Davie
As if my day weren’t long enough with four classes, all with Isaiah, I had a shift at the infirmary after dinner. At least it was a short one; I just had to gather up the dinner trays and take them back to the Dining Hall.
“Thanks, Davie,” said Sharon, one of the kitchen workers. “See you tomorrow?”
“Probably not, unless you’re working the breakfast shift. I’m on super early.”
“No early shifts for me,” she said. “Just the thought.” She gave a dramatic shudder. “Musicians do not get up before noon.”
I laughed. Sharon lived in Greenvale and came into the Bubble every day to work. I’d heard her band play at the Bean a few times, and she rocked a mean fiddle. “You guys playing the ball?”
“Not this year,” she said. “I’ll be there, though; not missing the biggest party of the season.”
“Well, then, I’m sure I’ll see you there if not before,” I said.
I hauled my ass back across the Agora to change out of my peach-colored scrubs and grab my things. Someone could have created a portal to make the trip between the Dining Hall and the Infirmary shorter, but it seemed nobody with that level of skill could be bothered to help out the lowly Infirmary interns. I supposed I was building fucking character or some such shit.
Cabot was in the Emergency area when I got back to the Infirmary, standing off to the side while Faye, one of the Healing grad students, treated Gillian. “Hey, Thomas,” I said. “This the same migraine Sofia mentioned last night?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes she shakes them off and she’s fine, other times they just swamp her. I think it depends on the vision that triggers them.”
“Any idea what the vision was this time?”
“Not really. She said it wasn’t clear, just something about spiders. I think she might have been drawing from me.”
“From you?”
“There was a spider, Friday night, and some… never mind.”
He’d come over all twitchy. “Arachnophobe much, Cabot Thomas?”
“Nah, not me.” There was a slight weight on the word me. “You going to the Samhain Ball?”
“Of course. Sofia’s excited. I’ve been answering her questions about it for a week.”
He smiled. “I’m glad she has a witch for a roommate; I haven’t been about to answer half of what she’s asked.” He ran a hand through his unruly black curls, then reached to adjust glasses he wasn’t wearing at the moment. “So, who are you going with?”
“My favorite person,” I said. “Me.”
“You’re going alone?”
“How long have you known me, Thomas? You know I don’t date inside the Bubble.”
“Yeah, but its the Samhain Ball. I figured you’d at least go with someone to that, even if it wasn’t a date-date.”
“And have to keep some guy entertained all night, while repeatedly reminding him it isn’t a real date and him not believing me? Thanks, but no, thanks. Even one date in this fishbowl can turn into the disaster that keeps giving.”
“It’s really not as bad as all that.”
“Your lack of ex-drama is not universal. I choose to avoid the risk.”
“Why don’t you go with a friend?”
“If I had a single friend who was also planning to go alone, then sure, as long as they understood it was absolutely not a date. But, as it happens, I have no such friend this year. Unless you’re suggesting Gillian?”
“No,” he said. “She’s going with Jackson.” The disgust on his face was plain.
I’d seen her talking to him at Cabot’s party the other day. “So, she’s actually dating him?”
“I think the ball is their first official date. I don’t know what she sees in that self-important asshat. But I was talking about Isaiah. He doesn’t have a date for the ball.”
“Huh?”
“Isaiah. He said he got distracted studying and didn’t realize how soon it was, so he never asked anyone. You could go with him as friends.”
I must have stared at him without speaking for a solid minute. “While we’re in the Infirmary,” I said at last. “You should maybe have them check out your head, too.”
He smirked, reaching to adjust his absent glasses again. “Why not? You’ve been spending a lot of time together.”
“We’ve been working on a project together,” I clarified. “That’s Markston’s doing. We aren’t hanging out voluntarily, I assure you.”
He’d given me an idea, though. The Samhain Ball was the biggest social event of the year; everybody would be there. Nothing else was ever scheduled on the thirtieth, because nobody would have gone. “Tell Gillian I hope she feels better,” I said, turning to leave without waiting for him to respond. I pulled out my tarot cards on my way to the locker room.
DAVIE
The cards confirmed my idea was viable, so I texted Where are you? to Isaiah. By the time I was back in my regular clothes and picked my phone up again, I had an answer.
Why? We didn’t plan a practice did we?
Goddammit, Isaiah, why can’t you just cooperate? No, we didn’t. I need to talk to you about something. Project related. Where the fuck are you?
Library
Way to narrow it down, fucknoodle. Where in the library? I started walking while I waited for him to answer.
Orestes room
Stay put. On my way.
The Orestes Room was a large study lounge on the first floor, filled with tables, couches, and soft chairs. A huge window on the back wall let in lots of light and offered a nice view of the Carriage Path.
I looked around the room. The day was in that weird transition phase where the dimming light from outside was competing with the electric light from inside, casting everything into shadow and strange contrast. I spotted Isaiah in a corner, near the window.
He was going through the textbook for his Spiritual Studies class so fast there was no way he was absorbing anything. I watched him turn several pages at once and keep on reading, showing no sign he knew he was skipping pages. This dipshit was my primary competition? I needed to up my game.
“I have an idea,” I said, sitting down at his table.
He looked up. He hadn’t known I was standing there, but to his credit he didn’t jump or scream like a little girl. “Yeah?”
He wasn’t going to make this easy. Of course, to be fair, were the situation reversed, neither would I. He was objectively a much nicer person than me; I’m sure I’d have been even worse. “Are you going to the ball?”
His eyes widened with panic for a brief moment.
“I’m not asking you to go to the ball with me, fuckwit.”
“I didn’t say you were. No, I’m probably not going to the ball. Why?”
“Because pretty much everybody will be. Meaning the rest of campus will be more or less deserted.”
“And?”
“And we could practice our circle outside without being interrupted.”
“Outside?” He looked at me like I was an idiot.
“Yeah. You know, out there, where the nature is?” I gestured to the window, and the world beyond.
“Our circle requires all kinds of intricate symbols to be drawn on the floor. How are we supposed to do that outdoors? That’s exactly the sort of pitfall she’s trying to train out of us. We’re tree-hugging Wiccans, so of course our instinct is to assume it’ll work better outside. But I don’t think this is that kind of circle.”
“I do,” I said. “Maybe, anyway. The word used in the instructions is engrave. What if that isn’t just part of the fucked up, old-timey language? What if it’ll work better if we etch the symbols in the dirt, rather than draw them in chalk? What if it’ll only work if we do that? And being in nature, where we can use our specific training and draw extra energy from everything around us, can only help power the spell, right?”
“How do you propose we carve the symbols into the ground? They wouldn’t be legible, even if we could manage it.”
“There’s a bare patch near the edge of the woods, not far from the dorms, where the grass is dead. I haven’t checked it out yet, I got this idea right before I texted you, but I think we could do it there. We can use an awl or an icepick as a drawing tool. I already have a consecrated awl that I use for carving symbols into candles.”
I could see him thinking, weighing my idea behind his light brown eyes. “And we’d do this when?”
“Sunday night, during the ball. We should have a few hours, at least, to practice uninterrupted.”
After a minute or so of consideration, he sighed. “Okay, we can try it. What time?”
“The ball starts at eight, with a fancy dinner beforehand. Most people will start heading that way around six. If we meet at seven, we should be guaranteed relative privacy until at least ten, probably as late as midnight.”
“You really think nobody’s going to come back early?”
“I’m sure a few will, but it’ll be because they’re tired, or sick, or on their way to bang, so they won’t be paying any attention to a couple of people casting circles fifty yards away. Even after the ball’s over, there’ll be after parties and crap all night. Nobody’s going to pay attention to anything we’re doing.”
“True.” He didn’t even spend an hour considering before he agreed that time.
“So, it’s a plan?”
“It’s a plan. You really don’t mind missing the ball?”
“Nah,” I said. “If the circle works and we get done early, I can do a quick costume change and drop in late, or I can hit one of the after parties. But the world won’t end if none of that happens.”
That was all a pack of lies. Missing the social event of the year was going to goddamn kill me. But getting this project right, and showing Markston I could overcome the challenge of Isaiah in my way, was well worth it.
“Okay, then.” He opened his book and stuck his nose back in it.
I didn’t appreciate being dismissed, but I wasn’t going to fight it, either. “Remember to pack up your stuff ahead of time, so we’re ready to go when we get there. And remember to grab something to eat before, since we’ll be skipping dinner.” I might not be willing to fight for his attention, but I was sure as shit going to get in the last word.
Isaiah
“Can you tell us more about Samhain?” Jessica asked.
I sighed and put down my pen. I’d barely managed to get all the reading done before class, which already had me annoyed. I never waited until the last minute to do my reading, but I’d been so preoccupied with that damned circle, and Davie barging in on me in the Library hadn’t helped.
I liked to read over the assignment twice before the actual lecture, so I was good and prepared. I’d managed, eventually, and now it looked like the class was going to distract Professor Cooper with stupid questions about Samhain, because most of them were Academics who didn’t understand Pagan holidays.
Professor Cooper gave Jessica an indulgent smile, and the small nod of his balding, ginger head said I should have expected this as clearly as my irritated sigh. He seemed far less annoyed than me, but he hadn’t stayed up late doing the reading we’d now be ignoring. And really, Cooper always seemed less annoyed than everyone else. “Sure, Jess. I’m going to guess several of you have the same question?” He looked around the room for confirmation.
Most of the Academics nodded their heads. Logan Day shot me a commiserating look across the room. It was going to be a boring, pointless class for us.
“First of all, you may have noticed it’s not pronounced the way it’s spelled. It’s a Gaelic word, so it sounds nothing like it looks to a native English speaker.” He wrote the word on the blackboard, then underneath he wrote out the phonetic pronunciation as SAW-win. At least he was sparing us all hearing a few sam-hayne pronunciations in the future.
“Samhain is the origin of the modern Halloween. It was celebrated as the final harvest of the year, and also associated with death and crossing over. This is why personifications of Death in mythology are often depicted holding a scythe. At Samhain, we harvest the last of the crops from the field as a symbolic representation of the gods harvesting the souls of the dead.”
I was bored. This was the sort of thing new witches learned from the very first Wicca 101 book they got at Barnes & Noble. Having been raised by Wiccan parents, I’d actually learned this stuff as a little kid.
“What about the Veil?” another Academic, Eddie Strathmann, asked. “Any time I see Samhain mentioned in a book, it says it’s the time when the Veil is thin, but doesn’t really explain what that means.”
“The Veil is what we call the separation between planes of existence. In the case of Samhain, we’re mainly talking about the Veil between the realms of the living and the dead, though there are others. There are more than one world we’d consider lands of the dead, even, realms from several mythologies, such as the Greek Underworld and the Norse realm of Hel.”
Hands flew up at the reference to Hel. He didn’t even bother to call on anyone. “That’s Hel with one l, not two. This isn’t the place of torture from Christian belief. Hel is one of a few realms for the dead in Norse mythology. It’s said to be cold and bleak, ruled by an unpleasant goddess, Hel, for whom the realm is named. Many of the suggestions that Hel is a place of punishment, though, come from—well, never mind. I don’t want to tangent off from our tangent. Suffice to say Hel and Hell aren’t the same place. Both are realms of the dead, with varying levels of evidence as to their literal existence. If you’re truly interested, maybe I’ll see you in my Otherworlds class next year.
“While we generally mean the divide between life and death when discussing the Veil at Samhain, all of the veils are thinner at this time. Beltane, which falls on the first of May, is the time when the veil is thinnest between the worlds of Earth and Faery. Like at Samhain, though, all veils are thinner on and around Beltane, despite Samhain tending to get all the veil-thinning credit.”
As I expected, a lot of hands shot up the second he said Faery.
“Olivia?”
“Faery? Like, actual Faery?”
He smiled. “Yes. Faery is a real place, though not everything in the books is true. It does not exist inside a hollow hill, for example, though Faerie folk here on Earth do sometimes build inside hills, and the symbolism of hidden places underground is often important to them. It’s…” He hesitated, thinking. I was sure this wasn’t the sort of thing he liked to do a half-assed lecture on, but had gotten himself into it before thinking better of it. “We’ll say it’s partially true about it not being safe to accept food or drink while inside Faery, for fear of being trapped there. And it is true time moves differently in Faery, though the way the phenomenon is depicted in fiction tends to be way off. Kendra?”
Kendra Newton was Magickal Arts, a year ahead of Davie and me. “What’s the significance of the veils being thin? What can we do with that?”
As a third year MA student, there was no way she knew as little as that question suggested. Then again, she wasn’t a witch; her focus was Thaumaturgy, which was a far less spiritual approach to magick.
Cooper considered for a moment. “Traditionally speaking, Samhain is a good time to attempt communication with the dead. Since the barrier is thinner, if we have any chance of contacting a person on the other side, Samhain is the best time for that. I don’t recommend that sort of thing for someone not trained, though. In fact, if you’re considering experimenting with something like a Ouija board or a séance, Samhain is the worst possible time if you lack training or experience. More safely, Samhain and Beltane are both good times for performing divination, such as reading tarot cards, scrying, or using a pendulum.
“These dates are also powerful days for creating and using portals though, again, that’s not something anyone should attempt without a lot of training and experience. Even spacial portals, ones that only go from one place to another within the same plane, work more powerfully during these times. Dimensional portals, ones designed for crossing over between planes, are especially strong near these two dates. Once more I warn you, this is not something to be undertaken without training and experience, something no one in this class has enough of yet. If you’d like to experience the effect, however, I invite you to go into Greenvale for a coffee sometime in the next few days. You may notice the main portal in and out of the Bubble is extra strong right now. In fact, you’ll likely see some staff members in the Terrestrial Building for the next week or so.”
“Why will there be staff on the fake campus?” asked Eddie.
“Because this time of year, some people who normally ignore us grow curious about the secluded campus up the road and decide to come check it out. We need to keep it staffed enough to catch these curious seekers. Otherwise, the best case scenario is they go back and report finding an empty campus, and worse case they stumble upon the portal and wind up here in the Bubble.”
“Couldn’t that happen anytime, though?” Jessica asked.
“There are spells and wards on the Terrestrial Campus that normally prevent it. People see the gate, and the building beyond it, and think ‘yep, that’s a college, and I don’t go there, so I’ll just be on my way, now.’ And then they leave. If someone makes it further than that, and actually comes through the gate, they’ll grow more and more uncomfortable being there until they’re finally compelled to leave. But at Samhain and Beltane, sometimes the call of the portal is stronger than those spells, and not everyone is repelled.”
“What’s special about those people who aren’t repelled?”
Cooper smiled and nodded. “There’s a lot of insight in your question, Kendra. Generally, people who make it all the way across campus and into the Terrestrial Building are psychically and-or magickally gifted in some way. The staff members are there to protect the portal, but they also ask questions of those few who show up. Sometimes, they’re ultimately recruited to OTA, or referred to other forms of supernatural education.
“Now,” he said, walking to the board and erasing it. “Let’s spend our remaining time talking about the reading assignment, shall we?”
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