Page 35 of Reluctant Witch (A Course in Magic #2)

35

Prospero

The laboratory was awkwardly silent as the magic left the women there. A few sheepishly headed toward the door. Several tried to set their clothes to rights with a modicum of success.

“You were exposed to toxic gas from a leak in the lab,” Ellie said calmly to the group. “Please line up and the mind healer will examine you. Failure to be cleared will result in memory loss and vision loss. It is important that she check you for retinal damage.”

Retinal damage? Prospero usually wasn’t this delicate, but Ellie’s excuse worked well.

Ellie smiled encouragingly as she stood between them and the door. Her authoritative voice and calm manner were undoubtedly a result of her years working in a library, but regardless of the source or the consequences, Prospero currently found it absurdly attractive.

Not the place or the time.

Shoving aside the thoughts of her wife’s assertive streak, Prospero climbed up onto a tall laboratory table and watched Ellie round up the women who seemed to be trying to leave. She was managing the chaos well, even as Prospero simply wanted to curl up and ignore this part.

Ellie directed a few of the women around both the bodies and vomit on the floor.

“Oh my god,” one woman said, practically breathing the words. “Is he dead? ”

And Ellie’s expression clouded. She went from capable to still in that moment. The horror of the open-eyed corpse was enough to stop her, and the calm in the room started to fade as quickly as it had arrived.

“He… there was… an incident and—”

“Yes. He’s dead. You’re lucky you’re not.” Prospero looked at her unflinchingly and spoke loud enough that the crowd all heard. “He refused his exam, and there he is. It didn’t work out well for him. Line up. Let’s get this resolved so the authorities know it’s safe to come in here and handle the dead.”

Ellie shot her a scowl, but whether or not she approved of Prospero’s blunt tactics, most of the group lined up.

One woman went over to a cabinet and pulled out several long white coats. She draped them over the three dead bodies. “Respect,” the woman murmured. “No one ought to be gawked at when they’re like that. ”

One by one, Prospero looked into the minds of the women, erasing memories of magic exposure, maenad madness, and male idiocy. She left just enough hints that they all knew that they had been compelled to grope Allan, but that no one had been intimately violated. She also impressed an urge to talk to a therapist about it. While she was not actually a mind healer, she understood—from long talks with Cass and a few other witches—that talking post-violence could help.

And it’s a lot healthier than my coping mechanisms were.

Prospero wouldn’t say that she had stitched all of her own cracks and panics together, but she reached more-or-less stable eventually. Therapy hadn’t been a viable option in her very short nonmagical years, and it was still not popularized fully in Crenshaw.

Once the last of the women left the laboratory, Prospero stood and reached her hand toward Ellie.

“We need to sort out Aggie yet,” Prospero said quietly, “but for today, I simply want to go home. She’ll turn up.”

“The bodies…”

“They are the domain of this world,” Prospero said gently. “We cannot manage everything. They are covered, and they’ll be found by someone here as they assess the damage across campus.”

Ellie frowned. “I wonder what they’ll think.”

“The astounding thing about magic is that—these days—it’s often dismissed with a thin excuse. To believe that it was what it was is to be declared superstitious,” Prospero said. “There are places where people still believe on a large scale, but mostly, the government of advanced nations is the only place where you find unfettered belief. There are pockets, people who handle the realities of witches and missing people, but as a whole…” She shrugged. “The average person will rationalize it away.”

Prospero looked into the now-empty hallway. The throngs of drunken people were gone. All that was left was the destruction. “Let’s go home.”

Ellie wrapped an arm around Prospero’s middle. “Tell me how to teleport us.”

“I can do it.”

“You look like you’re going to topple.” Ellie’s arm tightened, holding Prospero to her side firmly. “Implant the information in my mind.”

“I can’t—”

“Try. If I don’t resist, maybe you can.” Ellie tilted her head. “I won’t resist.”

“Do you typically?”

“Typically?”

“The two times I tried,” Prospero clarified.

“Obviously.” Ellie rolled her eyes. “Implant it or tell me.”

Erasing the minds of almost two dozen women was exhausting, but Prospero tried to slide into Ellie’s mind. Suddenly, it felt as if she had bodily entered Ellie’s head. Prospero knew she was standing in the foul-smelling laboratory surrounded by formaldehyde, decaying wine, vomit, and corpses, but she could suddenly smell lilacs.

“Hi.” Ellie was wearing a goldenrod-yellow dress, not modern in its cut or style.

Prospero reached out and poked her arm. “This feels real.”

“I was researching if we could connect here,” Ellie said simply. “If there are no rules here, I thought maybe we could date in ways that would… make you love me.”

“I already do.”

“I didn’t know that, did I? I was going to charm you, seduce you, and make you mine.” Ellie twirled, the skirt of the dress flaring out like a bell.

“Already done, love.” Prospero smiled. “I need to rest soon, though. Can we—”

“Show me how to get us home.”

Prospero thought through the process, taking Ellie’s hand and then letting go of the way she resisted the pull back to Crenshaw. She put her hand over Ellie’s stomach. “Feel that hook. Right in here. And then stop fighting it.”

In the next moment, Prospero was back in the ruins of the lab. She missed the smell of lilacs and the dress Ellie had been wearing, but then Ellie put her arms around Prospero and said, “I hope I get this right.”

And they were standing outside the castle. Prospero felt like she was swaying on her feet with exhaustion. “Thank you.”

“Are you okay? I didn’t do anything that made you sick or—”

“Just tired.” Prospero gave her a wobbly smile. Over the last few weeks, Prospero had hunted down and erased Ellie’s mind and the Lynch woman’s mind. She’d slept insufficiently as she was trying to figure out how to live with Ellie, and then she’d been left to deal with Scylla’s injury, Aggie’s attack on Sondre and on Prospero. And now this debacle with Allan.

“I just want to hide away in our house,” Prospero admitted. “But first…”

They approached the main door of the castle, which swung open silently as they neared. Prospero didn’t slow her stride. She never did.

“Don’t use extra magic,” Ellie murmured.

“I don’t. I was briefly headmaster, and whatever hob or magic hides in the castle seems to welcome my visits.” Prospero smiled to herself. She liked the fanciful notion that it was the castle, but in truth, she suspected hobs. They were the embodiment of magic, an unstoppable force at the best of times.

They headed to the lower level of the castle where the infirmary was housed, and Prospero felt a glimmer of pride as Ellie took her hand. No one they passed likely cared, but Prospero had felt uncomfortable about the fact that she was unable to stand with Ellie as equals, as partners, as beloveds. Even though Ellie claimed to have wanted that, it hadn’t been until the night prior that they were truly able to move forward. Now, she felt permitted to touch Ellie in public.

When they reached the infirmary, Prospero was unsurprised to see Scylla in her infirmary bed again.

“Did you tear open your wound with that stunt?” Prospero asked.

“ Psh. ” Scylla gestured over at Allan, who was straining against restraints. “I punched the jackal that punched me. I am fine with a bit of bleeding. Plus, Mae has a theory we’re going to test now that you’re here.”

Trepidation crawled over Prospero. “Dare I ask?”

Scylla chuckled. “That boy is a siphon. That’s why I’m not healing. Why Mae’s draining over and over. If that’s the case, it’s not poison we’re dealing with at all, just miscategorizing the waifish one.”

“Monahan?” Prospero thought about it, the side effects of boosting energy if Monahan was not an amplifier but a converter. It made sense. “So he wasn’t boosting. He was draining it from somewhere, and then when he added energy to help heal you… he drained from Scylla’s magic. Then drained you and whomever else.”

Everyone watched her as she thought it through, and it occurred to her that she was validating or invalidating their theories from before she arrived.

“What’s the experiment?” she asked.

From the door, Walt, who had just walked into the infirmary with Sondre, said, “The boy will siphon Allan.”