Page 12 of Magical Academy for Delinquents
-Not sure awesome will get you in.-
-Awful, awesome. You know. Whatevs. XX-
-XX-
I parked my pretty red Porsche, double and then triple checking the address. But it was correct.
I stepped out of the car and stared for a second. This office was a bitdifferentfrom the others, to put it mildly. It was in a strip mall, for one thing. It was right next door to a Chinese buffet that smelled as delicious and unhealthy as it was possible to smell. Unlike the uptown offices that I had been to before, this counselor’s office had blinds on the windows and when I stepped inside, instead of a bimbo with blindingly white teeth smiling at me, the reception desk was empty except for a sign in book, which was old school paper and pen—not even electronic. I signed in on today’s page and chuckled to myself as I walked over to the seats and tapped the blinds. I watched them sway in the window. Blinds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a place with blinds. Maybe when I was a kid, before my dad’s energy company had done an IPO and the stock had skyrocketed. Nothing was more of a sure bet than a natural’s magic power.
I looked around the office, wondering if the plants were fake, too. How long had it been since I’d seen a plastic plant?
I couldn’t resist. I leaned over to touch one. To my shock, it was real.
I tried to sit but found I had too much nervous energy. When I stood, I looked down at the carpet tiles, and realized that a trail had been worn thin, where other patients had obviously tracked back and forth as they awaited their own appointments. I wondered about this therapist. If his patients couldn't even sit to wait, what kind of success rate did this douche have?
Just because, I let my feet wander the path that others had made.
“Hayley?" A soft feminine voice called.
I turned and was nearly startled out of my skin. In front of me wasn't some prim receptionist in a suit, but a short, red-haired woman with a jagged scar that ran down the length of her face and was clearly the cause of the empty black socket on her left side. She smiled and the scars stretched around the crater, which she hadn’t bothered to cover with an eyepatch or anything. Her face was so gruesome that it was hard to look at, and so my eyes swept the floor. “Yes, ma'am,” I sputtered.
The red-headed woman walked to the front door and turned the lock with a click.
"Oh, don't pull that meek bullshit with me. I hear you've got quite the attitude.” The red-headed woman chuckled. “No need to get all formal because I’ve lost an eye.” She turned back to me and I just couldn’t maintain eye contact. It was too unnerving. She strode closer in her flowing, flowery dress. “Unless you think I might take yours as a replacement."
I looked up in shock. Was she joking? That had to be a joke. Only, she grabbed onto my chin. Hard.
Her face took on an evil, evaluative tone as she studied my eyes. "Yours are quite beautiful. Lovely shade of blue. I bet there's a spell writer out there who’d be happy to steal them for me."
I jerked my chin away from her and took a few steps back.What the fuck?
She watched me and laughed. "You can dish it out, but you sure can't seem to take it. I've heard you pranked a ton of your headmasters recently." The woman pulled out her wand and a piece of parchment. She opened up an inkwell on the reception desk and dipped her wand into it. Then, quicker than a blink, she scribbled onto the piece of parchment. It lit up with a golden glimmer as she wrote, and the paper burst into flames. As the paper burnt itself up, the gaping hole in her eye socket suddenly disappeared. Her left eye restored itself, but the eyelid drooped a little, and the jagged scar on her face remained.
Holy fuck. This woman had to be a Delusionist-level spell writer! That was fucking perfection. A level 10 spell. And fast, too. She hadn’t hesitated once to ensure she was writing the right thing. Every professor I’d ever had urged caution. Whenever they demonstrated spells, it was always slow and steady. Because if you messed up writing a spell … you had to suffer the consequences. A slip of the hand, an extra line, could change your life forever. If she’d messed up, she could have lost an eye, or both.
I rubbed a hand across my face, more shaken by her performance than I wanted to let on. Impressive, yeah. Fucking nuts? Also, a big hell yeah. "Okay. That was a pretty good one." I could admit when I'd been had. I could even admire it a little. "You wouldn't mind giving me that spell, would you?"
The counselor laughed. "From what I hear, you write pretty good spells for yourself. You were in fourth- and fifth-year classes as a third year at Medeis. But if you need a little incentive, maybe want to freak out your mom one night, I might be able to be persuaded to give it to you, after you actually show up for five appointments, of course."
Bribery in return for my participation. That wasn’t a new technique, but no one had ever bartered something I’d wanted before. The bribes had all been money or threats from my mother. This pitch almost had me intrigued.
I tilted my head as I stared at her. Her hippie flowery dress and random office did not seem like something my mother would have chosen for me.
"Did Claude pick you?”
The red head avoided answering me and extended her hand. "I'm Dr. Meg Potts. I specialize in hopeless cases."
"Hopeless cases? You're very tactful."
She waved her hand dismissing me. "Your family thought you might like to talk to somebody else who was also a bit traumatized," she gestured at her face, "when a spell writing attempt to become Unnatural went wrong."
The skeptical part of me wondered whether or not the scars she'd left on her face were also just a spell she'd written, but the curious part of me won out. If she’d been hurt during an attempt to go Unnatural, those weren’t just scars on her face. They were claw marks. "What kind of shifters did they end up becoming?” I asked.
"The ones that shifted all ended up becoming wolves, surprisingly enough. It was unusual, since Unnaturals don’t get to choose their shifter form. I theorized maybe that the massive amount of magic in the air somehow influenced the animal ultimately. But no one else has ever replicated the conditions because it’s too dangerous.” Her voice grew thin. “There were seven of them."
I took a step back in shock. That was a lot. Most magicals that tried to go Unnatural attempted the spell in groups of two, three at most. The spell writing was so dangerous that a lot of people were dissuaded from even trying, though shifter status was considered the highest level of magic. Only those that became shifters earned the title of Delusionist-level spell writer. Chances were less than one percent that a person would get everything exactly right—it was like the chance of a norm becoming an astronaut—but every year, nearly a thousand magicals tried.
I stared again at Dr. Potts face, surprised she had survived that night at all. "They. You didn’t try? Why were you there?"
