Page 17 of Phoenix Academy: Madness

Monday and Friday

2:00 PM: Introduction to Hand-to-Hand Combat with Laura McKinley (two hours)

It's a full schedule, all laid out and ready to go. The pace is stunning; I haven't even laid my family to rest, and already I'm being told what to do. Resentment bubbles up inside me at the audacity of it all.

Then I scan the list of teachers a second time, and the resentment turns to rage.

Gregory Auerbach.I recognize that surname. It's a very familiar one to witches like me, especially those of us in the west coast region. Though I've never had dealing with an Auerbach mage myself, their name is legendary.

Theirs was the family that drove us out of prospecting, harried us far from the west coast, and sent us underground. They're not just mages—they're witch hunters, tasked with finding us and doing something to us that's even worse than death: cutting off our connection to the natural world around us so we can no longer cast magic that reaches into the spirit realm.

Modern mages claim such ceremonies are never done anymore, and haven't been performed for decades. But that's only because they don't need to. The old mage families of Europe have not only set themselves above the rest of us and secured their legacies and fortunes there, but also driven natural magic users like the witches I descended from so far underground that we might as well not exist. Hunting us is no longer necessary.

The idea of having an Auerbach as a teacher is shudder-inducing. There's no way that schedule can be right, though. Either he's not one ofthoseAuerbachs, or a mistake has been made. Headmaster Towers is apparently a phoenix herself, specifically a Red Phoenix descended from a line of fire mages. Either she's so far removed from her mage roots that no one bothered to teach her about the bad blood between our people, or she's fucking with me for some reason.

She told me that I'd be safe here. This was supposed to be a place to settle in and lick my wounds. A base of operations to plan my revenge against the Heretic, then after that... well, after that, maybe I'll go to the woods, make a house out of gingerbread, and scare little kids like witches of old used to do.

It's hard to imagine my life without Mom and Lizzy in it. All I can picture is the satisfaction of violent revenge.

And it doesn't involve a judgmental, bigoted, hateful mage teaching me how to usemymagic.

I find myself staring at the class schedule so hard that it almost starts to light on fire. There's a little blue tinge to my vision. My fingers are hot.

The paper isn'talmoston fire, I realize with a jolt. Flames are licking around my fingers. Yelping, I drop the schedule on the floor. There's a hole in the middle with black scorch marks all around it.

And blue is leaking out of me into the room all around me. Like glitter, it gets everywhere, settling into the carpet and coating the air. I feel like a Drag Race winner was just in my room.

Except unlike little flakes of glitter, this is magic. I've seen it kill already. And I don't know how to control it.

The magic grows the more I panic, until I find myself staring in the bathroom mirror at my reflection: two glowing bright blue eyes, unnatural blue hair, and a dusting of magic like a halo all around me.

Reaching out with my naturalistic senses, I can feel the lives all around me. Now that I know what a shifter feels like, it's clear the animal spirits I'm sensing are just that. And bit by bit, predator by predator, the madness is infecting them. Its blue contagion settles into them, turns their spirits into vibrating blue anger, and sets them off.

I can hear a roar as the lion shifter in the dorm to my left changes into her animal form and throws herself claw-first at the door.

"Shit shit shit." I reallydon'thave any idea what I'm doing; that's becoming clear. "How do I make it go away?"

I stare down at my palms, which are tinged with blue. It feels like the madness is a part of me, desperate to leave my body and infect others. The more upset I get, the worse it becomes.

I panic. It grows. The madness spreads. So I panic more.

It's like the world's stupidest snake eating its own tail. Or an idiot chowing down on an imaginary dick. If the mages could see me now, they'd smirk like the jackasses they are.

I'm out of control, and someone else is going to pay the price if I don't figure out how to stop my magic from taking over completely. I try to breathe deep, getting in touch with my inner hippie witch, and it helps a little.

But the madness I've put out into the world seems to have permeated every inch of the air around me. It won't sink back into my skin no matter how I try to draw it back in. Unlike the flames, or my naturalistic instincts, the madness is out of my control. It's like a part of my subconscious, some kind of flight or fight instinct. I feel as helpless to it as the shifting gazelle in the room next door must feel.

Then, something happens. Among the countless shifters all around me in the dorm, three familiar spirits arrive. They're in their animal form already, like three beacons of light in the darkness. Bursting in through the doors at the end of the hallway, they approach my room.

I grab the doorknob in my hand, palm slick with sweat. Something thrums beneath my skin. My pulse surges impossibly fast. I see them with my eyes, their gazes glowing blue like mine: two black panthers and a feral wolf.

As I approach them, the blue magic in the air all around me siphons through my feet and hands and into them. They become full with it, their spirits turning a bright, unnatural blue. One of the panthers—Xavier, I can tell now that I've spoken with them each—approaches.

At first my lizard brain panic instincts go off, insisting that he's about to attack me and I should grab a rifle to shoot him with. But there is no rifle in my dorm room at Phoenix Academy. More than that, now that I've met him face to face and spoken with him, I have zero interest in hurting Xavier.

But he doesn't attack. Nothing close to it. A sound starts low in his throat and chest, a rumble not quite like a growl. He'spurring.And, with a stretch of his neck, he bumps his head against my hand, silky black fur impossibly soft beneath the touch of my fingers.

I breathe. Let my fingers sink into Xavier's fur.

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