BY THE TIME I had emerged from my new home at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages the next morning, mist was draped across the school grounds like a headache clinging to the temples of a mildly concussed and half-hungover private investigator.
I swallowed an extra-strength Tylenol with a last swill of cold coffee left over from the night before. I cursed last-night-Ivy for her woeful judgment regarding gin—but the curse didn’t have much firepower behind it. I couldn’t blame past-Ivy, even if I wished she would have at least added water into the beverage rotation. The photos in the folder had merited a late-night trip to a neon-windowed liquor store in the nearest town.
I didn’t spend much time looking at dead bodies. It was usually petty, shameful shit that I saw. This case was a whole new level for me. The headache was probably worth the lack of the complete nervous breakdown that should have come with looking through that folder. Looking at those photos.
They were high-quality matte prints, littered with scale rulers and yellow crime-scene markers and obscure annotations. In each of them, Sylvia Capley lay on the dull gray carpet of the Theoretical Magic section of the library. She looked like an optical illusion, like a crappy trick at a third-rate magician’s afternoon show at an off-Strip casino in Vegas.
She’d been bisected, split down the middle; a clean line from the top of her head, through her nose, down the cupid’s bow of her top lip, between her collarbones, all the way to her bellybutton and beyond. She’d fallen open like a split log; the two halves of her faced away from each other, staring at opposite bookshelves.
Subsequent photos of the carpet showed only bloodstains. I’d started leaving the tonic out of my gin upon realizing that, sometime between the photos of the corpse and the photos of the carpet, some poor bastard had to figure out a way to scoop Sylvia off the floor without leaving anything behind. I had wondered if there was a spell for that—to keep everything inside her, given her state—or if maybe they’d slid a sheet of cardboard under her. And then I had put the folder away and taken my drink to bed with me. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I’d fallen asleep before I could finish the last few fingers of gin, which was probably the thing that saved me from a debilitating hangover. I’d dreamed of Tabitha and a hall of mirrors that night; when I woke up, I felt mushy, staticky. Somehow pushed off to the left of center.
A spell gone wrong.
That’s what the file said. I wanted to believe it—I wanted a reason to think that maybe this kind of thing just happened to people who got magic handed to them at birth, or whenever these things get handed out. It would have felt a little like justice. I’m not proud of thinking that, given that I was standing on a campus full of children who had two fistfuls of magic already and were reaching for more.
But then, this isn’t a story about things I’m proud of.
The folder Torres had given me didn’t just contain photos of horror beyond my wildest imagining. There was also a copy of a report with the logo of the National Mage Investigative Service stamped across the top: a spray of leaves, probably alder or something with a similar symbolic weight, over a barbed crescent moon that cupped a spread-fingered hand. I’d stared at the logo for a long time, studying the seven stars that were nested in the palm of the hand and wondering about the significance. Wondering if this was the kind of thing you know when you spend your school years in a place like Osthorne.
When I finally read the report, I found it even less satisfying than the emblem had been. It reported Sylvia’s cause of death as “a miscast version of a theoretical spell intended to facilitate instantaneous physical translation.”
I spent too long in a too-hot shower that morning, trying to cut through the fog in my brain and figure out what that meant; in the end, I decided that it probably meant she tried to teleport and failed. Or maybe it meant she was trying to transform herself and wound up split in half. I wasn’t sure it really mattered either way. Sylvia Capley, it seemed, had tried to do something impossible because she thought that the rules of existence didn’t apply to her. And she paid the price. It was, as the report wanted me to believe, that simple.
I took the long way from staff housing to the school grounds, trying to get a little fresh air to circulate where the last of the gin fumes might be lingering. I told myself that it was also to give me a chance to scope out the grounds—to see if there was anyone skulking around where they shouldn’t be, scrawling “I am the murderer” on a wall somewhere. I scratched absently at the tape that held fresh gauze on my still-stinging shoulder. It itched like hell, and the only thing keeping me from reopening the wound was the bandage covering it. The air was crisp and cloud-smelling, but rather than clearing my head, the breeze grated against my headache like sand between my teeth. I kept taking deep breaths, telling myself that this was fine. It was all fine.
As I cut across the grass in a wide arc, a tone like a crystal glass being struck rang out through the morning, the sound bright in the thick silence. The immediate explosion of chaos and sound was only barely muffled by the walls of the school as students decamped from the first class of the day. Given the headache that lingered at the base of my skull, I was glad to be a safe distance from the banging of lockers, the squeak of shoes on linoleum, the blinding flashes of bright adolescence.
By the time I made it inside, a second clear tone had sounded, and most of the students were once again safely stowed in classrooms. I walked through the halls toward Torres’s office, feeling truant. Waiting for someone to ask me where I was supposed to be. I thought I remembered how to get to the front office, but my head was throbbing. I took a wrong turn.Then I got flustered and took several more wrong turns, tangling myself up in my own leash. I finally rounded a corner and things looked familiar again, and I thought maybe I was on the right track, but no. I wasn’t at the front office; I’d found myself at the same bank of lockers I’d lingered over yesterday.
And I wasn’t alone.
The boy I’d seen in Torres’s office stood where I’d been the day before, his fingers tracing the m in “Samantha” from an inch above the metal, just far enough to avoid the shock. His hair was still unkempt in that hours-in-front-of-a-mirror way. He was rangy, but not hunched—there was something in his posture that suggested purpose. He had that too-many-bones look that teenage boys get, but I could almost see the shadow of the man he would become in six or seven years. He looked perched on the cusp of something. Or maybe he was at the edge of something, looking down.
Here we go, I thought. Time to get to work.
“Do you know who did it?” I asked. The kid—Dylan, I suddenly remembered, that’s right, Dylan the troubled—jumped about a mile at the sound of my voice. He looked around to see if a teacher was going to make him go to class, if someone was going to yell at him.
“No,” he answered. His face had gone still. The lie was as obvious as if it were a tarantula perched astride his wide, thin-lipped mouth. It struck me that he might not be sure if I was talking about the graffiti or the murder. I let his lie—and his uncertainty—linger for a moment before brushing it to the floor to scurry back into the shadows for another time.
“Okay.” I clocked the twitch of surprise between his eyebrows; he couldn’t tell if he was getting away with the lie or not. Good. Let him wonder. When someone thinks they’re getting away with something, they’re easier to manipulate. They stop looking closely at the things that might make it feel like their lie is unraveling, and they reveal things they didn’t mean to. “It’s supposed to be some really advanced stuff, isn’t it? This spell.” I gestured to the graffiti, watching his face closely, but he didn’t look proud so much as irritated.
He nodded, twisted his mouth up. “Yeah. I mean, I haven’t even been able to figure it out, and I’m supposed to be—” He stopped himself, looked down at his shoes. “I’m supposed to be smart.”
“Remind me of your name?”
“Dylan DeCambray.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, glowering. I beamed at him, bright enough that he surely knew I wasn’t missing his glare so much as willfully ignoring it.
“Great, Dylan, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Ivy Gamble, PI.” His face rearranged itself when I dropped those two letters after my name: I’d piqued his interest. I handed him a card. “I’d love to talk to you sometime—smart kid like you, I could use your help.” A spark of pride—that was good. It meant he was at least a little bit gullible. “Meantime, though, can you show me the way to the main office? I promise not to rat you out for skipping class.” He nodded and fell into step beside me. “So. Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you smart?”
He seemed to chew on this for a minute. “I have to be.”
“Says who?”
He gave me the kind of shrug that probably made his mother’s ears shoot steam. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh, I see. Too hard to explain.” I said it mildly, trying not to be too obvious about pushing the big flashing red insecurity button. It was like stealing candy from a big bowl of free candy surrounded by helpful multilingual signposts.
“It’s in a Prophecy,” he huffed, leading me through a set of double doors. He said “Prophecy” with a capital P. “My family Prophecy. It’s a huge deal. It’s been passed down for like, centuries. It got smuggled out of Dalmatia, okay? It got saved from the Prophecy purges in the sixties, too, back when people decided that prognostication was a False Magic. So you know it’s one of the really important Prophecies.” He took a deep breath. “My generation is supposed to have a Chosen One.”
Jesus, this kid speaks in a lot of Proper Nouns. “And that’s you?”
“Well, nobody else is right for it. My half sister Alexandria and I are the only ones who were born at the right time, and all she cares about is eyeliner and who’s friends with who and popularity.” This was a sore point too, then—or maybe he was just broody by default. “So it’s not like she could be the most powerful mage of our time.”
“And what’s the Chosen One supposed to do?” I asked.
Dylan pulled up short; we’d reached the main office, and he’d stopped just out of sight of the windows that looked in on Mrs. Webb. When I glanced back at him, his eyes were intense; sixteen-year-old me would probably have described them to her diary as “burning.”
“I’m supposed to change the world,” he said.
The door to the office opened behind me. I startled as a student walked out—a girl, holding a pink hall pass and a small white pharmacy bag. I turned back to ask Dylan how he was supposed to change the world, but he was already gone.
I bit back the old, familiar anger. Get it together, Ivy, I reminded myself. These people love to disappear.
I sat in Torres’s office and we reviewed the facts in the file: Sylvia Capley, thirty-five years old, health and wellness teacher. Split down the middle by … what?
When I mentioned the spell-gone-wrong theory, Torres closed her eyes, fighting some internal battle I couldn’t identify. She took a slow anger-management breath.
“I’m not qualified to comment on it. As the ’miz reminded me several times.”
“The—sorry, the ’miz?”
“Oh, yes—the National Mage Investigative Service. Nobody wants to say ‘NMIS,’ so it usually gets shortened to ‘MIS,’ or—”
I nodded. “Right, got it. So, what’s your unofficial opinion, then?”
She picked up a letter opener, twisted the point of it against the pad of one thumb. It wasn’t sharp enough to draw blood, but I watched the place where her skin dented with a wary eye. My shoulder prickled.
“My very unofficial opinion, which I am not even giving, which we are not discussing, which you are not writing down or recording: Sylvia didn’t screw around with theoretical magic. She was too smart and too … wary.”
“Wary?”
Torres leaned back in her chair, still pressing the top of the letter opener against her thumb. “Sylvia was a cautious person. And reliable—until the week of her death, she hadn’t taken so much as a sick day.”
“What happened the week of her death?”
Torres shrugged. “She took a sick day. Three, actually. Right before she died. Normally I would have been angry at a staff member taking days off during the first week of school, but there was a rash of food poisoning that week—five teachers and a student got sick. And besides, even if Sylvia had been the only one out, I wouldn’t have held it against her. Like I said, she was easily my most reliable staff member. She wasn’t the type to play with fire. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“‘Fire’ meaning theoretical magic.”
“Right.” She pursed her lips. “You’ve never taken a TM class, so you may not understand—but it’s a very dangerous field even at the entry levels. It’s a lot like sticking your hand into a black box that may or may not have cobras in it.”
I blinked. “That’s the most coherent explanation of magic I’ve ever heard.”
“Ah, yes, well.” The corners of her lips pinched in an ironic almost-smile. “I imagine the only person who’s ever explained magic to you is Tabitha? And she’s … well. She lives in the black box.”
“That’s apt. I’ll have to ask if she’s a cobra or not.” I couldn’t help watching Torres’s face for a sign of something, anything, that might allow me to avoid stepping into the black box alongside my maybe-snake sister. Anything to keep from having to go in there alongside her. But Torres just laughed.
“I’ll learn what I can from Tabitha,” I continued, “although I don’t know how germane theoretical magic is to my investigation—I really just need to rule it out. I’m honestly more interested in the people.” Torres was kind enough not to comment on the obvious lie. Of course I needed to learn about theoretical magic for this investigation. But I wasn’t ready to face talking to Tabitha. Not yet. I flipped through the folder, past the photographs, and landed on a list of names I’d compiled while reading the NMIS report. “I’ll want to interview the people who were spoken with last time, if you don’t mind. Is that okay with you? It looks like there’s a lot of staff on this list.”
Torres flinched. “Of course. Officially speaking, there was nothing suspicious about Sylvia’s death, and Osthorne is and shall remain a safe haven for students and staff alike.” Her words had the practiced rhythm of a letter sent to worried, angry, tuition-paying parents. “But unofficially … do whatever you need to do. Talk to whomever you need to. Solve this case.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, then looked at her narrowing eyes and revised. “I’ll solve the case. I will.” I shouldn’t have made a promise—that’s a rookie mistake if ever there was one—but I couldn’t help it. Marion Torres needed to hear a promise.
She nodded, then put on a pair of reading glasses and began tackling a pile of papers that was waiting on her desk blotter. I knew a dismissal when I saw one. I stood, let my hand rest on the doorknob. Then I turned back as though I were just remembering something—something small, unimportant, oh-by-the-way.
“I almost forgot to ask—where’s Sylvia’s medical record?” I asked. Torres looked over the top of her glasses at me.
“It’s in the file, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s funny—the coroner’s report is in there, and it refers to ‘attached medical records.’” I pulled out the report and read her a short section. “‘No anomalies found excepting sagittal bisection. Anomalies noted in medical records, Appendix B, not found.’” I held up the report for her to see—two pages, no appendices. “So, where’s Appendix B?”
“I gave you everything I had,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t send it over?”
I thumbed the staple on the report. There was a tiny shred of paper stuck to the backside of the staple—the top corner of a sheet of paper. “Maybe,” I said, watching Torres closely. “Can you give the ’miz a call and see if we can get a copy?”
She nodded absently as she looked back down at her paperwork. I watched her for a few more seconds, then accepted the dismissal. I closed the door behind me as softly as I could, and went in search of a box with a cobra in it.
Tabitha stood at the front of her classroom. Her stance was commanding; behind her on a whiteboard, a series of diagrams showed—well, I have no idea what they showed. Arcs and angles and a few symbols that I thought I recognized from the five or six calculus classes I’d actually showed up for, back when I was doing my best to flunk out of high school. I stood in the doorway, watching my sister speak about a theorem I’d never heard of, and tried to recognize the girl I remembered in the woman she’d become.
She looked exactly the same as I remembered, but I still wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d passed her on the street. So much was different—the line of her back, the timbre of her voice. She commanded attention, respect, authority. You’d never believe that she’d cried for hours over a squashed frog in our parents’ backyard. I couldn’t connect the woman I was seeing with the girl I’d been so angry at for so long. The double vision that had been plaguing me since my arrival at Osthorne returned—I could see the Tabitha that was, and a Tabitha that might have been. Someone I could get drinks with after work. Someone I could make eye contact with at holidays. Someone I could trust.
But that wasn’t this Tabitha. Not by a long shot.
My head throbbed. A sound like a whipcrack filled the room, and electricity arced between her palms. All of the students in the classroom jumped—it took me a moment to be sure my heart hadn’t stopped. Tabitha spread her hands wider—the electricity fizzed between them, too bright to watch. I couldn’t see her face, but I was willing to bet that the sparks were lighting her from below, ghost-story shadows making her eyes look hollow.
Then she closed her fists, and the light was gone.
“Alright, everyone. You’ve got the concept—now, pair up and try it for yourselves. Take notes! I’ll expect your lab report on Monday!” Her voice rose as students started to rustle and fidget, eager to pair off with their preferred partners before they wound up stuck with that other kid. “One person at a time—you try, and your partner will have a Suresh Stick to disrupt the arc as needed. Then switch. I want to see everyone take a turn.” She clapped her hands, and the kids flitted to each other.
The room brimmed with the scraping of chairs and murmuring of Do you want to be my partner? and Okay um who goes first? Tabitha turned to walk back to her desk; when she spotted me standing in the doorway, she smiled. It was a broad smile, one that would greet a stranger; I could see the exact instant when her mind processed me. Ivy Gamble, her sister. Standing here, in this context, where I had no business at all.
“Ivy? Oh my gosh, what on earth are you doing here?”
I returned her fixed smile. Surely Torres would have told her that I was going to be here. Surely. “I’m on a case. I’m supposed to come talk to you about”—I waved my hand around her classroom, gesturing toward the kids who were sending anemic sparks flying between their palms—“this, I guess. Theoretical magic.”
Tabitha cocked her head to one side. Her eyes were even brighter than I remembered, like shards of glass under a streetlight. “What are you—? You know what, this isn’t a great time.” She blinked at me hard—she couldn’t reconcile seeing me here, now, in this place where I didn’t belong. “Maybe we should get drinks after work? This isn’t a great time. I know a nice cocktail bar downtown. It’s hipstery, but usually pretty mellow. We’ll be able to hear each other.”
“Wh— Drinks?” My head throbbed again, reminding me that drinks were a bad idea I’d had the night before. I also didn’t relish the idea of getting into a situation where I had to linger with Tabitha long enough to settle a bill. But I knew that if I didn’t rule out her involvement that night, I’d just have to do it some other time. I didn’t have a choice, not really. “Okay, drinks,” I said, edging toward the door. “Come find me after the last period of the day?”
“Sure,” she said, watching me. “Sure, that’s fine. I normally wouldn’t go out, but tomorrow’s Saturday, so…” She trailed off. Tabitha had never liked saying things that she thought were obvious. “You’ll be here all day, then?”
“Yeah, I’m going to be doing some interviews. Well. Not really interviews, just meeting some people.” I was holding the doorframe like it could keep me steady. “And I’m going to be here all day … every day, I guess. I’m kind of staying on campus, in the empty apartment?”
She cocked her head. “Empty apartment?”
“Yeah, in staff housing? Torres is putting me in it so I can be here doing the investigation.” There I went, overexplaining. Tabitha would have just said yes and left me to wonder whatever she didn’t happen to disclose.
“An empty—oh. Oh,” she said, some understanding dawning across her face. “Okay.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it’s kind of spooky, right? But I don’t get haunted vibes or anything.” I tried a smile, but she didn’t return it.
“Drinks tonight,” she said, closing off so suddenly that I wondered if I’d imagined that weighty oh. “I’ll text you the address of the place, you’ll meet me there. Yeah?”
I was about to suggest that we just open a bottle of wine at my place or hers—that we catch up, linger. I was caught in that double vision. It felt like there was a second Tabitha there, a possible-Tabitha, and if I just reached for her, I could slip into the world where that sister lived. The world where we were friends. The world where I wasn’t alone.
But then there was a smell like burning hair and one of the girls in the classroom shrieked. Tabitha whipped around just as the girl’s partner whacked her hands with a rubber rod, disrupting the stream of electricity. My sister turned her back to me as though I had never been there at all. The emergency was over, but she was gone—talking to the class about safety measures and how to properly protect each other. Midway through a sentence I didn’t understand, she looked over her shoulder. Her eyes glanced off me like I was furniture, and I realized that to her, I wasn’t there anymore. Plans for the evening had been made. I’d been contained.
I eased out of the room as quietly as I’d left Torres’s office, and when I shut the door, there weren’t two Tabithas on the other side. There was only the real Tabitha, my real sister. And she was a stranger.