Defensive Magic-Chapter 34: Dark Side of the Moon

WINTER TERM - January 23rd

Gods forbid we ever see you in the throes of a break up.

Blackclaw has said it. I don't even know for sure that we were ever really together, let alone broken up, but this sucks.

Whisper wasn't in my room and I didn't really feel the need to go looking for him. I refilled his bowl of dog kibble. Jury's still out as to whether he needed it. The quiet was unbearable. His silence was worse.

I increasingly didn't want to be in my room, not when Aries was just down the hall, moping in bed behind his sigil-locked door. What was worse was that I was the one to ask for this.

I shadow stepped a dozen places around the Court and eventually wound up in the statuary that Aries had taken me to that late autumn day last term. It was off-campus, but lonely, abandoned, the statues now all cloaked in snow. There was a chance no one had been back here since Aries and I were here. It was cold and already dark, darker now that the winter sun set so early. I was alone and would be alone.

I wandered aimlessly first, but at the sight of the naked minotaur statue, it all came rushing in. This thing I couldn't name, the building pressure from all of it collecting in the spot behind my eyes. Until I couldn't hold it back any longer. The mark of Orendell lit up my arm until I cast the thing my hands chose before I had.

The naked stone minotaur cracked and crumbled, once standing, now rubble. Unrecognizable. Beyond a ruin.

The force of the spell left me panting, a little lightheaded. I might have been miserable, but I didn't want to pass out in the cold. My wolf didn't want me passing out either and I could already feel him inching forward, desperate to shift. I didn't have the bandwidth to force him back down, so I did what I could to strip off my layers and toss them around the base of a statue so I might have some chance of finding them later. The wolf ripped through me, claws, fur, fire, until I was down on all fours, panting hot plumes into the winter cold air.

It hurt because it always hurt, but this time maybe I needed to hurt. It was the only way any of this made sense.

I didn't really sleep that night.

The next morning, Aisling lingered a little longer at breakfast. The four of us still all sat together. A few times, Ripley Hodges tried to join, but even he seemed to get the hint that the vibes were off. The weird silent tension between me and Aries clung just strongly enough not even the humor of Aisling's gothy admirer could pull us from it. Aries stayed quiet, mostly opting to read through breakfast the next few mornings, as though the combat textbook could distract from his unwashed hair, the slowly creeping stubble, or the extra muffin or two that inevitably wound up on his plate these last few days.

Noodle and Aisling knew the details without me needing to tell them. Aries already told them, which in this case just felt like a relief. Aisling didn't mention the shadows under my eyes or my bloody knuckles. The naked minotaur hadn't been the only target of my rage.

I'd been out in the dark until my whole body ached, from shifting, from the cold, from throwing myself at the stone statues until I was too exhausted I nearly couldn't shadow step back to the Vodalysa dormitories.

Aisling only slid a second cup of coffee across the table to me. She hovered nearby in silence until Aries inevitably had to get up to leave for his lectures.

"You keep looking at him like you expect something, Zeph," she said. "He's doing what you asked. He's miserable but he's going to do it until you give him a reason not to."

WINTER TERM - January 25th

I woke in the middle of the night from the mark of Orendell. The last time it happened was during my stay at the Marblebrook's cottage, but even then it didn't feel quite so pointed. It's not Aries's fault. My casting's been sloppy. I have the little blue shapechanger's grimoire on my nightstand- Elandria gave me permission to practice from this one in private. But even the promise of getting the dark grimoire back isn't enough of a lure to get me to learn any five of its spells.

I slept in through Hostile Scenarios. It was slated to be a lecture day and on the off-chance I was asked to actually cast anything in the heat of combat I'd be useless. I woke at one point when the idiot part of my brain remembered there was a slim chance Aries could be left combatting some ridiculous invented enemy alone and pulled out the scrying glass. I dragged the glass back into bed and fell asleep watching him scribbling down notes as Blackclaw lectured on.

I skipped Divination too, not wanting to get out of bed. I'd have to tell Marblebrook later it was the mark of Orendell getting at me, which is the truth.

I woke again later to a knock at my door. I planned to ignore it, roll over, and go back to sleep, until the scrying glass on the far side of the bed told me it was Aries. He was waiting, holding two mugs heaped with whipped cream. freewёbnoνel.com

I got the door.

He'd shaved. Washed his hair too. Honestly, it seemed like he was doing better than I was, though it's not like he had the mark of Orendell scalding his arm. I'd been sleeping in my underwear and socks and it wasn't like he hadn't seen me in less.

"You missed class, dude. You sick or something?" He passed one of the mugs to me, melting whipped cream spilled down its sides. He licked his fingers after pulling away.

"Not sick exactly." I gestured to the mark on my arm, in much fuller display than it usually was.

Aries reached out a hand as though to touch it, but before his hand made contact with my skin, he pulled back. He refocused on the mug in his hands and now, also in mine. "I brought hot chocolate. It's one of those things my mom always made to make me feel better."

"Thanks," I said flatly. I stepped aside to let him in. He hovered just inside the doorway, looking to me for direction - couch or bed?

I'd been in bed all day and wasn't about to break the habit. I brought the hot chocolate with me, and pulled the quilt up around me. Aries sat at the foot of the bed, on top of the quilt, sipping his own hot chocolate.

He'd gotten whipped cream on his nose. Lick it off. I could feel the temptation but that wasn't fair. Not with how things were.

He didn't comment on the scrying glass propped up on a pillow beside me. I was feeling a little too shameless to even bother trying to hide it.

"I thought that mark wasn't so bad now what with you wolfing out every couple weeks?" My eyes were still caught on the whipped cream. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

I shrugged, trying as I might to focus back on the conversation. "It helped, but Orendell's moved on. He's fixated on a grimoire now Marblebrook's got in her office. She'd said she'd let me have it back after I taught myself some shape changing magic."

"That's it?"

I grabbed the little blue shape changer's grimoire from my nightstand and passed it to him. He propped the book up against his knee and flipped through it.

"They're not exactly easy," I said.

It was the excuse I was going with. The dark grimoire held spells that took weeks to figure out, yet I chipped away at the gestures anyway. The main difference with this one from what I could tell was that I already could change into a wolf at will, I didn't need to learn a whole separate painful spell to do it slightly differently. I wasn't interested and neither was Orendell.

But Aries wasn't here to talk about spells. I wasn't in the mood to beat around the bush. "Why are you here, Aries?"

He finished his mug of hot chocolate first. Set it on the nightstand and sat back down at the foot of my bed, farther away than he needed to be. "I don't know. I just missed you. I missed your stupid face, okay?" he said. "I don't know what giving you space is meant to look like, but I still wanted to see you, alright?"

I rolled over under my quilt to face him. He hadn't moved any closer.

"I just want you to act like you again," he said.

He'd picked up the shape-changer's grimoire again. I heard him over my shoulder flipping through the pages. At some point, he was going to decide I wasn't great company and leave. I was waiting for it. Wished it happened faster. Wished it didn't have to happen at all.

He was hovering again. I felt a hand swipe up through my hair - gentle, hardly there. Gone before I could even think to reach back for him.

"Maybe you could learn to change your face, like Aisling does. Come to dinner tonight with matching red hair?"

I said nothing. We both knew I wasn't coming to dinner.

WINTER TERM - January 26th

I was done feeling sorry for myself.

I gave Whisper an extra heaping cup of dog kibble. I still hadn't seen him in a few days, but his bowl was empty every time I'd checked it. He wasn't a dog, even though he acted like one. He occasionally would turn invisible and I'm pretty sure he was also capable of some minor teleportation because he was definitely nowhere in my suite this morning or last night.

I shaved, put on real clothes, and went to all of my classes. Blackclaw gave me a long, hard glare when I first arrived after skipping yesterday's lecture, but if he expected an excuse or an apology, he had another thing coming. It was his fault I was in this mess to begin with. Or partially his fault anyway. I was still feeling shitty enough that there was blame to go around.

Aries hip checked me upon arriving in class, which for his standards felt relatively tame. He hovered nearby as though to say, I'm still here, as we watched the other group of four mages in Hostile Scenarios take on the golems. It was relief enough that I hadn't screwed things up beyond fixing just yet.

Class was fine. I paid attention, mostly. Our group wasn't running a combat drill. I looked on as one especially determined upperclassman decided to try to use a spectacular show of fire to melt Blackclaw's mud golem. Most of us just thought there were easier ways to get the same end result. Ideally you use one that doesn't leave you winded and on the verge of collapse.

Anyway, after class, Stellan caught me. "Ashbourne!" His hand clapped my shoulder. The shock of him made me flinch. "Hey," he said. "You have a sec? Heard you and Blackclaw had quite the talk."

"Did he put you up to this?" I asked.

Stellan laughed. "Nadine did, so we're talking."

"Let's not and say we did."

"Blackclaw's not exactly my favorite person either. What'd he say?" Stellan nagged. "Something worth making your boyfriend cry?"

I grit my teeth. The wolf snarled behind my lips. Stellan only smirked.

"Blackclaw called Aries my mate. He thinks I'm too much of a mess for relationships. And he's not wrong." We didn't need to talk about this any further.

But Stellan tried to anyway.

"Ha... who's he to give love advice? The man's been drinking himself to sleep over the same vampire for years."

Now, that got my attention. "Blackclaw's into fangs?"

"We're talking about you, idiot. But yeah, Nadine said it was his wife... I don't know the details."

We were falling into step walking back to the Court. Aries had already shadow stepped away. A few of our other classmates walked too, but for reasons obvious enough, they kept their distance.

"So, he called Aries your mate. Did he bother to say anything else?" Stellan asked.

"Like what?" I wasn't trying to guess.

Stellan paused. It was loaded enough that I stopped walking. "He doesn't really get it that you get attached to people. It's miserable. If it wasn't Aries, it still would have been that fae girl you hang around. Or your little dogfolk friend. Or hell, sometimes you even look at Blackclaw with enough dopey affection to make me laugh."

"Don't be gross. I'd never sleep with Blackclaw."

Stellan laughed a little too loud. "I think everyone puts a little too much on the whole 'mate' thing. The real thing is that you want a pack. Werewolves are pack animals. He should have been warning you about collecting people. Aries is just another one of them."

"I think he's a little more than that," I said. "You know, there's that thing I heard where werewolves just have one mate forever?"

"Yeah, maybe they don't believe in divorce in Caburh, but you're in Mesym. Even vampires can get one. Ask Blackclaw about it sometime."

I rolled my eyes at him. He was missing my point. Or maybe, on second thought, I was missing his.

"It's a story," he said. "The shit thing behind it is that werewolves don't do so hot on their own. Your wolf doesn't care who you sleep with. It just wants someone to watch your back."

There was a broken minotaur statue that begged to differ, but I digress.

"So say he goes back to Caburh and you don't. It's probably more of the same thing you're feeling now. But the real thing to be thinking about is what happens come graduation. Your friends all go their separate ways and you have to start all over again. It'll be worse than this. A lot worse."

Stellan went on, "There was another werewolf. She graduated last year. Kind of lost her mind over the summer. She was meant to take a job in Hyhill at their botanical gardens, but now she lives in a werewolf commune a few hours north of here. I don't want that. That's what you're in for even if you do follow your boyfriend back to Caburh. So, really, no divorce there?"

"A good number of its people live for centuries. It shouldn't be too much of a shock that it's not known for being socially progressive," I said.

"My point is, you'd best figure it is what you want. Breaking up with your guy now isn't the worst thing if it means you're set on what you want later. Probably won't hurt worse than this. You could still find someone else, someone who makes you feel safe. Might take awhile, but finding someone who wants the same as you would now, wouldn't it?"

We talked a little longer. I don't need to get too into it. It makes a lot more sense now why Stellan's held me at arm's length. It's been that way for everyone. He's planning to go home to Horora eventually. It seems a little extreme to me, but then again, I also don't have anyone back in Nizari that I'm trying to get back to.

He mostly just wanted to rip on Blackclaw. Which, it's not like I'm the biggest fan of the guy. It was good to blow off some steam. Stellan's probably more bitter than he needs to be about it, but maybe he's got his reasons. Or maybe I just rely on the guy and his spotty-werewolf knowledge enough not to discount him completely.

We split off when I turned to go to the dining hall. Aries would already be there. We'd had enough of these days and the sad, longing stares were getting old.

Aries might not have felt like a choice— but he was one. I'd never been good at this kind of thing. I was going to have to talk to him. Later though. Not now.

Lunch was still awkward. Ripley was there again poking at Whim until Aisling snapped and Whim bit his finger. Aries's vice for today was ice cream. No one mentioned it. No one needed to.

No one said a thing either when I reached across the table with the spoon from my coffee and stole a mouthful. Our eyes met as I licked the spoon clean. Vanilla. Sweet. Cold.

Aries bit his lip and could not look away.

And for the first time all week, I couldn't look away either.