mere few hours earlier.
The moon puddled through the stained glass windows, throwing dappled red lights onto the table in front of her as she worked through the ritual. For a moment, she thought it was just her being stupid, but it turned out the words actually spelled out a riddle.
A smile curved at her lips. She fucking loved riddles. She didn’t do drugs, but if she did, riddles would be the crack she would be whoring herself out for.
Her fingers traced the yellowing pages, the text indenting the page as if it had been written by ink and quill. Given how old the book looked, it probably would have been. She highly doubted a twelfth-century witch peasant would have had access to an HP OfficeJet Pro.
The old language was tricky, the spelling archaic.
She recognized most of the words. Seith—seven.
Seven wicks of flame—candles, obvious. Seven ivory prisons of the servants—bones, most probably of animals.
She kept bird skulls in her room for arts and crafts when she felt morbidly inspired.
Her latest piece of art was an egret skull hanging with dried daisies that said, “I Egret many of my choices.” The witches’ choice of artwork on Caerwyn was usually delightfully depressing.
The works were beautiful, yes, but somber.
So she took it upon herself to make her own depressing artwork, because at least they were a bit more whimsical.
Her finger followed the next line. Seven green tongues. That stumped her for a moment. Serpents? Literal tongues? She rubbed her temples, something she often did while trying to solve them.
“Sage?” she questioned no one but the owl. “Sage!” That made sense; they literally looked like green tongues. A rush of satisfaction coursed through her.
The next word she was unfamiliar with. It didn’t help that some of it had smudged. Curse the twelfth-century witch peasants and their grimy, grubby hands. She tried to sound it out. “Seith cusan...g...wyn...y bleidd.”
Seven kisses of the white wolf? It had to be white. Gwyn was her sister’s name, which meant white, holy, blessed. Even though she was literally none of those things, she was an incarnation of the devil herself, beating unsuspecting students with a lacrosse stick.
It had to be some sort of ingredient. She racked her brain, shuffling through her mental catalog of ritual herbs.
Wolfsbane was purple, so that was out. Wolf’s milk was a yellow flower on the outside, but it had white sap-like stuff inside, hence the “Milk” part.
Luckily, the translation was not literal, and she did not need to go harass a pregnant wolf.
An unbidden thought crashed through her mind of that damn website where the main character had milked a wolf shifter.
Goddess, how far she had fallen. Wolf’s milk—the plant kind—was endemic to the island, and she could easily find it in the forest.
It seemed like a standard ritual, bar a few ingredients. Until one unriddled word stopped her. Gweli. Blood.
Blood magic was forbidden.
The only thing she hadn’t tried was forbidden magic, something that would get her expelled, anyway.
However, desperate times called for desperate measures, and she was one desperate bitch.