Wand: A Fantasy of Witches, Wizards, and Wands
Chapter Twenty-Six

On his way back to the dorm, Nick passed Daniel Wilson and a fuming Delrisa.

“What is this all about?” Daniel asked.

“Just tell the Dean—”

“Shut up,” Delrisa spat. “Come on,” she manhandled Daniel, who was smaller than her, down the hall. A great black stone formed in the pit of Nick’s gut as he watched them go.

If Delrisa had managed to get hold of him, she must’ve either found a Dorm Necromancy student and sent him or her in to retrieve Daniel, or, she’d found Daniel somewhere outside the dorm, which could only mean he’d left not long after their conversation. Hopefully this didn’t mean what Nick thought it did. He needed Daniel to place him inside the dorm for a long time. His cover with Other Nick would only work if Daniel had remained in the dorm for a long while.

The great black pit sprouted niggling hairs as he pondered these things.

Back inside the common room, Nick took his doppelganger aside and interrogated him. Nothing Other Nick revealed proved comforting. He dismissed the other boy and shuffled to the monitors bunk. The rest of the day past in a haze of depression. It was too much. By lights out at 9 o’clock, Nick realized he had not eaten since breakfast, and his stomach growled for it.

In the dark, listening to Bruno snore, peacefully oblivious, Nick gave way to tears. He did not rock in sobs or burst into a great wracking cry-fest, but his pillow was soon drenched all the same.

First class Monday morning was gym with Miss Quaffle. They’d been told to bring their familiars, so, following a spirited breakfast in which students fed their pets and pets squabbled with each other, Nick tagged along with the crowd. The rumor mill had been working overtime (helped along, Nick imagined, by Delrisa’s now boundless hatred for him). He’d been forced to repeat his story five times already. Fortunately Other Nick had been wise enough to brush his hair differently and accentuate the other differences between them, so nobody suspected.

On the way outside Delrisa rushed by Nick in a huff, shoving him roughly with her shoulder. Even her gray and white Dutch rabbit (a replacement familiar) managed to convey a sneer.

“Well, this is going to be a fun class, Severus,” Nick grumbled to the cat in his arms.

When everyone had settled down into groups of three in seated positions on the front lawn following long walks for exercise with their familiars, Miss Quaffle arrived, sporting her hip-hugging yoga pants and a blue active-wear blouse.

“Miss Quaffle?” Rachel, one of Delrisa’s Shaman girlfriends, threw her hand into the air.

“Yes?”

“Can we please play some Mageball again?” Rachel pleaded. “We know all the pranayama by heart now, and I’m pretty sure that golem isn’t coming back.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy chimed in beside Nick. “Duchaine said that golem is a pile of rubble in one of his cages. Come on, it’s got to be safe to go back by now.”

A chorus of pleading voices agreed.

“Well,” Miss Quaffle hummed, hands on shapely hips, “I guess if Duchaine says it’s safe—”

Cheers and clapping resounded, scaring Severus and most of the other familiars. Miss Quaffle shushed the class and then jumped right into their lesson. She planned to use the familiars as mystical lubricants in place of the Eye of Thoth capsules to aid their entrance into the Dreaming. Nick realized she’d been planning to return to Mageball this lesson anyway.

“Okay everyone,” Miss Quaffle gestured languidly, long slender-yet-toned arms waving through the air, “line up in a single row. That’s it. Now keep a good couple feet between each other. Donny,” she snapped at a Gypsy boy who had let his tomcat get too close to one of the sparrows Duchaine had caught yesterday to replace the dead birds. “Keep your bird under control. A wild familiar will make your journey more jarring than necessary. Okay then. Everyone—but Donny—excellent job.”

She strolled up and down the line then while giving instructions. Nick averted his gaze a smidgen too slowly, and was caught staring. “Eyes on your familiar, Nick,” she said, with a hint of ‘oh I’m so flattered you would check me out’ in her tone, he mused.

“Now,” Miss Quaffle continued her languid strolling, “slowly stroke your familiars head.”

She was forced to shush the class once more when it burst into giggles at her unfortunate phrasing.

“Pet,” she amended, “from the eyes back, slowly, gently. Always gazing directly into your familiars’ eyes. Now, quietly, begin the mantram we’ve been working on. If you don’t remember it, raise your hand and I’ll come by.” Silence for several ticks while Miss Quaffle helped a few of the more forgetful students. “Careful with the wording. A single mispronounced word and you could end up in some foul limbo dimension.”

Nick had no trouble with Severus; the cat was well-trained. Neither familiar nor master blinked while Nick recited the mantram. A placid sense of ease warmed his body. Fingertips and toes tingled, limbs hummed with energy.

A sudden jolt shocked him out of the meditative state.

Nick looked around. He was alone in the Elysian Fields.

Faintly glowing moons hovered in the sky. They looked distant and yet close enough to touch, and there was a low weak humming drone like the sound of space as heard from inside a spacecraft. Perhaps this world lacked an ionosphere and atmosphere.

Base paths traced the infield, while a vast tract of lush, vibrant, and weed-free grass outlined the Mageball field, which was shaped like a Magic Circle, rather than a diamond. Nick stood, only slightly surprised to replace that Severus had made the trip with him. He hugged the tomcat. “Good job, kitty boy. Look, we’re the first ones. You are so much smarter than those other pets.”

Severus jumped down and stalked off to investigate a mouse that had scurried by. Perhaps the cat had conjured the mouse. Nick wondered if that were possible.

Though time was mutable here in the Dreaming, Nick felt as though ten minutes had passed by the time other students began showing up. As he waited for the entire class, he scanned the fields. There was a good three-hundred foot shot from where he stood at third base to the tree line standing at the edge of left field. He snatched up one of the numerous regulation Mageballs hanging around and practiced pitching to a large and gnarled oak just outside the foul line pole. The first toss fell short by a couple hundred feet.

“There is no spoon,” Nick recited, and he fired a rocket. The ball struck the tree three hundred feet away and bounced harmlessly off its trunk. His third pitch was a line drive that blew a hole right through the Dreaming tree.

About five seconds of good clean glee followed this accomplishment, and then memory struck, demolishing his ephemeral joy with a reminder of yesterday’s transgressions.

The game proceeded for the next hour (or five minutes, it was difficult to tell). Through careful observation and keen insight, Nick picked up on the rules and limitations of Mageball. Here in the Fields, everyone seemed happy. Students from different dorms got along well, even though they knew they’d be playing against each other, dorm versus dorm, later in the year, following a month or so of these practices. Delrisa elongated her arm during one spectacular pitch, completing the delivery by dropping the ball into the catcher’s waiting mitt, sixty-feet six inches from her body. When she tried the same thing a second time, the batter struck her hand.

Outfielders made impossible catches, some performing long gliding dives spreading over twenty or thirty feet, while others leapt just as high into the air; Other Nick transformed his right foot into an enormous glove to make an extravagant shoe-string catch.

During his second at bat in the fifth inning, while being heckled by what sounded (thanks to magical acoustics) like twenty thousand Red Sox spectators in Yankee stadium, Nick decided ‘Screw it’ and swung high at three straight pitches low and inside, striking out. No sense prolonging the psychological agony.

The booing continued, even after Miss Quaffle warned against it.

On seeing that his hecklers continued the barrage—and that with fresh vigor—Nick fixed on a new plan. He would go on the offensive. Maybe that would shut them up. If anything was possible in the Elysium Fields, then he didn’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work.

In his next at bat, when Delrisa fired a beamer straight at his head, Nick barely managed to drop out of the way in time.

Delrisa wound up for the next pitch, delivered. Instantaneously Nick visualized his intent and voiced it. The rabble of the hecklers diminished. All sight narrowed to the trajectory of the ball, fat as a beach ball and ready to be smacked.

The bat made contact—and the world exploded.

A star burst at the encounter where ball met bat, sending out a world-coating spray of transformational energy. Blue astral light blasted across the field. Team hats were blown off and hair was whipped back. The ground trembled, cracked, and finally disintegrated amid tumultuous cries of shock and despair. The entire field, from just outside the batter’s box, to no man’s land in the depths of center field, simply fell away and vanished into a black hole—along with everyone who’d been standing on it.

In the silence that ensued, Nick picked up Severus. “Game’s over, kitty boy.” He gazed into the cat’s dark eyes, rubbed its face from cheek to nose, and spoke the grounding word.

A riot of disgruntled whiners and a gallery of shocked expressions assaulted him on his reentry. Students lay sprawled on the grass. Familiars ran amuck. Of those who were able to speak, the general outcry was not entirely unexpected.

With Severus trailing behind, Nick headed back towards the stairs to the front entrance. He held his head up high, back straight, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Let them say what they will, he could not be punished for this. Technically he’d broken no rules. It wasn’t his fault there wasn’t a ‘don’t destroy the Elysian Fields’ law.

Shrill accusations of ‘Sorcerer!’ bounced harmlessly off of Nick’s back as he marched away.

On the path to Lore class up on the third floor a few hours later, Nick, in a black mood, found himself face to face with the Wen twins. They were consuming a cinnamon bun each. “Would you like some?” Wut asked, scraping off a gob of icing with her index finger and offering it to him.

“No, thank you,” Nick said.

For a few moments he watched them eat. They were always eating, it seemed, sugary foods especially. And yet they were thin as rails. As they smiled up at him, their startling green eyes shimmered with almost supernatural brilliance. “Are you going to Lore?” Wut asked, nibbling on crumbs.

Nick nodded. “Thanks for sticking up for me earlier.”

“You mean the aviary thing?” Hu deduced. She waved this aside. “Oh, we know you didn’t do that.”

“Yeah,” Hu added through a mouthful of sugary sweetness. “We don’t believe that buggery for one second. And even if the rumors are true—”

“It wouldn’t be like you did it on purpose,” Wut finished for her sister.

For the first time all day, the dense cloud of gloom that had been hovering over Nick lifted. At least someone believed in him. Maybe he should ask one of them out. But which one, and how could he ask one sister out without offending the other?

Nick was pondering this very important question when someone body-slammed him into the wall. His face ended up mere inches from the flames of the glowing Wiccan altar candle.

He whipped around. “What the freak, man? What’s your problem?”

“My problem,” Philip Gravened said, “is that I don’t like sorcerers, especially ones that kill my parrot.” As if to emphasize his point, Philip jabbed a finger into Nick’s shoulder.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Bull spit,” Philip shoved him with both hands. “An entire room of familiars don’t just suddenly go toes up. It was sorcery. Admit it.”

“Okay,” Nick said, “I admit . . . it was sorcery.” He paused to permit Philip a respite of satisfaction, and then he continued. “But I was not the one who—”

Philip’s tackle was intercepted by Bruno, who was even larger than his crony.

“What gives?” Philip demanded.

The bully snorted at his crony, then turned to Nick. “You all right?”

Nick nodded. “Maybe you can help your pal get his facts straightened out, huh? I don’t like being accused of sorcery.”

Hopes of replaceing support in Bruno were dashed when the bully crossed his arms over his man-boobs and said, “Maybe you should straighten things out. Because I’m starting to think it might not be too safe for Sylvester in our bunk.”

The boy loves his pet more than his folks, Nick thought, not for the first time.

He fed them—and the audience that had accumulated—the same story he’d given Dean Delacort. When he was finished, Nick waited to see how Bruno and Philip would take it.

“What a load of waffle!” Philip burst. “Yo Brun, you believe this crap?”

“He’s got a point,” Bruno said to Philip. “The Dean would know if he was guilty. If Nick was a sorcerer, he wouldn’t still be here.” And he drew Nick away from the crowd, towards Mr. Pitts’ Lore classroom.

“Thanks, for back there,” Nick said as they took their seats.

“You should thank me,” Bruno said. “Your story was crap. Except that part about the Dean. You could probably fool us, but not him. You don’t get to be dean of the Institute without learning how to mind-probe. Shh,” he tapped his lips and grinned. “Our delightful teacher is about to drone on about the Inquisition for the next hour. I don’t want to miss anything.”

A soft whimpering version of a laugh escaped from between Nick’s lips. It was good to know Bruno was—sort of—on his side. Still, it wasn’t long before Mr. Pitts’ monotonous tone sent Nick’s mind wandering back. He kept picturing that morning in the aviary. Seemed ages ago that it had happened, but it was only a little over twenty-four hours in the past.

He trembled to think that spinning that invisibility spell had been easier than imbuing trinkets in Amulets and Talismans. As he wandered the meandering corridors of his mind, Nick began to wonder if every spell in the dark arts was as simply executed.

If they were, it would make his plan of uncovering the past worlds easier.

“Nicholas Hammond!” Mr. Pitts slapped his yard stick against Nick’s desk, rudely thrusting him back into the land of the waking. “What have I told you about sleeping in my class?”

“That it’s not unusual?”

Instead of his letting his head explode, or having steam shoot out of his ears, Mr. Pitts controlled his breathing and leaned down over Nick’s shoulder. In a low, controlled voice, the man said, “Mr. Fukushima is raking leaves outside the labyrinth right now. Go and help him.”

As Nick gathered up his things (pencil and empty notepad, and Magnus de Montfort’s History of Magic Compendium, which was just about the heaviest book in the world) he was forced to endure one last order from Mr. Pitts: “This does not excuse you from your studies. I want three pages on how the actions of the Druids in medieval England aided the witch hunters in tracking down our ancestors. You’ll replace notes and guidelines in Chapter Forty-Eight. And stop sleeping in my class!”

But Nick was already out the door by the time Mr. Pitts had finished his reprimand.

At the landing he paused to perform a quick bit of summoning using the Law of Association. Based on the physical association between him and Other Nick, and on their astral bonding in the Dreaming, he believed they could contact each other through the astral plane without actually projecting.

While trying to focus every last thought on his doppelganger, Nick realized that this might go easier if he had a lock of Other Nick’s hair. Physical items always facilitated this sort of working.

Five minutes later he stood staring down at Fukushima through an arched window on the landing between the second and third floors. “I guess I suck at summoning.”

“Wait, you summoned me?” Other Nick appeared at his shoulder. “I thought I just had a really weird desire to go to Mr. Pitts’ class. But this makes more sense.”

“Only in a school of magic would being summoned by another student make more sense,” Nick quipped as he shook hands with Other Nick. “I was hoping you could rake leaves with Fukushima for me.”

“What?”

Nick explained about his detention.

“I don’t know,” Other Nick scratched his head. “I’m out on a bathroom pass right now. And I probably shouldn’t . . . you know, let you wander the castle. You know, after the aviary?”

“Oh jeez,” Nick groaned. Outside, Fukushima was picking leaves out of his rakes tines. “You think I did it, don’t you?”

“No,” Other Nick defended. “Of course not. It’s just, every time you’re alone bad things seem to happen.”

For a few tense moments neither boy spoke. Then Nick snatched the wooden bathroom pass from his doppelgangers fingers. “For your information, I just wanted to ask Priestess Carnivales for help learning some advanced crystallomancy. It’s something Gra . . . Dean Delacort suggested I study, to help me harness my gifts.”

“Fine,” Other Nick said. “But you owe me. I get to pretend to be you around the Wen twins sometime.”

“Alright,” Nick slapped his mate on the back and watched as Other Nick hopped down the stairs. He waited until he saw his doppelganger shuffle up to Fukushima before moving.

Priestess Carnivales’ classroom was two doors down from Mr. Pitt’s on the third floor. Nick descended the stairs and kept going, on down through the meandering Shaman tunnels, lunging into alcoves whenever some stray student happened by, until he stood facing the enormous wooden doors to the Sanctum Sanctorum.

“Hoo,” Nick breathed in, breathed out, centering his chi. “Here we go.”

The doors eased open with a shove. Nick strolled into the sacred place of meditation and study—and instantly regretted doing so.

Amberly Lamborghini reclined in a chair beside the niche Nick had been hoping to access. When he entered, she looked up. “Hello Hammond.” She spoke in hushed tones, as of paranoid librarians the world over, though she was not the librarian. “Dean Delacort warned us you might try coming back for . . .” she gestured back at the alcove through which the tunnels to the Grimorium could be found “you know. So he’s posted us down here in shifts.”

Nick managed to shake off his shock after a few seconds and offered a shrug. “I was just looking for . . . The Institute, a History and maybe Bailey’s Annotated Records of the Preserve?”

“Really?” Lamborghini said, one arm slung over the back of the chair, hands folded.

“Yeah,” Nick assured her. “I figured I got all this time on my hands since I’m confined to my dorm during off hours, that I might as well study up on the past. I might learn something, you know?”

“Uh-huh.” Lamborghini took a long sip from her coffee mug, and then stood. “Okay,” she grabbed Nick by the elbow and began to force him out of the Sanctum. “Let’s go.”

“What are you doing? I’m serious about those books, you know.”

She ignored him. It wasn’t until they were out of the Shaman tunnels and back up to the ground floor that Lamborghini released Nick. In the atrium she said, “You should be in Lore right now. How did you get out?”

“Mr. Pitts caught me snoozing,” Nick confessed. “Sent me to rake leaves with Fukushima.”

“And why aren’t you with the groundskeeper right now?”

Ah, but I am, Nick barely managed to keep from saying. “I just got this urge to study up on the Adirondack Preserve. So I headed—”

Long slender fingers ending in red-polished pointed nails latched onto his elbow again. “Fine, lie. You can stay in your dorm the rest of the period.” She jerked him forward to get him moving again, and then released Nick. From that point on Lamborghini followed close behind. Within five minutes they arrived at the Dorm Necromancy entrance. Fresh plaster had been applied to the busted door trim, but the claw marks in the floor remained untouched.

“Go on,” Lamborghini stood with arms crossed over her bosom.

On Nick’s way into the common room, the mythic stirred. “Shut up, gargoyle.”

On the steps going up into the boys’ bunk, a metal hand shot out and Nick ducked to avoid it. The gauntlet remained outstretched, palm facing up, as though waiting for something.

Hesitantly, Nick gave the suit of armor some skin. It responded by raising its arm.

Nick gave it a high five, just barely managing to reach its palm with a small jump.

The suit of armor then turned its back on him, placing its gauntlet beside its tasset, or metal skirt. Quickly this time, getting into it, Nick slapped it. “Now you do me,” he said, sticking his hand out, palm up. The suit of armor gave him a stinging slap. As he continued on, Nick mused that the statuary in the school possessed better personalities than its teachers.

In his bunk, feeling nominally better, Nick opened up Gardner’s Book of Shadows, a Wiccan manual on rituals. Who knew? He might learn something from his punishment.