Page 4

Juniper

I had to wait until the rest of the dorm had cleared out before I could sneak out of Oz’s room, the spell ensuring we kept our connection a secret forcing me to take drastic measures to ensure it remained so. That was why I was currently climbing through a window, rope attached firmly in place in order to scale the back of the building where the rest of the academy couldn’t see. You know, since they were all gathered to gawp at the giant black structure on the other side.

My foot slipped on a particularly slippery brick, apparently having rained sometime last night while we slept, and I cursed. I cursed for my current predicament, for the spell that was causing said current predicament, and for the strange events that were happening. It would have been foolish to believe that a bright light, a loud noise, and a mysterious mountainous structure would be the end of it. No, something big was happening. Something none of us could have ever predicted.

But what?

I was just as eager as everyone else to get a closer look at the strange new addition, but I was stuck escaping Oz’s dorm building like a damn thief that accidentally fell asleep on the job, the sun shining directing on me (and in my eyes) to highlight how much I wasn’t supposed to be where I was.

We were going to have to find a better way to end our Friday night sleepovers, because this was getting ridiculous.

Finally, my feet touched the ground and I almost bowed down and kissed it. Scaling a multi-storey building wasn’t really too much of an effort for me, at least physically. I may have been sweating with the effort, my breaths sawing in and out of my lungs as adrenaline worked its way back out of my shaking body, but it wasn’t from exertion. I worked out plenty to give me the strength and stamina to keep myself from falling to my death, so that wasn’t the issue. No, my problem was that I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of heights. I could handle most things other people feared, like snakes and spiders and public speaking. But heights? They left me a quivering, hyperventilating mess.

Nope. Not for me.

After catching my breath and lowering my blood pressure, I jogged around the dorm building to where the crowd had gathered on the other side, my lungs seizing when I once again laid eyes upon the black mass taking up a significant portion of our already vast academy grounds. It was an imposing structure, the black of the rock so dark it would have been impossible to pick out the intricate, swirling designs that proved it wasn’t a natural formation but a hand-carved behemoth.

‘Junie!’ a shrill, feminine voice, one I knew well, called my name.

I turned to find my roommate, Kendra, heading straight for me, hazel eyes wide and flashing with disbelief and uncertainty. Her wild red curls waved dramatically around her face and shoulders almost like they were taking on a life of their own as the breeze blew thick strands in front of her face that she kept batting away with frustration. I wouldn’t have called us friends, exactly, though she was nice in a shallow way. She just wasn’t the most trustworthy person on the planet. Her big mouth got not only herself but countless others into trouble whether she meant to or not. It was the largest reason I kept an emotional distance between us. I couldn’t let someone like her get too close because my secrets wouldn’t stay so secret for long under her care, but we had fun together on occasion.

Which was why I struggled to understand why she was storming in my direction like hellhounds were snapping at her heels and she wanted to sic them on me instead, her face twisting into a thunderous scowl as she surged towards me. Even though we were friendly, even she knew we weren’t and never would be close, but she had never behaved like this toward to me before. I felt like I was missing something.

‘How insane is this?’ I pointed towards the large black thing in an attempt to draw the attention away from me and back onto the real important matter. When it didn’t work, trepidation had me taking a step back when she halted far too close and got right up in my face.

‘Don’t you give me that, missy. Where were you?’ she snapped, and I felt like a little kid with my hand caught in the cookie jar. She couldn’t possibly have any clue… right?

‘What do you mean?’ I hedged, taking another step backwards as if physical distance would save me from her wrath.

‘Don’t play dumb with me, Juniper. You didn’t come back to our room last night and this happens? What did you do?’ she accused, her voice whipping through the crowd and silencing the mutterings in a wave as they caught onto the potential of a fight. Or answers, though they were looking to the wrong person for those.

‘Not that I owe you an explanation, but I was with a… friend,’ I argued my case, internally wincing when I caught Oz’s eye in the mass of bodies and we both realised how that sounded. If anyone figured out I was spending my Friday nights with him, they would now assume we were sleeping together. Blech.

‘You’re missing from our room every Friday night and you don’t come back until after lunch on Saturdays. It’s like some sort of weird ritual or something,’ she continued throwing the accusations, each one feeling like a nail hammering into my coffin. Not because she was right, but because there was no way for me to defend myself with this damn spell silencing me. My stomach churned when the mutterings started back up, this time aimed at me.

‘And now this!’ she gestured vaguely behind her towards the black structure. ‘This is your fault. I just know it.’

‘Now, hang on a minute,’ I started, but another voice cut me off.

‘How could she have had anything to do with this?’ a familiar handsome face appeared between us. My stomach twisted for an entirely different reason when Hawthorne Ramil stepped forward to block me from the verbal attack. Brown hair slightly too long on the top flopped over his forehead and into his eyes, uncharacteristically unstyled, though I didn’t blame him. Most of us were out here still in our pyjamas, not willing to change in favour of getting a front-row seat to whatever was going on, and I didn’t miss the way his flannel pants hung off his slim but toned hips, clinging to his ass in a way that made me want to both bite it and pull it the rest of the way down to reveal those pert glutes for my viewing pleasure.

He was also Oz’s best friend, a man I’d been secretly crushing on for years but never even knew I existed.

At least, I hadn’t thought he knew I existed…

I wrinkled my nose in disdain when her demeanour immediately softened into something more flirtatious and less combative as soon as he appeared, my opinion of her lowering further than I ever thought it could go. It wasn’t that I had ever considered her a malicious or negative individual, but I was seeing a whole new side to her that I didn’t like. I didn’t like it at all.

Plus, she needed to stop ogling Hawthorne. That was my thing.

‘Thorne,’ she simpered, moving closer so that they were almost touching while batting her lashes at him. ‘You don’t understand. She never tells me where she’s going, what she’s doing, and then this happens? It’s the only explanation. She has to be responsible somehow.’

‘Has anything happened before when she spent the night away from her room?’ he retorted, but she wasn’t cowed.

‘She must have been planning. Can’t you see it? She’s been cavorting with the devil this whole time!’

Snorts of disbelief sounded throughout the gathered crowd, even from me, and a few people even turned away from the altercation. I supposed when someone started spouting bullshit about devil worshipers as a legitimate source of a mystery people started to lose interest.

Hawthorne’s unimpressed expression must have matched my own, his square jaw clenched and the muscles ticking as he ground his teeth. ‘I highly doubt that, Kendra,’ he deadpanned. Many humans believed that witchcraft or sorcery or whatever name they wanted to call it was borne from Hell, that magic was Demonic in nature and anyone who participated in it was evil. Those that believed in the supernatural, anyway. Most just dismissed it all as a bunch of hocus pocus, which was exactly how we in the magical community viewed the Devil. We had our religion, the proof of it a tangible thing running through our veins and clear to see after we perform an actual ritual.

Devil worshipping… Absolutely ridiculous.

I pushed passed Hawthorne, eager to take back the reins and put this bitch in her place. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re getting out of this, throwing around accusations like that, but you sound like an idiot.’ I levelled her with my most disappointed look, attempting to emulate the one my mother had perfected while raising me. ‘We may not have been close, but I never would have expected this from you.’

She looked around as if to gather back-up from the bystanders, but when she realised she’d lost her audience her entire demeanour switched up yet again and she turned a sneer on me that I had only ever seen her throw at people she’d deemed beneath her. Until now, I had never made that list. Or perhaps I had, and I’d just never noticed her going behind my back.

Now that I thought about it, after this interaction the latter was the more likely conclusion.

With a shrug, because you couldn’t win over everyone, I dismissed her and tried to give Hawthorne a grateful smile, but all I caught was the back of his head as he was already walking away. My heart sank, but I refused to let it show. Hawthorne was one of the most sought-after Warlocks at Aurora Academy. He always had been. And while he’d had his fair share of the female population in his bed if the rumours were correct, I had never even managed to find myself even a blip on his radar.

With a disappointed sigh, I left Kendra behind as I headed deeper into the mass of confused and curious Witches and Warlocks. I kept Oz in my sights (and Hawthorne, since my twin was whom he’d stalked off to after that altercation, not that I was complaining about the eye candy), and moved closer to the front lines of the crowd. Professors had already accumulated towards the edge of the clearing to discuss our next move. I nodded at a few who taught at the middle school alongside me, but as I was still a grad student there was a divide that kept our relationship purely professional so I didn’t try to join them.

I would wait until they called upon me and the other older students for assistance, but until then I didn’t want to get in their way.

Another body came to stand beside mine as we stared up at the giant thing that had replaced the forest surrounding academy lands, but I didn’t adjust my gaze to see who it was. A pang of sadness passed through me at the loss of so much life. There would have been countless animals living amongst the foliage, all wiped out and for what? What was the purpose of summoning such a thing here?

I just couldn’t think of any possible explanation.

‘Alright, folks!’ the Dean emerged from within the circle of staff, his arms spread wide as he addressed us all. ‘Time to head back inside. Stay in your dorm buildings until otherwise instructed. Let us investigate these strange happenings without needing to worry about you causing any more problems by poking around, yes?’ he half joked, earning a few half-hearted chuckles from us. He wasn’t wrong and we knew it.

I turned on my heel and headed back towards my dorm building as soon as he’d dismissed us, eager to get away from the overwhelming sense of foreboding the emanated from the windowless, black skyscraper.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the structure itself but those strange, swirling markings. They looked decorative from a first-glance standpoint, but after another look with the sun shining directly on them, visible more so through shadows than the actual carvings themselves, they struck me as odd. There was a system to them I couldn’t outright decipher, but I’d noticed it only because it was reminiscent of the Fae language Oz and I had been decoding.

I would bet that they were words, not just pretty pictures, and if we could figure out what it said then maybe we could get ourselves some answers.

‘Miss Olwyn, if you wouldn’t mind staying behind, please,’ Dean Winters called me to a halt. I did as I was told, heading back towards the circle of staff members though I remained on the outskirts. I may have been a twenty-four year old grad student with a job teaching at the middle school, but these Witches and Warlocks were far older and more experienced than me, so even being in their presence made me feel like a little kid trying on my mother’s far-too-big heels with lipstick smeared all over the lower half of my face.

I relaxed a little when the dean called more of us over and Oz took up position a few spaces to my right. It seemed we were being included as staff since we technically were, even if we were still students as well. I wondered what tasks we would be given, though I tried not to feel too guilty when I worried it would cut into my research with Oz. That was something that had been going on for years already, and we were hardly any closer to figuring out a way to free ourselves from our curse.

As with anything else in life, it seemed we were going to continue having to jump through hoops to get the answers we sought. Firey hoops that dangled one hundred feet in the air and moved as soon as we got close, because nothing could ever be simple for us.

He was worth it, though, so I would do it without complaint.

I wish they would just hurry up. We’ve got more important things to do than stand around and wait for them to get their thumbs out of their asses, Oz’s voice rang out and I glanced at him from the corner of my eye in confusion. Why was he speaking so disrespectfully in front of the very people he was referring to?

Dammit, I could have been deciphering Old Fae if it wasn’t for this shit. I hope Junie’s okay after scaling the building. And her roommate is a bitch. I never should have fucked her. Though she did do that thing with her tongue…

I tried my hardest to keep the shock and repulsion from my face. His lips weren’t moving. He wasn’t speaking out loud. I’d just heard my brother’s thoughts, and I wanted to be sick. I didn’t even want to acknowledge what I’d just learned, far too stunned with his voice in my head over the content.

I wasn’t given the opportunity to ignore it, however, because his thoughts went down a rabbit hole of horniness that was traumatising for a sister to hear. I tried to tune him out as he continued reminiscing over not only the things my roommate did to him but what he’d done to her, and I was feeling thoroughly sickened. With this new development, I decided to try and see if it worked both ways if only to stop him from continuing down this avenue of thought because I couldn’t take another second of it.

‘ Oz!’ I attempted to push the thought towards him. When he winced like I’d shouted in his ear and his head whipped around to stare at me, the whites of his eyes showing in his shock, I almost did a happy dance that it worked.

‘ Junie…?’

‘Apparently we can hear each other’s thoughts now, so I would appreciate it if you stopped thinking about my soon-to-be ex roommate’s naked body and the things she can do with her tongue.’

‘Oh, fuck… How?’

‘I don’t know, Ozzie, but now’s not the time,’ I darted my eyes towards where Dean Winters was circling back around in our direction. I got the sense he was nodding his head in acknowledgement, but his head didn’t actually move. It was an odd sensation that jolted me out of reality for a moment, my head swimming with everything that had happened in such a short space of time.

What next? I thought to myself dejectedly, though I realised Oz had caught it when his shoulder shrugged almost imperceptibly in response.

That sense of foreboding grew as the dean practically jogged back towards us, concern shining in his tired brown eyes. He glanced between us then gestured for those of us he’d just gathered to circle around.

‘Alright. You may still be students, but as teachers you also have a responsibility towards your students. You will be reassigned a new room in the lower schools’ dorms to keep the younger ones calm and in line. Hopefully, they won’t need protection but you will be their first line of defence if the need arises. In the meantime, all other faculty members from across the campuses will be conducting an investigation. We are entrusting you with the safety and wellbeing of our younger students. Please take that seriously.’

He waved three professors over, one from each of the campuses. ‘These fine Witches will be assigning you your new rooms. Please pack only what is necessary and retrieve your keys as soon as possible. They will be waiting for you in the dorms.’

‘ At least we’ll be closer and have a better reason to be seen together,’ Oz’s voice sounded in my head again and I forced myself not to outwardly startle. It felt weird, like someone trying to stroke my brain from inside my skull and it sent shivers across my skin, my hair standing on end.

I answered as we were departing to collect our belongings, pleased with the way things were suddenly turning in my favour. ‘We’ll just need to be careful not to draw attention to the fact we never speak out loud to one another, or our newfound ability to communicate mentally,’ I warned.

‘ Do you think it’s a side-effect of whatever is going on?’ he asked. ‘ What if it’s only temporary?’

‘ Then nothing’s really changed. If this is a side-effect then we’ll deal with it, but I’m not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth. I can talk to you around others without anyone knowing, and our secret will remain safe. I’m not seeing any down sides to it so far, besides losing a big chunk of the forest to a massive black mountain. Maybe it’s not a bad thing?’

He mulled it over before responding, pausing momentarily before we had to go our separate ways. ‘ We need to be cautious, Junie. We don’t know what’s going on, and we don’t know how this is affecting us. Hell, someone else could already be listening in and we just don’t know it.’

All very valid points that I hadn’t even considered yet. ‘ Okay, let’s pack our things and get settled into the middle school dorms and then we can get together tonight and see if we can work out a plan.’

‘ Good idea. I’ll see you soon.’

My fingers twitched with the urge to wave goodbye as he turned his back on me and headed in the opposite direction. It was going to be so nice to live in the same building, at least for the time being. I could feel it the longer our curse kept us apart, the need to be close to him. There was a pull that couldn’t be ignored but we couldn’t act on, and though it had grated on us for many years, it was starting to become painful. Headaches, insomnia, a physical link that seemed to want to tear from our chests the longer we were apart.

I may have been cautious about what was happening, I wasn’t afraid, and though that was likely incredibly na?ve, I couldn’t help but be grateful for it. Whatever it was, it was giving us the opportunity to hopefully soothe our fractured bond, so I was going to thank whatever Gods were responsible and jump into what came next with both feet, a smile on my face and my brother by my side.

My gut was screaming at me that this was our chance. We were on the cusp of uncovering everything that was keeping us apart, I just knew it.