Page 2 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

“The pièce de résistance, my friend.” I grab the bag I’d stashed off to the side before crouching and tipping it upside down.

When magic wielders discovered other planes, it was cool and all, but the real mark of brilliance was from whoever decided to take all that interdimensional magic and put it in storage containers.

I jump to my feet, whipping the bag away with a flourish, revealing a dazed corpse who blinks cataract-white eyes at me.

My showmanship is immediately overshadowed by—

“ Holy shit, he reeks .” Orok slaps his hands over his nose and mouth.

I also fight the urge to gag, but I don’t win, and end up hacking aggressively at the floor.

The corpse doesn’t seem offended. He doesn’t seem like he can feel much of anything, which is good. If he were alive, he’d be freaking out. And he would’ve suffocated in the interdimensional bag, but whatever.

Most of his bones are visible beneath sagging clumps of what I assume were once muscles. Or skin? Organs, even. A scraggly beard clings optimistically to what’s left of his chin, and he has very little else in the way of fleshy human bits.

I grab another vial and dump out the components as I mutter a quick preservation spell. The corpse shimmers head to toe before the smell dies down and a few of the more precarious skin flaps settle into place.

“There.” I dust off my hands. “All better.”

Orok chokes again. “You said you were going to leave an animated corpse in the Conjuration Lab.”

I waggle my hands in a rather pathetic display of razzle-dazzle. “ Corpse .”

“No, skeleton . He’s gonna shatter the moment we’re not there to lay preservation spells on him.”

The corpse turns sharply on his heels and the bones of his feet click-clack a few steps across the tiled floor before I stop him by grabbing his decaying arm.

It’s squishy. A bit chalky.

I compartmentalize that and say, “Woah now, Sten,” in the soothing voice of someone talking to a child. “We took a field trip, remember? Stay.”

“ Bqllr, ” the corpse mumbles, and a tooth falls out of his mouth.

I don’t bother with a translation spell; the Necromancy Lab two buildings over said he mostly mutters Nordic cuss words when he’s not under the effect of a full-blown repossession.

Orok rubs his thumb against the skin between his eyes. “What’d you call him? Stan?”

“Sten. The Nec Lab said he was a Viking. He was one of the corpses that freshmen practice talking to, but he was due to be disintegrated since he’s, well…

” I wave at his condition. “Plus, apparently the only stories he tells are brutal recountings of raids on Danish villages that get a little racist. No one wants to work with him.”

Orok eyes Sten. Then me.

He pushes off the wall. “I’m climbing the building.”

“Wait!” I grab for spell components with one hand, the other still holding Sten in place. “I can—”

But Orok flips me off over his shoulder, then he’s gone, jogging toward the stairs.

I look down at Nick’s floating top hat. “I get no respect around here.”

Nick twitters.

And Sten seems determined to meander up the hall, his bones tapping as he basically walks in place against my grip.

Probably should’ve waited to dump him out until we were in the lab, now that I think of it.

Impulsive? Me? How dare you.

The stillness lets the absurdity of this situation sink in. I feel Orok’s words creep back on me. How maybe I should give all this up.

My eyes snag on the plaque next to the Conjuration Lab’s door.

REFURBISHED THANKS TO A GENEROUS DONATION FROM THE TOURAEL FAMILY

A molten burn gathers in my stomach.

Yeah, fuck taking the high road. I’m going to put an animated corpse in the Conjuration Lab like any perfectly sane twenty-four-year-old almost-grad-school alumnus.

A minute or two later, the magic over the door shimmers, vanishes, and the door pops open to reveal Orok.

He gives a smile that’s brought more than a handful of Lesiara U’s single population to their knees and shows me the timer he has running on his phone. “Forty-two seconds.”

“You didn’t let me—”

“ Thank you, Orok .” He pitches his voice up several octaves. I don’t sound like that. “ You’re the most amazing wizard in our graduating class, Orok. I bow to your prowess, Orok. ”

I sigh. “Thank you, Orok.”

“You’re welcome.”

“My GPA’s still higher than yours.”

I duck his attempt to smack the back of my head and shuffle Sten past him into the dim lab space.

I’m sure Orok already checked as part of his forty-two seconds of speed magic, but I wrestle one-handed to pull out mirror dust and cast a spell to find any scrying enchantments or stuff that might be recording our presence here.

I get nothing, not even extra levels of traps or security precautions.

Wow. They really didn’t think I’d get past the ward on the door.

I mean. Technically, I didn’t.

That’s not important.

This lab takes up most of the second floor, with one section farther down for lowerclassmen, and the rest segregated by half walls into individual lab spaces for students who get dedicated areas.

Each one is neatly tucked away, most experiments and research locked up since the semester’s winding down.

Huge windows throw hazy moonlight into the room, giving enough illumination to see by.

For comparison, the Evocation Lab, a floor down, is a quarter this size. And has one window.

“What now, O Captain, my Captain?” Orok sidles up next to me.

“Give me a sec. Here—hold him.”

I shove Sten toward Orok, but Orok lurches back with a shudder.

“I’m not touching it.”

“This one won’t bite you. I promise.”

“That wasn’t a fear until just now, thank you. No—I meant I’m not touching dead flesh .”

I grunt. “Fine, gods; just don’t let him wander into the hall. Pretend he’s one of the people you have to tackle on the field, but corral him.”

That seems to register with Orok. He stands straighter, refocusing on Sten with the intensity that makes him one of the university’s top athletes.

Mildly confident, I release the corpse, who wobbles, only toward the wall, not the door.

I fold to my knees and scramble for other components, laying them out in a quick seeking spell. There’s still a magical trace left from whoever cast the ward on the door—and I know very well who cast the ward on the door—so I link to it, let it spread out to find more of the same signature.

A trailing vapor of glowing blue sizzles through the air, leading from the door to the third lab space on the left.

That blue glow vanishes when I scoop up the spell bits and climb to my feet.

The Nec Lab gave me a few spells to control Sten, basic first-year necromancy stuff, and I rattle one off now.

Could I have used one to keep him in place instead of making Orok hover around him, doing some weird herding dance? Yes. Would it have been as fun? No.

Sten jolts into action, marching like a soldier for the lab space. He stops inside and his arms snap straight, at attention.

A huge chunk of skin—muscle?—falls off his body and plops onto the floor.

I grin. “ Perfect. ”

Orok gags. “You need help, Seb.”

In this space, the tops of the desk and worktable are mostly clear, a few stacks of papers, a jar of pencils. The whiteboard has some equations on it, spells that are just conjuration bullshit. But there’s nothing of importance lying around. I do have my limits, unlike some people.

I recite the command spell for Sten, adding a few instructions— stay and messy, followed by jump out and scare the first person who comes over here .

Sten shudders as the magic sinks in.

Then he bends and licks the desk, leaving a good amount of his tongue behind.

Orok gags again.

I grin again.

“Good boy, Sten,” I say in a cutesy voice.

Something sharp digs into my calf and I yelp, only to look down and see a top hat bobbing away.

Orok cackles. “Someone’s jealous of your new pet.”

I rub my leg—damn, that does hurt.

“The Nec Lab doesn’t expect the corpse back, do they?” Orok asks, head cocked as he watches Sten wobble to the window, bump into it, back up, walk forward, bump into it, back up, and stare impassively at it.

“Technically they’re supposed to dispose of Sten through proper channels, but I worked out a trade of services with the guy there.”

Orok catches me with an accusatory stare. “A trade of what services?”

“I volunteered in the Nec Lab.” They infamously can’t get students to volunteer in their experiments no matter how well they pay.

Shockingly, few people are cool with being test dummies for protection spells against decomp attacks, let alone more advanced shit.

There was a rumor that a student’s leg fully decayed once.

My own experience was hardly a danger to my person; a couple of sophomores resurrected a guy, and I had to talk to four people and give my guess who the resurrected corpse was. Something about believability, how well they healed the decomp, and so on.

But Orok’s implication clicks and I tip my chin down, vaulting my eyebrows seductively. “Did you think I was trading sexual favors for a dead body ?”

“Like you haven’t done shit more reckless than that.” His accusation holds. Intensifies. “You’ve been more… unhinged lately.”

I sober, feeling an immediate kick to match up with his energy. “I have not.”

Orok looks pointedly over my shoulder.

Sten is scratching his bony finger down the dry-erase board, pulling lines through the writing. Meanwhile, pieces of… something… are falling off his pelvis and down around his feet.

This is harmless.

Tomorrow will be fine.

Despite that, my stomach turns to lead.

All I see is the grant committee. How desperately I need that money to finish my degree and keep the job offer with Clawstar.

Doing spells in an experimentation capacity adds up, especially once you factor in the need for component purity and consistency. And here Elethior Tourael’s family paid for a whole lab refurbishment while he was still in undergrad.