Chapter Two
Nearly two weeks had gone by, and nothing could drive the kiss from Maggie’s mind. Nothing. Not all the work she needed to do to prepare her students for their final exams. Not the beautiful, warm spring weather. Nothing.
After the festival, she had returned to her apartment, a sleepy Dahlia in tow, just as the birdsong became insistent and the sky brightened to an offensive shade of pink.
They had drawn the curtains tight against the onslaught of morning; drank tall, necessary glasses of water; and crashed, Maggie in her bed and Dahlia on the couch.
It should have been easy for her to fall asleep, but instead Maggie tossed and turned, thinking only of the way her body had come alive under a stranger’s touch.
When they had risen hours later—bleary-eyed, flowers still in their hair, and a hint of bonfire on their skin—Maggie had fessed up and told Dahlia everything.
When she thought of the kiss now, its memory felt well worn, like she had smoothed the edges by thinking of it too often.
She couldn’t hold on to any details about the man, no matter how hard she tried.
Not the way his hair looked in the firelight or the clothes he’d been wearing or the way he smelled.
Instead, she felt branded by his touch, by his breathy whisper against the skin below her ear, by the way his body was like an answer to a question she didn’t know she’d been asking.
She remembered nothing much about him, but his echo was all over her.
Unfortunately, nothing had driven the kiss from Dahlia’s mind either.
Her friend had spent every spare moment over the past weeks interrogating her, combing her vague memories with an exacting precision for any hint of the man’s identity.
The first thing Dahlia said to Maggie as she walked up to join her for lunch by the giant, ancient hawthorn tree that gave their college its name was, “What if we did a scrying spell?”
Maggie took a bite of her sandwich, wondering if it was worth it to try to ignore this question, but she knew Dahlia would only continue the conversation without her.
“And put what, exactly, into the calculation?” Scrying runes worked if you knew what you were looking for. The precise calculations necessary to complete the rune required specific details about the missing person or object. They knew nothing that would be useful.
“Have you remembered anything new?” Dahlia asked as she shook her container of salad.
“I remember looking up at him as we danced, so he was taller than me,” she recited, though Dahlia had already heard it a dozen times. “And I remember what he told me. That’s it.”
Dahlia stabbed her fork into a cherry tomato with more force than was strictly necessary. “I still can’t believe you found Galloway’s tallest eligible bachelor and you didn’t let him take off his mask.”
There had been many moments since she left the beach when Maggie had wondered at her own decision, regretted it even.
The mask taunted her from its new home, hanging from her car’s rearview mirror, its hawthorn petals drying to cellophane.
But she knew, without a doubt, that she would still make the same choice if he were in front of her now.
She would rather dream about what might have been, maddening as it was, than let someone in.
—
In her Introduction to Phonology course a few hours later, Maggie threw open the windows to catch an errant breeze as she watched her first-year students complete their quiz on the interdimensional phonetic alphabet.
However they did on this quiz would help her shape her review lessons before the final exam in a few weeks, which made her almost as nervous as they were.
Would she spend the next few weeks frantically reviewing the basics, or could they dive deeper into some interesting topics that might entice some of the students to keep studying linguistics? She’d know soon enough.
Her students were restless—noses scrunched, tapping pencil erasers and fanning themselves with spare pieces of paper.
Peals of laughter drifted up to the classroom from outside, where students who were already free of their classes had shed sweaters for T-shirts and sundresses to enjoy the warm weather.
“Five more minutes,” Maggie said as she weaved through the desks. One student sighed in relief or frustration, Maggie wasn’t sure which, and pencils began scratching faster across paper.
The first sign that something was very wrong came when the flickering faefire lamps hanging from the ceiling began to swing on their dainty chains.
Maggie looked up quizzically. She was watching the ornate pendants and the dust shaken free from their shades when a cacophonous crash shook the floor above them.
Confusion more than fear rippled through the classroom as her students followed her gaze as if they would be able to see through the ceiling to whatever caused the ruckus.
At first, Maggie thought one of the transmutation lectures had gotten particularly unruly. It wouldn’t be the first time that one of Jim’s demonstrations turning a cockroach into a mouse led to knocked-over chairs and frightened second years, but then there was another crash.
Somewhere upstairs, glass shattered. The floor shook again.
There was shouting and a high-pitched scream.
Maggie’s heart raced, even as she reminded her students to remain calm.
But none of them could deny the unmistakable odor of magic gone wrong—sulfur and the burnt tinge of ether—that was now seeping into her classroom from above.
“I think it’s time to evacuate.” The easy tone of Maggie’s voice belied her worry.
Her students glanced at one another nervously, like fawns, but obeyed the careful instructions she recited, filing slowly out of the classroom toward the nearest stairwell.
In the hall, the smell was overwhelming, and they tucked their noses into their collars and sputtered coughs.
Ilex Hall was an old manor house that had been converted into classrooms eighty-odd years before, when the property became Hawthorn College.
Square-shaped with a courtyard in the middle, there were rounded turrets with sprawling spiral staircases in each corner.
Maggie directed her students to the northern stairwell while she cataloged the possibilities of what had gone wrong.
A fire in one of the alchemy labs on the third floor, filled with countless chemicals and equipment, would be a nightmare.
It could, she supposed, be a ghoul. They weren’t unheard of this close to the Wilds and were sometimes drawn to campus by their insatiable hunger, though how it would have gotten all the way to the third floor without anyone noticing, she had no idea.
She was thinking through their evacuation route and the dangers they might encounter when Beth, the student in the front of the line, screeched, “What the fuck is that?”
Maggie pushed her way forward. The heavy antique door that led to the stairwell oozed a lavender-tinged sludge, and Maggie blanched. Damn. In all the possibilities she had sorted through, this was not one of them.
“That is pall slime,” she said, breathless. “Stay behind me.” The mouths of her students dropped in shock, new alarm widening their eyes as they shuffled behind her. Beth wiped her hands aggressively on her jeans.
Maggie’s students knew well enough the hazards of a pall, even if they’d never seen one before.
Palls were the dangerous by-products of powerful alchemical reactions gone wrong.
The energy required for spellmaking had to come from somewhere.
Small, everyday spells took only a little bit, like plucking a piece of lint off a sweater.
Big spells took so much more, and, when things went wrong, they could cause a snag, a rip in the fabric that separates this world from the next. That was a pall.
A misplaced line in a rune, a mispronounced incantation, the incorrect ratio of ingredients in a decoction—if the magic was strong enough, if the power needed to initiate the transformation great enough, even a small slipup could cause a pall.
Palls caused untold havoc, including producing otherworldly debris like the strange slime.
“I thought only big spells could produce a pall. Why is there one here?” one of her students asked.
“That’s a great question,” Maggie muttered as she took out the spare bit of chalk she kept in her pocket.
They all knew the rules. Class 3 spells are strictly prohibited on Hawthorn College’s campus without the proper protocols.
Most spells did not have enough power behind them to produce a pall, and only the most experienced alchemists should even attempt the ones that did.
She hadn’t done magic that powerful without some form of magical training wheels until a full year into grad school.
She couldn’t imagine which of her colleagues had let such a thing happen.
“Anyone have the time?” she called over her shoulder, and a student provided it down to the second. Maggie did a quick calculation in her head and began to draw a rune on the door.
“In an emergency,” she explained, taking advantage of the situation to get in a little instruction, “we go for the simplest rune with the highest impact.” Her hands shook—with adrenaline, with fear—but she managed straight-enough lines.
“Until we contain this pall, even mistakes on simple spells will feed it. The last thing we want to do right now is make this thing worse.”
When the rune was complete, she placed her palm on the chalk lines and said the Diadhan incantation to activate it—a simple phrase that invoked a temporary but impermeable seal.
Her chalk lines glowed bright, followed by a dim shimmer that slid around the gap between the frame and the door.
It sealed with a pop, cutting off the source of the lavender sludge.