An uncomfortable shiver runs through me at the thought, but I shake it off and set my gaze forward. If they’re watching, let them. I’m determined to give them nothing to see.
Across from me, a girl finishes changing. I offer a polite smile; she flicks me a single glance before turning away, dismissing me, as though she already knows I’m not like the rest of them. I silently change into my uniform. We’re both stripped of individuality now. Just two people dressed in gray.
I hate gray. Almost as much as I hate black.
And yet here I am—voluntarily wrapped in both.
The uniform for all first-year Whittaker students: a graybutton-down shirt, gray pants, and a zippered jacket with a first-year triangle patch. Black socks. Black standard-issue boots. I close the locker with a sharp clang and tuck the key into my back pocket.
At least they let me keep my ring. One small rebellion. The gold bites warm where it presses against my finger, like it remembers the hand that gave it to me. Something twinges in my chest—there and gone, like a string plucked in an empty room. But I’ve long since learned not to look for ghosts.
I touch the stone without thinking, twisting the band, the metal sliding against skin that has always been one step past tan no matter how much sunscreen my mother would try to lather on me.
Never—not in a thousand years—did I think I’d end up here.
I was always taught that magick was dangerous, corrupting, that it no longer had a soul. My father made sure those warnings were etched into me like scripture. Gods, if he knew where I was right now, he’d come back just to drag me away.
* * *
I spentmuch of my life moving between different embassies and classified postings. My father’s work in high-risk negotiations meant we lived like ghosts: untraceable, unrooted, constantly moving through the shadows of power.
Nothing rattled him… except Magicks.
It wasn’t hatred, exactly—it was just that he always said,“When their world begins is when the rest of the world ends.”I never really knew what he meant by that, actually. I used to just think he was paranoid. Now I wonder what he knew that I didn’t.
When I started showing signs of an affinity to water at a young age—ripples that answered my laughter, puddles that moved when I touched them—he crushed it without amoment’s hesitation. Brutally. Like he was fighting a war I couldn’t see.
He told me that trying to draw power would be the death of me. Of us. So I learned to hide it. Ignore it. Bury it so deep I almost believed it was gone.
But magick doesn’t stay buried. It waits—quiet and patient—until the world tilts just enough to wake it.
Sometimes, things happen that change your path irrevocably. Sometimes fate just has a sick sense of humor.
The water knew before I did.
August fifteenth was supposed to be just another Saturday. But it was the kind of day that felt wrong from the moment I opened my eyes—a day where the air tasted like metal and ozone, long before the sun broke over the mountain.
A boating accident on the lake, they said.
Sudden. Quiet in its finality. Loud in every other way.
My father always hated the water—always warned me to stay far, far away from it.“Water remembers,”he used to say, like it was some kind of boogeyman that would rise from the depths and drag me under if I got too close.
So it was cruel, in the worst way, that it was the lake that took him from us.
I was the one who found him—floating face down in the water, his blue shirt spread around him like a warning. The one with the cuff I’d mended just weeks before. The wind was howling—tearing through trees, lashing the water into ribbons in its wake.
I don’t remember entering the lake. Only the shape of him—wrong in all the ways that mattered. Still, in a way nature never is.
My mother saw it all.
Said she knew then. What I was. What I was becoming.
She was the one who told me to apply to Whittaker.
She never said it outright, but I think she was afraid. Afraidof what might happen if I stayed. Afraid of what she saw clawing just beneath my skin. Maybe she thought coming here would help me keep it contained. Or maybe she wanted to finally let the monster inside be free.
Either way—she got what she wanted. Because now I’m here. Dressed in gray and black. Surrounded by Magicks.
