Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
When I accepted the job and was brought here to the institute, a whole world that was previously buried inside me was unearthed like a grave, a monster of potential crawling out. I went through their aptitude tests, tests I’ll admit I don’t remember much of, aside from sitting in a cathedral and drinking wine while the four cloaked Sisters of the institute chanted spell after spell after spell. I don’t know what they did to me, but I remember the feeling of opening up, like they were cutting me open and taking a look inside me. It went beyond the telepathy and mind reading that Leona Van Tassel had done in Manhattan. They were sifting through me for parts I didn’t even know existed.
But after that initiation, things began to change. I became more aware of the magic I already had, especially with bestowal. I started spending time in the school’s library, another expansive cathedral filled with books on the occult and peppered with arcane artifacts, nothing like my father’s church back in Kansas. I read, I learned, I filled the well. I started to feel like, perhaps for once in my thirty years, I had found a place that truly accepted me for what I was. Well, most of me, anyway.
And now, here, in my first class of the school year, I find myself presented with a young pretty girl that seems able to resist my gift of curiosity. This shouldn’t be a surprise—after all, there’s always some pupil in my classes that doesn’t take to my methods as well as I want them to. But because this girl is a Van Tassel, related in some way to Leona and Ana, it surprises me. It’s as if she doesn’t want to be here at all. I didn’t even see her on my class attendance list, like she was some last-minute addition.
Perhaps she was. But she’s here now, and I’m determined to reach through to her. I’m nothing if not stubborn when it comes to teaching.
So I asked for her to be a volunteer in my demonstration. The animosity on her face was worth it. Her blue eyes went wide before turning to an icy glare that made my pulse skip a beat, a snarl on her soft pink lips.
She refused at first but then succumbed. From the wary way she’s been looking at her classmates, I can tell she doesn’t want them to think she’s getting any special treatment by being a Van Tassel, and I suppose that’s why I’m singling her out like this as well.
She gathered up her dress in her one hand, and I held out my hand for her and braced myself for what was about to happen. There are ethical issues, I suppose, to doing this, but I’ve never been one to stake my life on ethics when it comes to magic.
The moment her hand touches mine, a cacophony of feelings floods through me. They don’t come in images as they usually do when I try to read someone, but instead, I’m quickly overwhelmed with grief. Grief and love and…loss. So much loss that I’m not even sure this girl knows it’s deep inside her, rooted there like a tree.
And there are other feelings here too, like yearning, longing, the need to fit in and belong, the urge to be elsewhere, to find a life worth living. A need to escape.
Then there’s something else. Something that surprises me that comes in hot and dark. Lust. Desire. Arousal. But it’s not that she has these feelings in general that catches me off guard—I know witches tend to be very in tune with their sexuality—but that the way she feels them is the same way I once felt them. Almost as if I’m looking into a version of myself from the past. Almost as if…
I can’t quite grasp it, and the longer I hold her hand, the faster her feelings drain from me, like they’re being poured through a sieve. It’s through this transaction, her memories and feelings flowing into me, that I can usually bestow things unto her. We give so we receive. We receive so that we must give.
But I can’t bestow anything onto her. There’s a blockage here, and it’s only then that I finally notice she’s been staring at me with her big azure eyes, the color San Francisco Bay would get on a cloudless day, a look of defiance in them.
She rips her hand out of mine and holds my gaze steadily, her eyes narrowing, and I know she knows what I was trying to do. I can’t help but feel bad about it, like I’ve violated her somehow.
I’m sorry, I whisper to her, using what I call voice to say it so that no one else can hear it. Another thing I picked up while perusing the library for spells.