Surviving Magic (School of Magic Survival Book 1) Read online

  “Warding on the building is more than a century old,” Mrs. Gold said. “Never been broken. You stay on the property and you’ll be safe from any outside magic.”

  “Magic,” Valerie whispered.

  Mrs. Gold glanced over at her.

  “If you’re expecting me to answer you, you’ve got to speak up so I can hear.”

  “Sorry,” Valerie said.

  They walked past offices and trophy cases, classrooms and lockers, turning several more times, first away from the front of the building and then outward again, into a carpeted wing with periodic doors.

  “These are the dorms,” Mrs. Gold said. “That’s my room, there. You tell me if there’s something I need to deal with, but think carefully about the meaning of the word emergency before you knock on my door at three in the morning, you hear?”

  “Okay,” Valerie said slowly. “So… I live here now?”

  “Unless you’ve got enough pull to get yourself into one of the cottages as a freshman,” Mrs. Gold said.

  “I’m supposed to be starting my junior year,” Valerie said and Mrs. Gold shook her head, getting out a ring of keys and unlocking a door.

  “This one will be yours,” the woman said. “No one else will be here until at least tonight, might not get your roommate until tomorrow or the next day. Some of the kids won’t come for the first week, only turn up at the weekend, but the freshmen are required to be here for the first Wednesday.”

  Valerie’s school had started two weeks before.

  She looked at the dark room and then Mrs. Gold, and decided the room was better than the moody tour guide.

  She went in.

  “I have a key for you,” the woman said, holding onto the doorknob. “I’ll give it to you at dinner. Don’t lock yourself out before that.”

  Valerie started to ask when and where dinner was, but Mrs. Gold had already closed the door.

  Valerie shivered, rubbing her arms and going to sit on a naked mattress.

  She didn’t have sheets.

  She didn’t have a pillow.

  She didn’t have anything.

  She went to press her back against the wall, wrapping her arms around her knees and staring out at the dark room.

  Alone.

  She’d never felt so alone.

  Her mother had abandoned her.

  Her friends at school - would they ever even know what happened to her?

  Hanson.

  There was no telling what he would do, if Valerie turned up missing. It had felt as though Valerie’s mom would also be leaving soon after Valerie had… Hanson would call the police.

  No one was ever going to know what happened.

  She squeezed her knees tighter, tears breaking loose and rolling down her cheeks.

  There was a quiet knock on the door and Valerie blinked quickly, looking around for tissues, but the room was absolutely bare.

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeves and went to answer the door.

  An attractive man her mom’s age stood there. Kind eyes. He had an authenticity to his expression that Valerie would have trusted, anywhere else. Unconditionally.

  “Miss Blake?” he asked.

  She almost, almost asked him who else he might have expected her to be.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m Alan Jamison,” he said. “Your mom called me. Told me you were coming here and asked me to help you figure out what’s going on. Can we talk?”

  Valerie put both hands over her mouth, the seeping tears from her room only a forerunner to the blinding ones she found now. She sobbed and he put his arms out, letting her step in to put her head on his shoulder and cry.

  “It’s okay,” he said when she was able to hear him again. “It’s really not as bad as it feels. There are a lot of kids, almost all of them who are going to be turning up over the next couple of days, who have been working their entire lives toward getting here. It’s not a bad place to end up. It’s just a shock. Come on. Come get something to eat, and let’s talk, you and me. It’s okay.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice, and he indicated, leading the way back down the carpeted hallway.

  “This is the girls’ wing,” he said. “The boys’ rooms are upstairs, and they lock the stairwell at both ends at ten. You met Mrs. Gold…”

  “She was wonderful,” Valerie said, regretting it immediately, though he seemed unbothered.

  “She’s been watching over the girls dormitories since your mom and I were in school. She’s seen too many shenanigans to give people the benefit of the doubt, but she’s fair when push comes to shove. If someone does something to hurt you, she’ll come down on them like a she-bear, make no mistake.”

  “You went to school with Mom?” Valerie asked.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “She was in the Light school, and I didn’t even have the scores to get in here. No, she and your dad are most of the reason I’ve had enough credibility to land a job here. We just all graduated at the same time and went off… You know. The wars.”

  Valerie shook her head.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You knew my dad?”

  He frowned.

  “You don’t know about the wars? She told me you didn’t know anything, but I didn’t imagine… Well. I guess we have to start a bit further back, yet, then. When we were teenagers, well, basically as long as anyone can remember, the magical community has had divisions. The styles of magic align a certain way, the opinions about our relationships with the civilian community, the demonic community…”

  “Demonic,” Valerie said, stopping. He turned back to look at her, his eyes still earnest, but now with something akin to pity.

  “Demons are real. Angels are real. Magic is real. Is that where we need to start?”

  Valerie nodded slowly. He motioned.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “Picking up where I was, we’ll come back to the demon thing, we’ve always been divided, and we’ve always had passionate opinions, but somewhere along the way we stopped being even friends. There were men who thought that we were superior to the civilians and ought to rule them by natural selection, and there were those on our side who thought that it was our job to proactively prevent magic users from attacking or manipulating humans… Fringe groups, for a long time, but as time went along, they started getting into more and more fights, and then they were killing each other, and little by little and then all at once, the rest of the community picked sides and we were killing each other… just on sight.

  “It was brutal and awful, but it wasn’t anything compared to what happened when they got organized. They started orchestrating mass attacks on humans and on us, and that… Well, that was our senior year, when that started.”

  He stopped, opening a door for her and indicating.

  “Cafeteria,” he said. It looked exactly the way a cafeteria ought to.

  “War,” Valerie answered, and he nodded, leading the way to a stack of trays and going to a buffet table where Valerie served herself a portion of pasta and another of steamed vegetables. There were rolls and pats of butter… It wasn’t as miserable as her school’s cafeteria, but… It was mass-produced food, certainly.

  “Right,” he said, sitting down. “You have to understand that the magical community wasn’t ever really organized before it all happened. We were flat-footed, and the first few years, they killed a lot of us, and a whole lot more humans. They enslaved hundreds or thousands of humans and… If it hadn’t been for some luck on our side and some hubris on their side, they should have won the war before it even started. It wasn’t until about maybe five years in, Susan, Grant, and I had been fighting since we graduated, and really just picking at it around the edges, learning who we were and what we were capable of, but around that time our side really realized that if we didn’t get ourselves organized, we were going to lose control of the situation and, yeah, we were all probably going to die. They formed the Council, they affiliated the schools… They did a lot of
things that are still really controversial today, but they did it to try to turn the war around, and it worked.

  “By that point, the three of us were really out in the middle of it, and… Well, the details of that…” He shook his head, looking away. “Probably a story for another time. We won. Your dad…”

  He looked at her, and Valerie shook her head.

  “What about my dad?” she asked.

  “What did your mom tell you?” he asked her, and she looked at her tray.

  “That he died,” she said, looking up again. He frowned, then he sat his fork down.

  “I have no idea what she was going through,” he said, meeting her eye. “And I really don’t want to be in the middle of that. So. Let’s agree to leave it?”

  “What happened to him?” Valerie demanded, and he shook his head.

  “She quit,” he said. “We won the war, and Susan was just done with all of it. I don’t think that she hated all of us, and I don’t… I can’t believe that she hated magic. I think she just felt like magic wasn’t worth it. Not after everything. So she walked away and she took you with her, and…” He paused, smiling. “When Susan Blake decided something, you really didn’t have a chance to tell her otherwise.”

  “That sounds like mom,” Valerie muttered.

  He nodded.

  “She disappeared, and no one ever knew where she went. The idea that you’ve just been right there in the city all that time…” He gave her a half a smile. “She had the right to go. Before the Council, no one would have even thought twice about it. The Council didn’t like her leaving, and that might be part of the reason she hid so well. I looked for her once or twice, just… Wanted to make sure she was okay, maybe sit and talk about old times once more… I couldn’t find her with as hard as I was willing to look, but I expect they spent serious resources, tracking her down.”

  “Why?” Valerie asked. “Why would they come looking for her? Is she in trouble?”

  “We need her,” Mr. Jamison said. “The Superiors… When the war was over, we didn’t know the half of who had been involved on the other side, by the end, or to what extent. Certainly not everyone helping us was happy about it, and there was a lot of argument about what to do with everyone who fought against us. We knew at the time that some of the hard-liners would slip through our fingers if we just let everyone go, and a lot of good men argued for stricter measures, but…” He licked his lips and leaned forward. “We’re getting into the zone of politics, here. People are going to have impassioned opinions, so you have to be careful who you talk to and how, if you decide you want to have these kinds of conversations with other students. A lot of us remember the days before the magic community had alignments, back when we all just had opinions, and that was the vote that carried the day. Maybe we were wrong. Looking back…” He tapped his fork on his plate and shook his head. “No point questioning it, now. What’s done is done. We let everyone go that we hadn’t witnessed actually killing someone. The ones who had killed civilians or our side, we executed, but the rest went back to their normal lives. There was a lot of mistrust in the early days, but I thought we’d made a lot of progress, mending bridges, and now…”

  “Jamison,” a man said, coming into the cafeteria. “Jamison, I need your mind.”

  Mr. Jamison turned his head, looking as an older man in a gray jacket and slacks walked quickly over.

  “I’m working on a cast, and it’s not centering the way I want it to. It needs a verbal cast to supplement it, but I’ve tried three different languages and none of them are working.”

  Mr. Jamison raised his eyebrows slightly, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms.

  “I need more detail than that,” he said.

  “It’s a type of ward,” the man in the gray jacket said, glancing once at Valerie. “Should hit concrete walls and stick there like a flypaper, and the azara root I’m using is adhering to the hard surfaces quite well, but it smokes off after I cast it because I can’t get it to balance long enough to set.”

  “Have you tried Cornish? Or one of the old Gaelic dialects?” Mr. Jamison asked.

  “No, obviously not,” the man said.

  “Do you have words you like?” Mr. Jamison asked with a sort of bemusement.

  “Yes I’ve written the cast,” the man said, annoyed, glancing at Valerie once more. “Who is she?”

  “Mr. Tannis, I’d like to introduce you to Valerie Blake.”

  The man paused, shifting on the table to look more squarely at Valerie. Valerie looked back, not sure what she was supposed to say or do.

  “Nice to meet you?” she tried.

  “I don’t know you,” he said. “You don’t intend to start classes, I hope.”

  “She will be starting with the rest of the freshman class,” Mr. Jamison said.

  “I didn’t test her,” Mr. Tannis said, standing. “I test all of the incoming students.”

  “She was last-minute,” Mr. Jamison said. “Lady Harrington signed off on it.”

  “Then she will hear from me,” Mr. Tannis said. “What’s the point of me testing all of the students before we select them if she can just choose them at random? Were you tested at all?”

  “No,” Valerie said, hoping that the truth was the right answer.

  “And what aptitudes have you identified for yourself without any external evaluation?” Mr. Tannis asked.

  “Um,” Valerie said, and he shook his head.

  “I work hard to uphold the standards of this institution,” he said. “I take it very seriously. We didn’t used to compete with the School of Light Magic with any real seriousness, but we now have some of the best students graduating here. They want to come because they know it’s competitive to get in. This only damages the school’s reputation.”

  “You need to take it up with Lady Harrington,” Mr. Jamison said, unruffled. “She can’t answer you for any of that.”

  “Blake,” the older man said. “Blake, Blake, Blake. I know that name.”

  “You ought to,” Mr. Jamison answered.

  The gray-suited man frowned, turning his attention more intensely on Valerie.

  “Blake,” he said. “Susan Blake.”

  She nodded.

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing but trouble, that woman. Best in the business, but she would think that she was entitled to bypass the entrance process.”

  “Again, she can’t answer that,” Mr. Jamison said. “Don’t blow up the school with the wrong dialect. Give me your cast and I’ll give you a few options on translation. Better yet, give me the entire cast and the text, and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  The man looked at Valerie once more, then shook his head, pointing a finger at Mr. Jamison.

  “It will be on your desk in twenty minutes. I need it today.”

  Mr. Jamison nodded, then watched the man go and turned his attention back to the table.

  Valerie’s food was getting cold, but she had no appetite.

  “He’s going to hate me, isn’t he?” Valerie asked, and Mr. Jamison shook his head.

  “Impress him and he’ll be impressed. Fail to impress him and he’ll forget all about you.”

  She frowned, then closed her eyes and sighed.

  “Mom is going to go fight again, isn’t she? The people you let go at the end of the last war, they didn’t change, any of them, and they’re going to try to kill her all over again.”

  He rubbed his thumb and forefinger down the sides of his mouth.

  “Wow, you sound so much like her. Yes. You’re exactly right. That’s what is happening, and we lost so many key players, winning the war… I don’t think we could win another without Susan Blake at the front of it.”

  “Why am I here?” Valerie asked, knowing the answer. Thinking of the smashed concrete of the sidewalk and how close it had come to being her or Hanson who had gotten smashed.

  “Because the schools are the safest places we have,” Mr. Jamison said. “Well, the s
afest places that are going to take in someone like you. Your mom… Both of your parents were… polarizing. Your mom still has friends in the community, but after all of those years, there’s no way for her to have known who still feels about her the way they did the day before she left. She was smart, insisting that you come here. The faculty here… We care about the students first and the politics after. There are people here who blame an awful lot of death on your mom and the things that she said…” He held up a hand when Valerie’s eyes flew open, as though she’d been about to speak. “When you’re up against impossible decisions, looking at life and death everywhere around you, you see people’s true colors come out, and you leave marks on each other that don’t ever come off. She did what she thought she needed to, and she still has my whole-hearted support for everything she did, given what we knew at the time.”

  “Tell me about my dad,” Valerie said after a moment, lifting her eyes once more to look at him. He shook his head.

  “I told you, I don’t want to get in the middle of that,” he answered, and she clenched her hands under the table.

  “Not how he died. Not, like, the stuff that my mom ought to have told me by now, but… You knew him. I don’t even remember him. There are pictures of him holding me as a baby, but I never knew him.”

  Mr. Jamison drew a breath and nodded slowly.

  “He was… quieter than your mom. He played pranks, sometimes… back then, we did that. You shouldn’t do that, now. I’m a teacher. You understand. Pranks are bad. But he played these brilliant, cerebral pranks, back in the day…” The man smiled, thinking about it, then shook his head. “I always felt like your mom was the smart one, but then he’d go and do something like that, and you just realized how evenly-matched they actually were. He was funny, and anything he said, every word out of his mouth was worth hearing. He was… He was tough, and he knew his own mind. They said he changed a lot, coming out of school, but I only ever knew him from the war, and he was… He might have been the most determined person I ever met.”

  Again, that sounded very much like Valerie’s mom.

  Valerie shook her head.

  “She should have told me. She should have said something to me…”