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Juniper

F ridays were my favourite. Not because I didn’t have to go to class or teach rowdy middle schoolers for an entire weekend, but because these were the nights I got to sneak out to Ozzie’s for our weekly sleepover.

That was why I was currently peeking out from behind a mess of tiny leaves and sharp twigs, trying unsuccessfully to avoid getting scratched as I hid some foliage while all the other students at Aurora Academy’s university campus headed in droves towards the student village. The grad students were notorious for nightlife on Fridays, which was one of the reasons Oz and I picked that day to do this. We couldn’t let anyone discover us.

Once I was sure the coast was finally clear, I darted from the bush and dashed into the dorm building that housed his room. I didn’t wait around, bolting up the grand staircase that separated in the middle. Girls on the left, boys on the right. I glanced around me and cast my magic out to perform a quick scan that we truly were alone before knocking on the familiar green door.

Knock.

Knock, knock… knock.

The door swung open and a large hand grabbed a hold of the front of my shirt, dragging me inside before slamming the door shut behind me.

‘You weren’t followed?’ Oz asked.

‘Nope,’ I grinned, smoothing out the wrinkled he’d made with his fist and wincing when I brushed against a shallow cut. It didn’t escape his notice, and he immediately waved a hand in my direction. The warmth of his magic ran over me as it sought any injuries, and soon enough the cuts were completely healed over like they’d never even been there.

I was about to send him a grateful smile but he engulfed me in an all-consuming bearhug before I got the chance. My arms latched around his neck as we squeezed each other as hard as we could, the peaceful sense of coming home warming me from the inside out.

He released a sigh of relief. ‘Fuck, I missed you, Junie.’

‘I missed you too, Ozzie. This is torture,’ I admitted. It was the same thing we said to one other every Friday, but it was no less true each time.

He pulled away to look me in the eye, the brilliant blue eyes that were an exact match to mine glinting with excitement that filled me with tentative hope.

‘You found something?’ I asked, barely daring to put the question out into the universe for fear of being crushed by the answer. Again.

But I didn’t need to worry this time. This time, his answer had me beaming from ear to ear.

‘I found something,’ he confirmed with a beaming grin, then led me over to his bed where a stash of old tomes were spread out across his sheets. A few were open to reveal worn pages with writing in a language long since forgotten by our kind. Said to be spoken by the Fae, a race of mythological creatures rumoured to have walked the earth long before Humans, Old Fae was a dead language that was still largely indecipherable for most. The others were closed, their worn, faded brown and grey leather covers simple and plain with no decoration beyond the engraved, Old Fae symbols that held the titles of each book. They were dusty when we’d first discovered them deep in the recesses of Aurora Academy’s library. We didn’t have a restricted section, necessarily, but these were stashed away in a forgotten room hidden away inside the library’s walls. We’d cleaned them up enough to crack them open without coughing a long time ago, taking great care to ensure they remained in better condition than we’d found them.

We had been decoding the symbols to read through them for years, but without much luck. While we had be partially successful, the writings didn’t make much sense. It was like trying to put together a puzzle only to discover we were missing most of the pieces.

‘What is it? What did you find?’ I bounced on my toes, eager for answers. If he truly had found something that could help us then we could finally be free. We wouldn’t need to hide anymore. I held myself back from pouncing on the books, though I wanted nothing more than to tear through them to discover Oz’s breakthrough for myself. He wasn’t moving fast enough for my whirring, overexcited brain.

He flipped each tome open to a specific page and arranged them on his bed, though the reason why was lost to me. When he saw me staring at him in confusion he gestured to the pages with a smug smile tugging up the corner of his mouth, highlighting the dimple there that we both shared. He was awfully pleased with himself, but I couldn’t see why. Clearly I was missing something.

I frowned down at the displayed pages. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the pages, so I tried again. I scanned the swirling symbols inked onto the pages and attempted to read the ones I recognised, but if there was anything to say about Old Fae it was powerful and difficult to translate even with the ability to read a few symbols here and there.

Ancient, forgotten words dotted the pages in a seemingly random fashion that I failed to make sense of. I caught certain scribbles I recognised from our personal studies: Black. Sickness. Womb. Trials. But still, despite those few words jumping out at me, I couldn’t see what Oz was trying to show me. I looked up at him and shrugged, eyes wide as I waited for him to actually show me what he’d found.

His gaze darted from me back down to the tomes, then poked his tongue out the corner of his mouth as he studied them, his lips pursing in concentration. After a moment of deliberation he snorted and adjusted the way they were spread. ‘Oops. I did it backwards.’

He sent me a crooked grin when I giggled, pulling a silly face at his mistake. I stuck out my tongue and wrinkled my nose in response, the action warm and familiar. Silly faces was sort of our thing, not that anyone but us really knew that. It was essentially our way of saying I love you without voicing the words out loud, our sneaky little way around the magical gag order preventing us from speaking to one another in public. Sometimes, though, it just felt good to do it when it was just the two of us, a reminder that we could still interact despite the contingency of spells that attempted to keep us apart.

When I studied the pages once more I finally noticed what he’d found. With the tomes arranged in just the right positioning the magic slowly revealed itself. It started as a shimmer, like the reflection of gentle waves cast against a rocky cave wall, then the words rearranged on the pages until they connected to form a picture. It was a woman and a man, their hands connected. It was like the puzzle pieces were finally slotting together, the randomness from before merging into an image with astonishing detail. Their faces were clear, and that was what was the most shocking, because they looked just like me and Oz.

But there was more to the image that we couldn’t see. The edges seemed frayed as if it were torn from the centre of a bigger image, the magic fading into fractured smoke. Were there more tomes needed to piece together the full picture? Perhaps. Or maybe it was something else. Regardless of what it was, it was clear that something was missing, but what?

‘What is this?’ I asked, awed by the detail of the design and the effort that must have gone into creating such a masterpiece. Magic emanated from in waves so subtle I had to really focus to feel it, yet powerful enough to raise goosebumps on my skin and vibrate my own magic inside my veins. It was as if they recognised one another and were responding to the proximity, almost as if they were trying to reach out to touch the other.

‘It’s us,’ he said gravely, all levity leaking from him as we gazed upon what could only be a prophecy. Our prophecy. The awe I felt before morphed into a spine-chilling realisation that whatever curse was placed upon us had been long-since foretold. Our path forward was written in the stars, but if history had taught us anything it was that nothing good ever happened to those whose fate was recorded.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, but unless he’d been able to gather some information I had yet to see then I doubted he’d be able to give me those answers just yet.

‘I think we need to decipher the texts before we can figure that out, Junie,’ he confirmed. ‘I have a feeling the answers we seek are right here. We just need to figure out how to read it.’

I inhaled deeply before tearing my gaze from the tomes to lighten the mood with a smile. This was work well done and he deserved a break before we cracked down on our research once more. ‘Well, we’re not going to get that done in one night. I say we continue deciphering the Fae language in our spare time and put it aside for today. I don’t want to spend our one night together poring over musty old books.’

He huffed but the smile hiding in his lips let me know he was thinking along the same lines. We could have spent our time together working, but both of us would have rather spent it in enjoying the moment. These Friday nights were all we got, and it was only these past few years that we’d even managed to figure out that little workaround to the curse.

We’d been raised separately our entire lives, ignorant to the other’s existence until we’d both started at Aurora Academy. The middle school campus was where we learned who we were to one another after we’d been partnered up for a project in class and discovered we couldn’t speak, up until we’d met in private and the words flowed without a hitch. A rapid-fire mutual interrogation revealed we had the same birthday, we’d both been adopted, and an awkwardly thorough inspection of the other’s unusually similar physical features allowed us to connect the final dots. Yet when we’d re-entered the general population of the campus for classes, the magical gag was back in place. Magic was holding our tongues, and it made absolutely no sense, so we’d put our heads together to dig deeper into the cause.

What we’d found had rocked both of our worlds to the core, turning everything upside down and destroying any sense of peace we had ever known. Confirmation came in the form of Ozzie’s father, who had apparently been friends with our bio-dad though they were no longer on speaking terms. We were twins, separated at birth and adopted into families from different covens. Only one question remained: why?

Well, that one was a doozy, but we’d long since processed those emotions and moved on from the absolute betrayal we’d felt from our birth parents. As it turned out, Oz had been adopted by a close friend of both of our parents, not just our father, but I’d been tossed aside completely by everyone and adopted into a family with zero connections to either of them. It was why Oz and I had taken so long to find one another in the first place, which we’d later learned through his adoptive father was by design.

It had hurt at first. I’d wondered why him and not me? Why did they want him closer to them only to send me as far away as they possibly could? I’d long since determined that I didn’t particularly want the answers to those questions, but I’d also accepted that they were undoubtedly a necessary piece to this puzzle we were still piecing together twelve years later.

It was the reason why I chose to focus on the positives whenever I could. I may not have been capable of speaking with my twin in front of others, but we had developed a relationship many siblings would have been envious of, choosing each other time and time again throughout the years until we had become each other’s person. I couldn’t have imagined my life without my Ozzie. We may have only had our Friday night sleepovers to truly connect and spend time with one another, but that was still one day a week we got with each other uninterrupted while our friends went out a partied without us. They’d long since learned that we were homebodies on Fridays, using the excuse of our jobs teaching at the middle school. We’d decided to apply for teaching positions as another way to be closer to each other during the week, our connection like a living creature that needed the proximity to keep it docile.

It was becoming harder and harder to be apart the older we got, like a ticking time bomb counting down the minutes until our curse destroyed us. Yet another reason why we were so desperate to break it. We could feel its malevolence growing each day, slithering beneath our skin like a serpent ready to strike.

‘What do you suggest, sis?’

He flinched when I smirked, already knowing what I was about to say but I was jumping on the bed with excitement before he could protest. ‘Dance party! Dance party!’

He huffed but the fondness in his eyes let me know he wasn’t truly upset with me or the suggestion. Instead, he merely smiled and waved a hand to turn on the music, a thin stream of his magic shooting from his palm to connect with the speakers. I grinned when I recognised the opening guitar strums of The Proclaimer’s I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) , my head already nodding along. This was our song, and while he may have griped about a dance party, we both knew he loved being goofy with me. He didn’t even complain this time, instead immediately putting on a truly terrible Scottish accent that clashed with mine as we sang and danced along.

Even if our secret came out I doubted he would ever admit to these moments, but that was okay. I liked that his goofiness was for me, and me alone, but I would forever tease him over his too-cool-for-fun attitude. With me, he may have let loose and been as much of a weirdo as me, but in public he had perfected the quiet, mysterious bad-boy persona that made my nose wrinkle in disgust. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate a bad boy, but I hated the way the girls here threw themselves at him simply because they thought they could change him. There wasn’t anything about him that needed changing. He was my perfect little brother, because yes, I was a whole two minutes older and I milked it for all it was worth and then some.

Song after song played while we danced like no one was watching until we were breathless and laughing so hard we were bent over, clutching our stomachs. It was like we were making up for time lost as kids and we milked it for all it was worth.

Eventually, we crashed onto his bed and turned on a movie. He tucked me under his arm and I snuggled into his side, more content than I had been all week.

That was how we fell asleep.

∞∞∞

Bright light filtered through the window, burning my retinas through my eyelids and forcing me to move away from the assault on my senses with a tired groan. A deeper voice mimicked the sound before a heavy, muscular arm draped over my waist, the bony elbow digging into my stomach.

And then a big, smelly foot kicked into my legs and shoved me right off the bed.

I fell to the floor with an oof , barely catching myself before my forehead could smack into the solid wood flooring.

‘Ass!’ I shouted, laying where I feel because I was too lazy to move.

Ozzie’s eyes blinked dazedly down at me as he peeked over the edge of the bed, and then he chuckled when he realised what had happened. ‘Sorry, sis. I was just tryin’ to starfish.’

I pouted, then an idea came to me and my pout turned into a wide grin. He pulled back warily, and rightfully so, but he didn’t put enough distance between us to escape.

‘Starfish this, bitch,’ I mumbled before I grabbed onto his fingers still clutching the edge of the mattress and added a little extra assistance with my air affinity to push him over the rest of the way over while I yanked.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the most well-thought-out plan, because he landed right on top of me and knocked the breath from my lungs. His elbow jabbed so hard into my ribs it was any wonder they hadn’t shattered inside my chest. I wheezed.

‘Oh, shit. Junie, you okay?’

‘Bad… idea…’ I struggled to squeeze out past the pain.

Suddenly, just as he was pulling away from me, the light through the window flashed so bright that I slammed my eyelids shut. Oz covered my body with his protectively, then crashed on top of me when an excruciatingly high-pitched ringing sliced through the air and we both pressed our hands over our ears in a useless attempt to shut it out. It swelled louder and louder until a scream burst from my throat that I felt more than heard.

And then there was silence. Not a twitter of a bird, the buzz of electricity, or even the shuffle of clothing reached my ears, and panic rose up inside me. I could feel my chest rising and falling rapidly, the air being sucked into my lungs drying up my raw throat, but I couldn’t hear those breaths either. Had my eardrums burst?

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and shook, and I cautiously blinked open my eyes, afraid I would be blind as well as deaf. Luckily, all it took was a few blinks for my eyes to adjust, though splotches of colour danced in my vision and blurred my surroundings. I could still make out Oz’s worried expression above me.

And the lines of blood trickling from his ears and his nostrils.

His thumb swiped under my own nose and came away soaked in red when he pulled it back.

His mouth moved to form words, but no sound reached me. I could tell by the shape of the words that he was saying my name, but I realised he was also deaf when he frowned and looked away, his lips forming those same shapes until his jaw opened wide, his chest rose as he breathed in deep, and then his neck strained as his face turned purple. A scream.

Still, nothing.

I patted his arm, drawing his attention and lifted my torso from the floor so I could wrap my arms around his in a hug we both desperately needed if the way he squeezed me back was any indication.

When we were both calm enough to release the other, he pulled away and sent out a wave of his magic to study our injuries. It felt strange, like a soothing caress but still oddly invasive as it wove its way into my very being before focusing on my ears with a wave of heat. My eardrums knitted back together with an uncomfortable prickling sensation, and the silence that greeted me after was louder than ever before. There was no sign of movement outside of the dorm room, but at least now I could hear the way our breaths sawed in and out of our lungs, the rustle of fabric as we rose to stand, and even the wind brushing up against the window with a slight whistle.

Still no birds, though. Never a good sign…

‘Thanks,’ I told him.

‘Of course,’ he said, but he was already on the move towards his window. He ripped open the curtains the rest of the way and looked outside while I studied his reaction. His eyes widened while his browed lowered, his jaw dropping as he gawked at whatever he saw. Under any other circumstances I might have found the expression amusing. Now, I just found it concerning. What was he seeing that caused such a reaction?

When his jaw dropped even lower and the breath was expelled from his lungs like he’d been punched in the gut, I couldn’t handle the suspense any longer and joined him to look out the pane of glass that separated us from the outside world.

A world that at first glance looked exactly the same as any other time we’d looked out this window. That was until we raised our gazes to the horizon. Instead of miles upon miles of forest that surrounded Aurora Academy’s multiple campuses, there was a vast, black stone mountain that blocked our view of anything else.

No, it wasn’t a mountain… A longer examination showed signs of a man-made structure, swirled carvings decorating the surface that were only visible from the shadows created by the sun. Whatever it was, it wasn’t naturally made.

‘What the fuck?’ Oz breathed out beside me and I mirrored the sentiment.

We watched as bodies started streaming out from the surrounding buildings, each of them gawking at the new structure with dazed expressions, blood dripping from their faces much the same as us.

Oz and I shared a heavy look, our trepidation clear, but when our hands clasped together in a silent promise that whatever was happening we were in it together, I felt our strength and resilience rise up between us. I had a feeling we were going to need it.