- Jessa Lucas
- Jan 17, 2021
- 9 min read
Chapter Four
Low-Level Miscreants
A look of horror blooms on Sabbath’s face. “I sent Cecily for a professor—”
“You. Did. Not,” I gasp. “Please tell me that’s not Thorncaster marching her way up here right now!”
Her lips press together as she nods.
“SABBATH. Seventh year hasn’t even started yet and we’re going to get expelled. And that whole capital-G Good Witch speech I just gave? How’s that going to go if you get kicked out of the noblest of witching schools, huh?”
“You were dead!”
“AND YOU’RE A NECROMANCER WHO’S BROUGHT BACK HAMSTERS!”
“AND YOU’RE A PERSON—NOT A HAMSTER, MIKA—AND MY BEST FRIEND!”
This, of course, is true. I frown, pressing a palm into my forehead. “One day you’re going to have to stop being so responsible—”
“Are we going to try to get away with this or not?” Sabbath demands, waving wildly at the evidence of the séance.
I freeze, because I’ve never heard Sabbath Winters utter the words “get away with” before in my life. Then again, Sabbath is surprising me a lot today. Resurrecting me against God’s will, casually dropping F-bombs, agreeing to cover-ups of our accidental death-by-séance.
Like I said, a lot.
Quickly blowing out the candles, I close the flustered looking books and lamely toss a floor pillow across all the places where there’s blood. We lean back into the pillows, looking very casual, I’m certain.
Flicking my fingers toward my hair, I mutter a spell under my breath, but the simple charm isn’t working. “Sabbath,” I hiss. “Put a glamor on my hair!”
“What?” She mumbles, apparently incapable of understanding the discreet language of indistinguishable hissing that we’ve spent years perfecting. In my biggest time of need, no less!
“Hair!” I gesture stiffly, waving my hand the length of my long, newly color-drained locks.
“Oh!” The magic words fly from her lips, and I immediately see my hair darken to its natural auburn hue in my peripheral vision… just in time.
The door bursts open, shuddering against its frame. Professor Mirabel Thorncaster’s frazzled, grey-streaked hair looks especially enraged as she barges into our room. It’s barely contained beneath the rim of her black pointy hat, much like her wrath, as she stares at us with sparkling, ageless eyes and severely thin lips.
“What is the meaning of this?” she asks in her posh English accent, infused with the same deadly calm as her stiff posture. She holds the tension of a wild animal in her body at all times—those ones who are in the middle of a hunt, watching, waiting, ready to spring.
The bespectacled and highly irritating Cecily cowers behind Thorncaster, aghast at my aliveness while our professor’s gaze wheels around the room. If she’s shocked to see me conscious, she’s not showing it.
“An unsanctioned séance is one thing. Attempted student resurrection by a seventh-year necromancer is far worse!” Thorncaster cries. “Imagine if she’d actually been dead! You could have brought Michlynn back a zombie, Sabbath. You could have cleaved her spirit from her body, leaving her to wander for all eternity!”
“We’re sorry for worrying you, Professor. I just passed out,” I explain, pretending like the textbook, candles, and the way I look like death are totally irrelevant facts.
“That’s not—” Cecily starts, but I promise her punishment with my eyes if she doesn’t snap her mouth shut.
She does.
All I have to do is convince Thorncaster that I haven’t just been to Purgatory and back. I’m shining with confidence. The trick here, I’m certain, is not to persuade her that we’re innocent, but to prove that we are merely low-level miscreants, and thus, disguise our greater trespass.
“We were just curious about the ancestors, and things got a little out of hand.”
Thorncaster’s eyes sharpen, and for a moment, I’m certain she can see right through me like I’m the ghost I’m very thankful I’m not.
“I’ll say,” Thorncaster growls. “You’re lucky that it takes proper training, and skill, for nearly all witches to be able to conjure spirits, especially on a night like tonight! The ancestors are not genies to trap and tame, ladies. They’re unwieldy, unrested souls.” Her arm stirs violently around in the air to indicate, I guess, the unwieldy, unrested nature of these apparently violent souls. “They’re not easily ensnared, nor are they easily convinced to come play with witchlings for sport.”
“My Grandma died this summer,” Sabbath offers, and I look over at her, trying to keep my face straight. “I didn’t get to say goodbye, and I always felt like she had something to tell me. I’m really sorry, Professor.”
Omens, I’ve been a bad influence on this girl if she’s lying about her dead grandmother this convincingly.
We’re lucky Thorncaster has always had a soft spot for Sabbath, who’s graciously become a liar on my behalf. If anyone finds out we’d actually been trying to commune with my mom, it’ll be off to Gloomgate for us. I don’t even know what witch prison entails—we don’t get that level of clearance until at least ninth year. Obviously, whatever it is can’t be ideal.
“I’m shocked, Sabbath,” Thorncaster says, dropping her voice so low that the whisper of her disappointment is like a slap.
“I know.” Sabbath bows her head in shame.
My throat bubbles up with emotion, because for a good minute there, I definitely didn’t think I’d ever be alive enough to watch Sabbath’s token shame make its grand appearance again. This moment is oddly poignant for me.
A tear comes to my eye, and I wipe it as though it’s part of this charade. “It’s my fault, Professor Thorncaster,” I interject. “It was my idea. I just thought maybe her grandmother might be an unrested soul, you know,” I parrot Thorncaster’s gesture of waving her hand in the illustrative aether, “up there.”
Peering down at me curiously, Thorncaster doesn’t seem particularly convinced. Here comes the real nail in my coffin. “Sabbath would never do something like this on her own.”
Always good to rub a little truth into an especially good lie. And boy is this the truth.
“Detention for you both,” Thorncaster barks.
I offer a solemn, but obedient, nod. “We’re sorry.”
“I am this close to banning you from the feast tonight,” she adds, pinching the air between two fingers to indicate just how close. It’s pretty close. “If I had my right mind about me, I would. But as it is, the feast exists exactly for this reason—to dissuade students from sneaking off at the peak of power, with their own purposes in mind.” She straightens her hat. “Besides, tonight is a night for celebration. This is no way to start a new year. Get your acts together, ladies.”
Thorncaster retreats, leaving Cecily pinned to the spot. Cecily’s also Necromancy Brood along with Sab, and she’s a total stuck up nobody. I’m disappointed that she’s one of three people who knows I died tonight. Clearly suspicious, she shakes her head and walks through the door adjoining our rooms with a huff.
Giving a quick wave to Cecily’s roommate, Isolde, I move to close the door. Isolde is Transfiguration Brood, and she’s currently busy putting all the lessons she learned last year to good use in a re-decoration effort. The Leaning Tower of Pisa tchotchke sitting on her shelf could use a little work, though; she’s just tried to transform it into the Eiffel Tower, but it’s sitting there, looking a little droopy and a lot phallic.
Cecily glares at us from the narrowing slice of space between the door and its frame as I slam it shut and twist the lock.
“She’s going to get us expelled one day,” I mutter.
“Definitely,” Sabbath agrees.
I exhale, amazed we just got away with whatever just happened. I mean, I don’t want to be dramatic, but that might have been worse than actually dying.
“Maybe we just stop breaking the rules?” Sabbath suggests.
“Somehow, that seems like an overly optimistic plan.”
Muttering a brief incantation to keep any eavesdropping ears from listening in, I wave my hand at the door. I can’t feel the reverberations of the charm spark, and I frown at Sabbath.
“Sab, should I be worried about the way my magic seems to be, um, gone?”
“I think it’s normal to come back with some side effects,” she says as I collapse on the bed next to her. “You should be okay soon.”
Sabbath opens the window and I take a big breath, glorying in the taste of the fresh air—I can smell pumpkin everything wafting up through the window. My stomach grumbles. Dying can really make a gal famished.
“How do you feel?” Sabbath asks softly.
I think about it for a moment. “Pretty solid.”
“No, I mean about your mom.”
Oh. That’s a totally different question. I frown up at the ceiling, with its ribbed vaults and aged paint, and wonder how many generations of witchlings have also stared up there, searching for their own words.
“Maybe this was it, you know,” I finally admit. “My chance to find out why she killed the High Council. And God, or the Universe, or whatever it is that decides the way things are... didn’t want me to. Maybe it’s better this way.”
“You don’t believe that, do you? I mean,” Sabbath stumbles over her words, “you don’t sound like you believe it.”
“Aren’t you the one who’s all, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ blargh,” I make a sound that I believe most accurately conveys how I feel about such platitudes.
"Sometimes. But sometimes the reason could just be to try a little harder.”
“I don’t know what could be harder than dying, Sab. That seems like a universal way of saying, ‘Come to a full stop now, please.’”
Her sad gaze falls on me. Sabbath wanted this closure for me, and I think she wanted reassurance that going on a killing spree was a choice, not a fate someone happens to stumble upon. It would’ve been nice to have that reassurance for myself, too.
“It’s okay, Sabbath,” I say, mostly meaning it. “I’ve spent the majority of my life not thinking about my mom. It’ll just be like going back to normal.”
“To seventh year,” she says, raising her hand for a high five.
“To seventh year,” I chuckle, smashing my hand into hers.
I quickly bite back the whimper when the burn lights up against my palm. Turning my hand over, I stare at it as the ghost of pain returns. There, carved into my skin is the brand of my time in Purgatory. It’s sat on my skin unobtrusively as I escaped academic expulsion and contemplated a second chance at life, waiting until a quiet moment to announce itself.
Stunned, I examine it. I mean, I don’t know a lot about runes to begin with, but this one is way out of my realm of expertise. It’s wildly intricate, and unlike any rune I’ve ever seen.
“What is it?” Sabbath yanks my wrist, scowling down at the mark.
“I think Peter-Paul gave it to me in Purgatory.”
With my words Sabbath bolts upright, rushing to her pile of books. Leaning back on my forearms, I watch as she digs through them and finally withdraws a voluminous tome quite reminiscent of Peter-Paul’s mysterious ledger.
“What?” I demand. “What do you know that you’re not telling me, until you have the perfect textbook definition, Sab?”
“Theory of Necromancy 101. In necromancy, you almost always have to know how a person died to bring them back—” she begins, the brainiac in her surfacing.
“But you said you didn’t know—”
“I know what I said, shhh,” Sabbath hushes. “I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know how I brought you back. I told you, it was instinctual for me. But—” she flips wildly through the book, finally landing on a page, “runes are one way necromancers can perform resurrections. Meaning, there’s a whole lexicon of death runes. Here.” She indicates, pointing at a bunch of circular markings.
I look over at her expectantly, waiting for her to explain since I decided long ago not to be very good at runes.
“Look familiar?” Sabbath asks as I examine the page carefully. “Every cause of death is associated with a specific rune, Mika—flayed by heathens, burned at the stake, poisoned by a mistress. Voodoo, the plague...”
“Et cetera, et cetera,” I nod.
“And each type of death follows a similar pattern.”
“So, what do these mean?” I ask, pointing at them and stirring my finger around the runes that look vaguely like mine.
“This pattern here,” she informs me, tracing a circle with an elongated triangle and a series of notches inside it, “is the symbol for premeditated death, Mika.”
“…Premeditated?”
Worry knits at her brow as she nods. “Someone did this to you.”
“Wait. So you think,” I pause, scrunching up my nose. “You think I was murdered?”
A pained expression dances across her face, and I can tell Sabbath feels all the things I’m supposed to feel. Instead, I just stare at her.
“Maybe our séance didn’t just go wrong, Mika. Maybe it was sabotaged.”
“But I’m delightful,” I argue, still caught up on the part where she thinks someone killed me, like, on purpose.
Despite her best effort, Sab laughs, and I can’t help but join her. I mean, while I do think I’m pretty great, I guess I could also understand why someone might want to kill the offspring of this century’s greatest traitor.
My abs hurt from the laughter tumbling through me, and it’s such a relief to be alive, even if the working theory is that someone wants me dead. Right now, that sounds pretty ridiculous, and therefore, indescribably hilarious.
Like Thorncaster said, tonight is a night for celebrating, and I have a lot to celebrate. Like Sabbath being my best friend.
She reaches for me, her laughter wobbly like at any moment her giggles could easily roll into sobs of relief. Her fingers wipe her eyes before the tears even come. “For a minute there, I really thought I was never going to laugh with you again.”
“Not a chance,” I promise, squeezing her hand. This promise, I don’t make lightly. This promise is one I’ll keep.
Accepting my vow, Sabbath’s laughter frays. Her gaze sharpens. “But Mika, there is one person who might want you dead, and I know who it is.”
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