Chapter 19
Gwendolynne
I hate him, I hate him, I really fucking hate him.
It’s been a few foolish days of a strange and tentative truce—but clearly Harrisford and I are back to blackmail.
I’m almost tempted by Percy’s offer to pee on Harrisford’s pillow, but it’s too much of a risk.
With Harrisford’s threat hanging over our heads, I simply cannot risk Percy getting caught.
Still, I appreciate the solidarity.
I barely notice anything as I storm back to the hospital ward. When I burst in, a trail of rage like a cloud behind me, Conall and Pen glance at each other, concern etched on both their faces.
Isla finally lowers her strap. “Snogging Briggs in the drug cupboard now, are we, Chan?” Her upper lip curls.
“I wasn’t snogging anyone,” I snap, reaching into a cupboard and yanking out a syringe pump.
While magic can heal traumatic injuries like cuts and bruises and even broken bones, internal diseases are a different story.
Magic is powerful, obviously, but this cat is diabetic and in desperate need of insulin.
And even the most skilled magical veterinarians cannot conjure hormones from thin air.
First, though, I have to rehydrate her and balance her electrolytes. As I unwind the cord wrapped around the pump machine, I spy the small lettering on its underside: Powered by Magecorp. I sigh. Of course it is.
Isla moves closer, the overhead magelights casting a halo on her head.
“Just be careful he doesn’t break your heart right before exams.” She gives a contemptuous toss of her blond hair and flashes me a simpering smile.
“I’m sure you’re well aware of his reputation.
I’d hate to see your grades slip because you’re fawning over some man. ”
She’s mocking me, but I know what she’s really doing.
Isla and Harrisford were a thing back in fifth year.
They’d dated for ten months before Harrisford had illustriously broken things off with her.
Rumor has it that she never quite got over him, and she likes to stake her territory whenever she sees him getting close to, well, literally anyone else.
What she doesn’t realize, though, is that zero territory staking is necessary.
Harrisford’s and my circles had briefly overlapped, like a particularly distasteful Venn diagram.
But now our circles have separated and are so far apart from one another they’re not even touching.
They’re not overlapping…they’re underlapping.
I don’t look at her as I begin setting up the pump, plugging in the magical charging cord and powering it up. “I’m not foolish enough to make the same mistakes you did, Isla.”
She scoffs and moves away again, talking to her parrot familiar through their bond. Her comments sound rather snippy, and I’m pretty sure I hear the words “snot-nosed swot” and “ugly cow” muttered beneath her breath.
Conall moves closer to help me calculate the electrolyte concentrations and infusion rates. “Are you all right, Gwen?” he whispers. “You seem kind of…off.”
I stab at the buttons with my finger, taking my ire out on the machine. “I’m fine, Conall,” I say. “But meet me after class, yeah? I think I need your help.”
It’s the second time I’ve been inside Conall’s room, and this time I have more opportunity to examine the displayed drawings. They’re beautiful—all intricate lines and tightly drawn circles and scribbles that should look messy, but in this context, they are not.
“Are all of these yours?” I touch one of them with the tip of my finger.
“Yeah,” he says, shrugging. “It’s what I do to decompress.”
He comes to stand behind me, silent for a moment. I’m not exactly sure, but I feel like there’s a new drawing, one that wasn’t there the night Gary died. It’s the most beautiful and ambitious one yet, and I can almost feel the grief and rage and agony pouring out from the page.
“So what do you need help with?” Conall says, fixing his big brown eyes on me.
“I wanted to know if you can help interpret some blueprints.” Conall started out doing an engineering degree.
But from the little he’s said, I gather he found the toxic masculinity too triggering to his dysphoria, so he transferred to veterinary science after completing third year.
He got some credits for the pure sciences and then worked hard to catch up to the rest, joining us in fourth year, a few weeks into term one.
If anyone here can figure these blueprints out, it’d be him.
Unlocking my strap, I show him some of the photos I snapped of the scrolls stored at Magecorp HQ. The lines are faint and scratchy on the parchment, and I’m reminded of how old they were. Guilt swoops through my belly. They would have all been blown to bits.
Conall squints at my small, cracked screen, then extends his fingers toward me. “May I?” he says, and I nod, slipping the strap off my wrist.
He swirls his fingers through the air in a complicated figure-eight pattern, and all of a sudden the screen is projected into midair, suspended like a slightly translucent billboard. The projection shows the plans and blueprints, magnified, and he spends some time swiping through them.
I watch him, fascinated. It’s incredible, really, how everyone here seems to so casually wield their magic.
Conall’s family isn’t super wealthy—he does room in my dorm wing, after all—but from what I can gather, they’re comfortably middle-class.
Well-off enough, at least, to use magic on a whim.
For someone like me, who’s always had to carefully control my magic quotas, it’s such an unfamiliar concept.
His eyes are two bright sparks as he finally turns to me. “What are these? Where did you get them?” There’s barely leashed excitement quivering in his voice. “And more to the point…how?”
“I…well…I can’t say how I got them, sorry. But they’re from Magecorp HQ. Can you read them?”
Conall’s gaze swivels back to the magnified blueprints.
This time, when he speaks, he allows the excitement to fully fizz over.
“Gwen, these are amazing! I’ve no idea what dark magic you did to get your hands on them, but everything is here: how to open portals, how to keep them open, how to harvest the magic that comes through… This is bloody brilliant.”
The blueprints are tapping into Conall’s innate love for the hard sciences, and my heart twists, wondering whether he might’ve stuck with engineering if circumstances had been different.
“I didn’t even realize magic came from multiple portals,” he murmurs. “I thought it came from mines.” With one finger, he reverently traces the lines in midair. “Do you think this is related to the surge?”
Surge. Singular. Conall’s only experienced one, and doesn’t know about the others—the media has been busy telling everyone what happened at the charity gala was the result of a terrorist attack, and someone powerful has managed to quash all mentions of the rest. But even this one surge has impacted Conall in a big way.
He lost his familiar, Gary; he lost his best friend.
“I think so,” I say, and even though my voice is quiet, it lands heavily in the hush of the room. “I’m trying to…work out why it happened and whether there’s a way to prevent one from ever happening again.”
Conall’s eyes are distant—he’s clearly working things out in his head.
When he speaks again, he speaks slowly, rubbing at one of his elbows.
“According to these plans, once a portal is torn open, the tear is held in place by using some sort of…tether. An object, I think. It probably needs to be quite magically powerful to tether open a hole in reality.”
My stomach flips. A tether. If someone is tearing open too many holes, is it because they’ve got hold of a tether? And if so, if there is indeed a rogue tether being used to sabotage Magecorp, could someone like me steal it back? Without knowing what the tether is, I can’t be sure.
A twinge of guilt twists itself into my gut. Perhaps Harrisford’s dad was telling the truth all along: that Magecorp aren’t at fault but are, in fact, the ones being sabotaged.
Now, at least, we have something else to investigate—and I don’t even need the assistance of a certain pompous, annoying blond.
After supper, Conall and I head to the common room, earning ourselves a slew of strange looks.
I understand why: While Conall is sociable in his own quiet way, I almost never frequent any of Heywood Hall’s communal areas.
In fact, the closest I usually get to mixing with other people is when I pull long study sessions at the library.
Even then, I try to secrete myself in a hidden corner and talk to other people as little as reasonably feasible.
I mean, humans are disgusting, right?
But tonight I have a singular aim: Search the common room with Conall to see if there’s anything vaguely resembling a tether, the theory being that it might still be in the vicinity after causing such a huge explosion.
The thing is, it’s difficult when we have no idea what to look for.
The one saving grace is that Harrisford is happily absent, and nowhere to be seen.
To avoid suspicion, we wait until the room is mostly empty—the majority of the students having gone to bed—before we perform a thorough search.
Pen joins us, after their rostered evening check of the hospital patients.
They tell us Matilda the Norwegian Forest Cat is doing well, which is a huge relief.