An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 16

Ellory walked back to Moneta Hall alone, unenthused by the approach of her morning shift at the Powers That Bean. This early, the campus was vacant, as etiolated as a neglected houseplant—or maybe her world was muted by the lack of sleep. She tossed the dregs of her tea in a nearby trash can and buried her hands in the deep pockets of her overalls. During fall break, it had been a relief that life kept moving on despite her mind bisecting it into a before magic and after magic . Now it grated on her, how normal the university could look. Slowly, the student body would wake and head to class, ignorant of the fact that Warren’s emerald lawns and cobblestone pathways were topographic artifice, pristine lies to blind them to the poisonous powers at work underneath.

Of course, that was hardly new information.

Ellory had done everything right—or thought she had. She prioritized her grades and her extracurriculars above all else. She wrote exemplary essays and filled out convoluted forms. She worked to have enough money for SAT classes and application fees. She tried her luck with every single scholarship and grant she qualified for, no matter how small. It would all add up, after all. On paper, she was the perfect applicant. But she got rejection after rejection—not from the schools but from the financial aid she would have needed to attend.

“You’re a Black immigrant,” Aunt Carol had said from her hospital bed, weak from her latest stroke and still trying to make Ellory feel better. “There’s no number of right things you can do to get the same results in this country. You did your best, Lor. Don’t hate yourself for losing a rigged game.”

Warren University was no different than any other college in that respect: The wealthy bought their way in. The poor begged their way in. Both groups were praised for their admission as if their journeys had been equal. And so did the foul forces underneath remain unseen and unchallenged.

Now they even had magic hidden from the world at large. It was as disturbing as it was infuriating. With every advantage at their fingertips, did they have to hoard magic, too?

Footsteps clomped down the path behind her.

Ellory looked over her shoulder, half expecting to see Hudson fresh from some early-morning detour that had kept him from going home until his first class. But there was no one there. The sound was gone, but all sounds were gone. Dawn birdsong and susurrant wind had been replaced by a stillness so comprehensive that her own heartbeat was muffled. Ellory placed two fingers to her chest, feeling the vibrations of an escalating thadum thaDUM THADUM . Her skin prickled with warning.

And then the footsteps returned, louder and closer than before.

Ellory ran. She ran before she even knew she was running, blinking to find herself three feet farther down the path. Four. Five. The footsteps followed— clomp, clomp, clomp —as her own feet moved soundlessly over gray stone. On the horizon, the sun bled vermilion and coral, tinting the clouds, trees, and buildings in red orange and pale pink. Ellory imagined her pursuer catching up with her, imagined her own blood painting the quad, the only sign she had ever existed, and her throat closed in terror.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

Her lungs burned.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

She ran faster.

Clompclompclomp.

Moneta Hall appeared in the distance as her energy flagged. Unwillingly, she thought of Hudson Graves sprinting across the soccer field, barely winded. She was sweating like a gravedigger in a zombie apocalypse, unable to sustain this momentum for much longer. If she could reach the door… But her student ID was somewhere in her bag, and the footsteps were closer and louder, louder and closer, and she was alone, so no one would hear her if she—

Ellory jolted backward as strong hands grabbed her dangling overall strap. The tear of fabric cracked the silence, and other sounds immediately rushed in: Her wheezing breaths. Her cry of pain as her spine hit the pavement. Her bag rattling across the ground, hurling her books into the grass.

A shadow hovered over her, features obscured by the sunlight they blocked. The same hands that had torn her clothes now wrapped around her throat, silencing her scream. She clawed at their wrists, but the grip didn’t loosen. Black dots gathered at the edges of her vision as she contorted her body, trying to dislodge this person from their perch. Their knees shifted until they pinned her hips to the ground. Their thumbs dug into her windpipe. Ellory’s lungs howled for air. Her limbs sighed their defeat, getting weaker and weaker.

“We will warn you only once, Ellory Morgan,” said an androgynous voice. As Ellory gazed upward, she realized it was not that the person’s features were obscured—it was that they had no features at all, their face a silkworm-white mask with deep divots where their eyes, nostrils, and mouth should be. “The more you pry, the more likely you are to get hurt.”

Ellory’s hands hit the ground. Her eyelids fluttered. Air. I need air. I…need…escape…

In that static darkness, a memory—

“When was the last time you saw sunlight?”

The sudden brightness that slammed through the open curtains blinded her. Her room was dim, and she was hunched over a notebook with every joint throbbing. It could have been hours; it could have been days. All she had to show for it was a half-full notebook and the sneaking suspicion that she was being watched by forces more powerful than she could even imagine. Three alchemical symbols were labeled atop the latest page: a triangle resting atop a cross (sulfur), a circle with a cross coming out of the underside and a half circle resting on top (mercury), and a sun with a line bisecting it (salt).

“I’m so close,” she murmured. The Old Masters had fused too many different mythologies together for their curriculum, but slowly and surely, she was decoding the method to their madness. Her throat was dry. She gratefully accepted the water bottle that was handed to her, draining half of it before she attempted to speak again. “All the pieces are here. I need to put them together before the Old Masters put me in the ground.”

“Ellory…”

She lifted her gaze from the lined paper to his lined face. They were the same age, but there were bags beneath his eyes. His frown was so deep, it wrinkled the skin around his mouth. His complexion was wan, as though he were the one who’d spent the last few hours—days?—buried in research. But the thing that drew her attention most was the darkness of his eyes, not purely because of their soil-brown color but because of the shadows that lingered within them. She had seen him angry and aloof. She had seen him happy and hopeful. She had seen him sorrowful and sincere. She had no reference in her mental catalog of his moods to match this one. Her stomach dropped.

“Hudson.” She searched his gaze. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“I—”

He turned to the window, let the golden sun hide his expression. She got to her feet, hungrier for answers than food, and reached for him. Her hand disappeared into the radiance of early afternoon, but before she could touch his skin—

Light erupted between her and her attacker. Their bony knees, their viselike hands, it all disappeared. Ellory sucked in precious oxygen as she rolled onto her side. Her fingers traced the bruises forming on her neck, the raised skin burning hot to the touch. When she searched for the person without a face, however, they were gone.

In their place, the path had been scorched. Gray stones were blackened. Several of them were cracked, revealing flattened dirt and ash beneath.

Ellory swallowed past the pain in her throat. Her heart pounded. No matter where she looked, she could see no sign that there had ever been another person out here with her. And yet she could still hear that nondescript voice hissing down at her as she slowly lost consciousness. She could still see Hudson Graves, his face carrying a secret that his lips refused to tell. She could still feel hands around her neck and soft notebook paper beneath her ink-stained fingers, a confusing swirl of sensations that made it impossible to relax.

It took her a long time to force herself back onto her feet. Moneta Hall watched dispassionately as she approached, her petrified gaze jumping from shadow to shadow. She flinched at a thud like it was a gunshot, only to realize someone had flung open the door to the dormitory to let the first stream of students out onto the grounds. The sun was crowning the trees now, a sunflower yellow that was entirely too cheerful for the darkness she had witnessed.

What was that?

I’m losing my mind.

No , said that stubborn side of her she couldn’t quite ignore. I’m regaining it.

That had been a memory, not madness. Something that her tattoo begged her to remember. Something lost that was now found. She couldn’t keep rationalizing this when she had seen—chased, even—the unexplainable. Her fingers returned to her throat, where the hot skin had already begun to swell into raised bruises. It was all real. This was all real.

But the farther she got from the scene, the more the details of her recovered memory slipped through her fingers like beach sand. She scrambled for her phone to record it all in her Notes app, but she’d forgotten to collect her bag. She paused outside Moneta, torn between returning for it alone and running upstairs even if it meant someone would steal her things. There was a yawning chasm where her memory had been, and all she could recall now was blinding light and—and what?

Magic.

I don’t want to forget.

Ellory raced back the way she’d come, finding her bag and her discarded personal items strewn across the grass. The burnt stones were gone. Birdsong intertwined with the chatter and laughter of students and professors on their way to class. Wind caressed her skin like it was any other autumn day.

By the time she finished typing into her phone, the memory was as dim as the room she could now barely describe. She could read the sentences she’d written, but she couldn’t visualize them, and the more that she tried, the more nauseous she felt. Dread and déjà vu clung to her the longer she stood in this spot, staring at the place on the path where she’d been attacked. Where she’d pulled sunlight from her own mind and wielded it like a shield against—she looked down at her phone screen—the Old Masters.

We will warn you only once.

Her head hurt. She rubbed her arms absently.

The more you pry, the more likely you are to get hurt.

Clutching her bag to her chest, Ellory ran back to Moneta Hall with that threat ringing in her ears.