Chapter 5

5

D elina wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, cold and alone, and immediately wants to tear everything down. Wants to grip the stupid floral curtains and rip them in two, to smash the antique dresser and the overly ornate mirror on top of it; wants to rend the squeaky door to the closet away from its hinges, until everything is destroyed and everything feels better.

So she blinks hard up at the wooden ceiling, spreading her arms and legs out on the bed wide, as if taking up more space would do it.

All things considered, the room is…fine. A bit dusty, but fine.

There's a gigantic bed smushed against one wall, and a circle of spray paint in the opposite corner, staining the perfectly baby blue carpet. There's a bathroom attached, with an overindulgent cast iron tub and a separate shower, and two twin vanities and sinks that each have their own mirror.

She splashes water on her face, but it does little to wash away the circles under her eyes, or her truly destroyed makeup that she had applied all the way before leaving for coffee.

Her stupid cheap phone with no signal tells her it's around 10 AM, but when she creeps into the kitchen, there's no lights on and no sound but the rain against the roof.

Which, fair. She kept them up until two AM, and who knows what sleep schedule these two oddballs keep.

She dejectedly pokes at the espresso machine until it refuses to chug to life, but even that action seems unreal.

"Wait," she whispers to herself, then swipes her thumb over the top of it, one quick action.

Immediately it whirs, grinding coffee in a smooth motion, like it had just been waiting for her to do that.

If that's what her mother meant by magic, she's going to be simultaneously excited and really, really disappointed.

"You're telling me Dr. Frisse put a bio-lock on her coffee machine?" Chloe pipes up, startling Delina. Chloe's hair sticks up on the sides, and she's wearing an oversized T-shirt and some basketball shorts as pajamas. "Jeez, she was insane."

The machine pours a beautiful shot of espresso without her needing to do anything, and they both sort of numbly watch.

"Just so you know, Gurlien's gonna watch you do that like a hundred times while we figure out what kind of magic you have," Chloe says, after Delina's poured the shot into a glass of milk and started the next shot of espresso. "Indulge him a bit, it'll be easier to work with him that way."

"So there are different types of magic," Delina says, taking a fistful of ice and then some chocolate syrup she found for her coffee.

"Oh, you know nothing," Chloe says, opening the cupboard and pulling out a box of PopTarts. "Jeez."

Delina holds out her hand, and Chloe thoughtlessly hands her one of the PopTarts. She hasn't had one of them in years, but she had a burger, might as well kick the rest of the clean eating streak away.

The cat from the night before wanders into the kitchen, stares at them, before idling back out, butting its head on Chloe's leg once.

"There's about as many types of magic as there are people, though the College likes to pretend there's only three or four," Chloe says over a mouthful of PopTarts, popping herself up so she sits on the counter. "Dr. Frisse was an experimental Spell Weaver, she specialized in finding new ways of combining and twisting magic to her purposes. She was obsessed with new magics, like necromancy and demon shit, all super dangerous and rare." Chloe gestures at herself with the PopTart. "Me, alchemy. I make things into other things. The older the thing the easier it is."

Delina crosses her arms. It's still before breakfast.

"Gurlien was also a spell weaver, he mostly did diagnostic shit, but his magic got exploded in a big accident, that's why the College kicked him out," Chloe continues. "I left because they were dicks."

"Exploded?" Delina asks. Too many people used that term to her in the last twenty-four hours.

"It's gone," Chloe replies helpfully. "Caput. Non-existent. He's now the second person in the world it's happened to and the College thought it could be contagious so…" she jerks her thumb over her shoulder, "he's out." She swings her legs off the counter, and Delina can't quite grasp if she's much younger than her or not. "Don't ask him about it, he'll pout the rest of the day."

"And me?" Delina asks, finally taking a bite of the PopTart. "What am I?"

"We won't know until the bio trap, and I don't pout," Gurlien breezes in, already wearing a neatly ironed shirt. "I have appropriate emotional reactions to stimuli."

Chloe and Delina just glance at each other.

"And Dr. Frisse had libraries full of research on how to make someone powerful," Gurlien continues. "I read the report on you, they locked your magic up because nobody had any clue what she did to you."

Her dad had said she had a seizure.

"They think something weird," he continues, like it's not emotional. "Like she deliberately tried to make you…dangerous. They didn't want to deal with that, with all the training and guidance and making sure you weren't a psychopath, so…locked away."

Delina stares down at her thumb and the silence stretches on.

"Her magic responded to the coffee machine," Chloe says, instead of anything else.

Gurlien's eyes light up.

Delina ends up making five cups of coffee while the two of them make a bunch of remarks that might as well be Latin to her, before she shuts herself back in the room without either of them.

The spray-painted circle is still there, tucked neatly in the corner, with no chance of her accidentally stumbling into it.

And she's here, in a cabin owned by her actual mother, without so much as a basic internet connection, with nobody but two practical strangers for company.

And some sort of nebulous magic she may or may not have.

Her mother wanted her dangerous.

She flops onto the overly soft bed.

So dangerous that an organization she's never heard of locked it away and sent her minders and boyfriends to keep her happy. So dangerous that her mother did some weirdness with a P.O. Box instead of picking up the phone and calling her.

So dangerous that her boyfriend of so long had been faking it the entire time to just make sure she didn't figure anything out.

"Oh, he was never gonna propose," Delina says aloud to the room, to the exposed wooden beams and the furniture that looks like it was bought to be cutesy. "It was just going to be us living and lying for forever and him never telling me."

Saying it doesn't make it feel better.

From outside the room, she hears the cat make a warbled meow, and the soft sound of someone replying to it.

Delina spreads her fingers over the quilt, but her thumb doesn't react to that, so she sits up, pulling the textbook and the will out of her suitcase and laying it on the bed, before someone raps on the door.

"No," she calls out.

"I'm just saying we're gonna drive into town once the weather breaks to get cell connection," Chloe says, muffled through the wood. "Are you going into the bio-trap right now?"

Delina glances to it. "Not right now."

"Okay cool." Footsteps thump away from the door.

The letter gives her nothing else, no new revelations, and the will is even worse, a clinical description of bank accounts and properties and everything else. No hint of the danger, no hint of anything.

She stares back at the completely useless cell phone.

The first number she had put in was her dad's. The second, Maison.

It says something about her, she decides, laying there on the quilt, that she's way more torn up about Maison than the possibility of magic. Even after all the bullshit with the coffee machine, even with the pager, it still seems…not real.