Real Magic Read online

  “But it’s not magic,” someone else complained.

  “So?” Mr. Marve asked. “So what?”

  “I probably could have stopped her, if I’d jumped in front of the car,” Hanson said. “She wouldn’t have hit me, but I thought that was cheating.”

  “You were lucky I didn’t swerve into you,” Valerie answered. “I don’t want to be quarry again.”

  “But you’re so good at it,” Mr. Marve said.

  “You left skid marks in the parking lot,” Ethan said with appreciation.

  There had been a moment, as she’d gone to return his keys to him, that she’d worried that he might have been protective of that car, but he’d just had a huge grin from the moment he’d seen her. It was just a thing, and an easy-to-replace one, at that. Valerie still wasn’t used to the idea of having real money.

  “Someone,” Mr. Marve said, snapping his fingers over his head. “Someone talk to me about what you were thinking as you were tracking her down the first hillside.”

  “Not again,” Milton said. “I don’t like doing tick checks.”

  “She always goes for the trees,” someone said.

  “She goes for cover,” Mr. Marve said. “Come on, now. One of the people who was actually tracking her. What were you thinking?”

  “That she was probably going to keep going downhill, because uphill was a lot more work,” Shack said.

  “Good,” Mr. Marve said. “Good. What else? Someone else?”

  “Why did you light the fire?” Milton asked.

  Valerie blinked, trying to remember.

  Because it had seemed like a good idea at the time was worse than a bad answer. It was a smug answer, in this context.

  “Um,” she said. “Partially as a diversion.”

  “Wait,” Shack said. “You doubled back from there, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  He pointed at someone else.

  “I told you, man. I told you.”

  “Why else?” Mr. Marve asked.

  She closed her eyes.

  She was still exhausted.

  “Um,” she said, swallowing. “It set up a big wave of magic that wiped out a lot of my trail, magically. I guess it didn’t do enough for the physical path, if Shack knew.”

  “Oh, no,” Shack said quickly. “I just told Matthews over there that I bet you’d doubled back from there, because we were going to keep going forward and try to pick up your trail again on the other side of the crater.”

  “Crater?” Mr. Marve asked.

  “There’s a big region down there that looks and feels like a human being has never even been there,” someone said.

  “Fascinating,” Mr. Marve said. “How did you do it?”

  Valerie shook her head, honest this time.

  “I don’t remember.”

  There were dismissive noises among the class; they were getting tired of the way that she did things, in the context of direct competitions like this. Mostly, they didn’t mind all that much, because it wasn’t a huge advantage on tests and the like, but they’d been running these simulations twice a week for a month, now, and patience - tolerance - was wearing thin.

  “What happened next?” Mr. Marve asked. “Chasing team?”

  “We went straight, never picked up her line again,” someone said. “Heard yelling and came back up the hill. Didn’t ever see her again.”

  “All right,” Mr. Marve said. “Sentry team. Where did you deploy your resources?”

  “Her room, the boys’ wing of the dorm, Mr. Tannis’ room, the visitor cottages, and two on either side of the school to watch the trees,” Ann said.

  Mr. Marve tipped his head to the side.

  “If you had someone on the far side of the school watching for her, how did she get to the parking lot ahead of them?”

  There was a long silence, and finally Ann made a frustrated noise out of a sigh and shook her head.

  “Because I came around the back of the school to make sure that she couldn’t sneak in through the back windows. I knew everyone would come down to the front stairs, and…”

  “You were the one who could have stopped her,” Mr. Marve said.

  “I’m the one who could have let her hit me with a car,” Ann protested. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Did you search the cars to make sure they were all locked?” Mr. Marve asked. She made another exasperated noise.

  “No. Because she shouldn’t have been allowed to use them. They aren’t magic.”

  “Neither are her shoes,” Mr. Marve said. “Does that mean she should have had to run barefoot?” He took a step back and put his arms out. “Everything around you, when you are in a life-or-death situation, is potentially a tool. Don’t rule anything out, and don’t assume that anyone you are up against will rule anything out.”

  “So you’re saying that I should be prepared for her to come at me with a knife, or cast a spell to kill me?” Ann asked. “There have to be boundaries to a game like this, or people are going to die.”

  Mr. Marve grinned.

  “Excellent. We have a volunteer for quarry for next week. Miss Womack, I will be happy to give you the rules of engagement from the quarry perspective, for the event.”

  They really weren’t that bad, but they did eliminate all intentional physical injury against the other side and against most property. She was allowed to break windows and damage doors, but that was about it.

  Burning leaves might have been a bit of a gray area, but Valerie didn’t consider them to be actual property so much as on the property.

  She sighed, relieved that she wouldn’t be the one running around like a frightened rodent next week, and she hopped down off of the stool. Mr. Marve shook his head.

  “I’d like to hear what you were thinking, from the point where you set the fire onward.”

  She glanced at him, feeling a conflict of interest here.

  She might have been exhausted, and she might have been D-U-N-done with being the quarry, but she was good at these games. The lifetime of passive instruction with her mother had given her an unexpected advantage over the magic kids, and she liked it. Telling them about how to beat her seemed… stupid.

  On the other hand, if any one of them was ever running away from a hunting squad of Purists through steep woods… she wanted any one of them - every one of them - to survive.

  So.

  She nodded, closing her eyes.

  “I did start out just going downhill because it was easier,” she said. “I was just trying to cover my tracks and outrun them, but that wasn’t a sustainable idea. I had to find a way to keep them from being able to get to me, and just hiding all day… They would have eventually found me. I thought about holing up in the visitor cottages…” Ann gave her a smug look. “… but I didn’t think I could find them, at that point. I thought about trying to hide with the upperclassmen, but I figured they’d turn me in. Considered my room, because that’s notoriously hard to get into, but figured they’d have someone watching that, too. I just wanted to get away. I was thinking about who would have come to help me, if it was really happening, and where they would be able to find me to help, but ultimately, being able to get all the way away where no one could find me seemed like the best plan.”

  Mr. Marve nodded.

  “All right. Essays on your role in the simulation, your observations of the leaders’ roles in the simulation, and the overall outcomes are due on Friday,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”

  Valerie slid back down off of the stool and went to get her backpack. She walked out of the room with Shack and Ethan, waiting for Hanson because he’d gotten a seat near the back.

  “Food?” Shack asked.

  “Food,” Hanson agreed.

  “I’m going to go wait for Sasha,” Valerie said.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Ethan told her. Hanson looked down the hallway guiltily, then waved Shack on ahead.

  “I’ll go, too,” he said.

  “You guys a
re weird,” Shack said with an easy grin as he set off toward the cafeteria.

  Valerie let Ethan gather up her hand hook his elbow through hers.

  “You tired?” he asked.

  “That much running is stupid,” she said with faux-mood.

  “You’re in terrible shape,” Hanson said. “You ought to come run on the treadmill with us a couple of mornings a week. You’d feel a lot better, out there running around like that.”

  “Or I could sleep in the hours that I have available for it,” Valerie said. “I like sleep. Do I have to tell you how I feel about running?”

  Ethan laughed.

  “How is Sasha liking her seminar?” he asked Hanson.

  “Can’t stop talking about it,” Hanson answered.

  They’d had the option to either take hands-on survival training or hands-on healer training, and Sasha had been the only one of the New Shadows who had chosen healing. Apparently she’d asked Hanson to try it with her, but Hanson was pretty adamant that he wanted to do survival training instead, and Sasha hadn’t taken it personally as far as Valerie could tell.

  They went to stand outside of the classroom where the healing seminar was held, Valerie leaning against the wall by the door and Ethan and Hanson on the far wall.

  “She’s loving it,” Valerie said. “This is all she’s ever wanted to do, and with the war, they’re moving up the practical magic a lot.”

  “Practical magic like stealing cars,” Ethan muttered in good humor, and Valerie shrugged.

  “You guys outnumbered me, what, twenty-to-one, and no one was going to help me. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Let us catch you once,” Hanson said. “So that everyone stops whining about it.”

  “Not likely,” Valerie said, grinning. “Not if I can help it.”

  She considered, for a moment, taking Hanson up on his offer to help her work out, but then again… no. No. Being a gym rat was not the end goal of all of this. She didn’t want to have to run. She wanted to have magic to defend herself, magic to get away, and magic to hide so that no one could find her. That was how her parents did it.

  No one had heard from them in months.

  The fighting was getting more intense.

  Even after everything, the teachers still resisted telling them what was going on, but they could tell. The specialists came in for a couple of classes each, and then they stayed, spending all hours with the rest of the regular teachers, and no one had any spare time.

  They were all working, all the time.

  Valerie got some information from Mr. Tannis, based on the magic he asked her to work on with him. He liked her - what he called - creativity as a stimulant to his own efforts to generate defensive magic for the front line working for the Council, and while he didn’t give her any more background than he had to, it was unavoidable that Valerie would get a sense for the kind of magic that The Pure were using against the Council, and how often there were new engagements with new magic involved.

  It was approaching manic.

  And yet.

  Here she stood, leaning against a wall, waiting for her roommate to come out of class so that they could go to lunch.

  Everything was so normal.

  And so completely not normal.

  She was learning magic.

  Like it was a regular school.

  With regular school friends.

  And classes.

  And teachers.

  Everything was so surreal.

  The tone of conversation in the room behind her changed, and people started streaming out. The guys straightened, anticipating Sasha, but Valerie stayed relaxed.

  They would never learn.

  Sasha was never ever going to be the first person to leave a classroom.

  Or the second.

  Or the third.

  The entire class streamed past and the noise in the room dwindled to the point that she could hear Sasha’s voice as she argued with the teacher over something.

  Valerie smiled.

  Sasha was nothing if not herself, all the time.

  Valerie glanced around the doorway, not intending to make eye contact with Sasha, but the girl was facing the door and she saw the motion.

  “Oh,” Sasha said. “Sorry. My friends are waiting.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” the teacher answered. “You’ve seen that work?”

  “Multiple times,” Sasha asserted. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, here.”

  “I’ll reach out to some friends,” the teacher told her. “Write it up for me and I’ll see what I can confirm.”

  Valerie grinned as Sasha walked out of the room then turned and darted back in to go get her stuff.

  Finally, as Sasha came out again, Valerie pushed herself off of the wall and fell into step next to her. Sasha walked sideways for a moment, waiting for Hanson to come put his arm across her shoulders, and Ethan leaned forward to look around Hanson and Sasha at Valerie.

  “I feel like they’re out-cute-ing us,” he said.

  “I’ll put a bow in your hair if you want,” Valerie answered.

  “No, thank you,” Ethan said, straightening.

  “How was class?” Sasha asked.

  “I was quarry,” Valerie said. “Again.”

  “And you won?” Sasha asked.

  “Almost ran me over in Ethan’s car,” Hanson said.

  “Yes, then,” Sasha said. “So no one is going to sit with us again.”

  “No one ever sits with us,” Valerie said dismissively. It was strange, how easily she had taken to being a pariah, and Ethan and Shack seemed to bear it with a sense of being elect, but it bothered Hanson and Sasha. Hanson had always been popular, and he was even now, despite the fact that he had no background in magic and even though that was purportedly the reason everyone resented Valerie. He just wasn’t enough of a bridge to get people to sit with Valerie, and he chose to sit with them rather than going to sit with the other groups that would have welcomed him.

  Sasha was just suffering under the death of a dream.

  She’d thought she would fit in at magic school.

  Poor girl.

  They rounded the corner into the cafeteria and paused, finding Shack at the empty table in the center of the room where they would have expected him, but also finding the rest of the room packed.

  Packed.

  It was normally an ample space for the kids who came here as they felt like it for dinner, even if the seminars had pushed dinner a bit later and more uniform for the underclassmen. There were about two-hundred underclassmen, and the space fit easily three-hundred.

  No.

  The walls were lined, at this point, with underclassmen who had been pushed out of their tables by the surging influx of upperclassmen.

  The upperclassmen had their own kitchens and living facilities in their cottages, and they only came in for prepared meals in small numbers.

  For a moment, Valerie worried that it was about her, but the general noise of the room kept up, completely ignoring her arrival, and Shack went on eating without looking up.

  They went through line - more slowly than normal - and went to sit.

  “What’s up?” Ethan asked Shack, and Shack nodded.

  “Rumor is your dad is coming to make an announcement to the school,” he said. “They’re guessing the terms of engagement are changing, and they’re going to start taking student volunteers…”

  “As if they didn’t already,” Ethan muttered, and Shack shrugged.

  “Or that there’s been some huge battle and this is how they’re breaking it to the students that we’ve all lost parents.”

  Sasha shuddered, and Hanson turned his face down to her hair.

  Valerie hadn’t asked where Hanson’s mom had ended up.

  At least Ethan’s mom was safe. She lived a very luxe, very well-guarded life up on the coast somewhere, far away from the Council and the war, along with Ethan’s little brother.

  Shack’s dad was
a healer, and while Valerie didn’t know if he was active or not, if he was, he was going to be at the front of anything that happened, and Sasha’s mom… Well, Sasha’s parents might be okay, too, so long as Ivory hadn’t gotten drafted to go be a healer for the Council. Valerie was pretty sure Sasha would have said something if that had happened.

  Valerie’s parents, though… No one could tell her what had happened to them.

  Valerie sat down next to Shack, Ethan taking the chair on her other side and Hanson and Sasha sitting down across from them.

  “What do you think?” Ethan asked Shack confidentially, and Shack nodded again.

  “I think that Mr. Tannis has Valerie working all hours, these days,” he said. “And that Mr. Marve isn’t around any time but when we’re in lecture. I don’t think he even watches the exercises.”

  Valerie couldn’t prove he did, as she thought about it.

  “I think they’re losing,” Shack said softly. “Don’t know if it’s battles or if the Pure are just way ahead of us, going after civilians, but I think we’re losing big.”

  The stuff Mr. Tannis had her doing…

  She didn’t like the idea of humans doing that to each other.

  It was just inconceivable.

  Trying to kill each other, that she could maybe get. Someone standing in your way when you were absolutely certain you were right.

  Yeah.

  Even for the Pure.

  But the way they were trying to kill the magic users that the Council was sending against them?

  It was…

  It was inhuman.

  She’d avoided telling the rest of the Shadows, because it was the kind of thing they couldn’t do anything about it, and all it did was scare Valerie, but she knew things…

  “I think you’re right,” she finally said. The table looked at her, hearing the information she was holding back, teased there, and she shook her head.

  “It’s bad. The things they’re doing. Stuff that kills a lot of people. Stuff that hurts them just so that they need help and can’t take care of themselves. Stuff that… seeing it, everyone around them is going to lose their stomach to fight.”

  Stuff that Valerie had been trying to figure out how to cause.

  She knew - she knew - that Mr. Tannis was shielding her from the worst of it. There was only so much he could put on her as a seventeen year old, only so much he was willing to ask her to do as her teacher, but the stuff she was doing was bad enough.