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Emboldened by professor Reine, she’d been doing this more and more lately, trying to rid herself of the habit of thinking of it as something spooky or weird. Any skill required practice, whether it was running a marathon or playing a musical instrument, and magic was no different. She hadn’t noticed much progress yet, but she was trying not to hurry herself. It was a little overwhelming to look at the whole dance floor. Every person there seemed to glow and pulse with every throb of the music, and she wondered about the unfamiliar sense of a fuzzy intensity to the edges of each aura until she realized she must be looking at the effects of alcohol.
But what really made her catch her breath was the absolute blackness at the center of the dance floor. She’d never seen a shadow so deep, so dark… it blotted out the light around it even at its very edges, where it lightened slightly to a bruised, mottled purple. When she looked at it, she felt nothing good. It felt like looking at a friend and seeing blood pouring from a deep wound in their body—it made her simultaneously want to recoil in horror and rush to their aid.
Morgan knew without a doubt whose aura she was looking at. She closed her eyes firmly, and when she opened them, she saw only the dance floor. But she knew the shadow was still there, lingering beneath it all. After a quick shout to her friends that she was going to grab a drink, she made her rapid way off the dance floor and towards the relative quiet of the bar. Sipping on a cup of water, she frowned into the night. Asshole or not, her gut was telling her that something was seriously wrong with Archer. Something major must have happened to bring about that kind of darkness. Was it something to do with the exams? Or maybe something had gone wrong with his family? Morgan frowned as her mind raced with speculation, wondering whether it was purely hypothetical or connected, even slightly, to her magic.
When she got back to the dance floor, Archer was gone. She felt her unease intensify, felt her worry for him become more concrete. Drunk as he was, and with that kind of darkness in his heart, it would be dangerous for him to be alone. She scanned the crowd, recognized half a dozen of his friends dancing and celebrating, oblivious to their leader’s absence. What could they do, even if they knew about it? Archer spent his life showing off to them, he was hardly going to reveal his vulnerable side.
And before she could rethink it, Morgan set off walking down the beach, the thudding of her heart telling her she was heading in the right direction.
At the end of the long crescent of sand, the beach gave way to jagged rocks that lay at the foot of an imposing cliff. And that was where she found Archer, balanced precariously on a rock at the edge of the water. As she watched, he hurled a stone at an advancing wave, the violent gesture almost overbalancing him. The wave dashed itself against the jagged rock, oblivious to his efforts. Morgan called his name. For a moment, she thought he hadn’t heard her over the roar of the ocean. But as she got close enough to make out his features, she could see that he was looking at her.
“What do you want?” he said flatly. He was trying to keep his voice level, but she could see him swaying on the spot.
“I’m checking if you’re okay.”
“I’m not. Anything else?” He turned back towards the ocean, throwing another stone at a wave as it broke. Morgan exhaled.
“Don’t fall and hurt yourself.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
Morgan exhaled, her rising frustration with him tempered by what she could see around his edges. The anger was a pale, brittle shell over a much darker storm. Knowing that made his barbs a lot less hurtful.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, trying to soften her voice. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He spun to look at her, and she saw the flare of anger in his aura. Then she saw it weaken, sputter, and burn out. His shoulders slumped, and he jumped down from the rock, feet sinking into the sand as he landed. She moved a little closer, hoping that what she was seeing might be another of those rare glimpses of his true self, and worried, at the same time, by what that might mean.
“I failed most of my classes,” he said, a humorless grimace twisting his lips in a mockery of a smile. “The Dean decided not to expel me like he should’ve, not because of anything I’ve done to deserve that kind of special treatment, but because my father’s such a monster that he seems genuinely concerned I might die if I go home with the bad news.” He uttered a bitter little laugh. “I’m used to people being nice to me because of what my dad might do. This is a fun little variation on that, I guess.”
“Is he right?” she asked quietly, her heart thudding in her chest. “Is your father really that kind of man?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Archer said abruptly. “I’m staying here for the break. They’re letting me make up for my exam with remedial classes. Professor Rowton’s babysitting me.”
“Archer, that’s—”
“None of your business,” he muttered. She could almost see him trying to generate the anger physically, clenching and unclenching his fists, tightening his jaw… but it wasn’t working. The fire was out. “Just—get back to the party, why don’t you? You’ve checked on me, your conscience is clear, now… go.”
“If that’s what you want,” she said, not dropping his gaze. “Is it?”
He looked at her for a long moment. She could see the shifting turbulence of his aura, the clouds that were almost—but not quite—blotting him out completely. And she could see, just for a moment, the faintest glint of light. “I—”
Shouts split the night. She and Archer both looked around sharply to see a group of a dozen or so young men splashing out of the water close by, whooping and laughing. She saw Archer tense and go to turn away, but before he could, one of the guys shouted his name. To her horror, she heard her own name among the explosion of loud, drunken conversation, too. She gritted her teeth, prepared to wheel on the approaching group and give them a piece of her mind… but before she could, she felt Archer grab her and pull her against him. It was so unexpected that she froze for a moment, feeling his arms tighten around her in a horrible reflection of the way he’d held her on the mountaintop that night.
Cold fury exploded in her at the sudden roar of approval from the group of guys. That was how it was going to be, was it? He’d been on the verge of opening up to her… and then the minute a bunch of his asshole friends was in the vicinity, he was happy to use her as a prop to show off his own toxic masculinity? The instinct was immediate and overwhelming, and she didn’t think twice as she let the transformation rip through her. Archer let go pretty quickly, knocked flying by her flaring wings, and she hissed and snapped at the men, who scattered backwards, still whooping and laughing. Morgan sprang aloft, wings working hard to carry her as far from the beach as she could get.
As far as she was concerned, Archer could rot down there.
Chapter 16 - Archer
So much for a mid-semester break, Archer thought as he dragged himself down the empty hallways of the abandoned university. These had been the hardest two weeks of his whole stupid life. He was never going to take rest for granted again for as long as he lived. It felt deeply wrong that he was looking forward to the start of term for the reduction in workload that it would represent. The Dean had warned him that he’d need to work hard to make up for the shortfall, but he’d profoundly underestimated what that was actually going to mean. The packet of work each teacher had left was, on its own, more than enough to fill two weeks. And he had to work his way throughthreeof them.
The one bright spot in all of this darkness, which was hardly a bright spot at all, was that he was far too busy to give much thought to how badly he’d embarrassed himself on the last night of term. At least during the days he was, anyway. Those thoughts came creeping back to him at night, once he’d shoveled some food into his face and fallen into bed exhausted. Tired as he always was, his wretched mind still managed to find a little bit of spare energy to torture him with blurry drunken recollections in the few minutes it took him to fall asleep…
He’d never lost control like that in his long, long years of drinking. There was a knack to pacing yourself, and Archer considered himself a master of it. But all of that mastery had gone out the window that night. He’d started drinking the minute he’d gotten back from his grim meeting with the Dean, and if Brody and Zack had wondered why he wasn’t packing his stuff like everyone else, they’d known better than to ask him about it.
Once he was drunk enough, he’d thrown himself single-mindedly into making sure the end-of-term party would be one for the history books. By the time the guests had arrived, he’d been absolutely obliterated… his memories got properly patchy around sunset, with huge missing chunks he could only piece together in context. He must have gone swimming at some point, because at some point in the night he’d realized he was soaked through. And he’d spent plenty of time on the dance floor. Aside from that, much of the night was missing…
But the real cruelty wasn’t in what he’d forgotten. It was in the part that he remembered with absolute clarity… a clarity he hadn’t experienced while it was happening, of course. Morgan, coming down the beach to find him, her cool, steady presence absolutely impervious to his pathetic attempts to insult her. Why had he been so determined to drive her away? Why couldn’t he have just accepted the help she was trying to give him? He’d wanted to, so badly… and then the guys had turned up, and he’d frozen, unable to figure out how to tell them to get lost. And in that moment of panic, he’d reverted to old habits. He’d grabbed Morgan to pull her close, wanting the guys to think that was why he was down the end of the beach by himself…
