Officer Marcos stared at her. He had a gap between his front teeth,and when he sucked in air, it made a small whistling sound. “And why would you think that?”
Ellsbeth’s stomach dropped. She would need to try to explain. “I—saw it in a scrying ritual. It’s an arcane mechanicals ritual to—”
“I’m aware what a scrying ritual is, Miss Storer.”
“Okay, well, then. Yeah. I saw her. In a bathtub. You need to reopen this case. I have information that can help! I remember what I saw.”
Agent Marcos plucked the file—was it even afile?—from Ellsbeth’s hands and stood. “I would advise against you giving too much credence to a little magic spell.”
“It’s not a spell. It’s a scrying ritual. And I know what I saw.”
“Maybe you made a mistake,” Marcos said gently. “Arcane stuff is complicated, right? It’s hard even for professionals.”
Ellsbeth could feel her cheeks burning. “I didn’t make a mistake.” She watched as Officer Marcos sighed and stood, smoothing at a pleat in his khakis. “Please,” Ellsbeth said, making her voice as gentle as possible. “There has to be more to her file. Some sort of investigation. Surely the college makes you do more. Aren’t there notes from the officer who found her? Interviews he did with people who knew her? Where did those reports go? If I could just see them myself…”
Officer Marcos was done with her, Ellsbeth understood that very well. His face had closed off; any pity he had felt was replaced with exasperation.
“There are no more files,” he said, his voice filed to a sharp edge.
And Ellsbeth realized something: He was lying.
“Thereare,” she said. “Ofcoursethere are. How could there possibly beone sheet of paperfor the death of a teenage girl? Is it Newlyn? Did they put you up to this? Do they prefer that these things are kept quiet and covered up? I get that maybe a suicide is more palatable than—”
“If you’ll excuse me.” Officer Marcos stood, scratching at the pink spots visible on his scalp, and left Ellsbeth sitting alone with her Styrofoam cup of coffee turning cold and bitter in her hand, her mind already working a thousand new ways she could get the answers she needed. She had returned to the police station a few more times, but she was met with increasingly curt dismissals.
The university had been even less helpful throughout the spring.There were the polite expressions of sympathy, but then Ellsbeth’s emails had been shuttled from the dean of the college to the administrator student coordinator. One day, Ellsbeth waited on hold for an hour before her call was connected to someone who turned out to be the campus therapist specializing in trauma. “I don’tneeda therapist!” Ellsbeth had spat in exasperation when she realized who she was talking with. “I just need someone to say something other than, ‘We’re so sorry for your loss.’ ”
“I understand,” the therapist had said in a tone dripping with condescension. “And I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Their reticence to reopen Bertie’s case was obvious—it had been a tragic suicide, but that was it. There was nothing more to investigate, and she, Ellsbeth, was clearly distraught with grief, attempting to cause problems where there weren’t any. “It’s a common phenomenon when a loved one takes their own life,” the therapist had told her. “There’s the grief, of course, and then sometimes an element of self-blame—Is there something I might have done differently?And then there’s what you seem to be experiencing, which is very, very common. Looking for an external answer even where one doesn’t exist.”
The university wanted to let the past rest. Why couldn’t Ellsbeth?
There were moments in the months since Bertie’s death that Ellsbeth found herself so exhausted by the bureaucratic walls and tormented by her own doubts that the thought of simply accepting what she had been told seemed tantalizingly appealing. Wouldn’t that be easier? Maybe she could convince herself that she had made a mistake in the scrying incantation, or that she hadn’t seen anything terrible at all: The image that played in her nightmares was just her mind playing tricks on her. Maybe she could believe that the pressure had just been too much for Bertie, that Bertie had been lonely, and heartbroken from a bad boyfriend.
But then the vision of the bathtub came back to her, as real in her memory as the moment she had conjured it in the basin. Her little sister, broken and bloody. Ellsbeth hadn’t been mistaken. That image would stay with her until she got the answers she needed.
There was a way to get people to do what you wanted, to make condescending university administrators or bored sheriffs open file cabinets, to tell you the truth, even if they didn’t want to. There wereareas of study within the field of the arcane that were obscure and verboten, ways of controlling people’s bodies and people’s minds. The months since seeing Bertie’s death had changed Ellsbeth, made her hard and angry and on-edge. She spent her days adrenalized, new ideas for formulas and incantations causing her fingertips to twitch.
She was here, at Newlyn, where someone knew the truth. The pieces of her plan were forming day by day. Whether he knew it or not, Professor Rawlins was the key to Ellsbeth getting what she needed.
Rawlins
Standing behind the podium at the dais on the north end of the room, Rawlins endeavored to muster the enthusiasm of his words: “The duty we have is not only to educate the young minds that pass through our classrooms, but to imbue them with the necessary sense of gravitas to become responsible and conscientious practitioners of the arcane mechanicals.”
He glanced out at the sea of faces, lit with a soft amber glow summoned by anIlluminatisritual. Such magic was rarely employed, given that electricity had long since provided a vastly easier alternative, but for symbolic occasions such as this, it offered an attractive display of flattering light with no discernible source.
His colleagues all watched him respectfully but with evident disinterest. Some picked at their salmon; others signaled waiters to refill their wine. At the closest banquet table, he saw Lennox, ignoring his speech and laughing quietly with one of the school’s boosters. Her complacency irritated him, and when his eyes returned to his speech, he found he had momentarily lost his place.
His mind stalled, going blank, and the emptiness was filled, as it always was these days, by Ellsbeth. He thought of seeing her outside before he entered—of how badly she wanted to be the sort of person who would be invited to take a seat in this room…and how disappointed she would be to see the blasé indifference and complacencyon display. As he considered what she would think, Rawlins abandoned his prepared speech entirely.
“Let’s not pretend here, shall we? The study of magic, many would say…is a dying art.” A ripple of surprise coursed through the ballroom at his heresy, and Lennox’s expression darkened. But Rawlins went on, off the cuff. “Our place in the culture is marginalized. The range of what can be accomplished is shrinking. And what is the reason for the decline? In a word:fear.”
Around the room, he heard the rustle of fabric as people sat up in their chairs. Enjoying his power over the crowd, Rawlins let the silence hang for a moment before he continued.
“At some point, the world became fearful of what we could do…and so did we. We internalized their fear. Turned on one another. We’ve witnessed witch hunts in our field, purity tests, all ensuring against any ideas that could be construed asdangerous.But fear drives out curiosity. It does not serve scholarship, much less innovation.”
With the crowd now in his palm, he sought to wrap up his talk on an inspiring note. “Spaces like this colloquium and the universities we all represent—they need to be forums for free thought and exploration. For what is our field…if not the study of what is possible? Thank you.”
