“Come on, Kacie. Wake up. Please come out of this. Please don’t make me have to tell anyone what happened. Come on. Wake up.”

  I shook my head a little and pulled away. “I’m awake, I’m awake,” I mumbled. “What happened?”

  “It was a Lusus Naturae attack.” She sat back on her heels. “They sent another agent out after you.”

  “Agent?” I pushed my elbows against the carpet flooring, pushing against it to struggle to a sitting position. “Why would the Lusus Naturae send an agent after me?”

  Ms. Hush bit her bottom lip with even, white teeth. “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

  “Not supposed to tell me?” That shook away some of the remaining fog out of my head. “Why would you be expected to keep something like that secret from me? No. Don’t answer that. Who expects you to keep that a secret from me?”

  Ms. Hush stood up and brushed her long black skirt free of dust. She held out one hand and I scrambled to my feet, too, grateful for the assistance.

  “Normally, I would simply tell you,” she said, gesturing me to one of the two chairs in front of her desk and cast a keen glance in my direction. “But unlike most people, I think you’d remember.” She moved over to a separate, wingback chair in one corner of her office, dropping gracefully into it and crossing her legs. She was tall and willowy, and I understood why they called people who looked like her “wraithlike.”

  “I probably would,” I agreed. “But I want to know anyway.” I glanced around her office. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that Ms. Hush even had an office, though logically, I knew all the instructors did. They also had housing on campus. But I had no idea where most of their apartments were, either.

  Ms. Hush’s office was simple and elegant. Deep Oriental rugs on the floor, tall bookcases with books and knickknacks, and a lamp with a burgundy shade casting the entire room in a warm golden glow.

  She was peering at me intently. “You’ve been poking at your block,” she said, her soft voice suddenly more piercing than usual.

  “You know about that?”

  “I do.” She moved her head back and forth as if she could literally see through my eyes to the cloud in my head. “Now that you’ve disturbed it...” Her voice trailed off.

  “What? Now that I’ve disturbed it, what?”

  “I think we should try to eliminate it.” With a nod, she stood and moved toward her shelves. She began pulling small jars off the shelf. “If you’re willing.”

  “Oh, I’m willing. What do I need to do to help?”

  I had never seen Ms. Hush so directed—at least, not that I remembered. She generally seemed a little vague, like someone who floated through life. Now, though, she moved with serious purpose.

  She opened one jar and began sprinkling what looked like rock salt in a large circle on the floor. “Move inside the circle,” she instructed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter 4

  I sat down in the center of the salt circle, while Ms. Hush walked around it, chanting. She closed the circle with the salt—something that we had talked about a little in magics class but hadn’t actually gotten to yet since we weren’t doing formal spellcasting yet.

  Mr. Meriwether did something similar earlier,” I said. “I mean, he didn’t have a salt circle or chant anything. But he did go poking around—he got me to go poking around, anyway.” I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t seem to shut up.

  “It sounds like Mr. Meriwether wasn’t fully prepared to work with you,” Ms. Hush said. “Maybe more like he was simply exploring?”

  “Yeah. He said he just wanted me to look at it. Maybe touch it. I think he was trying to figure out what kind of block it was.”

  The wraith shook her head. “Oh, I know what kind of block it is. It’s one that doesn’t take well to being poked. Did it try to cover you?”

  I nodded vigorously, then put my hand up to my head, hit with another round of dizziness and nausea. “What was it that jumped me outside? What attacked me?”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “No. Should I?”

  Ms. Hush frowned. “You’ve had enough exposure to me—and you remember comparatively a lot from encounter to encounter with me—so it seems like you would have some memory of any wraith.”

  Another wraith? No wonder I’d felt dizzy and sick when I tried to look at it. I probably had looked at it but couldn’t remember.

  “Is that why you’re here? Because the Lusus Naturae are sending a wraith?”

  Ms. Hush shrugged. “It’s not not a reason for me to be here,” she said.

  Great. Whatever that meant.

  “Okay,” Ms. Hush said. She stopped walking around the outer perimeter of the circle and instead stood at the north side of the room, just outside the line of salt.

  I have read enough ahead in the magics textbook to know that when she opened with a summoning of the cardinal directions and all the elements, this was going to be a very formal invocation indeed.

  Nonetheless, her instructions to me started out almost exactly the same as Mr. Meriwether’s had.

  “Go into your mind and seek the source of the intrusion.”

  I was more tentative this time, less likely to bounce up to something and introduce myself, especially now that I knew there really was something foreign in my brain. Or at least in my mind.

  “Find the pathway back to the cloud you saw.”

  I retraced my path from earlier, my mental footsteps slowing as I grew closer to the black cloud that overshadowed me. When I could see it, I called out to Ms. Hush. “It’s here.”

  “Tell me what Mr. Meriwether had you do,” she said.

  “He told me to see if I could go around it, then when I couldn’t, he told me to try to touch it.”

  “Well, don’t do either of those things,” she said, half mockingly.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I replied. I stared at the ball of shadows that had coated me before. It looked evil.

  Ms. Hush began chanting, and suddenly, she was standing next to me, inside my mind.

  “How did you get here?” I demanded, but she didn’t answer. She was too busy examining the malevolent cloud hanging in front of us.

  In my mind, the wraith glowed with a purple light—something akin to the hot pink I’d seen along my path, but more subdued. Her silver-white hair was streaked with it, her entire form outlined by it.

  Ms. Hush’s mere presence changed the entire landscape of my mind, I realized. Whereas before, it had been a kind of garden outlined in neon-pink streaks, we now stood in what looked like a city alleyway, tall brick buildings rising up to either side of us and the cloud blocking our way forward.

  Gently, with one finger, she tapped the cloud.

  As it had with me, it quickly coated her finger.

  Unlike me, though, Ms. Hush was able to get rid of the stuff. She simply held up her forefinger, murmured a word—a particular spell, I assumed—and blew on her finger. The black coating cracked and blew away like powder.

  “Wow,” I muttered. “That’s impressive.”

  She turned and smiled at me, and I realized it was the first time I’d really gotten the full effect of that smile.

  She was beautiful.

  I mean, I’d known she was pretty—it was easy enough to tell that. But the wraith effect meant that I didn’t remember from time to time exactly what she looked like.

  Her features were delicate, her eyes enormous and fringed in black and silver eyelashes. If she’d been human, she could have been a supermodel.

  As it was, when the humans saw her, they forgot her instantly.

  There’s a good chance I’ll forget how stunning she is as soon as we’re done here, I realized.

  Then she began removing the evil cloud from my mind, and I forgot to think about anything other than the agony I felt.

  She started slowly, but the pain built up faster than I could ever have anticipated. It was like the migraines I had suffered over the years had all ganged up together and attacked me at once.

  My vision split in two, then split again, and again, until it was like I was staring at the world through a kaleidoscope of mirrored balls spinning and whirling.

  In the dream-vision of my mind, I fell to the ground—not the garden-ground of my images, but the hard asphalt of the mindscape Ms. Hush had brought with her. Unable to catch myself, I slammed my head against it, stars exploding in my vision and leaving me sick and dizzy.

  The stars faded out to blood-red splotches that joined the whirling blacks and whites, until, I realized, all I could see were the school colors twirling through my vision: black and white and burgundy.

  That’s when the pain hit.

  It began as a throbbing sound pounding against my temple, a hammer of noise beating insistently at my head. It moved from side to side, bringing tears to my eyes, leaving me vomiting on the asphalt.

  But what I threw up wasn’t the contents of my stomach. It was the black cloud itself, moving in and through me, coming out of my mouth in long ribbons of evil, streaming out of my nose, even pushing its way out the corners of my eyes.

  And the more I vomited, the more the world around me resolved itself. The black and white kaleidoscoping images became a white wall and dark shadows. The hard asphalt scraping against my palms swirled down to become the fibers of the rug in Ms. Hush’s office, the burgundy splotches in my vision the flowers in the rug’s design. The pounding noise moving from side to side faded into Ms. Hush’s soft voice chanting gently as she circled around me.

  And the giant black cloud that had blocked my mind and tormented my body for more than four long years coalesced into a puddle on the rug, a tar-like substance that continued to contract as Ms. Hush chanted her magic spell, until it solidified into a wriggling slug.

  Ms. Hush quit speaking and leaned over, plucking it up on the rug with her thumb and forefinger. Then she opened her door and dropped on the marble flooring in the hall.

  Holding her hands up as if to avoid touching anything else at all, she delicately lifted one pointed black boot, and using only the ball of her foot, stomped on the slug, leaving a smear of black and red on the floor.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting,” she said with a shudder as she shut the door, grabbed a handful of tissues from a box on her desk, and sat down in her chair to scrub at the sole of her boot.

  Chapter 5

  I pushed back and sat on my heels, moving from all fours.

  “How do you feel?” Ms. Hush asked, tossing the tissues in the trash.

  I blinked several times, glancing from side to side and testing my head. I rubbed my forehead and my eyes. “Better, I think.”

  “I should imagine so,” the wraith said. “No one could function at full capacity with that bug in their head.”

  “What was it?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “We don’t really have a good word for it.”

  “Was it a spell? Or a creature?” Had I been carrying a slug in my head for years on end?

  “Both, kind of.”

  Now I was the one shuddering. “And it was inside me?”

  Ms. Hush sighed and turned her hands out. “Partly? What you saw in here—the creature that I smashed—was its manifestation in this dimension. But the thing that was in your mind, blocking you from using your psychic powers, that was its manifestation in another dimension.” Her voice dropped and turned contemplative. “It took a lot of power to hold it there in both realms while it continued to block you.”

  “You still think the Lusus Naturae were the ones doing it?”

  She blinked and looked up at me, as if suddenly remembering that I was there. “Oh, undoubtedly,” she said briskly. “They’re the only ones who could command that kind of power and wield it that effectively for that long.”

  As she turned to her shelves and began replacing the jars she’d taken down earlier, though, she whispered, “I hope.”

  I don’t think she meant for me to hear that.

  I helped her put her office back together, suddenly feeling better than I could remember feeling in ages.

  Maybe since before that thing had been implanted in me.

  “Will I be able to do more magic now?” I asked, handing Ms. Hush the jar of salt she’d used to create the magic circle.

  “Probably. It will depend on your level of ability, of course, but I assume the Lusus Naturae wouldn’t go to such trouble to block just anyone.”

  I frowned. “Does that mean I’ll continue to be a target?”

  Blowing out a long sigh, she dropped down into her chair again. “It’s hard to say.” She waved me to the seat across from her. “Clearly someone in the organization thinks you’re a threat, or they wouldn’t have taken these measures in the first place.”

  “But you don’t know who it was?”

  Her laugh was low and smoky sounding. “No. For all that you hunters tend to think of the Lusus Naturae as some kind of monolithic organization, they are really, at core, a loosely bound group of supernaturals with similar goals. In truth, the hunters are more dangerous than the Lusus Naturae—at least in terms of their organizational ability.”

  That surprised me. “We are?”

  “Yes. You hunters could band together and take out whole swaths of the human population in a matter of hours.”

  “But we wouldn’t want to. Isn’t that the difference?”

  “Perhaps.” She stretched her arms and then stood. “If you’ll excuse me, that spell work was exhausting. I need to call it a day.”

  “Of course.” I thanked her for having removed that spell—or monster, or bug, or whatever it had been—from my brain. And although simple thanks didn’t seem like enough, it was all I knew to give her at the moment. So I said goodbye, awkwardly, I was afraid, and headed back to my dorm room.

  The instant I stepped out of the faculty office building, I realized I had never asked Ms. Hush what had happened to the Lusus Naturae wraith who had attacked me as I’d been leaving Mr. Meriwether’s classroom earlier.

  I was way too busy vomiting up magical slugs to get all the details of the wraith’s demise.

  At least, I hoped it was the wraith’s demise.

  Surely Ms. Hush wouldn’t have simply let him—or her?—go.

  I would have to ask her later. Right now, the sun was dropping below the horizon, and I was suddenly deeply uncomfortable with the idea of walking back to the dorm—on the far side of campus from this building—all by myself.

  I set off at a brisk walk.

  I wish Souji was here.

  I glanced around at the lengthening shadows.

  Kacie?

  The voice saying my name was almost familiar. But not quite.

  “Hello?” I spun around, searching for the source.

  Is that you?

  “Who is that?” I demanded.

  Where are you?

  I sped up, worried that I might be hallucinating.

  No, your shields just suck.

  I jumped and screamed before I realized that the darkness separating itself from a shadow ahead of me was Souji in his panther form, loping toward me.

  He rolled to a stop in front of me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth in a feline grin.

  Hi, there. Nice to actually talk to you at last.

  Chapter 6

  I gave Souji all the details of my un-slugging as we walked back to the dorm. And for the first time in the months that I had been giving him details, he was actually able to respond to me.

  Well. Almost the first time. The first time he was able to respond while he was in his panther form, anyway.

  I heard that, he sent to me.

  “That’s awfully inconvenient,” I said. “I mean, how am I supposed to keep you out of my thoughts?”

  Most of us have been trained to avoid broadcasting our every thought.

  “Yeah, well, most of you didn’t have a magical cloud-slug in your heads keeping you from doing anything productive with your psychic powers.”

  True. Guess you’ll have to talk to Mr. Meriwether about improving your shields.

  “But I’m not scheduled to see him until Monday.”

  He chuffed out a panther laugh. You might want to avoid seeing other people over this weekend, then. You’re pretty much sending out waves of information.

  Oh, great. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start thinking about how hot Souji’s human form was...

  I quickly switched to the multiplication tables.

  Nope. Those weren’t helping.

  Thank goodness Souji was polite enough not to mention it if he’d heard me.

  “This is awful!” I wailed.

  Souji laughed again as we made it to our building. You’ll be fine. Just go spend the weekend studying or something. And let me know if you need anything. Apparently, you can call me pretty easily.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to even think anything. He escorted me all the way to my room.

  “Thanks, Souji,” I said, turning my key in the lock. He nodded and turned to make his way to his own room. “I really appreciate you coming when you heard me calling you.”

  Anytime.

  His mental voice echoed in my mind as he padded away, and I wondered if he really meant that—if he really would come anytime I called.

  Of course. We’re partners.

  “Good night,” I called aloud after him, though it wasn’t really nighttime yet.

  I opened my door and stepped into my room. My roommate Erin was not there. She had probably gone to dinner and then to movie night or to spend time with friends.

  I could still make it to the dining hall for dinner, if I wanted to. But all I really wanted was to lie down in bed with a good book.

  I wasn’t even interested in going to movie night tonight.

  That reminded me—where was my phone? I had been texting Angelica when the wraith jumped me.

  I hadn’t seen it since.

  Maybe Ms. Hush had put it in my backpack? I dug through it once, then twice, then dumped it out on my bed.

  No, my phone was definitely missing.

 

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