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  Real Magic

  School of Magic Survival 3

  Chloe Garner

  Copyright © 2019 Chloe Garner

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Melody Simmons

  Published by A Horse Called Alpha

  The Hunt

  Valerie ran through the trees, her breath coming in hard gasps, slamming her back against one of the larger trunks and listening behind her.

  Turning quickly, she fished into her backpack, getting out a marking stick and put a cast on the tree, trying to disrupt the world around her in a way that was going to make her harder to track.

  A breeze picked up and the remains of leaves from the previous fall caught in it, scattering along behind her.

  Still amazing that she could do that.

  She had no idea what the mark meant.

  She turned forward again, trying to catch her breath, but she couldn’t wait here.

  They might only be a minute behind her, and one of the things she couldn’t cover was the epic amount of noise she made, running through the woods.

  Underbrush caught and snagged on her jeans, ripping them along the knee deep enough to catch her raw flesh. She hopped on one foot, pulling the thorns out and away, cursing her lack of woodsy awareness from her childhood.

  Do this on a city street? She’d have it, but in the middle of the woods?

  She was still terrified she was going to stumble on a snake and end up having that be the thing that did her in.

  She shuddered at the thought, then picked up her speed again, her knee stinging with a promise of blood.

  That was trackable, if it got to the point that it was dripping, but she hopped on one foot once more and checked to make sure that - yes - it was just a scratch.

  A limb caught her unprepared and she stumbled sideways as her head glanced off of it, trying to remember what direction she’d been running and what tactic she was using to get away.

  She needed a plan, and fast wasn’t a plan.

  No.

  Fast was exactly the kind of instinct that was going to get her caught. She needed better than that.

  And, no, putting random marks on trees didn’t count, either.

  She forced herself to slow down to a pace she could actually manage, picking her way downhill through the vegetation and trying to get her head clear enough to think.

  Think.

  That was how she survived.

  She didn’t have any allies, so the skills she had to work with were all her own.

  The problem with being a natural was the inability to plan on any particular skill showing up when she needed it.

  Alternately, the way Sasha so preferred to look at it, she could simply count on any skill to show up when she needed it.

  So far, she’d done okay, like that. She’d dug herself out of some pretty bad scrapes, just assuming that the instincts were going to support her and that somewhere - inside of her head? outside of her head? wherever the ideas came from - she was going to pull the spell that she needed to do the thing that had to happen.

  The problem was that she hadn’t done it often enough to really count on it. One of these times, it was going to fail her, and she wasn’t going to see it coming, because she had no idea where the ideas came from.

  Dr. Finn had some idea. He didn’t talk about it, because he said that naturals had very little in common, but she expected that she could get through his puzzles without a problem, so long as she was doing them carefully and in the right order. He knew what her limits were, she just knew he did, and she trusted him to stay inside of them, even if the things that lived inside her limits were terrifying.

  This, though.

  She wasn’t going to get away, just counting on serendipity and genetics.

  She needed a plan.

  “Plan, plan, plan,” she whispered to herself, navigating a course around a particularly dense thicket of undergrowth. “Don’t get caught.”

  Wasn’t a plan.

  Still wasn’t a plan.

  She leaned against a tree, listening hard again, trying to remember what she’d talked about with her mom, watching movies with running away in the woods.

  Her mom had always had commentary on what the hero did right, what he did wrong, what the villain should have been doing the whole time.

  Valerie had always thought she would have made a better villain.

  She took a deep breath and steadied herself.

  What did she need?

  That was the foundation of a plan.

  The goal at the end of it.

  She needed to get away.

  Under other circumstances, maybe, that might have been finding a place to hide until they gave up finding her, but now… No, that wasn’t enough, now. She needed to get someplace safe where she could barricade herself in and find a way of summoning help.

  The visitor cottages?

  Maybe.

  If she knew where she was well enough to come out at the cottages, that would have been perfect, but she’d been going across and downhill for too long, now, and she didn’t know how far she might have gone around the hill the school was situated on.

  Uphill was the school.

  Downhill was, what?

  Water.

  She guessed.

  Who did she need help from?

  Ethan would be good.

  He knew all the people, knew all the plays, knew how to manipulate the situation.

  Sasha, to talk things through with her carefully, to spot the blindingly obvious holes in Valerie’s initial plans, to back her when things got bad.

  Hanson, because she always had her best ideas with him sitting across from her. He just made her calm. Made her think differently because she stopped thinking like a freaking scared little mouse.

  “Stop thinking like a scared mouse,” she whispered.

  Shack. Even Shack standing next to her would have been a profound improvement. Oswald MacMillan knew how to put holes in things. And not arguments. Holes.

  What she really needed was Lady Harrington to knock everyone out and come striding down the hill and tell her that she needed to be back at class in the morning, or she would be considered tardy.

  That.

  That was the definition of not going to happen.

  Valerie was alone.

  Come back.

  What was the goal?

  Water at the bottom of the hill wasn’t going to help her.

  She very much needed to not get lost.

  Getting away.

  She could lock herself into the visitor cottages and hope that her magic supplies held out until help came.

  If she could find them.

  She could go up to the school - across all of that open ground - and try to find a room in there that suited her. Her dorm room had all of the warding on it, already, but the odds of getting there without someone spotting her seemed remote, and the odds of them expecting her to try it seemed… too big.

  Where else?

  Where else could she go?

  She was panting hard from the run and the elevation changes, and she hadn’t been out here an hour. She couldn’t just lead them on a merry chase on and on and… no one would come for her out here.

  She needed to get…

  Away.

  It was blindingly obvious, when she came to it.

  Ethan kept the keys to his car on top of the tire, out of sight under the wheel well.

  He’d taken her to dinner, three weekends ago, in town. She hadn’t even known there was a town to go into.

  That.

  That was her way out.

  And with the entire world to pick from, there was no way for them to corner her, and she didn’t have to wait on reinforcements. She just had to keep moving.
/>   Gas cost money, but she didn’t worry too much about that, just yet.

  One problem at a time.

  She needed to cover her tracks - particularly well just now - so that they didn’t notice that she’d turned back. Her mom would have been talking about how the villain needed to anticipate her paths to flee and cut them off. That they should have had someone watching the parking lot to keep her from getting anywhere near the cars, because that was something they couldn’t recover from. Her holing up in her room? They could work with that, but of course they would guard her room. They needed to anticipate the worst-case outcomes and seal them off completely.

  Valerie hoped that they weren’t thinking like her mom.

  The upperclass cottages were another place that was relatively easy to cover all at once, though Valerie didn’t exactly have allies among the upperclassmen. They had an overwhelming opinion of her that she didn’t belong and shouldn’t have been allowed in, even now, after she’d…

  That was a rant that she didn’t need to distract herself with, right now.

  Focus.

  Cover the path she was leaving behind.

  What kind of magical signature was she leaving? How would they follow it?

  She knelt in a space where the leaves had piled up high, against a place where the hill had eroded away from the rocks underneath, and she took out a palm-sized stone. The top of the pile of leaves was dry, though everything underneath was damp and rapidly turning to dirt. Brushing the dry leaves off into a pile of their own, she closed her hand around the rock, speaking words that set it to light. Pink flame - actual pink - dripped down her hand and onto the leaves - flames should not drip, and yet this one did - and they lit with vigor.

  The leaves underneath the dry ones wouldn’t take the flame as well, and it would put itself out even before she was out of sustaining range, but it would be a lovely beacon to show where she had been, as well as to suggest that she was grasping at straws for how to cover her trail.

  She doubled back almost completely on her own path, going back up the hill.

  Literally toward her pursuers.

  She couldn’t do this long, because the vibrant gold smoke from the cast would be visible from anywhere nearby, if they got out of the trees to see it, and they would come charging in.

  They didn’t have to stop and think. They could just run as fast as they wanted.

  No, Susan Blake’s reprimand came to her. If they stop winning, the heroine wins, because she’s going to outsmart them.

  Sure. Just as long as she didn’t throw up her breakfast from running too hard out here.

  She followed her own path for as long as she dared, then took the straightest path up the hill that she could, hoping that she was still actually on the same hill.

  It was possible… Yes, it was entirely possible that she’d crossed onto a neighboring hill and she was going to get to the top and find… nothing.

  She shook her head, putting the worry aside.

  Nothing to do about it now.

  If she had any luck at all, even if she’d switched hills, from the top of this one she would be able to make out the school and set a better path.

  And be very confusing for anyone accurately tracking her.

  That wasn’t bad, was it?

  She stopped to breathe once more, now just from marching uphill through loose leaves, sliding earth, and rocks of varying degrees of trustworthiness. Her jeans were ripped twice more, and she had a long scratch across her back where a thorny vine had managed to get up under her shirt.

  Everything itched.

  There was a primordial part of her brain that was convinced she was covered in bugs, and the bits of debris sticking to her from messing with the leaves didn’t help with the illusion.

  She scratched her arms and leaned against a tree again, looking back the way she’d come.

  She couldn’t see that far, which meant they couldn’t see that far.

  Maybe.

  She stood a chance, here.

  She forced herself back up onto her feet, remembering that someone had told her there was poison ivy in these woods, and she gritted her teeth.

  You do what you have to do to survive, her mother had told her. Survival always comes first. Don’t worry about the other stuff.

  Uphill.

  She began to see blue sky through the trees - either she was getting close to the tree line around the school, or she was almost at the top of the wrong hill.

  She slowed, trying to pick her way more carefully - more quietly - through the woods, heaving a huge sigh of relief when she saw the field of grass ahead.

  They could be patrolling the treeline.

  They ought to be patrolling the treeline.

  She could see the school.

  She was about midway between the upperclassmen housing and the visitor cottages, a region she didn’t often hang out in. There were a few playing fields along through here, and she knew anecdotally that somewhere there were a pair of pools, though it had hardly mattered of late, with the number of people hunting her and the fact that it was too cold for swimming.

  She was either going to have to pick her way through the woods all the way around, risk them catching up with her or a sentry spotting her, or she was just going to have to run.

  She reached into her bag, hoping that there would be something in there to help her be, what?, more invisible or something, and she pulled out two bottles of oil and three ropes of fiber, crushing one fiber and rolling the other pair, then pouring one and another of the oils over the thread-pair of fibers, slicking the oil off and tucking the ends of the thread up into her hair like a crown over the top of her head.

  She was going to look ridiculous, but… Trust her instincts.

  She put the oils away and put her backpack back on, bracing and taking several more deep breaths.

  She needed to do more running, if this was really going to be her life, now.

  She wasn’t in shape for this.

  She closed her eyes, wishing she had a bottle of water and, like, thirty minutes to rest, then shook her head, taking off.

  Through the trees and across the first ten, fifteen yards of green, nothing happened.

  Her heart was racing, and she stumbled once because she wasn’t looking at where she was putting her feet. She was too preoccupied with trying to figure out if they had had someone watching the woods.

  “There,” someone shouted. “I see her. She’s there.”

  Valerie sped up, her body no longer confined by her fitness but rather the adrenaline in her system and the need to be out.

  If they had anticipated the cars, she was cooked.

  She was.

  No spare time or capacity to think about it, she would run right into their arms.

  If not, though, she didn’t have to be a secret.

  She just had to get there with enough distance between them and her, and… Well, she had to be able to work keys.

  Her hands were going to be shaking.

  The keys thing might be a real problem.

  She kept running, up the hill to the crest, listening hard behind her as voices shouted.

  She didn’t know how many there were.

  She didn’t know how close they were.

  She didn’t know how fast they were.

  All she could do was run her heart out and hope she could find Ethan’s car in the lot…

  Oh, great. She hadn’t even thought of that.

  It was gray.

  Or black?

  Or maybe blue.

  Black.

  Ethan would have a black car.

  She came into sight of the lot, someone running down the front steps of the school after her, and she realized that everyone would drive a black car.

  Had Ethan been out since they’d gone on their date?

  No.

  No, there hadn’t been time.

  They’d been working so hard at… everything.

  Everything all the time.

>   It would be where he’d parked it.

  Where had he parked it?

  She remembered walking in.

  Leaning against the corner of the building there and letting him kiss her.

  Where had she been walking from?

  She let her feet lead her, following her own path from the corner of the building, remembering the way the ground had felt underneath her, there, that cracked section of pavement.

  She walked directly up to a car and put her hand under the wheelwell, finding the keys.

  And knocking them on the ground.

  Squatting, she picked them up, wrapping her hand firmly around them so that she would use her fist to control them rather than her fingers, and she pushed the button with her other hand. The car clicked as it unlocked and she pulled the door, getting in as figures appeared around the corner of the building after her.

  Fist sideways into the ignition and turn, the car started with a slick roar - it was a nice car - and she searched for the gear-shifter to put it into drive.

  On the steering column?

  No, in the console next to her.

  Reverse.

  Neutral.

  Drive.

  She overshot and came back, her entire body shaking with exhaustion and adrenaline and flight, but her foot went down just fine, and she hauled the steering wheel around to turn down the row of cars, swerving around the closest of her pursuers and accelerating, just letting the wheel go to straighten out.

  The driveway beckoned, empty ahead of her.

  No one between here and freedom.

  They couldn’t catch her.

  The engine stalled and the car lost power.

  Valerie put her foot down, but there was very little response from the brakes, at that point. With a wild-animal sense of panic, she put both feet down on the brake and pulled on the steering wheel, and quite abruptly the car stopped, slamming her against the seatbelt.

  She took it off, not remembering putting it on, and she opened the door, looking around.

  Lady Harrington appeared at the top of the hill.

  “Who wants to tell me where things went wrong?”

  “It wasn’t fair, her going and getting a car,” Ann said. “How were we supposed to predict that?”

  “Why wouldn’t she go get a car?” Mr. Marve asked. “In retrospect, it seems like a very reasonable course of action, doesn’t it?”