Page 3 of The Library at Hellebore

I was back on the metal fold-out chair I’d been sitting on, like my muscles had changed their mind midway to rising. Except I hadn’tfeltmyself sit back down. Instead, it was more like the seconds had rewound, had flinched back from my decision like it was a hot stove. I tried again. This time, I felt it: reality slingshotting backward through linear time, not far enough to leave me discombobulated, but enough to have my ass on the cold, cheap steel. It hit me then that I was trapped. All my efforts, all those months spent trying to get out, and here I was with no place to go, a bunny with the hounds gathered all around.

The doors of the gymnasium opened, allowing our headmaster entry. She drifted down the aisle, splitting the crowdof so-called graduates, resplendent in a fawn-colored suit, the majesty of which was spoiled by the fact that her white hair was still in curlers. A clipboard was tucked in the crook of her left arm. She checked something off as she passed each student, her smile as it always was: slightly too wide for her face.

When she finally reached our row, she only said, with an effervescent giggle:

“Ah. It’s time for a speech by the valedictorian!”

Sullivan took her hand when she offered it. I couldn’t help the “No,stop!” that wrestled out of my mouth. I groped for Sullivan’s arm, the motion entirely reflexive. He and I, we weren’t close, but some animal instinct roared past all my other sensibilities. I knew unequivocally that if he went with her, he would be dead.

“Sullivan—”

He unbraided my fingers from his wrist, a suicidal gentleness in his eyes as he said, “It’s okay.” His eyes shifting to Delilah—his light, his lamb, his death. She wouldn’t meet his gaze, stared instead into her palms, more statue than girl.

It definitely wasn’t.

BEFORE

If you’re reading this, there’s a small chance you’re another student, frightened senseless (been there) by a waning belief (sorry, this book won’t make this better) that you are in a safe place; but more likely, you are an incumbent in the Ministry, and therefore are already aware of what the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is (fuck you very much, if you are). On the off chance that you’re neither, that you’re a bystander who found my journal in an antique store, or someone raiding the evidence locker for novelties, I want to set the stage before we get any further.

Magic is real.

I want to assert that I know you probably know this already. We do both live in a world where even governmental bodies have acknowledged magic’s existence. But we reside as well on a planet where the efficacy of medical science is questioned and media personalities argue whether a clot of cells has more value than a woman’s life. To put it another way, these are unutterably stupid times, so I’m not taking chances.

Now, while magic has always been real, there was a period when it thrived. For better or worse, people were once steered by folklore—cultivating gods, curating herbs based on their value in rituals, the works. Back then, population density was low enough that myths could breed in dreams and spring likeVenus from the peasant’s skull, ready for mischief. It was the best and worst of times.

That went away with the Renaissance period when society began mass-producing these tender, inquisitive souls: scalpels draped in skin. All they wanted to do was cut the cosmos open and see what was inside. Their joyous and relentless curiosity led to such a revolution in human thinking. We went from soothsayers to science, gods to generating electricity. Our lifespans grew; childbirth stopped being a macabre lottery. We sanded the dark down to a manageable threat; everyone still knew to be cautious when out walking at night, but they were no longer afraid of ghosts, just one another.

Those years of frenzied development, interspaced with decades of war, kept mankind so preoccupied we didn’t notice magic receding from us. One day, it was there. The next, it was entirely fictive, all illusions and sleight of hand, cold reading and con men: nothing a rational person would believe in, let alone practice with any kind of seriousness.

But about a hundred years or so ago, it started coming back.

And chaos immediately ensued.

Like,immediately.Faith healers discovered their snakes now had opinions, many of which were kinder than their own. Relics were demanding their burials, along with a share of what wealth had been accrued through illegal use of their matter. The graveyards woke with barghests andgwisin.Rat kings whispered through the walls. The housing market collapsed as hauntings drove tenants to paranoia. Psychiatrists were initially delighted by the prodigious business but then discovered that their clientele weren’t all human and weren’t all there for simple conversation. Statues wept; no one would sleep for months.

As was customary, the authorities did very little until thisplague of global re-enchantment led to a decimation of the workforce. Unable to rest, unable to eat without worrying if their salad would consign them to a lifetime in a fae lord’s service, unable to distinguish loved ones from doppelgängers, people began choosing the ledge, the pill bottle, the train tracks, the gun. Suddenly, it was a problem that needed immediate solving. Capitalism was unsustainable without bodies to feed the machine.

So the nations of the world slammed their figurative heads together, and concluded there was only one recourse available: bureaucracy. Magic was legislated. Foreign entities were subjected to hastily drafted but impressively thorough immigration laws, and municipalities came up with techniques for zoning cursed territory. Within a generation, there was something comparable to order so long as you were willing to squint real hard—and to blame any deviancy on the education systems now instated across the globe.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, no matter age or nationality, who was gauche enough to show even a mote of magical talent was instantly freighted to the nearest available school for proper processing. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is one such academy. In fact, you could argue it isthepremier college for such things. Enrollment isn’t guaranteed by proximity. You have to be a specific kind of someone to be inducted here, have to have the type of bona fides that the front page obsesses over and the op-eds love to dissect. Yes, every member of the student body is—how do I say it delicately?—someone with the potential to destroy the world three times over, and still have time for a good long brunch. (Which you’d know, if you were working for the Ministry. I’ve heard the rumors: you handpicked us for the butcher block.)

Here in Hellebore, we are all Antichrists, all Ragnarökmade manifest. We are those who are destined to break the chains binding Fenris to his boulder; we are Kalki come riding on his pale horse; the death of Buddha; the vectors of apocalypse, avatars of the end, world-eaters; memetic violence distilled into bodies with badly underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, like the world’s least impressive tulpa.

Some of us came by our designations through honest means. Take poor dead Sullivan Rivers (How did he die? You’ll see; have patience), for example. Because Sullivan was the first son to be born in fuck-knows-how-many generations, he had found himself the imminent host of the deity his foremothers had dutifully screwed since prehistory. Sullivan had practically flung himself through the doors of Hellebore, hoping they’d save him from the cicada voices scratching at the inside of his eyelids. I wonder how pissed his gods were when his skull was trepanned from every direction. (And his family. I bet they loathed losing, if not a son, then a commodity, a prize; he was their fortune, a bargaining chip, something they could leverage. The powerful never like letting go of such things.)

Admittedly, Sullivan’s kind was a rarefied group. Very main character, if you’d like to be colloquial about the subject. Most of the students in Hellebore are more like me. Freaks. Accidents of circumstance. People who might have led innocuous lives if they hadn’t turned the wrong corner at the wrong time. Unfortunates who woke up one day indelibly different for no reason at all, their appetites like a cancer gnawing through their skin, growing until it erupted through their gums as a forest of new maws. Girls who were hurt and who discovered they couldreallyhurt their abusers in return. You’d be surprised how many of us there are in that last category.

(Or not, depending on who you are.)

The first time I learned I had powers was when my stepdaddy decided that the ring on his finger was the master key to every entrance in our household. He slapped me when I said no, unable to contend with the notion that my sense of autonomy precluded his need to be inside where he damn well shouldn’t be. I remember my ears ringing, and his hands locked around my wrists, raising my arms above my head. I remember his mouth along the nubs of my spine, his knee trying to spread my legs wide, and thinking,I need you to hurt.

So I rent him in half: lengthwise and real fucking slow, suspending him in the air so his guts sheeted down on me like a porridgy red rain. I didn’t let him go gentle into that good velvet night, and I took as much time as I’m sure he’d wanted to with me. He squirmed and moaned for hours, begging me for respite throughout, going,Please, Alessa, let me die, let me die, this hurts.When I got bored, I made him amputate his tongue with his teeth and choke on it like a cock.

He was the first man I killed and, as you might have guessed, not the last. Though in my defense, the subsequent deaths were less acts of intentional homicide and more (to put it with some modicum of decorum) the consequences of fatally efficient self-defense. One or two of these cases were definitively punitive in timbre, but the victims were deserving.Noshould have sufficed as an answer.Noshould have been taken without interrogation, accepted without need for wheedling or attempts at coercion.

Since they wouldn’t listen, I didn’t either.

Anyway.

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