Governor Anderson finding out about even the zombies could shut down the school. Zoe wasn’t sure how Wayne convinced the man to send his only son to Brakket and she didn’t want to jeopardize that.
Zoe took a quick look in the mirror in her office. She straightened out her hair and smoothed down her suit. It was the same suit as yesterday. Student’s at Brakket alternated classes, so she wouldn’t see many people from the day before. Even if she did, she doubted they would notice. Zoe had a lot of suits, after all. With a flick of her dagger, a bit of air magic freshened her up.
Confident in her appearance, Zoe turned to the door separating her from her classroom. She paused, watching through the one-way wall. One of her students, a Mr. Bradley, just set a sickly green sphere at the base of her lectern. He pulled out his wand and cast a spell on it. It shimmered and blended into the background.
The ball was easily recognizable as a joke item from Sorcerous Shenanigans by the double S logo on its side. She couldn’t be sure what this specific one did, but she didn’t intend to find out.
What interested her more was the spell. It wasn’t an invisibility enchantment, but chameleon was the next best thing and still a third year spell at best. Impressive, but always a shame when students put efforts into jokes rather than schoolwork. Still, more than one of her students had gone on to be very successful despite terrible school performance.
She waited until Mr. Bradley had returned to his seat before opening the door. With barely a motion of her dagger, she dropped the camouflaged ball between. In the same stride, Zoe twitched her wrist to cause it to reappear just under Mr. Bradley’s desk.
Zoe reached her lectern and glanced slowly over the entire class. She doubted a single one of them had noticed; most weren’t even looking at the lectern when the sphere was placed. Mr. Bradley, at the very least, had an eager grin on his face.
She met his grin with her usual mirthless face. One thing she learned and mastered as she got older was never to let on when you held all the cards.
Today’s class was bound to be a fun one.
— — —
“I’m just saying that Jason got what he deserved,” Max said. The three seats across the table were ruthlessly splattered with some kind of brown beef mush. Everyone quickly learned to leave them empty. The only danger came when he looked around.
Shalise frowned at the gross display of wasted food. Not to mention the gross display itself. She half thought that Max took twice as much food as everyone else solely because it ended up on the seats and table. Such a waste.
Restaurants threw away food by the truck load. Tons of good food tossed at the end of every day. They’d lock the dumpsters to keep vagrants out of it. Even Brakket Academy had to throw away tons of leftovers so she knew it was a petty thing to focus on. There was just something different when it happened right in front of her.
She sighed, tuning the conversation out.
Learning magic was supposed to be fun. Classes were fun. Hanging out with friends was fun. It was the bits that came after that put a damper on things.
All this necromancer and zombie business Juliana and Eva spent half their time talking about scared Shalise. Whatever little adventure they went on two weeks ago only made things worse. They came back talking about skeletons and a grimoire that needed to be destroyed.
Skeletons, Shalise could understand. She hadn’t bothered to ask what a grimoire was; the answer was probably worse than her imagination.
She imagined quite terrible things. From spells worse than raising zombies or skeletons to horrible creatures seemingly made of nothing but tentacles and mouthes. Shalise had no idea where that last thought came from, but it occupied her nightmares since hearing the word, grimoire.
Her nightmares were nothing compared to Juliana’s. Shalise was sure that her roommate hadn’t slept for three days straight. She tossed and turned all night until it was finally time to head to school. Until the third day, that is; they got home from school and Juliana flopped onto her bed. She didn’t move until Shalise woke her up the next morning.
Since then, Juliana had very restless sleep, but she slept.
Eva, on the other hand, slept like a baby. She worried about something, Shalise could tell, but it wasn’t whatever kept Juliana up at night. Eva wrapped up in her spider’s arms–or legs, rather–and slept until her alarm went off.
A poke in her side made Shalise half scream. She glared over at the culprit.
“You were off daydreaming,” a smiling Jordan said. “You better be careful. Shadow creatures lurk daydreams and eat intruders.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Irene said as she elbowed the smile off Jordan’s face. “Everyone knows shadow creatures lurk in the shadows, duh. Fae are the ones who invade daydreams.”
“I suppose you’d know more than I do,” Jordan said a bit sarcastically in Shalise’s opinion, if in good humor.
