Spellfire

Chapter 1

The broad coastal view was also the same.

The Pacific spooled out into the horizon, vast and endless, increasing Bryn’s feelings of loneliness.

She did, after all, come from a family of sirens; of course the ocean felt like home.

But she resented it for making her feel that way, especially now, after she’d tried so hard to find a new home.

She’d moved to the mountains, to a city with a far different skyline and a more contained view, without the sprawl of forever.

Yet, standing here in Grimoire again, the sensation was unavoidable: this was her home, even though she hated it a little bit. Sometimes more than a little bit.

The subtle hum of magic was also the same.

Most individual witches weren’t strong enough to make the air around them vibrate, but a magical institution, housing many of them (some of whom were quite strong), definitely altered the space it inhabited.

A “magical planar field” was how the physicists referred to it in those books she’d bought when she still intended to study the subject.

The ability to sense such things had marked her as different from her mother and sister, both sirens.

It was also what had gained her early entrance to Grimoire Academy at the age of just thirteen.

“But you’re a siren,” her mother had said, with that familiar edge of I don’t know what to do with you desperation that had been such a feature of Bryn’s childhood.

“I … think I’m a witch, Mom.” She remembered holding up the glossy Grimoire Academy pamphlet. “Like they are.”

At the time, the look of resignation on her mom’s face had been a victory sign—she was going to say yes!

Only later did Bryn wonder how hard it had been for her mom, a proud siren, to raise an odd little witch she didn’t understand, and then to send her off to a school, entrusting her to strangers she understood just as little.

Which reminded her that although she was back at the school, her favorite professor was not.

Professor Herringbone had been the best thing about Grimoire Academy.

She’d died suddenly the month before, leaving Bryn her beloved library.

When Bryn had asked if the collection could be mailed, the unknown woman on the other end of the phone line (whom she’d pictured as a permed-and-blue-tinted old lady with a furrowed brow and glasses the right shape to peer over in irritation) had coughed and said she didn’t have the staff to take on “such a project” and that the rooms would need to be cleared, so if Bryn wanted the books, she’d have to come herself.

It had seemed like such a dismissive way to treat the belongings of a professor who’d made Grimoire Academy her life, and who’d cared so much for the school and its students.

Raw emotion caught Bryn off guard and she steadied herself against the car, before turning back to the wrought-iron gates.

The wind picked up, blowing hair across her face.

She was jittery with nerves. The flight from Denver had been delayed, and she’d forgotten (or repressed?) the dire state of the traffic, which meant that not only was she late, but she also hadn’t stopped to pick up boxes and packing tape.

No doubt she could find shipping supplies on campus somewhere.

She could do this. She was an adult now.

It had been five years. Sure, she’d suffered here, but didn’t everyone in high school?

Embarrassment, public humiliation. This was where she’d been betrayed by her first love—well, her first girlfriend, anyway.

In retrospect, love was laying it on a bit thick.

And who needed love? Good sex was easy enough to find without having to fling open the gates of your heart, just to have it ripped out.

She’d always been a loner and she was happy that way.

Well, content at least. Right?

She shook her head, trying not to examine that claim too closely.

In an attempt at distraction from her thoughts, from the gate she really needed to walk through any minute now, she looked around more carefully.

Only then did she notice the things about the school that had changed.

The sandstone pavers that made up the driveway and entrance had been power-washed in the not-too-distant past. She hadn’t paid attention as she’d parked on the side of the wide semicircle driveway, but now that she was standing, she could see the telltale marks of a high-pressure sprayer.

She wondered if she could craft a spell for that; cleaning spells were all well and good, but didn’t hold up to large expanses or uneven surfaces. There had to be a way to …

Before she could go down that rabbit hole, her eyes took in the plaza beyond the gate, lined on both sides by glittering fountains, with the school’s ceremonial cauldron in the center.

She remembered the awe she’d felt the first time she’d walked towards the looming castle, laid eyes on the cauldron and seen the bright residue of generations of graduating classes adding their own magic.

The jittery thrill of thinking: This is my new home had filled her until all of her nerves were humming, and despite the ups and downs of adolescence, it had never fully gone away.

Tonight, the sound of falling water and the scent of summer combined in some aching cocktail of nostalgia and regret that Bryn tried to push away as she approached the iron gate with the informational plaque about the school’s founding.

Bryn didn’t need to read it; Grimoire Academy’s backstory had been instilled in its students from the first day they arrived.

The struggle for magical education, the establishment of legal protection for witches, fights for justice and equality and empowerment.

It wasn’t that she didn’t engage with those issues, but the legislation codifying magic and its users had been signed into law over a hundred years ago, and she’d had other things on her mind at thirteen.

Like trying to figure out her place in the social pecking order of boarding school, as well as working out how her relationship with her mom and little sister had changed since she was officially “Other”.

Trying to make friends … but it soon became clear that Bryn was terrible at that.

She’d told herself that maybe it was the siren in her; maybe she didn’t actually need friends.

For that matter, her mother had left home in Baja as a teenager, then spent most of her life in Grimoire and still hadn’t made any friends—magical or non-magical—so perhaps it was some sort of genetic thing and she may as well give up.

Sex, though, was different. Her mom (and, as far as Bryn knew, most sirens) had a sex drive that overcame her social distaste for others—or had at least a few times, judging by Bryn’s and her sister Luna’s existence.

Bryn, at age fifteen or so, had decided maybe that was the solution.

Maybe she needed to leap over “friendship” and go straight to “sex”.

At the time, it seemed like a reasonable theory.

And so, somehow, she’d worked up the courage to ask a girl to the winter solstice dance and everything went so well that she almost couldn’t believe it.

Her first kiss was glorious. Holding hands on the way to class was even better.

She finally felt like she belonged. But then her girlfriend found her diary and read about her silly crush on one of the older girls, the completely unattainable Amelia Hexford.

Bryn hadn’t even thought about Amelia (much) since she’d been kissing and holding hands with someone else.

And anyway, Amelia wasn’t a threat to their relationship.

She was way out of Bryn’s league—popular, cool, so beautiful that it almost hurt to look at her.

But her girlfriend was furious and at dinner that night she’d stood up and read the whole embarrassing paragraph out loud.

In front of everyone. In front of Amelia.

It had been, bar none, the worst moment in her life. She’d been humiliated, but more than that, she’d been ashamed. Why had she written that down? Why had she left her diary in her bag, and how had she ever trusted that girl, who’d not just read it, but read it in public?

They had all laughed at her. Some of them nervously, just glad it wasn’t them—but all of them had laughed. For months.

Except, actually, Amelia, whose expression had gone stark and unsmiling—though her friends were laughing the loudest, as if the very idea that a little toad like Bryn would dare to have a crush on her was the most ludicrous thing they’d ever heard.

Bryn, flushed bright tomato-red with humiliation, had dared to dart a glance towards Amelia, who was pretty red herself.

Possibly because it was embarrassing just to imagine being crushed on by someone like Bryn.

Even years later, Bryn wanted to cry when thinking about the look on Amelia’s face.

Amelia Hexford, who was now the headmistress of the school, at age twenty-four, and a glowing example of Grimoire Academy’s excellence.

Bryn cringed. What am I doing here? Except she knew.

She was here because Professor Herringbone, the only person who’d made Grimoire Academy feel like home, had died.

And left her incredible, enviable, rare-as-hell library to Bryn, out of all the students she’d ever taught.

The fact that the news had been delivered by an icy-voiced stranger, who hadn’t seemed to care about the professor’s books (or at least wasn’t going to bestir herself to make sure Bryn received them) had also contributed; it had felt so personal, like dismissing Professor Herringbone’s entire life work.

Maybe that’s why Bryn had felt so compelled to come in person: to show that the professor had made a very real difference.

That she honored that legacy. Or maybe she was trying to prove something to the girl she remembered being, the one who’d fled the refectory in tears after her diary had been read to the whole school.

She hadn’t really been an ugly little toad, though she had felt like one.

She was just a girl who’d grown slightly too tall too fast, whose light brown skin and non-witching background set her apart from most of her classmates, and who wasn’t skinny enough, or rich enough, or confident enough.

The girl who’d kept her head down for the last two years of school until she could finally escape to anywhere but here.

Except now she was here, again.

She had to go in. It was just her old school.

No monsters lurked here, only a few painful memories (and a very few good ones).

All she had to do was enter the gates and ring the bell, which would magically alert whoever was currently on duty.

Was it still Madame Thwaits, who served as majordomo at the castle?

She’d been rule-oriented, but not mean with it.

Maybe Bryn could avoid Amelia altogether.

She just needed a few hours in Professor Herringbone’s rooms, with some boxes and tape.

A lot of boxes and tape. That would be best: get in, do the job, get out.

Load everything she could fit into the rental, arrange with Madame Thwaits to ship the rest. No need to bother the headmistress at all.

I’m an adult, she admonished herself again. Plus, Amelia probably doesn’t even remember me. Hopefully. She was Amelia Hexford, and I was no one.

On this reassuring note, she pushed open the gates—just as the doors of the castle swung open.

A clear voice rang out, carrying to Bryn across the plaza: “That’s all right, Mrs Mallory, I’ll take care of this!

” Then a figure in a flowing emerald dress, with a matching over-robe, practically flew down the main stairs right towards Bryn.

Amelia freaking Hexford was, right now, in real life, skipping right at her.