Page 15 of Bonds of Magic (Vesperwood Academy: Incubus #3)

CORY

I stared at Noah. He was closer to me than he’d been in a long time. I could see the individual flecks of green in his hazel eyes. I could have reached out and touched his face.

Noah was touching me, a second ago. He wasn’t anymore, but my hand was still warm from where his had covered mine.

I tried to make sense of what he’d said.

“How?” I asked, my voice catching.

“It’s complicated. And there’s too much to talk about now. We need to get you back to your room.”

“What? No!”

I wasn’t about to let him change the subject, not about this. Everyone said incubi were rare, but Noah was one, of all people? At least it explained why Dean Mansur thought he could teach me. But I was still lost.

“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” I added.

Noah’s face went stony. “I was in a fight. I almost died. But instead, I lost my connection to the dreamworld. Lost my ability to dream entirely. That’s it.”

He pressed his lips together, but when he shut his eyes a moment later, I realized he wasn’t mad at me. He was trying not to cry. Which was the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed. Noah crying was like a boulder crying. The two things just didn’t go together.

“I wish I’d died that day,” he said with a heavy sigh.

“But I didn’t. I’ve been dependent on Isaac’s trances—you know about those?

” He opened his eyes and waited until I nodded before continuing.

“Well, I’ve needed him ever since. To stay alive.

The incubus part of me needs to dream, but I can’t get to the dreamworld anymore. ”

He looked at my hands, clasped around my legs.

“And then I touched your hand, and I… I could see it again. I could feel it—the dreamworld—through you.”

Why were you touching my hand ? I wanted to ask, but Noah had never been this forthcoming before. Never been this close. It was stupid, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment.

Instead, I asked, “What do you think it means?”

“I have no idea.” He shook his head, and I could feel him building his walls back up. I could practically see it in his face as he—

““Oh God, you said you saw me,” I blurted out. “You could see what I was doing, in the dream?”

This was way worse than our run-in at the Balsam Inn. Worse than being seen half-naked, jerking off in public. Worse than coming when Noah asked me if I was next.

Humiliation rose in me like a tidal wave, but behind it, there was a silent question. Did he like what he saw ?

“Not the whole thing,” Noah said quickly. “Once I realized what was happening, I looked away.”

“That still means you saw part of it.” My cheeks were on fire.

“Kid, if you think that dream was enough to shock me, you’re even more naive than I thought.”

I bristled with indignation, but he didn’t notice.

“Remember, I was an incubus too. You think I haven’t seen my fair share of sex dreams? Haven’t had my fair share of sex?”

“Yeah, but—” I broke off, not exactly sure what I was objecting to. It felt stupid to complain when Noah made watching me give a blow job sound like watching paint dry.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” he went on. “And like I said, I only saw a few seconds. But I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, and I am sorry about that. It won’t happen again.”

“But don’t you—I mean, don’t you want to know why you could see the dream?”

He grunted noncommittally, then stood up.

“We’ll see.” He stretched his shoulders. “But in the meantime, we need to get you back to the manor.”

He turned and walked to the cabin’s front door, and there was nothing I could do but follow. It was clear from the look on his face that the conversation was over. We walked back to the manor in silence, but the whole time, my brain was buzzing.

Even if Noah didn’t want to talk about it, I couldn’t stop thinking. What did it mean that he could see me? Could he still be an incubus somehow, if he wanted? And if he had stopped being one, was there a way I could stop too, without killing myself?

Questions darted through my mind like sparrows, but Noah clearly wasn’t going to help me. If I wanted answers, I’d have to figure them out myself.

***

The next morning in Spellwork II, Professor Kazansky split the class into two groups, lining us up on either side of the room. Well, not the whole class. Felix, Ash, and a smattering of other paranormal students stayed in their seats. The Hunters stayed seated too.

As Kazansky explained the morning’s exercise, I wished I were sitting too. But that would mean admitting to everyone that I’d never be able to do magic, that I wasn’t actually a witch who was just behind schedule. Something the dean had explicitly told me not to do.

“You’ll receive the light from your partner across the room, hold it while they move to the back of their line, and then pass it to the new person in front,” Kazansky said, as though we were doing an egg toss, except the egg was a flaming ball of…

Honestly, I still wasn’t sure what magic was .

Energy, that much I was clear on. But it had something to do with willpower, and intentionality, and control, and…

a substance?... a network? of power that ran through reality, that only witches had access to.

I’d been at Vesperwood for over a month and magic still confused me.

But maybe that was because I couldn’t do it.

After Erika’s death, I hadn’t cared enough to keep trying to teach myself. Who was I kidding? I was an incubus, and that was all I’d ever be. It was dumb to think even for a moment that something could be different.

So with my stomach sitting like a lead weight in my body, I inched forward in line, watching student after student catch the light that was tossed to them, levitate it above their hand for a moment, and then toss it back.

I started to sweat when I was two people away from the front, and by the time I was first in line, my heart was pounding. My palms were damp, and if the light were a physical object I had to catch, it would have slid right through my fingers.

But instead, Rekha Bakshi stood across the room from me and tossed a small, golfball-sized glowing light in my direction. I reached out as if to catch it, the way I’d seen others do, but it winked out of existence before it touched my skin. Not that I’d expected anything different.

Somewhere in the middle of the room, Sean snickered.

“That’s alright,” Kazansky told me as Rekha moved to the back of her line and Meredith stepped into her place. “Manifest a new one.”

Manifest a new one . As if it were that easy. Except it was that easy, for everyone else in class. I was the only ‘ witch ’ who couldn’t do it.

“I’m not sure I can,” I said, but she shook her head firmly.

“Of course you can. You remember the steps. Empty yourself. Find your center. Lower your walls, find the field, and bring the power into the shape you desire.”

She made it sound so simple, but my every attempt at this had been like a fish trying to ride a horse.

“I’m not feeling that great today,” I said, putting a hand to my head like that might make my lie less obvious. “Maybe I should—”

“Nonsense,” she interrupted with a stern look. “I’ll talk you through it. Begin by closing your eyes.”

I stifled a groan and did as I was told, well aware that my face was tomato-red by now. It was embarrassing enough to be talked through this like a toddler, but in front of the whole class? I heard another laugh and I knew it was Sean.

I tried to do what Kazansky said. It wasn’t that different from how Noah described entering the dream world. At least at first. Get rid of distractions. Try to get in touch with a part of yourself that can sense another world, another power.

And for a second, when Kazansky told me to reach out and touch the network of magic that surrounded me, I thought I felt something. Like a part of me had stumbled forward, jerked by some invisible string, though my body hadn’t moved.

But then the string disappeared and whatever was moving inside me went still. I shook my head. Maybe it was just the dream part of me trying to fall asleep and enter the dreamworld. Noah had said that eventually I would be able to do that standing up.

I sighed and tried to follow Kazansky’s instructions from the top, but no matter how many times she walked me through it, I couldn’t do it. Finally, after what felt like an hour, she let me go to the back of the line. I wanted to sink through the floor.

When the bell rang, I was almost out the door when Kazansky said, “Cory, hold on a second. I want to talk to you.”

“We’ll wait outside,” Felix said with a sympathetic smile, following Ash out to the hall.

I turned back towards Kazansky, my stomach sinking. I didn’t know if I was going to get a lecture, a lesson, or an accusation, but whatever it was, I wasn’t looking forward to it.

“Rekha, you too,” Kazansky called, motioning for Rekha to approach her desk as well.

Rekha gave her a suspicious look, and me an even darker one, but she sighed and walked over to join us.

Kazansky didn’t waste time on pleasantries. “Rekha, you’re going to start tutoring Cory to get him up to speed.”

“What? Why?”

It took me a second to realize Rekha had said the exact same thing, at the exact same time as me.

“I’ve been making allowances,” Kazansky told me, “since you missed your first semester. But frankly, I’m worried about your lack of progress. You need to apply to a haven at the end of the semester, and interviews are coming up sooner than you think.”

My stomach fluttered. Interviews? I’d known we had to apply to havens, but no one had mentioned interviews before. It sounded like one more thing for me to fuck up.

“Students who aren’t admitted to a haven at the end of their freshman year have to repeat the year or leave Vesperwood,” she continued. “You don’t have any time to lose, Cory.”

She turned to Rekha. “You’re the strongest student in our class.”

Rekha’s face went from annoyed to pleased.