A Witch Among Warlocks: The Complete Series Box Set Page 39

  “Can I summon Samuel Caruthers? I didn’t know him.”

  Professor McGuinness looked depressed by the mention of him. “You should not. He gave you his powers and you have an emotional investment in him. In fact, let me rephrase that. None of you may summon blood relations.”

  Jack Harvey, who usually sat in the back doodling guitars, said, “Can I summon Prince?” I guess as a result of so many of the guys at Merlin College coming from money, every class seemed to get dumb interruptions.

  “Prince, as in Purple Rain?” Professor McGuinness waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll get to the celebrity question later.”

  “If we can’t summon our own family or a rock star, then why would we summon anyone?”

  “To learn stuff, dipshit,” Harris mumbled, sort of to me but mostly just to himself.

  Professor McGuinness shot a sharp look our way now, cleared his throat, and continued, “The people you try to summon may or may not actually answer. The spirit world is a mysterious realm where we can’t go. Spirits move on at some point, and we want them to move on. We must never summon anyone we cared about when they were alive.”

  “Why is that?” one guy asked. I didn’t know the guy but I think his brother had died. “Why can’t our family talk to us?”

  Professor McGuinness answered him more gently. “The bridge between life and death, when breached, sometimes causes nothing but pain for everyone concerned. It seems to disturb a spirit’s ability to move on when they are summoned by loved ones.”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course,” the guy said, trying to brush off some obvious pain.

  “I’ll be passing out the annual memoriam book from the magical councils, and I would suggest you pick someone from the book that you don’t know and summon them,” Professor McGuinness said.

  There was some general disappointment as everyone flipped through the memoriam book. The councils issued the books every year for the benefit of necromancers, so they knew who could be contacted. Warlocks who actually went into necromancy as a career often ended up doing work for the council solving crimes or working with historians and researchers, so the memoriam book had a lot of dry information. If a warlock died who had devoted his life to working with runes, for example, his credentials would be listed on his page and you could use his name to try and summon him and ask about it. People included the submission in their wills, so they were only in the book if they didn’t mind being summoned.

  The Sinistral warlocks and witches could also submit their profiles to the book. They were stuck in the back and everyone flipped there first, but of course Professor McGuinness said, “Lads, you can look but you can’t summon. Front of the book, please.”

  There was some grumbling from various corners about ‘my dad didn’t pay tuition fees just so I could skip the real magic’ and so on that McGuinness ignored.

  “Of course, there is no guarantee that any given person will show up, even if they are in the book,” Professor McGuinness said. “Many people cannot be summoned after death, for reasons best left to the mysteries of the heavens, but we shall all try. Class is dismissed for the day. Your assignment is to find someone to summon.”

  I was in the middle of a quick flip through the book when everyone started filing out.

  I stopped on a page in the back.

  Lily Maxwell. A dark-skinned, beautiful woman who had died at age fifty-seven. Just six months ago.

  A succubus.

  A name I knew. A face I sort of knew. My dad had a handful of photographs of my mom.

  My chest felt tight as I slammed the book shut and stood up. Professor McGuinness was talking to Charlotte beside me. “I am sorry we can’t summon Samuel. As you know, I knew him…”

  “I know,” Charlotte said. She had defended her uncle and Professor McGuinness after some boys started implying they might have been lovers. “It makes sense. Like…if you could just call up dead people…that could be bad.”

  Professor McGuinness nodded, and then he looked at me. “As for you, young man, whatever you spent your weekend doing, you’d better not do it again. Your father would be so disappointed.”

  “Yeah. It won’t happen again,” I said quickly.

  “Lay off him,” Harris said. “Alec’s uptight enough as it is. Pretty rare for him to go on a tech binge. He’ll recover.”

  McGuinness shrugged. “Well, let it remain rare, Mister Lyrman.”

  Right now, I was just glad I had an excuse for looking like shit.

  My mom is dead. I never knew her in the first place, and now I never will, unless…

  This was the last thing I wanted to explain.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Charlotte

  Alec and Harris started walking out with me, Monty trailing behind us as he looked through the book, Alec looking sickly and distracted.

  “Thanks for trying to defend me,” Alec told Harris. He was clearly failing at distancing himself from us, although he didn’t walk too close to Charlotte.

  “Everyone has a moment of weakness now and then,” Harris said. He looked at me. “Still, I’ve seen worse with you, Alec. It’s almost as if…someone perked you up last night.”

  I shot Alec a furtive look. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

  “Harris, drop it,” Alec said. “I can’t touch her.”

  “I’ve heard she’s dating Montague,” Harris said. “But I know what I saw on the boat. I thought you were covering for her relationship with her familiar, but…”

  “Hello, I’m right here,” I said.

  We all stopped walking. Montague and Alec both got closer to Harris, blocking him from me. They looked ready to throw a punch.

  (Not gonna lie. I loved it when they defended my honor.)

  “What do you care, Harris?” Alec asked. “Keep your eyes in your own lane. You’re two and half years out from being Mr. Daisy Pendleton, aren’t you?”

  “We know each other too well to keep pretending. Just tell me—are you all actually…establishing a bond brotherhood?”

  “It isn’t any of your business, actually,” I said.

  “Interesting. No denial. Just a good old-fashioned ‘none of your business’.” He stroked his chin. “You need three boys and a fancy wand to keep you busy, Chosen One?”

  “Stop calling me that. You’re starting to really piss me off.”

  “There is a difference between me and all of you. In the end, I won’t make any stupid decisions that damn me to spending my life in the Haven or a council prison or maybe even dead. I haven’t worked hard just to throw my life away on a girl.”

  He looked at me. I looked at him, clutching my books and glowering at him.

  “Charlotte is hot and even reasonably talented,” he added. “In a dream world, I’d do her. But I wouldn’t share her.”

  I flung out my wand and struck Harris back into the wall of the dining hall.

  It was an extremely sloppy spell, but if Harris broke a bone, my current mood was ‘sorry not sorry’.

  “I’ve had enough,” I said, pointing my wand at Harris’ throat. “You are never going to ‘do’ me and who I want to do is my business. Oh, and the way you keep objectifying me is real charming. I hope Daisy eats you for breakfast.”

  “That isn’t a gun,” Harris said, lowering my wand with his hand. “It wasn’t an insult. I’m impressed you managed to loop my two best friends into whatever this is. You guys can rage at me all you want, but you know your real problem is what the council will say when they inevitably find out. You’re all going to be shunned.”

  Montague punched him. “You really are a grade A dick. Come on, Char.” He put an arm around me.

  “Monty—Alec. Charlotte. I’m—I’m serious. I’m trying to save you from yourselves,” Harris ground out behind us. “No college flirtation is worth the trouble you’ll be in if you keep going down this path.”

  “You just don’t know what feelings are,” Montague said, “if you think this is a mere ‘flirtation’.” He swept me
along.

  Alec followed us more reluctantly.

  Harris wasn’t wrong, and Alec knew it. Montague had less to lose because he was already teetering on the brink of trouble by becoming a vampire. Maybe he didn’t care if he wasn’t saved from disaster.

  I could tell all this just by the looks on their faces.

  I also knew Alec had a blast this weekend. Could I like, actually ruin his life and all his future prospects? Am I underestimating how much trouble I am? Maybe Firian and I really are the bad kids.

  Poor Alec. He looked kinda wrecked.

  “He is really growing tiresome,” Montague said, taking my hand. “Let’s figure out who to summon.”

  We parked ourselves at a table. It was earlier than most of the school had lunch, but everyone from our class was there looking over their books. I glanced at the menu and ordered the house-smoked pastrami sandwich and some chicken and dill pickle soup. Alec got a bowl of pork belly ramen, and of course, Montague had blood and paprika soup. I mean, it was basically just gently warmed blood but it seemed a lot less gross if you threw spices in it. I immediately dribbled soup on my jacket but somehow Montague never got blood on his clothes. Becoming a vampire also seemed to make you perfect.

  “Hmm. Which geriatric ghost do we want to summon?” Montague thumbed through the pages.

  I plucked through the pages without enthusiasm. One lady was born in 1879—and died this past year. “What would I say to ‘Martha Ann Chadwick, hedge witch from Pinville, Nebraska’?”

  “We’re not supposed to summon our own family, but I wonder if we can…summon each other’s family,” Alec said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Samuel already talks to me when I need him. And I don’t know many dead people. I miss my grandpa but I got to say goodbye.”

  Alec’s expression got very stiff. He didn’t seem like himself.

  “Alec? Oh—is there someone you want me to summon?”

  He exhaled sharply and twirled his book around to face me. “Yeah. This lady.”

  “A Sinistral?”

  “Oh, crap. That’s right. It’s forbidden.” He smacked the table and then dropped his head into his fisted hands. “My mom.”

  “Are you serious?” Montague said. “Your mom died and you found out from the memoriam book?”

  “Yeah. My dad probably has no idea, is my guess. They have no contact.”

  “Have you ever talked to your mom?” I asked.

  “Nah.” Alec sat back and crossed his arms. His arms were just so sexy. I wanted to cheer up any man with such sexy arms. “Dad has never really…encouraged it. He told me she wasn’t a great person, and that sleeping with her was the best thing that ever happened to him just because it gave him me, which I can tell means he still thinks it really was a huge mistake. I mean, my dad and I get along great but I can’t have been easy for him to raise.”

  “Would it really be dangerous to summon your mom? I know I don’t have a great track record with mom summoning, but…”

  “There’s nothing special about summoning my mom,” Alec said. “She’s not working for a powerful demon. She was just a normal succubus. It says she died of lung cancer.”

  “Demons can die of lung cancer?” I asked.

  “She was just a low demon,” he said. “Not immortal. Dad said she chain smoked. A lot of succubi and incubi seem to die younger.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a hard and fast way of living. For some.”

  “Well, we don’t need a special reason to summon her,” I said. “She’s your mom and you need closure or something.” I wished I could touch Alec right now. We both knew what it was like, not to have half our family in our lives. “I think it would be good for me to use my magic for something like that. Wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s not just about blasting people who annoy me, is it?”

  That got him to crack a smile. “No, although I do enjoy that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Charlotte

  It was a pretty intense fall semester at Merlin College. If I wasn’t working on learning to store power in my wand I was getting big reading and writing assignments, and in necromancy class, before we got to learn individual summons we were building up our skills with some ghost hunting. We picked up weird sounds, including a singing woman and a man who told us to get off his land. In theurgy class we were working on some really hardcore demon wards, and Professor Adams said at the end of the year he was going to summon a class 4 demon we would have to ward off, “so you’d better listen or one of you might not make it to junior year, all right, boys?”

  I was working hard, and sleeping very soundly.

  Firian was gone more often, although he usually came ‘home’ in the evening to help me study and then keep me warm at night. I wanted to decompress after a long hard day, and I started dreaming of Firian’s hands on me, but usually I was too tired to do much of anything.

  But I knew Alec felt like he’d made a mistake during our Fortune’s Favor weekend. Finding out his mom had died must be hard on him, although he kept working out every morning, studying hard all week, and painting in his free time, same as always. Alec thrived on a schedule. I guess it helped control his raging incubus libido. He still flirted with me, too, but he kept up that wall.

  I started hoping he’d enter my dreams again. I was starting to feel like I was the one with a raging libido, and there was no outlet because we all had insane workloads and when Montague and I had tried to get some privacy he bit me. Maybe if Alec was there, he could protect me from Montague, and maybe Firian could protect us from any magical bats that might show up?

  But how would all that work?

  Damnit, could someone just stick a hand down my pants and relieve some tension already? I thought, as I was opening a birthday card from my grandmother, which I mention only to illustrate that I was in a weird place when I wasn’t too busy talking to ghosts and skimming through huge books trying to write papers about events I still didn’t understand that well.

  It was getting close to the winter ball again when a small caravan of old cars drove through the gates unexpectedly one morning just as we were about to head to class.

  “That’s the council,” Alec said, peering out the attic window. “I think it might be the witch and warlock councils.” His eyes shot to me.

  “Cool cool cool,” I said. “I’m sure that has nothing to do with me getting on the witch shit list or anything. Right?”

  “We’ve got your back, Char,” he said, picking up his bag.

  Everyone was milling around outside instead of going to class. It was obvious that something was up. I hid behind Montague as the witches and warlocks got out of the cars and walked into Arthur Hall to the main offices. I noticed the Locke brothers’ mom was here. “All packed up?” she was asking them.

  “Are they leaving?” Alec asked.

  “Yeah,” a tall, catalog model looking guy from their dorm said. “They’re transferring to a school in the UK.”

  “Good riddance,” I muttered.

  “I wouldn’t be too happy about it,” the guy said. “It’s your fault.”

  “It’s Charlotte’s fault?” Montague said, in a tone both dismissive and threatening.

  “And yours,” the guy said. “Vampire.”

  “Who are you?” Harris asked. “I have no idea who you are.” When Harris said this, it came off as socially damning.

  “Lucas Adam.”

  Harris made the smallest lip curl at the name. “Oh. Sorry. That means nothing to me.”

  “The Lockes were attacked last year by these two,” Lucas said. “They don’t feel safe here anymore. Master Blair is protecting her and she shouldn’t be here at all.”

  “They don’t feel ‘safe’?” Montague scoffed. “Aww.”

  “You drank their blood,” Lucas said.

  “I saved them from the demons, and those were not Charlotte’s fault,” Montague said, although he looked a little uncomfortable. The Lockes weren’t supposed to reme
mber the part where he drank their blood.

  “Well, we’ll see how it all shakes out,” Lucas said. “I heard a few incoming freshmen pulled out this year too. If Merlin College loses many more people just because of Charlotte, they might change the rules.”

  “What cowards,” Montague said. “They’re too scared to bully Charlotte anymore so they go running off to England while trying to get her kicked out in the process.”

  “I am glad they stopped bullying me though,” I said.

  “Did you drink their blood?” Harris asked. “I thought you had all that under control.”

  “No. I do have it under control.”

  “Is that why you haven’t spent much time with Charlotte?”

  “We’ve been too busy.”

  “Did you drink her blood, Monty?” Alec asked in a very calm voice. “I thought we had a plan to protect her from you.”

  “Hey, guys, guys—please. It’s fine. Montague didn’t hurt me. I can protect myself.”

  “If you must know,” Montague said. “I can’t always completely control myself. It’s true. But Charlotte is definitely more than capable of handling her own business, and even if she wasn’t, I just… I wouldn’t kill her. I’m sure of that.”

  “Oh, good lord,” Harris said. “You can’t be sure of that. You’re a vampire. And you did bite the Lockes, didn’t you? Whatever clumsy vampire spell you attempted probably wore off.”

  The doors to the main hall opened and Madame Solano herself called out, in this strict-old-lady voice that carried better than you would expect, “Charlotte Byrne. Montague Xarra. Please come forward.”

  Uh-oh.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Charlotte

  Montague gripped my hand and said, “We face this with dignity, whatever it is.”