Chapter 23
As much asI wanted to check on Clarissa, Bruce was already helping her. Instead, I ran into Aiden’s arms, my magical sight still in place. Everything about him was... normal.
I sighed in relief.
“I told you I’d be fine,” Aiden murmured in my ear. His hot breath made me shiver.
“Lincoln, can you help?” Bruce cried to the healer in our year.
I buried my face in Aiden’s chest. “What went wrong?” I whispered.
“I have no idea.”
“She’s got a pulse,” Lincoln announced, and my heart leapt in hope.
“Then why isn’t she breathing?” Bruce shouted.
“Give me a moment!” Lincoln said. “Get her lying on her back. Do you know how to give mouth-to-mouth?”
“Give what?” Bruce asked.
I marveled at the few differences between the sixteen hundreds and the present. He’d managed to fit so seamlessly into the academy. But some things, like life saving techniques such as mouth-to-mouth and CPR, had been so recently developed that he wasn’t aware of them. It’s not like the academy taught them; we had healers.
Lincoln explained in brief how to give Clarissa breath, and Bruce fitted his mouth over hers.
Something niggled in the back of my brain, and I repeated the cure to myself in an undertone. “Aiden…” I said slowly. “The gift of life... What if it’s a breath?”
“A breath from each of her siblings?” Aiden repeated, cocking his head to the side. “Could be.” His gaze was fixed on Bruce and his efforts. “Hey, Lincoln, is that doing anything?”
Lincoln shook his head. “I don’t understand it. Being without oxygen for so long, her pulse should have faltered. But it’s beating strongly.” He took his fingers away from her neck, where he’d been checking the timing of her pulse.
“It’s magic, then,” I said, more sure of myself than ever. “The breath of life.”
Lincoln’s eyes widened in surprise. “Worth a shot. Bruce, move aside.”
Bruce moved to Clarissa’s head, his fingers stroking her dark brown hair as if reluctant to part with her even for a moment.
When Lincoln breathed into Clarissa’s mouth, my magical sight saw movement. Just a tiny thread of magic moved from Lincoln into the unconscious beast.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “It’s working. Everyone, she needs you!”
Each of the eleven other beasts breathed a thread of magic into her. When the last one had finished, Bruce looked up at me expectantly.
“Hang on,” I said, watching closely. “Something’s happening. They’re twisting together. None of them are still attached to the beast that gave it, by the way. Now they’re getting smaller... I think they’re dissolving. Come on, Clarissa,” I pleaded with her. “You can do it.”
It felt like nobody was breathing for a moment, everyone focusing their energies on forcing Clarissa to wake up.
Bruce let out a whimper, closing his eyes and pressing his lips together tightly. His chin wobbled, and I knew he was holding back tears.
A sudden gasp broke the silence, and my attention was drawn back to the beast on the ground.
Green eyes were looking back at me.
“Clarissa?” I whispered, overcome.
“Bruce?” she croaked, her voice hoarse from disuse. “What happened?”
“You’re here! You’re really here!” Bruce kept alternating between touching her face and petting her hair.
“We should gather our things,” Hazel said, gesturing to the stairs.
One of the men started to say, “But most of us don’t have—”
Hazel cut him off with a glare. “Upstairs. Now,” she said firmly.
Aiden and I were the first ones to catch on, and we headed up the stairs to the common room to give Bruce and Clarissa some privacy for their reunion.
“I’ll show you my room,” Hazel said, grabbing my hand. “If you want to see it.” She looked past me at Aiden.
“I’ve been here all day. I’ve seen the rooms more than I’d like,” Aiden replied.
“Yes, please,” I said eagerly.
Hazel smiled and tugged my hand, leading me into the first room. It was simply furnished with a bed, desk, and chair. “I didn’t see this room very often,” she said. “Just to sleep in, really. Although once the others were here, I retreated more often just to get some peace and quiet.”
The thunder of eleven pairs of feet echoed on the stairs and I chuckled. “That’s quiet?”
“With the door closed, it’s not too bad,” Hazel said. “Better than downstairs in the lab, where everyone decided to congregate and ‘be helpful’.” She used finger quotes.
“I take offense to that!” said a voice, the owner popping his head into the room. “Some of us were very helpful!”
“Sure, if you call rearranging my notes helpful, William.” Hazel rolled her eyes.
“They made more sense in sequential order,” he protested.
Hazel pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Maybe you should leave now,” I suggested pointedly.
The guy opened and closed his mouth a couple times, but after glancing at Hazel, he nodded at me once and left.
“Thank you,” Hazel said with a groan. “It’s been like that the whole time. Everyone thinks they know my system better than me.”
“There’s a reason why you were chosen to be Professor Calderwood’s TA and not them,” I said, patting her hand supportively. I looked around the room again. “Why is this here? Or rather, I guess the question is, how is this here?”
“Bruce built it,” Hazel explained. “Ever since he arrived in the present, he’s been coming here and making it ready for us.”
“Which brings me to another question,” I said, half interrupting her. “Time travel?”
Hazel snorted a laugh. “He wouldn’t tell me more than that either. He doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, and although he trusted me with the revival of his wife, I think time travel is a whole other beast entirely.”
I raised my eyebrow at her pun and she smiled at me innocently.
“Well, let’s gather your things, then,” I said, wanting to be busy to avoid thinking about... well, everything. “Ummm, where are your things?”
“I don’t really have anything with me,” Hazel said. “I’d like to bring my notes. I’m hoping that Bruce will let me use this experiment as part of my thesis on unusual plant life.”
“Unusual,” I repeated in disbelief.
“I would hardly call this normal,” Hazel said, not understanding me.
“I was thinking the term was far too mild, actually,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I don’t expect to find anything else quite this outlandish!” Hazel shook her head. “But then, what do I know? I’m hoping Professor Calderwood will have some thoughts.” She bit her lip. “If he’s still willing to have me after I missed a full week of school.”
“If he doesn’t, he will be missing out,” I said, trying to reassure her. “He hasn’t picked a replacement, as far as I know.”
“That’s comforting,” she replied. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the siblings.”
“They’re all related?” I asked, eyebrows rising in surprise. “I thought I had explored that angle when I was searching for them!”
“Oh, no. It’s just what I’ve been calling them. Since they’re all of beast blood, you know.”
“Oh, right, the spell.”
We ventured back into the main common room, and Hazel introduced me to everyone.
“Geoffrey!” I greeted him cheerfully. “I’m so relieved to see you. I was worried about you, after Paige’s insinuations and then your disappearance.”
“Hello, Siobhan,” he replied quietly. “I know it wasn’t the best timing, but Bruce needed my help. I’m glad I was able to be of service in waking his wife from her death-like slumber.”
“He had quite a task, finding enough people willing to help him,” I said. I shivered. I couldn’t imagine going through all of this alone. Aiden caught my eye from across the room and I felt resolve trickle down my spine.
But I would do it for him.
A thousand times over.
“What are you all doing up there?” Bruce called up from the lab. “Don’t you want to get back to school?”
“No!” shouted some of the siblings, prompting the others to laugh.
“Coming!” I shouted down.
Eagerly, I took Aiden’s hand and we rejoined the happy couple.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Clarissa, who was standing encircled in Bruce’s arms.
“Like I just woke up from a long nap,” she replied with a rueful smile. “Bruce wants me checked over by the school’s healer, and I agree with him, but I couldn’t feel any better.”
“Are you ready to be hit by time shock?” Lincoln asked.
Clarissa wrinkled her nose. “Is anyone ever ready for that?”
“I wasn’t,” Bruce admitted. He opened the door. “Follow me, single file, please.”
“Can I grab my notes?” Hazel asked.
“We’ll come back,” Bruce promised. “I believe Siobhan has a meeting with Professor Dunlop at seven. It’s five minutes past, and he doesn’t like being kept waiting.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed, eyes wide. “I completely forgot about that! It feels like forever ago that I met with him.”
“Time passes differently in the tree,” Bruce said.
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Only a tiny time dilation effect. Every minute that passes in the real world is about a second.”
“Whoa. Something to do with shrinking?” I asked. “I didn’t notice it at Jim and Everly’s place.”
“Actually, it has more to do with the distance from the spell on their door,” Bruce explained. “The closer to the initial spell, the less dilation there is. But we’re quite far from it, so we felt it more.”
“How did that affect the growth of the golden spirit tree?” I asked, concerned. “The timeline seemed to match with the spell you told us.”
Bruce scratched his chin. “That’s an interesting thought. I don’t think it was affected because the tree is actually the size it’s supposed to be. So even though it was hidden in an area that was within a spell, it wasn’t affected by it.”
“Fascinating,” Hazel and I echoed each other, and then we smiled.
“I’ve missed you so much!” I said.
She squeezed my hand. “Same.”
By this point, we were out of the forest, our usual size, and heading for the academy.
The kitchen door flew open, an intimidatingly large fire-wreathed Professor Dunlop framed in the opening. “Where in the bloody hell have you been?” he roared.
I grabbed Aiden’s hand, scared for a moment.
“I’m sorry, professor,” Bruce said, stepping forward. “I must confess to the kidnapping of the students over the past week.”
Pure confusion stopped the professor in his tracks. “You... What?”
“You didn’t kidnap me,” Aiden said firmly.
“Or me!”
“Me neither!”
“Never been kidnapped in my life!”
“Professor, I think what we’re trying to say is that Bruce asked for our help, and we agreed,” Hazel said.
“All of you?” Professor Dunlop said dazedly. He counted heads. “Every single blessed one of you is safe? Wait, there’s one extra...”
Bruce cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce my wife, Clarissa Blackthorn.”
“It sounds like there is quite the story here, and while I can’t wait to hear it, I think we should all go and see the headmistress,” the professor said weakly. “Is anyone hungry? We can grab something on our way through the kitchen.”
“Starving! I haven’t eaten in weeks,” Lincoln teased.
“I brought you dinner before the—” Bruce cut himself off with a shake of his head. “Shut up.”
“Maybe we should travel unnoticed,” Professor Dunlop muttered to himself. “I don’t want everyone and their brother to stop us with questions.” Louder, he added, “Come on then, invisibility spells, everyone. Follow me to the headmistress’s office. If you don’t arrive, I will personally hunt you down.” He glared at us all, his eyes fierce under bushy eyebrows. “I assure you, I can do it.”
He cast a spell, and I realized that I still had my flow of magic spell on. I’d forgotten to remove it once magic wasn’t happening anymore. The magic moved across the sixteen of us, breaking into pieces, and tagging each person.
“Come on, chop chop,” the professor ordered, striding into the academy via the kitchen.
“You heard the man,” Bruce said.
“We’re not going to let you take the blame,” Aiden said to his friend.
Bruce’s face screwed up in a half smile. “Thing is, Aiden, I did ask multiple students to leave the academy. I took the memories of others, even if it was with permission.”
“But you had a good reason!” Aiden shouted.
“I’m not getting into this now.” Bruce took Clarissa’s hand and they disappeared.
“Fuck,” Aiden cursed.
“Come on,” I said. “You can argue with him in Headmistress Blackthorn’s office.”
I hadn’t been up close and personal with Headmistress Ophelia Blackthorn before, and certainly never been in her office. She gave an address at the beginning of every school year, but beyond that, she wasn’t seen very often, so I was eager to meet her.
Professor Dunlop was holding the office door open for us, counting his magical tags as we entered. “Sixteen,” he muttered, sagging with relief when the last person made it through the door. He closed it and said, “All right, invisibility spells off.”
The headmistress was sitting in her chair, fingers steepled in front of her mouth. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a bun, the silver streak wound intricately through it. She surveyed us calmly.
Finally, she said, “Thus it was spoken, ‘Master Bruce Blackthorn shalle travel through tyme and awaken his love, he shalle be of need, and shalle require siblings willing to gift of their lives, a golden spirit shalle be broken and consumed, twelve by twelve tymes, and she shalle breathe once again’.” She smiled. “The prophecy passed down through our family has been fulfilled. Why didn’t you come to me with this earlier, Bruce? I would have helped you.”
Bruce looked ashamed, his shoes suddenly of great interest to him. It was funny to watch him be scolded by his many-times descendent. “I didn’t know who to trust,” he finally admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“Tell me everything, from the beginning,” Headmistress Blackthorn said.
It took a while, with many interruptions from the siblings, but finally everyone was caught up on the events.
“Hang on,” I said slowly. “What about Richard’s death? He’s not a beast, so he had nothing to do with this.”
Bruce looked alarmed. “I never talked to Richard, I swear.”
“I believe you,” the headmistress said.
“But who killed him?” I asked.