An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 38

Ellory’s legs still couldn’t support her weight, so she could do nothing but crawl forward in a trance. That was her curly hair in its usual high bun, that was her deep brown skin tinted blue by the magic, those were her full lips, her broad nose, her curves wrapped in her favorite green hoodie and blue jeans. She was fast asleep, though occasionally her eyelids would twitch as though she were about to awaken. Every time that happened, another spark of lightning flashed across the globe she was trapped in, and the twitch dissipated into restful sleep.

From her spot on the floor, she could make out the figures in the nearby globes, just as she’d seen them at Colt’s house. Tai slumbered in one, her beautiful face tipped to the side, her lips parted. Cody was in another, curled into the fetal position with their legs pulled up to their chest. Sofia Aston. David Chang Vargas. Ximena Moreno. Imani Khalif. The bright cages continued on beyond what Ellory’s strained eyes could see, holding an untold number of her classmates captive in this underground prison.

But not Hudson. Where were they keeping Hudson?

Ellory turned back to her own body, trembling with dread. She had been here before, seen this before , and she had been terrified then, too. This fear was too ingrained to be new, and she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe ; her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest—

She dragged herself closer,

close enough to reach

out

and

touch.

The room went black.

***

“Wake up.”

Ellory gasped into something like consciousness, but she could tell from her translucent limbs and her crepuscular surroundings that she wasn’t awake. Before this year—before magic—she had always thought of her dreams as gossamer threads of imagination that disappeared in the dawn, nothing to worry about or retain. In the short time since she’d accepted that everything she thought she knew was a dream, she was getting better at grounding herself within them, at separating the real from the fake.

This was not real. She was in that hollow void that seemed to follow her wherever she went, that endless blackness where souls waited to send her a message. And, as always, she wasn’t alone. The Lost Eight circled her, their solemn faces staring down at her with pity.

“Do you see now?” asked Letitia Rose, stepping forward to help Ellory to her feet. “They take us, and then they take from us, until we have nothing and we are nothing. But you’re different. Special.”

“I’m not special,” Ellory whispered. “They took from me, too. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

“You’re not special because of the power you were born with,” said Eugene Kang, a handsome Korean boy with round cheeks, a wide nose, and thick lips. “You’re special because you’re kind . You chose to care about us. To research our stories and restore our voices.”

“You knew that this was bigger than you,” Angel Mclaughlin added. She was a bronze-skinned girl with a septum piercing. “You cared that we were lost. You wanted to find us, and you did.”

Ellory looked from one face to another, and though she should have been scared by where she was and what she had seen, she felt held. Protected. Even with Letitia breaking the chain, there was strength in the circle of ghosts around her, beside her.

“What do I do?” She looked down at her hands, through which she could see a floor that was little but shadows. “I have to stop them, but how?”

“You already know,” said Kristopher Douglas.

“You already have,” said Joel Carroll.

Olivia Holloway touched her shoulder. “For now, stall them. When the time comes, you will have our power to aid you.”

“But first,” said Letitia Rose, “wake up.”

And then she slapped Ellory across the face.

***

Strength returned to her in increments. As soon as she thought her legs could hold her weight, Ellory rolled onto her feet. She was too far from the tower wall to put her back to it, but she wielded the Taser like a sword as she stared down the rooftop. Even if she hadn’t felt like she was being watched, she could see eyes in the tenebrous distance, dozens of them pointed in her direction. There was no safety in these watchful gazes. There was only the knowledge that she was trapped in this dangerous place, with these dangerous people, and she had no idea what the Lost Eight thought she already knew.

“I know about the School for the Unseen Arts,” she said, trying to sound braver than she felt. Comforting herself with the facts she had gathered. “I know that you guys have been killing students of color once they’re no longer of any use to you. And I know you made everyone forget about Hudson except me. Why did you take him? Stop hiding in the shadows, and answer me .”

The orbs began to move, creating a circle of illumination before her. Into that circle stepped various pairs, an elder and a younger, a master and an acolyte, each someone she recognized from her investigation. First came two generations of Arthur O’Connors, so similar in appearance that they could have been clones. Stasie’s father, Chip, had her brown hair and pixie-like features, though he was taller and broader than she was. Her grandfather—the misleadingly named Pop-Pop—had silver hair, a silver mustache, and blue eyes the icy color of a blizzard. Half of her expected Stasie to be with them, smug and sinister, but her roommate didn’t materialize. Perhaps she was too young, or too spoiled, to have merited an invitation to this exclusive club.

Next, Preston Colt, leaning heavily against Gaia Hammond. Then, Boone Priestley, twisting her flashlight in his fingers like it was a baton. Miles Clairborne, grinning with malicious satisfaction at how helpless she looked trying to point the Taser at so many people at once. Nathaniel Graves, Hudson’s father, who cut an even more imposing figure in real life than he had in his portraits.

And beside him—

“Hudson,” she breathed.

He looked at her like she was a stranger, dressed in an olive sweater over a beige button-down, black slacks, and matching boots. His peacoat was open, his hands in its pockets. He was taller than his father by three inches, but next to Nathaniel, he looked smaller. Diminished.

She should have noticed that he wasn’t chained or gripped, wasn’t visibly injured or reaching for her, but the testimony of her eyes was swept away beneath a powerful relief. Hudson was here. He was alive. The tower was full of living batteries and human leeches, but Hudson was here , and together they would figure this out.

“You know,” said Nathaniel Graves, before she could ask what he had let them do to his son. “Every time we find you here, this situation plays out a little differently. After three years, I thought I might be bored, that you would be more trouble than it was worth to contain you, but Hudson was right. Your power is of great value to us.”

“ Us? ” Ellory echoed. She lowered the Taser, feeling foolish as she looked at Hudson for the second time. As the fact that he was standing with them, rather than with her, finally sank in. “What do you mean us ? Hudson, what does he mean us ? Are you—are you one of them ?”

His eyes were empty. “Yes.”

Ellory was trembling again. If she hadn’t been gripping her only weapon, she would have wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t believe you.”

He was like a robot rebooted to factory settings. There was no flicker of emotion on his face, no trace of anything they’d shared over the course of the school year. The warmth. The joy. The trust . She would have thought she had created him, too, but she would never create a version of him that watched her like she was no more interesting than a fly hovering over a too-full trash can. Maybe months ago, but not now. Not anymore. Not after all they’d become to each other.

“Hudson,” she managed, “tell me it’s not true.”

“I can’t.” His jaw ticked. “Ellory, I—”

“You performed commendably, Mister Graves,” said Colt. He steadied himself, waving Gaia away so he could lord over Ellory without assistance. “Don’t you see the beauty of it? The entire world you’ve been living in was catered to take you down the same paths in different ways. You, Miss Morgan, have the strongest wild magic we’ve found in a while. In almost four years, you’ve powered spells so small and so large, it’s like we’re back in a time when magic was everywhere. Our spell needs you to repeat certain actions, to gain certain knowledge, to return to certain places. It reinforces the boundary of the siphon.”

The conversations that had felt familiar. The confrontations that had seemed inevitable. The truth she could never escape, not really, because it was not in her nature to stop searching for it. Ellory hadn’t been making leaps and putting puzzle pieces together to form a whole picture. She had been guided by an invisible hand down a path to the same discoveries, threatened just enough to make her dig her feet in and then baited into standing right where they’d always wanted her to be.

For the hundredth time, she felt like crying. She forced the tears back, refusing to show them any weakness. “My aunt—”

“Thinks you’ve been taking winter and summer classes. Your calls with her have been short, vague. You’ve been more effusive by email. Soon, she’ll be told you’ve gotten a job far away from here.” Artie O’Connor chuckled, his voice like the rasp of a serpent. “Or perhaps we’ll tell her you’ve died. It doesn’t matter, in the end.”

Boone nudged Hudson’s shoulder until he took a step toward her. Ellory raised the Taser again, and Hudson stopped, his face brightening with the arrogance she’d once hated him for. That last, small part of her that doubted he was really a part of this curled up and died at the smirk that crossed his face. Beside his father, he’d been a lifeless puppet, waiting for direction. Standing before her now, he had come alive, and all she saw was a monster.

“You’re not going to hurt me, Morgan,” he drawled.

“Are you sure about that?” Her thumb flicked the button, feeding current between the two points of the Taser. “Come closer, and let’s find out.”

“You’re not going to hurt me, because we’ve been through too much together for that. I’ve seen the way you look at me. I know you’ve begun to remember.” His hand covered her wrist, lowering the Taser until it was back at her side, and she let him because he was her weakness, a vulnerability she could no longer hide. “We were in love, once.”

Ellory bit the inside of her cheek, refusing to give him the satisfaction of confirming that she knew. Their gazes locked, and Ellory could see it then, everything she couldn’t recall but had subconsciously been searching for. The way his eyes softened when he looked at her. The visions of intimacy that had plagued her all year. The way she was drawn to him like a moth to a forest fire, ready to die just to be close to him.

It hurt worse than his betrayal. Seeing him with the Old Masters had stung because she had finally allowed herself to trust him. The painfully slow restoration of her feelings—a love three lifetimes strong—had made her soul cleave in two.

She hated him. She’d missed him.

“Every time we reset your school year,” Hudson whispered, “you always end up here. You always remember.”

His thumb traced her wrist in gentle circles. The dissonance between his tender touch and his cutting words was too much to bear. She looked down at their linked hands, and her body relaxed under the familiar gesture. Every time he did this, a shard from their old life together cut through the fog of her mind, forcing her to focus only on what was true. Her eyes widened with realization.

This was no simple affection. This was a spell. One he’d been casting all year.

But a spell for what?

“I need you”—his voice dropped even lower—“to remember.”

Wake up.

Ellory’s head snapped back with a gasp. Her brain flooded with memories, each slotting into place like they’d always been there. She saw their first meeting in the classroom, a different conversation with the same competitive vibe, the way Hudson followed up on her answer to a question with reasoning that undermined her, the way Ellory followed up on his follow-up by citing an obscure case that proved her point beyond reasonable doubt.

She saw their first kiss at a frat party, half-drunk and wild with desire, a moment that ended with her riding his thigh on the very balcony on which they’d almost kissed in her dreamworld. She saw the awkward aftermath in which they tried to ignore the heat between them only to end up making out in library stacks and empty hallways, hooking up in her dorm room or his.

She saw his tea grow hot in his hands, the first small sign of magic that drew her suspicion, and the investigation that unfurled afterward. The same clues in different places. The same books in different stores. The same realizations in different contexts. She saw herself receive a formal invitation to join the Old Masters, her furtive conversation with Hudson. Ascending the stairs she had just climbed before her world had gone black, Hudson’s name the last thing on her lips.

Her eyes burned with a new wave of unshed tears as she lowered her chin to stare at him. “I remember everything,” she said, lashing the words like a whip. “You knew the whole time. You lied to me and set me up. You basically delivered me to them.”

“Despite all his excellent work, Hudson is not yet a full member of our society. He has a pedestrian weakness for you that we’ve had to stamp out.” Nathaniel Graves placed a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed in a facsimile of parental fondness. Hudson’s eyes briefly closed, and Ellory remembered with a pang how much his father’s good opinion meant to him. How rare it was. He had lied about forgetting his own magic, but he hadn’t lied about that. No matter what happened next, this was killing him. “We wanted you sooner, but there were…concerns about how Hudson was handling things that forced us to pull him out.”

“I still think we should have let Hammond finish her off,” said Chip O’Connor, scowling at her. “Whatever hold she has over the boy is too strong. Let Hammond kill her, and bring Hudson to the lodge for further correction.”

“Seconded,” Gaia said, lifting two fingers like she was at an auction.

Ellory glared at her. “Fuck you, Greer.”

“Who the hell is Greer—”

“It would be a waste ,” Nathaniel Graves shouted over them all. “Her power is too strong. Hudson has come to his senses. He has returned for his graduation. He will put her under himself, and he will not disappoint me like his brother has.”

Behind them, Miles Clairborne snorted. She didn’t know whether the version of him she’d met had been real or invented, but it was clear there was no version of him that cared for Hudson. Boone began to click the flashlight on and off, making dots dance before her eyes.

Through it all, Hudson didn’t let go of her wrist, didn’t stop the steady glide of his fingers against her pulse.

“Incantations aren’t as you see them in the movies,” he said. “You don’t say some special words and watch the magic happen. You have to set an intention, surrender a memory, and from that loss, you have to build. This is my creation.” He tugged the Taser from her grip. “When I’m finished talking, you’ll go back under, and you won’t remember any of this.”

Light.

Dark.

Light.

Dark.

Light.

Remember.

“It will be August, again. Maybe we’ll meet then. Maybe we’ll meet later. But no matter what, you’ll always…end up…here.”

Boone extinguished the flashlight and tucked it into his back pocket, staring at the two of them with an inscrutable expression. Ellory couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. She could only watch as Hudson stepped back, her Taser in his hands, and smiled a smile that didn’t reach his hollow eyes.

“Goodbye, Ellory.”

Light erupted between them. Someone screamed.

And then there was nothing left.