Page 5 of Witchlore
“Yeah, well, I read a lot,” I mutter. There’s very little else to do when you grow up with no friends.
“So your parents were fond of twentieth-century queer literature, were they?” he asks.
There are plenty of queer witches (after all, they don’t have the reputation of dancing together naked under the moonlight for nothing) and there’s even a nonbinary witch tutoring practical brews here at college, but they’re twenty-five and they’re not a shifter so they don’t get shit for it like I do. So I hesitate. I check Bastian for the usual signs, piercings or rainbow stickers or undercuts, and don’t find any. He might be closeted, but a closeted boy is probably the last thing I need after what happened last year.
“Why? Are you fond of queer literature?” I stare at him steadily.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. So, not closeted. Just tall and handsome and sitting with me.
“I don’t know what my parents are fond of.”
“I’m sorry.” He looks genuinely sad about it. “They said you were…”
An orphan.Nobody at college ever asks what happened to them or where they are so I never have to tell the truth. It’s easier to have no parents than explain the parents I do have. The locked doors, the emotional blackmail, the appalling and weirdly affirming realization that even a hospital-mandated halfway house for mentally unstable teenagers would be better than living with them again.
“Did you hurt your wrist?” he asks.
“No, it’s a fashion statement.”
“Shapeshifters can’t heal themselves?”
“No, I’m not Wolverine.” I scowl at him and put my bandaged wrist under the table, out of sight. His eyes follow it.
“I could heal it for you, if you like.” He lifts his hand and twists it, the stone of his ring catching the light. I stiffen. All witches can heal with brews (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble and all that) and anyone can make a healing tonic or two with ginger and lemon. But a talented few witches can heal with stones. Rings are inherited, passed down generations with different magical properties attached to them. A healing stone is a rare ring, however, so rare that most modern witches would prefer to take a broken bone to the hospital than trust in the volatility of an ancient stone. If he’s confident in his ability, he must be more naturally talented than most of the witches I’ve met.
I examine his ring. It’s a very traditional chunky piece, clearly ancient, yellow gold in a square setting that has lost the sharpness of its edges and runes graven into the sides of it. The sapphire itself is oval and a dusty blue, not cut like a modern gemstone but smooth, like sea glass. It looks so comfortable on his finger, as if eager to perform witchcraft for him. I stare down at my bare fingers. I’ve been trying to learn witchcraft my entire life and I still can’t do the basics. I can’t even control my shifting. I have a sudden flash of memory, my father standing over me as I cried, his face impassive as his body filled with light, the hair on his arms growing long and then disappearing, the disgust in his eyes still the same.A shapeshifter who cannot control her powers is less than a witch, less than nothing. We are made to be the strongest, not the weakest.I don’t know what I was made to be, but I knew I couldn’t make him happy and it was my fault. Always my fault.
“No, thanks,” I say. I would be a naive prat to let a strangewitch use their ring on me. He has sexy eyes but he might be a secret douchebag. So many people are.
“Another time, then,” he says.
“Can’twait.”
I am deliberately sarcastic but Bastian doesn’t seem to care. He grins broadly and nods, pulling a library book out of his bag and opening it.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I have this reading to do before my Early Medieval Brewing class in ten minutes.” He frowns. “Did you want to talk about something else?”
“No, I mean, what are you doing—” I gesture to his body, sitting opposite mine, and then to the various spaces at other tables around the room, implying the obvious question:What the hell are you doing sitting with me?
“Do you want me to go?”
“I don’t…” I go to pull my hair back from my face, that familiar smoothing motion of scooping long curls back into a ponytail, only to find the shortness of my new curls. The back of my head and neck suddenly feels very exposed. “Sit wherever you want.”
“Okay.” He turns back to his book. “I’ll sit here.”
I watch him for a minute, wondering if this is some kind of ploy and he’s going to start asking me if it’s really my fault that my girlfriend is dead, but he doesn’t. He seems to be underlining something with a pencil. I wait. He turns the page.
“Fine,” I say.
After all, what does it matter to me if some new guy wastes his time with the weird shapeshifter? I have a sudden urge to tell him my version of things; it rises in my throat until I can taste thewords on my lips:It didn’t happen like they say.But I don’t speak. No one believes me, after all, and neither will he. By lunchtime, he’ll have heard their version and he’ll never sit with me again. That’s just what happens.
CHAPTERTHREE
I think I expected every second of college this year to be an absolute ball ache, but it turns out even gossips and bullies have new schedules to manage, reading lists to update, and summer holidays to boast about. Against my expectations, I survive the first day back with no additional drama. And then the next. I’m starting to think I might actually get away with skulking through this year without too much notice, then as I’m leaving my first class on Wednesday (the History of Pre-Roman Necromancy) Kira Tavi steps across my path.
“Hi,” I say uneasily. She’s always very put together and that makes me uncomfortable. She has a kind of preppy vibe that I feel must be painfully high-maintenance. Today, it’s an orange jumper with a sharp white shirt underneath and the collar peeking over the top, matching orange glasses that complement her brown skin, and her black hair pulled neatly back. “Do you need something?”
