Chapter Eleven

Seerious Consequences

“Even if we wanted to meet Soren, we have detention tonight,” I argue.

I’ve just told Sabbath the long tale of false hope, utter failure, and ghost stalkers that has been my day. Now, she’s giving me a pointed look, and unfortunately, I know what it means.

“You can’t seriously be thinking of sneaking out of detention, Sabbath. It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore.” I sigh.

Arching a dubious brow at me, she tosses a light coat over her shoulders. “Apparently, someone who gets detention.” She bumps me jokingly, but I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be able to get away with doing that. “Your life hangs in the balance. It’s worth it to make a deal.”

“Let’s just see what we have to do first, okay?”

Gaggles of girls travel the halls, en route to their Saturday night plans, while Sabbath and I navigate the winding nooks and crannies of the château to meet Thorncaster for detention. The administrative quarter is on the first level, at the heart of the building, the offices nestled into the bottom floor of the bell tower.

We pass by the banquet hall to find Thorncaster waiting in the courtyard, in front of the tower. She consults her watch just as the bell begins to toll the hour, and a single eyebrow inches up her forehead, her gaze meeting ours.

We’ve cut it close.

“Follow me,” she briskly instructs, and follow we do.

Her steps lead us around the tower, to the north side of the courtyard and back into the main building. We pass several halls, and mount far too many sets of stairs, until the professor settles on a small hallway on one of the upper levels—a few floors below the astronomy tower.

We come to stand in front of a large tapestry of Spellfall, contoured in hazy tones of blue and grey. A colonnade frames the two sides of the scene as if we are viewing the château from a distant balcony. In the field just ahead, a horseman is woven into the scene, frozen mid-gallop on his mighty steed.

Thorncaster swipes her hand through the air, and the white horse and his rider slither from the left side of the tapestry to the right, the tight, threaded loops, rippling with their shape as the figures move. It must be some sort of unlocking spell because when the rider reaches the other side, the whole thing shimmers away to reveal an old, creaky door.

The ancient wood groans as our professor pushes it open for us, ushering us inside. Instantly, an overwhelming aroma hits. It seems Sabbath and I have been relegated to a small and windowless room lined with shelves full of bottles. Crates crammed with jars stand in disorganized stacks, and I spot a long work table at the far wall with a jumble of lots of little wooden boxes labeled Powdered Lavender, Burnt Sage, and Dead Sea Salt.

“You are to spend all night in here, organizing our ingredient store,” Thorncaster orders, a hand on her hip while her eyes roam the mess. “I want you to log every item in here, and make sure it is categorized by magic type, then alphabetically. Is this understood?” Flipping an hourglass, she smacks it down on the work table next to a pen and parchment.

Surely, it’s part of the punishment that we have to count down our next six hours in the unbearable increment of sand granules. Looking around helplessly at what can only be described as a storage closet, I try not to let my spirits dim.

Thorncaster turns on her heel, her black trench coat flying as she exits. She pauses, looking over her shoulder. “And no magic, ladies.”

We both barely stifle our groans as the door creaks to a formidable close.

Sab crouches and begins to drag crates from the dusty corners one by one, popping open lids and peering inside. I grab a bottle of a teal blue liquid, uncorking it to sniff. I cringe before I’ve brought it even halfway up to my nose, holding it away from my face in disgust. “Mmm. Potent.”

“Shut that thing,” Sabbath mutters behind her hand, which is currently covering half her face.

I pop the cork back in and put the bottle back on the shelf, next to thirty more like it, turning it slightly to read the label: Aged Swordfish Tonic. I’ve never heard of such a thing. We must be in the off-limits section of Spellfall’s stores, a place to which only teachers have access.

“Are you nerding out yet?” Sabbath looks up at me and I frown.

“Um, no. Obviously not.”

“It would probably be best if you did. We might be able to find something in here that could help your symptoms.”

“Are you proposing we steal from the potions store, Sabbath?” I mock her. Her integrity has really come into question these last few days.

“Only since you seem hellbent on avoiding our only viable option. But before you go snooping around, can you please help me take stock of what’s in here? Thorncaster said—”

“I know, I know, no magic. It’s not like she’d even know.”

Sabbath gives me a severe look. “Oh, she’d know. Come on.”

* * *

We spend the first hour unearthing all the things hidden in the crevices of the room, dusting them off and trying to read their scrawling labels. I swear some of the stuff in here might be as old as Spellfall itself. There are some pretty gnarly ingredients—wilted butterfly wings, two-hundred-year-old minced newt tongue, flakes of rattlesnake scales, crushed lynx bones. More than a few times, I’ve had to keep from gagging.

On hour two, I am shelving all the jars of animal byproducts, while Sab logs them. Her wrist must hurt from such proficient calligraphy, but her pen stops for nothing. Not as she nods her head along to my hypotheses on shadow walkers, or when she shakes her head judgmentally as I scheme up theoretical potions using tonight’s discoveries.

Honestly, I would trust Sabbath Winters to do a lot—raise me from the dead, for instance—but I wouldn’t trust her in a room alone with two rabbit spleens and bonsai roots harvested on a full moon if my life depended on it. The girl can’t even remember the difference between newt tongue and newt toes—which is a very big difference, I might add.

“I mean, maybe aloe for protection and luck? You know, against the shadow walkers. It seems too easy.”

“Yeah, we don’t know anything about them,” Sabbath agrees, looking down at her list as she aligns jars of mustard seeds. “Aloe would be good for that burn though.”

“You’re right. I mean what even are they? Do you remember ever hearing anything about them in a necromancy class? Thirteen jars of eel eyes, twelve of piranha teeth.”

Sab shakes her head. “Twelve…” she mouths, scribbling on the paper. Finally, she sets the pen down with a quick exhale. “Death and resurrection bleed into soul magic. You probably can’t get away with just a herbal remedy, right?”

Ah. Sabbath is remembering her bases here. I’m proud of her, since she totally flunked that part of exams third year. We all learned in Intro to the Practice that there are five categories willed magic can fall into—medicinal, transformative, pale magic, black magic, and the most dangerous… soul magic.

A potion, or the spell’s ingredients, are usually balanced toward the type of magic it’s meant to accomplish. While a medicinal potion requires a higher ratio of plant-based ingredients, for example, more costly black magic would call for a ritual based around blood.

I wander off into the corners of my imagination in an attempt to concoct another solution, but the sound of a bottle hitting the floor makes me jump. “Aw, omens,” Sabbath groans at the sound of glass rolling slowly over stone.

“What’s wrong?” I stand to check. The bottle didn’t break—it has a protection charm. Whatever it contains must be precious.

“It’s just that,” Sabbath grunts, lying her belly down on the floor, “it rolled underneath this shelf.”

“Well, you could leave it?” I suggest, looking at the massive shelf. It’s wide, thick, and laden with glass jars. That thing isn’t moving easily.

“Can’t. It’s angelfire elixir. The only bottle, too.”

“Omens,” I agree, crouching down with her. Angelfire elixir is one of the rarest potions and, like a fine wine, it only grows more valuable over the ages. Witches and warlocks have been known to kill for it, and I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for the only bottle Spellfall has going missing.

I wedge my arm underneath the shelf, feeling my fingertips flick against the vial. It rolls a bit farther. Nudging myself closer, my shoulder crushes into the base of the shelf. “I just can’t…”

“We’re gonna have to move this thing.”

“Everything will fall off!”

“No, it won’t, Mika. We’ll do it carefully. Just don’t go ghost mode on me, okay? Come on.” Sabbath stands briskly, the final embers of our already long night flickering in her eyes with forced vigilance. She brushes the cobwebs off her skirt as I stand.

“On three, we shimmy it, okay?”

“Shimmy. Got it.”

“One… two… three.”

We jostle the shelf sluggishly from corner to corner, slowly creeping it away from the wall, and I watch Sabbath squat again, reaching behind it.

“Almost… got it.”

The sound of glass rolling away from her fingertips echoes in the room, and then there’s the unfortunate plink-plink-plink noise as it topples downward somewhere.

“Sabbath,” I groan.

“Mika,” she gasps, eyes wide. “There’s something back there. Let’s just move it like a little more, okay?”

I drop my head back dramatically and groan. Sabbath stares at me and, with a totally straight face, lifts her hand to wipe away the pretend tear running down her cheek.

Rolling my eyes, I ready my stance. “Okay, on three.”

“One—”

“Three.”

We shove the shelf out of the way so Sabbath can wedge half her body behind it. Instead, she just stands frozen, peering at the wall.

“What? What is it?” Circling around, my eyes follow her frown.

Behind the shelf is a staircase that bends down into the pitch black. Tingles lash through my skin, but I can’t help the smile unfolding on my face. It’s a secret passageway. “Excellent,” I nod.

“We have to get the angelfire elixir,” Sab laments, cringing at the eerie darkness, but my eyes brighten.

“Omens, Sab. I bet this is where they keep the especially gross stuff, like shrunken heads and unicorn balls.”

“Unicorn balls?” Her face crumples with disgust.

“That was a joke, but you know what I mean. Like body parts. Human body parts.”

“For Necromancy Brood?”

“Totally,” I reply, looking at her eagerly for permission. “Maybe they will have replacement arms, since mine aren’t working too well!”

“Calm down, Mika. You have the crazy eyes again.”

“I’m just curious,” I retort a bit defensively. “I kinda want to see, like, some eyeballs floating in jars and stuff.”

“You’re gross.”

“I know.”

Reaching for a candle from the table, Sabbath and I exchange another glance and step carefully into the mouth of the stairway. She looks back over her shoulder hesitantly. “You don’t think we’ll get locked down here, do you?”

“With what door?”

She shrugs. “An invisible, magic one.”

“So, you want me to stay at the top of the stairs then and wait for you?”

“I mean, you’re the one who wants to see floating eyeballs—”

“No way, Sabbath. We’re going together. Come on.”

We edge our way through the darkness, moving in the small circle of light allowed us by the candle’s flickering reach. My mind is still in scheme mode, hammering out ideas for the reserve of stored innards that I’m certain we’re about to find.

“There’s just so much you can do with eyeballs,” I whisper. “You can, like, see into the future, or conjure some of the higher-level spirits. Damn, you could—”

“Shhh!”

“Why are you hushing me?” I whisper.

“Because, what if there’s a troll down here?” she whispers back.

“Trolls aren’t real, Sabbath.”

We hit the landing and a long row of candles ignite in quick succession. The room glows with orange light, and glinting along the shelves are…

“Eyeballs!” I say gleefully. “Yes, I was right!”

It is truly disgusting, but it would also be a lie to say that I’m not awe-inspired.

“You do not sound like Alchemy Brood right now, you morbid weirdo.” Sabbath looks like she’s going to be sick. She quickly tasks herself with looking for the vial of angelfire elixir on the floor, where there are conveniently no jarred frontal lobes.

It’s not just human organs down here. I mean, there are a lot of those, don’t get me wrong. But there’s also a bunch of old-looking books and artifacts, talismans hanging from little bent hooks in the wall. A case of wands that look suspiciously like elongated, wizened fingers.

I pass by the row of eyeballs. They all squirm in their liquid-filled jars, swirling to take a look at me as I pass. It does make me a bit squeamish to know that these all used to belong in someone’s head. Is there a rhyme or reason to how they’ve been organized, a dozen to a jar?

Shivering, I move away from the hundreds of pupils fixed on me and find myself standing in front of the hearts next.

Human hearts.

They all seem to be in various states of post-mortem, a few giving subtle hiccups as if they still believe themselves to be encased in a human body. I wonder if it’s magic, that keeps them sputtering forward. Or if it’s magic that pulled them out of a chest before they were ready.

“Found it,” Sab wheezes, shaking the little vial. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I say, coming to stand at a junky table, piled with an assortment of relics. “One sec.”

Something flickers from behind a set of tarot cards, and I reach out to find a crystal ball. It sits atop a golden stand, cast in the shape of the Triple Lunar Goddess. The maiden, the mother, and the crone, all reach their hands out to hold the ball aloft.

I lift the ball from the grasp of the goddess, sparing a chuckle. Seers are certainly a noble class of witches, but few possess the true Sight, and every first-year girl hopes she’ll take her first soothsaying class and be found worthy. Most of us just end up reading into our crushes and being miserably wrong about them for the next four years. Cough.

“A bit infantile among the spasming hearts and gyrating eyeballs,” I note.

A pang of regret sidles through me as I see myself reflected in the marbly sphere of crystal. Praying to spirits, consulting crystal balls. Right now, they both seem like equally ridiculous ways of sussing out logic from a universe that doesn’t need to account for the reasons why it gives and takes.

“I wish the séance had worked, Sab,” I find myself saying. “I wish I had gotten some sort of answer.”

I hadn’t meant to say it, but it’s at the forefront of my mind, almost as if just holding this laughable instrument of fate has drawn the truth out of me. Frowning down at the orb, I only see my own disgruntled eyes staring back.

Sabbath’s lips do a little dance on her face, like her mouth and her mind are at odds about what they want to say. “We don’t know that the séance didn’t work.”

“I would say it was pretty solidly a fail.”

She reaches for my hand, but I pass her the crystal ball instead. Though she takes it, it’s not the ball she wants. She flips up my palm where the rune is a brand of scarlet against my skin. “This means something, Mika. We just have to figure out what.”

“Convenient how all our options are pointing in the direction of my potential murderer.” I grimace.

“Let’s consult the crystal ball,” Sabbath says excitedly, rolling it from the nook of her elbow and motioning for the stand.

We set the thing up on a grimy work table, and she splays her fingers across the glistering surface of the ball. The candles seem to dim as the orb of pink-tinged crystal winks in the coruscating light.

“Tell us, oh wise crystal,” Sabbath murmurs in a mock-spooky voice, “does Soren Cain want Mika dead?”

I almost burst out laughing, but I somehow manage to hold it in. At first, I’m sure the crystal ball, like me, doesn’t know whether or not to take Sabbath seriously. But seconds later, it swirls with pale silver clouds that paint the air in a faint lavender glow, turning over a shape that’s converging in the heart of the crystal.

Sabbath sticks her nose closer to examine. “I think it’s—”

“Nope, it’s broken,” I interrupt with certainty. Crystal balls are for losers, and séances are for wanna-be ghosts. I have already learned both of these lessons.

“Mika, this thing is from the House of Fates. I don’t think it’s lying.”

“Well, not on purpose,” I agree. She’s right, of course, the school’s name is engraved at the feet of the mother.

The House of Fates is the school of fortune-telling, and no one gets in there unless they have true Seersight. Their soothsaying instruments are unparalleled in the witching world, capable of gifting trivial feats of discernment to those even without Seersight.

Inside the depths of the crystal, the image takes the shape of a wavering hieroglyphic eye. The pupil has a strike down the middle as an indication of denial.

When Sabbath peels her hands from the ball, the image disperses, clouds scattering away. Once they still, she replaces her fingertips. “Does Soren Cain wish to harm Mika?”

The clouds are riled anew by the question, spinning in their little spherical atmosphere until the same shape converges behind them.

“Maybe this one is just broken, and only hands out noes?” I shrug. “Probably why it’s down here.” I wiggle my fingers at her.

“You try, then,” Sabbath mumbles, pushing the stand toward me, challenge in her eyes.

Taking a slow, deliberate breath, I set my fingers on the crystal. “Wisest among crystal balls,” I say with no small measure of bravado, “Does Soren Cain of Burnbright Institute, desire to see me, Michlynn Carrow, fully and expediently ended?”

The seerforsaken thing has the audacity to stare back up at me with that same, unblinking eye of denial. “It knows we’re mocking it,” I whisper.

“Mika, I think it’s actually working.”

I clear my throat. “Is Sabbath Winters looking at me like a stuck-up know-it-all right now?”

The hieroglyphic appears, the pupil clear of the mark. It’s a yes. “Fine, it’s working,” I agree.

Sabbath rolls her eyes. “That was unnecessary. Soren’s not trying to hurt you.”

“I still don’t trust him,” I protest. I don’t know how to wrap words around the tightening in my stomach when he opens his big fat mouth, or the snag of anger that catches my magic when we lock eyes.

“Mika, he probably knows stuff about your mom.”

She’s right. For all I know, Burnbright has a shrine dedicated to my mother’s wicked accomplishment. Ignoring the statement, I heft up the crystal ball, and shuffle back across the room to return it to its place, but just as I’m about to make it, my hands ghost out.

Sabbath’s reflexes are madness. Lurching forward, she catches the contraption before it clatters loudly to the floor, and peers up at me. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but we can’t wait any longer, Meeks.”

We trudge back up the stairway in silence, the room dimming to an inky black behind us. We shove the shelf back into place, and Sabbath gingerly replaces the angelfire elixir. She stands there for a moment, her back to me. I know she’s thinking, and whatever she’s thinking I’m not going to like.

Finally, she turns to me slowly. I close my eyes painfully, already wishing I can unhear her next words.

“I can’t let you fade, Mika. I literally couldn’t live without you. So, I don’t care what you say, I’m ditching detention and meeting Soren at midnight.”

“No, you’re not.” I sigh, blinking open my eyes. All my reluctance softens at the look of determination on her face. “We are. Obviously, I’m coming with you.”

OMG I *love* secret passageways/rooms. This scene was one that surprised me—I'd plotted the story but had no idea there was a room back there with a snarky crystal ball until I started writing. Did I go too far with the jars of body parts (ew) or is it just spooky enough?! ;)

xx Jessa

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