Magic University Book One: The Siren and the Sword (9 page)

He nearly lost it when she began to come again, and gripped onto his cock the way she always did his hand, but he managed to hold back until she let go, and he just got his cock pressed against her stomach when hot come spurted out of him.

“Merlin and Morgana’s goat-fucking third cousin,” he said, choosing one of Alex’s more colorful swears for the occasion. “You are in-fucking-credible.”

She laughed and pulled him down for a kiss. “Now you’re starting to sound like one of us.”

“Good.” He settled next to her so he wouldn’t crush her and realized he felt content for the first time in days. “You’re amazing. You’re everything I could dream.” The words
I love you
hovered behind his teeth, too, but he held onto them. He wanted to wait to say them when he knew he really meant them, not when he was giddy from sex and would say almost anything.

“You’re amazing, too, Kyle,” she said, reaching behind her pillow for a towel. She wiped them both up and then tossed the towel aside, pulling up a blanket instead. “You’re not going anywhere for a while?”

“Not unless you want to kick me out.”

“Uh-uh.” She pulled him close and they fell asleep like that, arms entwined.

* * * *

Upon hearing that Jess and Kyle were going to go to the ball as Batman and Catwoman, Alex declared that he would not go as Robin the Boy Wonder and that it was now Kyle’s job to help him find something. Thus it was that on Saturday, Kyle found himself on the T with his friend, riding to Kendall Square. They emerged on the edge of the MIT campus and then walked several blocks, passing office towers for biotech and research companies until they came to a squat little brick warehouse.

“The Garment District?” Kyle read off the sign, hand-painted on the brick.

Alex led Kyle through a narrow door into the store.

Kyle stopped and took in the view a few steps into the place. The ground floor had a costume shop off to one side, and what looked like the world’s largest laundry pile on the other. Several people, mostly women, were climbing carefully through the pile, examining the clothes one piece at a time.

Alex shrugged in that direction. “They sell all that stuff by the pound. Dollar-fifty a pound, I think? Upstairs is the biggest secondhand clothing store I’ve ever seen. But this is what we want.” He led Kyle into the costume area. One whole wall section was covered with wigs. Several fancy costumes hung from hangers on pegs: a pirate, a space alien, a Kiss-like rock-and-roll outfit.

“If you want to match, you could always go as The Joker or something,” Kyle suggested as they began to look through a book of costumes on the counter.

“Ha, ha, very funny,” Alex said.

“Is something wrong?” Kyle had never heard Alex quite so moody.

“Oh just, you know, no one believes I take anything seriously, so, of course, The Joker.” He flipped the pages disinterestedly.

“That isn’t what I meant at all.” Kyle frowned. “But you
do
give the impression that you don’t take anything seriously, you know.”

“I know.” Alex fell silent, closing the book and moving to a rack to browse through some outfits.

Kyle tagged along. He had already gotten his costume—a cheap-ass drugstore model, but it would do. The mask was the important thing, he figured.

He’d also tried writing a poem for Jess. He imagined they would get hot and thirsty from dancing, and they would take a break, walking away from the noise and energy of the dance floor into somewhere cool and quiet and shadowed, and then he would recite his poem, words that would finally make clear to her how he truly felt. Her dream would come true, and so would his. Happily ever after.

Except that every poem he’d tried to write this week had been utter drivel.

Maybe I should just find one of Longfellow’s...?
But reciting the work of another, even a vaunted ancestor, wasn’t the same.
Inspiration will come. It will.

He tried again with Alex. “There are plenty of other heroes or villains to choose from, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“The Riddler? Mr. Freeze? Spiderman?”

“I don’t want a costume that hides my face and hair.”

“Okay, Superman? Um, Wonder Woman?”

Alex let out a laugh. “Cross-dressing is a time-honored tradition for this holiday, after all...and let me tell you, I look great in fishnet stockings.”

“Ugh, I’m not sure I needed that image in my head.”

Alex pulled out something on a hanger. “Hmm. Maybe I could pull off a pirate. Not the fancy kind like Captain Morgan or something, but more...yeah. I could put a hoop in my ear and borrow a parrot.” Kyle followed Alex up to the second floor, where Alex proceeded to spend the next hour hunting out the perfect shirt, breeches, headscarf, sash belt, and so on from the racks and rack and racks of clothing on display there. Even better, when he was done, he paid under $20 for his acquisitions. Kyle was amazed.

“Finding a bargain...finding just about anything, is one of my aptitudes,” Alex explained when they were on their way down the stairs. When they reached the street, Kyle turned to the right back toward the train, but Alex said, “You hungry? My aptitude says there’s something delicious this direction.” He pointed the opposite way.

“Um, sure.”

They walked further up the street, where it turned residential, trees lining the curbs in front of wooden houses built in Victorian times.

“So are you being serious?” Kyle pressed, as they turned down a side street. “About finding things?”

Alex shrugged. “Yeah. It’s a tricky one, though. Doesn’t always work, just like how soothsaying is on and off for
most people.”

“If your aptitude is on and off,” Kyle said, “then how do you figure out what you’re doing is magic?”

“Well, if you’re making something levitate, or things appear out of thin air, it probably doesn’t take more than once or twice for you to be convinced. But subtler things...you know how they say third time’s the charm? If you do something three times, it really starts to seem for real, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Kyle said, a little glumly.

“Buck up, Ace, you’ll figure it out.” Alex punched him lightly on the arm. “Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Like…how you and Jess are doing.”

Kyle’s laugh was wry. “We’re doing well.”

“But? I can hear a ‘but’ there.”

It was Kyle’s turn to shrug. “But I don’t think she takes me seriously. I mean, not as seriously as I take her. She’s great, she’s wonderful to me. The time we spend together is amazing.” He blushed a little but knew Alex already was privy to what their sex life was like. “We never fight, and every time I see her I just get more and more into her.”

“That’s how she was with me when we dated for like two months last year. Really fun to be around, seemed to like me plenty, but…”

“But what?”

“But I got out before I got sucked in any deeper, because I knew I wasn’t ‘the one’ for her.”

“The one?”

“Don’t you get the feeling you’re just a...an appetizer, while she’s waiting for the main course?”

Huh. Maybe Alex had the aptitude for picking the right words. “Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel. I...I kind of hope things change at the ball, though.”

“Oh?” Now Alex was looking at him as they walked, curiosity at full burn.

“Well, yeah. Okay, here’s why. She told me she had a dream she’s going to meet her true love at a costume party. I feel like, well, this is falling right into my lap. How can I not grab the chance?”

“Hmm. Well, Fate is like that sometimes.” Alex pushed open the front door on a restaurant that looked like a house. Inside, there was a counter to order food from, and a few small tables scattered around. A radio was playing some kind of Spanish music. One portion of the menu seemed to be regular submarine sandwiches, but all the rest, as Alex explained it, pointing to the lists of dishes posted above the counter, was Puerto Rican food.

“Is that like Mexican food?” Kyle asked.

“No. Not really. How hungry are you? I’ll order. Go snag a table.”

Kyle took a seat near the door, while Alex talked for a while with the man behind the counter, then came and sat down. What came next was a steady stream of food served up on Styrofoam plates. Thin seared steak with rice and beans and fried bananas. A bowl of goat stew. Some kind of little doughy meat pies.

And somehow, again, the bill came to under $20.

When they were nearly back at the train, stomachs completely full and the prospect of a mid-afternoon nap looming, Kyle asked, “So that was really the price, right? You didn’t put the whammy on them or something?”

Alex’s voice was scathing. “The. Whammy.”

“You know what I mean!”

Alex laughed, relenting. “You mean, did I use the Jedi Mind Trick to get them to undercharge us?”

“Yeah.”

“No. No, I didn’t. They’re both just dirt-cheap places.” He started down the stairs to the train platform.

“So that’s just one of those things that only happens in fairy tales?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You mean you really could do something like that?”

“Kyle, Kyle, Kyle, you’re going to have to learn to speak more precisely. It’s exactly that kind of sloppy jumping to conclusions that leads mundanes into trouble in all the stories, isn’t it?” Alex chuckled to himself. “It’s too bad the train is automated now. I don’t have the touch with machines that I do with people. I could always talk my way on when there were human attendants. Oh, shit, here it comes...”

He jumped down the last two steps and went through the gate while Kyle was still fumbling to get his wallet out of his pocket. He pressed it against the reader pad and the gate swung open to let him through as well.

He looked up at Alex, who was standing at the yellow line, waiting for the train’s doors to open. Had he really gotten his transit card out? Kyle had been busy with his own, so maybe he had and Kyle had missed it.

Alex gave him a sly half smile and stepped into the car.

* * * *

The night before the ball, Kyle was getting desperate. Poem after poem turned out to be junk. Jess had even been the one who told him love potions didn’t work, but that love poems did. Had she been sort of asking him to try it? He tore up a whole page of flower and fruit metaphors. Finally he decided that he needed a break and he made his way down to the
Gladius dining hall, where around ten o’clock each night, they would put out snacks for those staying up late to study.

He was nearly knocked down in the doorway by someone trying to leave the room in great haste, someone with silk-straight black hair and glasses. He just barely dodged Michael Candlin, Frost’s boyfriend, as he escaped.

Kyle stepped cautiously into the room to see Frost on his feet at one end of a table, as if he’d just stood, and Master Brandish making herself a cup of tea at the hot drinks stand. A few students sat against the back wall.

Kyle made his way to the snack display, where chocolate chip cookies—some of them laced with M&Ms—were laid out, still slightly warm. He put three into a napkin, took a small carton of milk, and made as if to leave.

“Wadsworth.”

Kyle stopped in front of the table where Frost had seated himself again. “Frost.” He had a feeling the House Master was watching them, but didn’t dare turn to look.

“Found an aptitude yet?” Frost arched one jet black eyebrow.

“Figured out what you’re wearing to the ball yet?” Kyle shot back, a weak rejoinder but mostly he just wanted to be out of this conversation as quickly as possible.

Frost snorted. “There are much better things to do on All Hallow’s Eve than dance around in a stupid costume,” he said. “Especially if you’re trying to tap into your as-yet-unreached well of power.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Isn’t that girlfriend of yours a Ritual Arts major? Ask her. She’ll no doubt have some suggestions.”

Jess
was
actually angling towards Healing Arts and hadn’t declared yet, but Kyle didn’t say that.
I can’t whine to Jess any more about being a late bloomer. Right now I don’t want her focused on my faults and deficiencies.
“Well, and how are you going to be spending the holiday?”

“Why don’t you meet me on the roof of William James Hall at ten o’clock and find out?” Frost’s blue eyes glittered.

“I’ve already got a date, thanks,” Kyle shot back.

“Oh ho. Well. Bring her.” Frost got to his feet and picked up his tray. He passed very close to Kyle as he went to dump out his trash. Kyle could have sworn that when they met, they were the same height, but now he couldn’t see the top of Frost’s head. It did seem Frost liked to act bigger than those around him; maybe he wore platform shoes?

Frost left the room. Kyle could still hear the clinking of Master Brandish’s teaspoon in her mug and knew she had been watching the entire scene.

Kyle hurried out as well before anything else could go wrong.

* * * *