Page 15 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

“Everyone’s fine, just fine. I was calling to see how your first week of classes went.”

The back hall is dark, one side piled with boxes that advertise chili sauce and hot dog buns next to the bathroom. The door to the kitchen is on the other side, blocked by a frayed sheet, and the heater ripples it, the air rich with the smell of fried pork and garlic and sharp cheddar.

I’m grabbing at those small, mundane things that make sense. Because my dad calling like this? Does not make sense.

“I—” My heart beats again, heavy, painful thuds. “I assumed you were calling to tell me someone had been in a terrible accident.”

He sighs. “Put aside your theatrics, Sebastian. I want to have an honest conversation. Are you capable of that?”

The adrenaline that spiked at his call comes hurtling down, a landslide barreling through my body in tiny, agonizing quakes.

“Yessir,” I say mechanically.

Movement next to me is Orok, who stops fast.

The colonel? he mouths.

I nod.

His eyes widen.

“Good,” Dad says. “Now tell me how your first week of classes went.”

In my whole collegiate career, he’s never, not once, called to see how classes went .

There’d been a time, though. Before high school. I always aced my arcane classes and I was well on my way to not only following in the Walsh family’s footsteps, but to surpassing many of them.

And gods, my dad was so proud of me, asking about my classes then, and we’d talk spell work incessantly until Mom had to ban any magic topics at dinner.

I knew I probably wouldn’t go the military route, but for that small window before Camp Merethyl, I at least felt a part of this family, because that spark in my dad’s eyes when we talked about spells?

It burned in me, too. We had that connection.

I’m so blindsided by this phone call, by the overlapping vignette of sitting across from his pleased smile at the dinner table more than a decade ago, that I can’t grab ahold of my senses.

“Classes?” I echo, scrambling. “I’m in the last semester of my graduate program. I’m not taking classes anymore. It’s a research block.”

With Elethior Tourael.

My shoulders wilt.

Of course.

“Then tell me how your research block is going,” Dad says, like that isn’t the actual point of his call. “Your mother said you have a lab partner. That you’re working with a Tourael. It’s important you make a good impression, you hear? It’s important you apply yourself.”

I don’t interrupt him. Can’t. My throat is swollen shut and I kick the floor, over and over, shoe scuffing the cheap peeling laminate.

Orok steps closer to me. “Seb?”

“This could be the kind of connection that makes your career,” Dad tells me. “You—”

“Your career.”

“What?”

“This could make your career,” I hear myself say. “Not mine. Right? That’s why you’re calling.”

Dad sighs again. “That is not, actually, why I—”

“Are you still in the running for that job?”

A pause. “The position doesn’t officially open for several weeks.”

I have no extra bandwidth to think about my father running that place.

“But yeah,” I scoff, “you’re calling about me.”

“I called because I know how you are,” Dad says. “And I won’t see you wasting this opportunity for yourself .”

My arms itch, my vision goes starry, and I’m pacing now, in the tight hallway, nearly bumping into Orok with every pass, getting dizzy with the sharp turns.

Distantly, I think how dumb a place this is for a freak-out. I mean, there’s a cartoon hot dog on the wall behind Orok, for fuck’s sake.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing,” Dad repeats, his voice harder. “I’ll help you figure out how to best navigate the situation so you don’t squander this connection. Not everyone gets a second chance. You had so much promise when you were younger.”

You had such promise.

This was wasted on you.

Get out, get out, get out—

Sweat breaks out down my spine and I get in a jagged, shaky breath.

“I gotta go.”

I hang up on him. I hang up on Colonel Mason Walsh so forcefully I nearly break the phone in half.

My ears ring. Ring and ring, a hollow clanging; and rage gathers, swelling up and out, and I want to call him back to scream at him.

“Seb?” Orok touches my shoulder. “Don’t answer his calls anymore.”

I bark a laugh and pocket my phone. “Lesson learned. Lesson mastered .”

Orok stretches his arms out for a hug. He’s blocking the hall, and he knows it.

“I’m being held hostage.”

“Yes. Hug me, dumbass.”

I fall into the center of his wide chest. His thick arms pull me in and my breath leaves my lungs in an unsteady whoosh .

When I was sitting at the grant banquet, knowing they’d announce that Elethior got it, I remember thinking that I’d have to go to my dad to ask for the money instead.

I wouldn’t, but somewhere in the back of my mind, that’s been the ghost of a safety net.

Still is, I think. Or it was, until this moment, when I feel the impossibility of me ever asking him for support.

Even if he’d give it, with his own messed-up stipulations, I wouldn’t ask.

If I go to the party tomorrow, and tell the grant committee I haven’t taken any steps toward doing the one thing they asked me to do, and they pull their funding…

I’ve got nothing.

The anger worsens, rising, anger at myself, at my dad, at this situation.

“Shit.” I back away and try to wiggle around Orok, but he’s still playing immovable object in the hallway. “Dude. Let me go.”

“You’re not going back to the lab. I’m serious, Seb; your work ethic isn’t sustainable.”

“I’m not going back to work.”

He stares at me.

“I’m not going back to work much .” Okay, that’s a lie, too. Maybe Elethior’s still at my lab— our lab, our our our —and I can, ugh, revert to my original intention and extend an olive branch, and the two of us can half-ass a plan in the fifteen or so hours until the cocktail party.

I can hear Dad’s disappointment if I get pulled from the grant. How I failed again. How expected my collapse was because I’m all dramatics and overreacting.

I wince and see I’ve pushed my sleeve up to gouge my nails into the back of my arm, crescent moon arches purpling into bruises.

Orok bats my hand away. “Seb—”

“Please let me leave.” I look up at him, not afraid to let him see that I’m not, actually, okay. “I promise, I’ll take a break after this.” Maybe.

He holds for a beat.

But he steps aside, and after grabbing my shit from the table and tossing a few bucks to cover my cut—and dodging are you okay questions from Ivo and Crescentia—I race to the lab.

When I burst through the door, Elethior’s not there.

I slam into the chair at my desk, dig out my phone, and start to type up an email to one of the committee members, Davyeras maybe, to ask for Elethior’s contact info, but—

Anyone I ask is going to want to know why I don’t already have it. Why Elethior and I have been working together for a week, but I don’t know his number.

“ Fuck, ” I bark at my desk.

Maybe Elethior’ll stop by the lab tomorrow before the party. That’ll be good, honestly. It’ll give me time to cool down enough to extend a truce.

My fingers rub absently over the swollen marks on my arm and I manage a deep breath, like Orok taught me. In, hold it; out, slow.

All the breaths I’m taking make my lungs burn.

I’m breathing too much, too deeply. That’s the reason my body feels like it’s stuffed with embers, packed full of debris, waiting, waiting, waiting for something explosive to set it all off.

I’m fine. I have a plan.

It’s all fine.

I grab a piece of paper from my desk and jot my number on it with a very polite request for Elethior to text me.

Then I stand in front of his workstation—I think there’s still a desk under there—and consider about half a dozen places to put it.

It’s going to get lost in his chaos no matter where it ends up.

Unlikely he’ll see it, so I toss the thing onto the mound.

The moment it crosses a hand’s width above his desk, it incinerates.

I blink at the remnants of ash that drift down onto his textbooks, paper, and garbage.

Elethior put a protection ward around his desk.

For some reason, this blatant symbol of our divide is the last straw.

Explosion detonated.

A spell component is in my hand. I don’t remember pulling it out. But I’m holding what I need and I chant the spell between my teeth, chant it and chant it, intensity building, anger surging to the tips of my hair. I feel them lift as the arcane power swells, magic that I draw from the component.

The spell needs a chip of iron from a lock, and I’ve got a whole gods-damned padlock in my palm. Chalk to draw sigils, but I can’t dredge up the fortitude to scribble out anything right now.

I don’t understand Orok’s adherence to religion for many reasons, but especially in moments like this. How does he cast spells, then think he needs a god to give him strength?

The spell sucks like a vacuum, magic funneling through the component, into me, and out .

I fling one hand toward Elethior’s workstation as the spell releases.

His protection ward shatters.

It doesn’t just fall; it’s decimated, the air alive with electrical currents so charged they could power the building.

I stand there, gasping, head pounding in the aftershocks. Prickles race up and down my arms and braid with my spine, making me shiver in the letdown.

But I look at my palm. The one that’d held the lock.

There’s a gray stain on my skin where the lock had been.

The spell to break a ward only needs a sliver of iron. But I let my rage get away from me, let my focus slip and liquefy, and the magic ate up the entire lock. Nearly a pound of iron. And I didn’t use any sigils, no way to focus the magic, to make sure it didn’t flare or rebound.

My hands go up into my hair, probably streaking it with the iron stain, but I don’t care.

I can’t lose control like this. I can’t fuck up, not anymore.

But this is why I’m here, isn’t it? This is my research project. To develop a safeguard so stuff like this doesn’t happen. So stuff worse than this doesn’t happen.

A plan. I had a plan. What was it?

I’ll find Elethior tomorrow. We’ll get to work. The committee won’t have any reason to take this opportunity away from me.

See? That’s solid. That’s safe .

I lower my trembling hands, sweat sheeting my face, eyes tearing, burning.

At least Elethior’ll know I’m capable of breaking his wards now.

Semester’s off to a bangin’ start, lemme tell ya.