Page 2 of Witchlore
“It’s fine,” I say.
“How is all this?” she asks, looking me up and down as if deliberately seeking out my broader chest even though she didn’t even know me in my old form. She frowns. “I thought the counselor suggested you… adjust your clothing to something more masculine? To help you get used to the new form?”
“It’s not new, it’s been four months, and what’s feminine about a T-shirt and jeans?”
I look down. Being a shapeshifter, I’m drawn to the same clothes over and over, as a way to reassure the witches around me that I’m the same person under all this different skin.
“Nothing, but…” Beryl gestures toward my ears. I reach up and touch the hoops. They’re white gold. They were Elizabeth’s and I am never, ever going to take them off.
“Boys can wear earrings and besides, I’m not a boy,” I say, picking up my backpack from the floor of the bathroom. When I told Beryl I was nonbinary she thought I was talking about computers. “I’m going to be late.”
“Have a good first day back at college, Lando,” she says. My stomach lurches. I think a good day might be too much to ask for. I’ll settle for a not-terrible one.
I brush past her and head to the front door, past the conservatory where a witch from a local coven is leading a light-and-healing celebration. Eight witches, all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, sitting blissfully in the golden September morning light, their rings glowing with inner peace. Beryl thinks it’s best I do any morning meditation on my own. She says it’s because group stuff won’t suit my rehabilitation plan, but I’m not the only one in here after a suicide attempt. I am the only shapeshifter, though. They’re nice enough, the other witches recovering from eating disorders or drug addiction or depressive episodes, they’re fine to share a kitchen and bathroom with and no one’s particularly rude, but I imagine the idea of having a shapeshifter in their morning ceremonies makes the witches twitchy. Especially when the shifter in question accidentally killed a witch over the summer.
When I arrived, there was one witch who wouldn’t stay in a house with a shapeshifter. I said to Beryl that it was a pretty bigoted response, but she just sighed and said sternly, “We don’t judge here, we try to deal in facts rather than feelings. The facts are that a shapeshifter with no magical control is not less threatening. It makes you unpredictable and, since you are twenty times more powerful than everyone living here, that unpredictability is dangerous.”
I got the message, loud and clear:We do judge here, just the same as everywhere else.
I press my key fob against the electronic door, trying to ignore the sensation that I am checking myself out of a prison. Beryl’s halfway house is in an old red-brick Victorian building in Chorlton, which unfortunately has the look of a haunted hospital, from the twisted wrought iron gate to the tiny slit windows on the fifth floor. When I first arrived a few months ago, I imagined someone was going to lock me in an attic in a straitjacket and feed me gruel. In reality, it’s a leaky old municipal building that’s been shoddily converted into a facility for young people. The double glazing is terrible, the bathrooms have no windows, and when someone cooks onions the smell gets into every nook and cranny.
I walk the ten minutes down the road to Chorlton tram station and put my headphones on, just like all the other students waiting for the next tram. No one looks twice at me. It’s only when I’m at college that witches know to stare.Freak. Abnormal. Shifter.
I let myself settle into the fantasy of another life, just for a moment. Right now, I could be on my way to the Manchester University library, ready to meet some mates for a study session and get coffee together. If only.
I see a witch farther down the tram platform. She’s a bit older than me, dressed for a corporate city job. She’s trying to balance a coffee cup on one of those tilted seats they put on the platform, more a bum rest than an actual bench. In frustration, she spreads her fingers wide and twists them into a spell, her jade ring glowing softly green. The cup sticks to the surface. Around her, several people give her a suspicious glare, stepping away slightly. She isholding the spell with her ring hand, her fingers trembling from the exertion while she fumbles in her bag for something.Not going to be fast enough,I think and, sure enough, the spell fades, the cup falls, and the people either side of her jump back in annoyance as coffee splatters over them.
“Fucking witches,” a man in a suit mutters, trying to brush coffee flecks off his white shirt.
“Maybe invest in a thermos, love,” an older woman says, handing the blushing witch a pack of tissues.
“If I was a witch, I’d change my nails every two seconds,” a schoolgirl standing next to me says. She’s in the middle of sharing a morning Egg McMuffin with her friend, both of them leaning indolently against the wall in their blazers.
“Get a manicure, it lasts longer.” Her friend shoots the witch a stunningly disparaging look for her age. “Nothing they do lasts. If it doesn’t last, what’s the point?”
I watch the embarrassed witch, her ring still haunted by a residual glow as she throws the remnant of her coffee in the bin. She looks up, clearly feeling me watching, and for a second she frowns and my stomach lurches. I duck my head and cough, looking away, wondering if I’m imagining suspicion in her eyes. You never know what a witch will do with someone they suspect could be a shapeshifter. I remember when my father taught me about magic and witches when I was about five years old.
“Witches are like musicians,” he says. “Their rings are their instruments, magic is their music.”
“So their rings help them make magic?” I stare at my father’s bare fingers, always one moment away from shimmering with white magic. “If a human had a witch’s ring, like—” I think of the humans I know. There aren’t many. “—Donald the postman, could he do their magic?”
“If a person took a maestro’s violin, could they make noise? Certainly. If they studied, might they learn to make music? Possibly. Could they make music like the maestro who has practiced since they were born, has lived for nothing but music, who has dreamed in music as their first language, whose musical culture going back generations has baked it into their soul? I do not think so. That is what witches are like. Magic is the air witches long to breathe, their only connection to an ancient, greater past, when they were leaders. Gods. Now they are mediocre.”
Father doesn’t look sad about it. He looks pleased. Father is rarely pleased.
“But… there are powerful witches?” I ask hesitantly.
“There are surprises, prodigies, there always will be.” He shrugs. “But the magic inside them is smaller than it used to be. Much smaller than ours.”
“So we don’t make music like they do?”
“No, Orlando.” He smiles at me, magic glittering across his face as it changes, a father of a thousand faces. “We are the bird, we are the river, we are the tempest, we are our own music, all the time, always singing. We are magic. They can never have it, they can never take it away from us, and for this, they will always hate us. They will never trust us. Remember that.”
When the tram arrives, the two schoolgirls take seats near the embarrassed witch and, two stops later, they are asking her if she has a crystal ball at home or if she dances with the devil. The witch is answering, explaining paganism, and I feel a strange thrum of envy. For better or worse, witches can be themselves in this world. Maybe my father was right and they think more power is the answer to all their problems. I am the proof that is categorically not true. I am a shapeshifter who is learning witchlore and witchcraft, and in May, my girlfriend died and everyone thinks it was my fault. All I have are problems.
CHAPTERTWO
If you ask someone to imagine a witchcraft college, they’ll spout off about turrets and gargoyles. In reality, Demdike College is on the other side of a metal door with the word “cock” graffitied on it in the Northern Quarter of Manchester. It’s a Merlin Foundation college, one of many around the UK, and some of them, yes, might have pretty spires and arches, but this one is housed in an old mill building near the Port Street Beer House with metal window- and door shutters that are magnets for the Manchester street artists. The sign over the door is small, easily missed, and has the wordsDEMDIKE COLLEGEprinted in Comic Sans over a vague silhouette of a goddess symbol. It’s pretty tacky, but witches seem to love any marketing that makes them indistinguishable from a yoga studio.
