A figure drew near. A shadowy form, just beyond the light of the streetlamp. Female—a tall silhouette, elegantly proportioned, boasting a large but well-cut coat with an enormous fur collar and a cunning hat that fit her regal head just so. She stepped into the pool of light, which gleamed on exquisitely-crafted bleached ringlets framing a hard, beautiful face which, despite the advent of fifteen years, had not changed enough for Nigel to fail to recognize her in an instant.
“Why, Nigel Grimm,” the woman declared in mellifluous tones carefully honed by pure affluence and affectation. “As I live and breathe, is thatreallyyou?”
Nigel stared at this ghost from his past, unable to comprehend what it was he saw.
The last time he’d looked upon that carefully-beautiful face, she was suffering from anaphylactic shock, having just bitten down on an almond pastry unawares. Nigel had been forcing air into her lungs with his mouth and pumping her chest to keep her heart going until the nurse arrived with a shot, which revived the young woman from the brink.
He’d not seen her since. But one doesn’t tend to forget little interludes like that.
Other than this one moment of hyper-intense intimacy, however, their relationship had been made up almost entirely of a young, freshman Nigel admiring the older, beautiful senior from afar, knowing full well he never had a chance with her, not in a million years. In part, because he hadn’t the courage to do much more than breathe in her presence. And even that was touch and go.
But memory of her beauty had haunted him for some years following their one, not-quite erotic encounter on the floor of theScrying 101 classroom. Hers were the kind of features that did not require cosmetics to be beautiful, but which the application of cosmetics transformed into something semi-divine, like the face of a cinema star, ready to be blown up a hundred times its natural size for billboards and screens. Those features, that hair, those exquisite garments, all of them made more sense in the hazy unreality of black-and-white thaumatic film, and didn’t feel quite natural in the realm of flesh and blood and color.
Her lips were red. The same siren red which Nigel vividly remembered from undergrad. He’d gotten that lipstick smeared all over himself on the day he saved her life.
Nigel realized he’d not yet spoken. He simply stood beneath the lamppost, his hands configured in sigils he could not use, his breath puffing in cold, white vapors. He closed his fingers into fists and drew himself up a little straighter. “Calista Quick,” he spoke in tones both dark and unwelcoming. “It’s been a while.”
“It has indeed.” She took another step into the circle of light, which flashed on the jewels set in her velvet-and-fur hat. “And it’s Calista Anguish now.”
Right. Nigel remembered that little piece of information bestowed by Fabian. His brother had said something about Calista Quick’s marriage to some pickled politician and her subsequent rise in thel’mauvas:Ladies of Moral Authority Voice Against the Uncanny Society.
“Thel’mavausare a powerful arm of social action these days,”Fabian had said.“Why, they claim single-handed responsibility for the finding and tattooing of fully half the sorcerous families in Plym.”
It had struck Nigel as strange at the time. The Calista Quick he had known was incredibly talented, and everyone believed she was destined for a stratospheric rise. There were rumors that she had even been invited to join the Nocturnus Institute of Magics immediately post undergrad.
But it was Nigel who went on to Nocturnus instead. While Calista disappeared from sorcerous circles, never even completing her degree at Belfany University.
A chill rippled down Nigel’s spine, settling in his gut. “I’d heard about that,” he acknowledged and lifted a brow, casting a quick glance around the neighborhood of Seething Street. While this was certainly no Bootblack Alley, neither was it a part of the city where one expected to casually bump into politicians’ wives. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, bringing his gaze back to her expertly-painted eyes.
“I could ask you the same thing.” Calista Quick—orAnguish,rather—drew in a step nearer, filling his nostrils with an intoxicating perfume that immediately shot him back to that classroom floor of fifteen years ago. Nigel felt a simultaneous urge to back away quickly and to lean in, to inhale. To let the memories of a bygone era draw him in deeper. “I’d heard that you’d left Plym and moved to Brython. Have you been in Ballycastle all this while?”
Nigel recognized a deflection when he heard one. He drew a steadying breath and cast a swift, surreptitious glance up and down the street. No sign of simulacrums anywhere. His mind, unprepared for the effects of that Penny Pilsner, raw and jumpy with distress, may have simply conjured them up out of absolutely nothing. But he doubted it.
His gaze returned to Calista’s. She had been the star student in every class she attended, and the heads of each department fought each other, trying to get her to focus on their individual fields of magic. There was a saying around campus back in Nigel’s day: “Quick as Quick.” Was it possible for a woman of her abilities to create something as complex as a simulacrum? As a whole line of simulacrums? Without the polish of higher education, she’d never be able to make them pass for human, but . . . Nigel narrowed his eyes. The idea seemed wild,fantastical. Why in heaven’s name would a politician’s wife and an active member of the most vocal anti-sorcery league in the kingdom delve into black magic like that?
Realizing she still needed an answer to her question, Nigel said, “I’ve been here a time.”
“And how do you find the weather?”
“Wet. Cold.”
A trilling laugh emerged from her siren lips. “That has been my impression also.”
Nigel took a step back, away from the lamppost. “Well,” he said, not taking his eyes off her, “it’s been good bumping into you—”
“You know,” Calista said, turning her head to profile and gazing up and down the quiet, snow-rutted road, “I seem to have gotten a little turned around. This city has such an odd layout, no grid or logic of any kind in the configuration of its streets. Why, it’s positively archaic!” She flicked her gaze up at him, her mature features transforming momentarily into those of a vulnerable young girl once more, complete with the faintest flutter of those heavy, dark lashes. “Perhaps, Nigel Grimm, you would be good enough to escort me back to my hotel?”
Though he had no intention of being caught in such an obvious trap, Nigel nonetheless heard his own voice asking, “Where are you staying?”
“The King’s Crown.”
He grimaced. “I would gladly call you a taxi.”
“Oh, no.” Calista shuddered and sank her chin a bit more deeply into her fur collar. “I don’t trust these smelly thaumatic mobiles or these surly Ballycastle drivers.”
“Surely you have your own driver.”
“He’s out sick.”
