Magic University Book One: The Siren and the Sword (22 page)

Kyle thought about it. “I really hoped I was leaving this kind of...politics behind when I left high school.”

Nichols shrugged. “Human nature doesn’t change. The reason the house is like this is so you can learn how to swim upstream, here where your progress is actually measured. Once you’re out in the real world, you think someone will just hand you a score at the end of the day to let you know where you stand at your job or among your neighbors or whatever? There’s a reason Glads tend to be in leadership positions.”

Kyle sat back. “I never thought of it that way.”

Now Nichols half smiled. “What, never realized this is all one big learning experience?”

“I knew that. I just didn’t know it was so structured.” Kyle folded his cards too, his mind no longer on the game.

“Manners, the proper way of speaking, learning to size up whether someone should be addressed as a peer or as someone of higher status...you’re not going to learn that any way but living it. You especially, since you didn’t grow up with it.”

“And here I thought it was just arbitrary stuff to annoy us.”

“Nope. So when are you and Speyer going to announce dance practice?”

“Dance practice?”

Nichols now grinned. “Oh, come on, you aren’t going to hold a formal dance, a Masque especially, without making sure everyone in the house can acquit themselves properly on the dance floor?”

“Um...?”

Nichols sighed and rolled his eyes. “There will be pavanes. There will be sarabandes. There will be contra dance of all kinds. You’ll be expected to go through the courtly dances so you can meet potential partners.”

“Partners?”

“It’s a
masque
,” Nichols said, as if that explained everything.

Perhaps it did. Kyle remembered what Master Brandish had said about some in Esoteric Studies discouraging masques from being held, ostensibly because of the erotic consequences. “Right.”

“Mark my words. If she doesn’t make the whole house practice, she’ll at least make sure anyone who doesn’t know how, will.”

Kyle didn’t doubt that Nichols was right.

* * * *

The night Jess returned, even a run-in with Frost couldn’t bring Kyle’s mood down. In the Gladius dining hall, Kyle had seen him eating alone. As he’d passed by him, he’d tried to be civil.

“You’re looking well, Frost,” he said. Frost’s cheeks almost looked like they had some color. “Did you go somewhere warm for break?”

But Frost had just glared at him and replied with a sneer, “Nowhere special, but it beat staying here, I bet.”

Whatever. He was probably cranky because he and Candlin hadn’t seen each other in weeks. Kyle could understand that; he’d been pretty moody himself while Jess had been gone. He grinned at Frost, pretending like Frost hadn’t said
anything. “Well, enjoy dessert. I’m off to meet up with Jess,” he said, then sauntered away, quite sure Frost was staring daggers into his back.

When Kyle got to Camella House, she was standing on the front step, and a month’s worth of anxiety melted away as she came running up to him before he could even reach her, grabbed him in a huge hug, and kissed him. Through their winter coats it was a bulky hug, but to Kyle that just made it seem all the warmer.

“I missed you, too,” he said.

“Come on, let’s go get coffee and you can tell me all about what you did while I was gone,” she said with a grin.

He laughed and they began walking hand in hand toward the Square. “You mean you can tell me what you did, since all I did was sit around, mope and study.”

“Was it really that bad?”

“Just boring, mostly. I’ll tell you about it once we get settled.”

They ended up with hot chocolate instead of coffee, and a table in the cramped back corner of the coffee shop where their knees touched. Kyle didn’t mind at all. He held his chocolate in both hands, feeling like the heat from it soaked through his whole body from his palms, and listened to her tell stories about her various family members, and the new CD she bought, and a few movies she saw.

When she wound down, he told her he’d been visiting Alex every day, that nothing was different other than he was starting to look kind of skinny, and about how he’d started reading the commentaries for some of the prophecies, which led him to trying to figure out how not to tell her how much trouble he’d had conjuring.

But eventually he got down to the part about the library. “I looked for the siren,” he said quietly, realizing it suddenly sounded like a much stupider and less impressive thing to do than he’d hoped it would.

Especially when Jess seemed less than thrilled. “You what?”

“I didn’t find her,” he said quietly. “Er, it. I did spend the night in the library a couple of times and there’s no siren there. If there is, she...it’s really hiding from everyone. But Dean Bell was there.”

“Dean Bell caught you in the library?”

“No, no. I saw him a few times, like he was looking for the siren, too, and didn’t find anything. Me included.”

She frowned. “Kyle, you could have gotten into huge trouble. Or worse, what if you
had
found the siren, or the siren found you? You could have ended up like Alex. And if you’re trying to keep your options open, as far as Esoteric Studies goes...” She made a face. “A siren fucking you...it still counts as sex.”

“Oh.” Kyle hadn’t thought about it that way. “Well, but I’m not sure I...” He paused mid-sentence, his brain catching up to his mouth. No, he wasn’t sure if Esoteric Studies was something he wanted to go into, but then again, his big
discovery of the past few weeks had been that masturbating and magic seemed to go hand in hand for him. “Well, I wasn’t looking for her to have sex,” he said a bit more defensively.

Jess made a frustrated noise. “That wouldn’t matter to a siren. If they want to have you, you don’t get much choice.”

“Well...” He took a breath and then pulled the chain out from under his shirt to show her the amulet. “I made this. It should keep me from getting attacked by sirens. And Sphinxes.”

“Sphinxes are extinct,” she said offhandedly, lifting the amulet in her palm and frowning as she examined it. “Where did you get this?”

“Um, well, the necklace came from a clothing shop around the corner. The one where you said everything’s ugly?” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the place. “I researched the spell for a couple of weeks.”

She sat back. “Wow. And does it work?” She seemed less annoyed now and he took that as a good sign.

“Hard to say, since I don’t think I’ve met any sirens or part-sirens since making it. No one’s been here, after all.” He shrugged.

She ran her fingers down his cheek. “You’ve really been lonely, haven’t you?”

He just nodded, closing his eyes as she traced his eyebrows with her fingertips. He swallowed, realizing two desires were at war inside him. One side wanted Monica to be there tonight, so he could test out whether she was a siren or not. The other side hoped she wasn’t there, so he and Jess could get reacquainted. “Monica?” he asked.

“Got back an hour before me,” Jess said, sounding a little wistful herself.

“I’ve been having dreams about you.” He tilted his chin forward for a quick kiss.

“I’ll find out when she’s in lab next, okay?” She ran her hand up his thigh. “Can you hold out until then?”

“Not if you keep touching me like th—” His breath caught as her other hand slid warmly up his other thigh and he realized the wicked gleam in her eye meant she knew exactly what effect she was having on him. “Jess...”

She leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “I haven’t got off in a month. I touched myself a few times, thinking of you...but...it just wasn’t the same.”

Kyle wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but it felt like they’d just agreed on their plan of action. He returned their mugs to the bin while she got the key to the restroom. He followed a few moments after her, to the back hall where the two doors were. He tried the handle of the one marked “Women” and it opened. She latched the door behind him, and a moment later he had her pressed against the wall by a hungry kiss.

She had hung her coat on the hook on the back of the door, but he didn’t even remove his from his shoulders as he turned her in his arms, undoing her slacks and pushing them down along with her underwear. He got his own jeans down to his knees and rubbed his bare cock against the cleft of her ass. She pushed back against him, urging him on.

He kept one arm around her while he slicked his cock with spit and slipped it into the crook of her thighs. She leaned forward, holding onto the handicapped safety bar, making it easier for him to move his cock and to get a nice deep-feeling thrust. He needn’t have worried about friction; she was quite slippery.

“How’s this?” he breathed, pushing her forward and pulling her back on his prick. “Am I hitting you—?”

The noise she made when the head of his cock rubbed her clit left no room for doubt and no reason to hold back. Kyle began moving with short, quick thrusts, and Jess stifled a moan. When he felt like she was getting close, he reached his hand around and spread her lips just enough to get his middle finger right onto her clit. Now he lengthened his thrusts, seeking the rhythm and stimulation that would bring him off quickly, even as his finger worked to finish the job his cockhead had started.

When she came she wasn’t able to keep completely quiet, nor was he, as her muscles clenching sent him over the edge, too, spurting messily onto the wall and dribbling a little down her thighs.

Nothing that some paper towels and some water couldn’t clean up. They rearranged themselves quickly, only slowing down for one moment for Kyle to bury his nose in her hair and take a deep breath of her scent. “I missed you.”

They emerged cautiously, but no one was standing in line, and Jess dropped the key off at the register as she breezed out. They were still a little red-faced from exertion when they kissed good-bye at the door of Camella House.

It wasn’t until Kyle’s post-orgasmic haze lifted somewhat that he realized he still hadn’t tested the amulet on Monica. It would have to be next time.

* * * *

Nichols didn’t have to be prophetic to be right about Caitlyn Speyer. She organized a practice for the afternoon of the Saturday before classes started and Kyle found himself in the common room shuffling his feet with a couple of other nervous freshmen while a few of the upperclassmen explained how the dancing worked.

“Three, count ’em, three. I expect you each to dance a minimum of three times,” Caitlyn said, stalking up and down their ranks like a military sergeant. “If you only master one of the dances, you’ll have to wait until it comes around again. No doubt some of the others won’t know how to dance either, in which case it’ll be your job to walk them through it. We’ll start with the pavane, which is slow and not that hard to figure out.”

As it turned out, Caitlyn herself didn’t have the patience to teach the steps. She’d delegated that to others. Remy took Kyle’s group and began to explain, while the students who had done it before were walked through the paces by Caitlyn and Masterson.

They weren’t evenly split girls and boys among the freshmen and others who had never danced this way before, so Kyle found himself face to face with a ruddy-cheeked guy with dirty blond hair down to his shoulders. He’d seen him a thousand times around the house of course, but couldn’t remember his name. Hopefully he’d remember it before he had cause to use it.

The pavane wasn’t that hard. Soon they were mixed in with the students who knew how it went, and another student whose name Kyle couldn’t remember played a small frame drum to keep them in time.

They moved on to other dances, then, and with more intricate changes of partner. Kyle wondered if it was going to be even more confusing when everyone was wearing masks. He was just wondering this as Caitlyn herself stepped into place beside him and they turned to press their palms together.

She pulled her hand back suddenly, “Circe’s tit!” She shook it like she had been shocked by a massive jolt of static electricity, but Kyle hadn’t felt anything. “Wadsworth, what...?”

Kyle’s eyes were wide. Did Caitlyn have siren blood? If so, she might not want everyone in the room to know about it. “Er, sorry,” he said. “Shuffling my feet on the carpet.” He shook his own hand, too, belatedly.

“Well, pick them up a bit more, and quit wearing those polyester pants,” she shot back, but he could see she was just playing along. They mimed their way through the dance without actually touching.

When the dance practice was over, she cornered him in private near the back door to the kitchen. “So what the fuck was that? I’ve never got a jolt like that off you before.”

“Um, you don’t by any chance have any mantic blood?” Kyle asked.

“What do you mean, mantic blood? My mother’s a seer, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Er, mantic, I mean like Sphinxes and sirens,” Kyle amended.

Caitlyn scowled at him. “You know mantic is a synonym for prophetic, right?”

“It is? I, um, I learned it from a book. I’d been assuming it was related to the manticore...” He broke off when she made a derisive sound.