An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 2

Ellory had worked a double shift the day the letter arrived. She might not have opened it at all if it hadn’t been for Aunt Carol, who was the kind of gossip who sat in her lawn chair on the fire escape to watch the neighbors in the Hummer-sized cement block her building called a courtyard. Ellory had spent four hours at Midtown Comics being talked down to about Marvel by people who considered “Do you like Blade ?” to be a form of flirting—the same people who sputtered when she fixed them with a dead-eyed stare and a “Why? Because I’m Black?” Then she’d spent another four hours at the Queens Public Library at Astoria, reshelving books from the endless supply of carts and trying not to get caught reading between the stacks.

Most of the mail that she got were bills or advertisements—for government candidates, colleges she couldn’t afford to attend, and preapproved credit cards—and she kept them in a chaotic pile on her night table until she was in the mood to open them all at once. But when she got home that day, Carol was in the kitchen, sitting in front of a battlefield of torn envelopes and crumpled letters. The holiday popcorn tin they’d repurposed into a piggy bank was open in the center of the table, and Carol was carefully counting out money for each bill: Rent. Electricity. Wi-Fi. Hospital. She would take an envelope of cash to the bank to deposit into her savings account, then cut checks by the end of each month. It was the only way she could guarantee she wouldn’t waste it all in a debit card swipe and end up short.

As soon as Ellory stepped into the kitchen, her shoes neatly discarded by the door and her jacket tossed over the half-empty barrel wedged into their narrow hallway, Aunt Carol looked up at her with a grin. “You got an envelope. A thick one.”

“And it didn’t fall open when you left it on the shelf over the kettle?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Carol sniffed. “But no, it didn’t.”

Ellory was tossed a brown envelope—as thick as described—that was still damp from the steam of the kettle. The return address was a sticker with an unfamiliar logo, the letters W and U in ink-black sans serif with forest-green ivy curled around the letters. Beneath, a scroll-like banner read, FOUNDED IN 1954. Her name was written neatly in the direct center of the envelope, ELLORY JESSICA MORGAN, as if they’d wanted to make sure there was no mistake about which Ellory Morgan they were writing to. Her aunt’s eyes bored into her forehead as Ellory sank down in the chair across from hers and fiddled with the seal.

Dear Miss Morgan,

We are reaching out to invite you to a four-year academic opportunity at Warren University in Hartford, Connecticut. Please find all informational materials enclosed.

As your academic records are three years old, we ask only that you sit for our free attendance exam at one of these hopefully convenient times. Should you pass, tuition, room, and board will be fully covered by the Godwin Scholarship in the amount of…

When she saw the numbers listed across from what that money would be covering, her hands started to shake. She read the letter twice before she managed to release her death grip on the paper and hand it over to Carol. She hadn’t even applied to Warren University in her hopeful initial round, three years prior. Columbia and Cornell were in New York, Princeton closer, in New Jersey; those had been her reach schools, and she’d lost her place in Princeton after her deferral year.

Since then, each time she brought up the idea of going to community college, Aunt Carol looked like Ellory had slapped her.

“You want me to tell your parents that they entrusted you to my care so you could end up at a community college ?” she’d said, her hand over her heart like a scandalized Puritan. Ellory’s well-worn arguments that there was nothing wrong with community college, that it would give her the same degree with less debt, and that Carol’s reaction was both elitist and classist had just made her aunt even more outraged. Community college was, in Carol’s eyes, a curse capable of staining their bloodline for generations to come.

Ellory googled WARREN UNIVERSITY while Carol read the letter, soon landing on the Wikipedia page. As she’d known, it was an Ivy League, a member of the Ancient Nine, the last added and the last built. The list of notable alumni included ten congressmen, six diplomats, twenty actors, and one serial killer serving a life sentence in CSP-C. Their admissions process involved a terrifyingly high rejection rate, fleshed out by active outreach to marginalized and underrepresented communities and a robust financial aid program. And they wanted her. Not to apply, but to attend on a full-ride scholarship.

When she met Carol’s gaze over her phone, she saw her own awe reflected at her. But there had also been a dawning hope, a fire not yet lit but flecked with embers. If this was real…if this was legal…it would be her second chance. Her almost-lost shot.

Her new beginning.

Bullshit. In three weeks, Ellory had made an enemy or two, cried in a third-floor bathroom after a lecture so confusing that it had made her question her grasp of the English language, and gotten troublingly addicted to the particular swirl of syrups and espresso in a Powers That Bean iced vanilla latte. Now she was hyperventilating in a hungry tempest, her sense of time and direction slipping through her shaking fingers.

If this was her beginning, she was going to hate the ending.

The rain formed a cage that blocked light and sound from the streets around her. Ellory fished her phone out of her wet bag to send Tai a text and let her GPS guide her back to her residence hall, only to find that it had no service—a feat she had not believed possible in the United States in this day and age. Two minutes later, when the tiny text remained the same, she turned around. A blue umbrella, its long rib jutting away from the canopy like an axe handle, skidded across the path and disappeared into the trees. Rain dripped from her shrunken hair and down the sides of her face. She shivered, her hoodie and T-shirt clinging to her clammy skin.

Wind giggled through the leaves. A strange scent hit her nose, making it wrinkle…and it wasn’t petrichor like she expected. She smelled inert dust and rotting wood and stale air, as if she were not outside but inside a tomb long abandoned.

Ellory stepped forward but didn’t sink into the gray water below the sidewalk. The ground beneath her fumbling feet was even, steady. She had just been on the side of the road, but she looked now and found nothing but gray-brown concrete spread forward and back, trees to one side and a darkness too complete to pierce on the other. The giggling returned, high and clear, as if to prove that this was nothing as mundane as the wind. Beneath that, she could make out a low metallic trill, like the vibration of a buzzing bee.

Hallucinations, delusions, paralogia…the sudden onset of all that seemed more likely than the testimony of her own senses. And yet…

And yet this had happened to her before.

As a child, her parents had let her go to the corner shop alone, money in hand for candy and scratch tickets. Halfway there, she got lost despite the shop being straight downhill. Her landmarks—the lavender house with the two dogs in the front yard, the cactus attempting to grow into a worn telephone pole, the stop sign that someone had drawn a curse word on—disappeared, leaving her on an endless dim street framed by thick foliage and twisted tree trunks. A doctor bird wove through the leaves above her, iridescent green wings a blur on either side of its round body, its long black tails stabbing the air like needles.

Just when Ellory was ready to sit on the sidewalk and wait to be found, she heard a familiar voice. “Mi closed,” said Miss Claudette, the elderly woman who owned it. She stood at the end of the lane, right in the center of the road, her hair wrapped in a bronze scarf. Although it was a hot, windless day, the trees seemed to inch toward Claudette, waving back and forth in time with Ellory’s breathing, closer and closer every time. Even the doctor bird had disappeared. “Gwaan home.”

“Zeen.” But her stomach twisted with the sense that something was off . “Yuh good, miss?”

“Mi seh yuh fi gwaan home,” Miss Claudette repeated, turning away.

Ellory went home. She stepped through the door and right into her panicked parents’ arms, confused but delighted by the attention. Only later did she find out that the corner shop had caught fire shortly after she’d left.

Only later did she find out that Miss Claudette had been inside.

When she told her parents that she’d seen the old woman, even spoken to her, they had said the same thing she told herself now: Hallucinations, delusions, paralogia. Ellory learned to rationalize and ignore those moments when the world seemed to stretch beyond the boundaries of what was real, into a liminal space where she could see a dead woman in the street or hear phantom giggles on the wind. Eventually, they’d gotten fewer and further between.

So why was it happening again now?

Her hands tightened around her bag, pressed it to her chest. Her heart rattled around her chest cavity. Her cold limbs dripped colder water down her skin and over her ruined umbrella. She pressed her eyes shut. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real . Maybe she’d fallen asleep in the library. Maybe she’d slipped on a puddle in the courtyard and was unconscious on the stones where Hudson Graves no doubt would have left her. Maybe—

She peeked through her damp lashes. Her eyes flew open.

She…she knew this place.

Ellory was standing in the same tree-lined area, in the same storm that had so disoriented her, in the same darkness that had breathed and breathed around her, but she knew this place. Without a thought, her feet strolled confidently across the road, took a left, and kept going. She didn’t check her phone again. She didn’t need to. This strange déjà vu made connections snap into place like a rubber band.

She knew that if she walked five more blocks and took another left, she would come across Moneta Hall, shining bright against the gloomy evening. She knew that, if she went right instead, she would eventually hit Bancroft Field, where the soccer and lacrosse teams performed some kind of athletic alchemy that kept the school board happy. And she knew that this, right here, was Riverside Campus, where the neoclassical architecture of every carefully crafted academic building yielded to the parts of nature that weren’t cleared to build Warren University, beginning with a footbridge that led across a pond and into a wooded area popular among on- and off-campus hikers. She knew that because she’d been here before; of course she had; this was where they’d—

No memory rushed to explain the sudden familiarity. Not even when she made the turn and realized she was correct.

There was Moneta, a ten-story building with large white pillars, a sloping, temple-style roof, and pale aloe-green walls that looked more like seaweed in the darkness. Her keys were so slick that she had to swipe the fob twice before the keypad let her drip inside. Her roommate, Stasie O’Connor (of the Irish royal house of O’Conor, at least according to the crest on the wall above her bed), was present but alone, watching a video while painting her toenails. Her only comment on Ellory’s appearance was curt: “Keep all that on your side of the room.”

But even after Ellory dumped her possessions on the windowsill to dry despite Stasie’s judgmental nose crinkle, even after Ellory took such a long time in the communal bathrooms that someone knocked on the wall beside her curtain to make sure she was alive, even after she detangled and twisted her freshly washed hair over the course of an entire comedy special before tucking it under a satin bonnet, she still felt a chill. Her ears rang with adrenaline, and behind her eyes, she could see those trees that clawed at the sky in a darkness too all-encompassing to have happened anywhere on Warren’s campus.

You were seeing things. It’s a typical panic response. Once you calmed down, your brain reminded you of what you’d forgotten.

Stale air and rotting wood.

High-pitched giggling and low metallic trills.

Rainwater so cold, it froze her down to her marrow.

You were seeing things. Sometimes, you see things. That doesn’t make them real.

It took Ellory a long time to fall asleep.

***

It rained for three more days before the sun got out on parole. From the moment Ellory tied her apron on to the moment she yawned back to her dorm, Powers That Bean filled with students who bought a single chocolate croissant and then parked at a table by an outlet for six hours to stay out of the rain. Others loitered by the doors and walls, pretending to be waiting for friends until the manager forced them out into the deluge. Mopping the floor became an exercise in frustration as new packs of customers tracked mud and grass inside, and though they grimaced and whispered, “Sorry,” when they saw the mess, not a single one left a tip.

Iced coffee sales remained steady. There was no weather that iced coffee didn’t improve.

After her shift, Ellory took a walk in the restored sunlight, her drink in hand. The soccer team had claimed Bancroft, which she knew only because Hudson Graves was among them. Ellory refused to do anything more physically strenuous than squeeze into a packed train car on the N during rush hour, so athletes were an alien breed to her. They ran the length of the field (why?) back and forth, again and again ( why? ), shouting insults and encouragement to one another:

“Pick up the pace, Mendoza!”

“Looking sharp, Novak!”

“Wilson, you’re falling behind!”

“Go! Go! Go! Go!”

No one jeered Hudson Graves, who was ahead of the pack of sweaty, grunting people by at least three yards. His long brown legs ate up the field with every stride, his moss-green jersey clinging to his muscled body. When she didn’t actually have to talk to him, Ellory could admit to herself that Hudson Graves had a certain allure. He was clearly in his element, and that confidence translated to his elegant gait and focused mien. If he was even panting, she couldn’t tell from here.

She needed to keep walking before he saw her and mistook her interest for something else. But she was rooted to the spot.

Luckily, Ellory wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take her eyes off him. On the other side of the field was a small crowd, also wearing jerseys, staring at Hudson like he was a two-for-one sale. Ellory had heard that the football and basketball teams were forever trying to recruit him, but this was the first time she’d actually seen their starving gazes in person. Maybe they meant it to be flattering, but it was dehumanizing, these covetous sentries longing for what they had been told repeatedly they could not have.

Ellory had been to Bancroft twice since she’d moved to campus. Tai liked to watch the soccer team play, especially in the humid summer days when the players would wrap their practice jerseys around their waists and let the sun turn their sweaty torsos gold and pink. But that was mostly because Tai’s partner, Cody, had decided to play for the men’s team. Cody waved when they saw Ellory, and Ellory waved back, admiring their new haircut: shaved on one side, flowing down to their chin in a wave of amber on the other. They were near the middle of the group, keeping pace but not showing off like Hudson Graves, even though, at well over six feet, they could have. Ellory knew a bit of what that was like—that innate fear of calling attention to herself in a place where it was safer to blend in.

“Hey, Morgan.”

Oh no.

“Hello, Graves,” she said evenly as he jogged toward her. “Keep a distance, please. I can smell you from here.”

Behind him, Cody slowed, their eyebrows two thick lines of concern. Even if she weren’t complaining to Tai all the time, Ellory’s war with Hudson was infamous enough that Cody was probably considering whether to intervene.

Hudson stopped a few feet away, close enough that she could see the perspiration collecting at his temples but far enough that at least four people could link arms between them. She couldn’t actually smell him, but she was sure he stank with the fetor of athleticism. His eyes were mockingbird black. His skin was golden brown in the caress of sunlight. His rose-pink lips held the raw ingredients of a smirk without quite finishing the recipe.

A bead of sweat traced the curve of his cheek, dripped onto his sloped shoulder, and disappeared into the fabric of his jersey. Ellory swallowed sharply.

Hudson tilted his head. “Did you hear there’s going to be a pop quiz in con. law tomorrow?”

“What?” Surprise yanked the words from her dry throat. “How would you even know about a pop quiz?”

“ I talked to the TA, but it’s all over class.”

Ellory bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying something she’d regret. After the first day, she’d been afraid to talk to the rest of her classmates in case they were all members of Hudson’s fan club. Her classmates seemed equally content to never speak to her. Occasionally, she checked the student message boards where they submitted assignments, but there was no casual chatter on there. Just CAN I GET AN EXTENSION and WHEN IS THIS DUE AGAIN and DOES ANYONE HAVE THE NOTES ON GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT?

“Why are you even telling me this?” she asked around a thoughtful sip of her iced vanilla latte. Today she’d tried the oat milk that everyone was going wild for; so far, she was unimpressed. “If I fail, you have another opportunity to gloat.”

Hudson snorted. “I don’t want to be better than you because I have information you don’t, Morgan. I want to be better than you because I’m obviously better than you.” He began to jog backward, and—annoyingly—he didn’t even trip. “Anyway, you have the information now. Study or don’t study. It’s up to you.”

Ellory hated that he was right, that their petty academic rivalry meant nothing if they weren’t on an even playing field. Hated that he knew that, believed that, which made her grudgingly respect him. She also hated the way his black shorts clung to his powerful thighs, and yes, she’d definitely been standing here for too long.

“Think fast, Graves!”

He thought fast, twisting out of the way of the soccer ball that had been hurled at him. It zipped toward Ellory’s head, and she locked up like a deer in headlights, too surprised to move. Move, damn it. MOVE.

A blinding flash swallowed the world.

Her skin went hot and then cold and then hot again, and sound swung back in like a punch: The shouting team running across the field toward her. The distant babble of the Connecticut River indifferently flowing southward to the Long Island Sound. The wind rustling every leaf on the surrounding trees until they loosened and joined the rising piles on the quad. Hudson was in the same place, but everyone else stopped abruptly to murmur among themselves, their gazes on her feet. Ellory glanced down, expecting to see her ankle boots and a pile of shit between them.

Instead, she was standing in a circle of dead soil.

The path that looped around Bancroft Field was a dirt trail, dark brown and packed tight. Now it was the color of wet sand, dusty and cracked. Fissures spider-webbed out from beneath her feet and stretched toward the grass before stopping mere inches from touching the vibrant green. It was like a target of ruptures, and she was the bull’s-eye.

Between the field and the cracks, the soccer ball rested. She hadn’t even seen it drop.

“Are you all right, Ellory?” called Cody. Like everyone else, they stared at the soccer ball like it was possessed. “I thought—well, I’m glad it didn’t hit you.”

“Autumn winds,” Ellory heard herself say, and it was automatic, easy, like she’d said the words a thousand times before. Her hand wanted to fly to her throat, as if that would help her figure out whose script she was performing, but she still couldn’t move . Only her lips remembered how, her mind steady in the certainty that this wasn’t the first time she’d made these excuses. “Weird.”

One of the team members—Novak, perhaps—chuckled. “One time, I swear the wind yanked my backpack halfway across the quad while I was napping.”

“Oh, please,” said another. “You’re so fucking scrawny, you probably got dragged away from it.”

“Who are you calling scrawny ?”

The two began to play wrestle, and whatever spell had fallen over them all was broken. Someone, the captain probably, shouted at everyone to get back to their drills. Cody fetched the ball with the kind of friendly wave that promised a full interrogation later. The team jogged away to launch into their next round of exercises, leaving Hudson and Ellory behind in a ringing silence.

There was a wrinkle between Hudson’s eyebrows, but even after he stopped staring at the ground, his gaze settled anywhere but on her. “I’m glad you’re all right, Morgan,” he said to a point over her shoulder. “Be careful when—just. Be careful.”

Then he was gone before she could question his sudden and unprecedented concern for her welfare. Ellory stepped gingerly from the center of the blast radius, half expecting the cracks in the dirt to follow her. Instead, they remained as a monument to where she’d once stood, a serrated circle of death.

This time, she wasn’t seeing things. Everyone else had seen it, too.

Ellory shuddered. What was going on ?

The more distance she put between herself and that moment, the more her thoughts raced. She took a long sip of her watered-down latte in the fruitless hope of a brain freeze that would calm her mind.

For a moment, it had seemed like she had…

But that would be ridiculous. It was more likely that the wind had stopped that ball in its tracks. As for the path…she’d probably been too distracted to notice that dead patch. No one else had mentioned its sudden appearance, so maybe it had already been there. That was plausible. And plausible was better than the alternative. The alternative made it sound like she was hallucinating again, and Warren was the kind of place that would pull the Godwin Scholarship if she started claiming she could…what, stop a speeding soccer ball with her mind and crack the very earth itself in the process? Ridiculous.

But for a moment, it had seemed like…

No. Ridiculous .

Ellory threw her empty cup in the recycling bin, tossing her uneasiness out with it.