Light of Equality (Hawthorn Academy Book 5) Read online

  The library was closed, and the cafeteria bustled like downtown Providence during WaterFire. I would've gone to my room, but Eston was there with Kitty, plotting their Truncheons and Flagons adventures. Or enjoying some other form of alone-time.

  I backed up, trying to remember Logan's descriptions during our campus tour. My brain kept firing blanks, not coming up with anything. Logan liked his quiet time, but probably managed most of it in his room since Dylan worked so much. I couldn't remember him mentioning any safe haven on campus besides the Café de Poison.

  I glanced around the lobby, noting that the exit to the outer hallway was blocked by an enormous cleaning cart. Nowhere was left but the academic wing. When I got to the double doors with their stained-glass mural, my plan was foiled. The doors refused to budge when I pushed on them.

  "Caw!" Mercy wrangled her way free of my blazer, swooping toward the doors. She wrapped her claws around the handles then flapped, throwing her weight backward.

  I shook my head, sighing. "Out of the way, Mercy."

  She cawed again and let go of the handle, allowing me to reach out and pull. The door opened, of course.

  "Not just a coward, but an idiot too."

  I stepped through the doorway to find the hall dark, though it wasn't pitch-black as I'd feared. The magical light fixtures gave off a dim glow, like dark mode on a phone.

  I paced the hall, holding my forearm out in front of me to let Mercy perch there. She wasn't nearly as heavy as she looked because a gryphon's bones were hollow. That made them delicate, another reason for my caution since bonding with her. I reached out with my other hand and stroked the top of her head with my finger.

  She leaned into my display of affection, as always. While walking, I relaxed into the unexpected quality time with my familiar and thought back to how I’d ended up with this adorably uncouth half-avian in the first place.

  The Academy didn't allow pets, magical or not. They had wards to prevent all kinds of animals from congregating, mating, or giving birth on the premises, too. That is why I was stunned to see the large speckled egg in a shoebox outside my window one winter morning.

  Calling what they have at the Academy windows was a gross understatement. They were small patches of wired glass, letting through only the dingiest version of sunlight. Sometimes I pretended to be a fish in winter, swimming under a thick layer of ice while I looked out the ersatz window in my dorm room.

  Anyway, I had no idea what kind of egg it was, only that no animal had laid it there naturally. That meant a person had put it there, possibly a telekinetic psychic or a winged shifter. Magic didn't work on the interior or exterior walls at that school, including faerie glamour. The Academy was the closest thing extrahumans had to a military school in New England, and it was on near-constant lockdown.

  I said my parents accepted me. I might have given the impression they were lenient, but that's been impossible for them over the last few years. I ended up at the Academy because I snuck out of the house after my sister went missing, doing that running thing toward where I thought Cassandra would be.

  After a near-brush with a member of the Gitano Family, they sent me to the Academy for my own good. Dad never said it in so many words, but he was an empath, so I felt it. Mom might have had a vision. I wondered whether she saw me finding the egg, too.

  No matter how it got to a windowsill on the fifth floor, I watched the egg every day. I knew it was magical after about a minute because I used the skills they taught magi in class and checked. It was blue and white, like my ice element. Maybe that was why I felt a connection, even though it was just this spotty oval on the other side of iron, wards, and glass.

  Every morning I'd wake before inspection. Yes, they had that. Staff came in to check that our beds were made properly and the rooms tidy according to regulations. Anyway, before all that, I'd silently greet the egg. It turned into something like a ritual, checking the aura, seeing it pulse and glow brighter, like the baby growing inside it responded to a walking mess of a person like me who didn’t know himself yet.

  I took to caring about the mysterious egg more readily than any of the discipline exercises they made us do at the Academy. I peeked at it every night also, wishing her sweet dreams. Yes, even then, I knew the baby inside the egg was a girl. She told me, and I trusted without question. If only it was that easy for everyone else.

  That year, I needed a friend badly. My roommate got sent to the Academy after putting another guy in the hospital. He called me sissy, a girl, and a whiny bitch, so I kept my head down. No jokes, nothing but deadpan compliance, worn like a mask.

  The little life inside the egg made me feel connected, together with somebody in a way I hadn't felt since my sister went missing. She’d been seen with an older man in her sophomore year of college before vanishing. Out of this world, as it turned out.

  They found her dead in the Under, aged an impossible number of years in a bargain with a Tsuchigomo—a sacrifice of life-force to the creature, payment to save the son she’d birthed there.

  "Caw?" Mercy tilted her head, her inquisitive noises bringing me back to the present.

  "What's up?"

  She flapped her wings, pointing her beak at a room that turned out to be occupied. I heard muffled voices within. It looked like a classroom, not one for my year or maybe not any other. The academic wing had an awful lot of empty classrooms. I thought maybe listening in on someone else's drama might get my mind off my own problems.

  I found myself hiding in the adjacent broom closet, index finger against the wall, using my ice magic to filter sound through the wood to assist in my eavesdropping. I’d learned that at the Academy, too, but spying was a self-taught skill.

  "They'll never suspect it was us."

  "Who's taking the rap, do you think?"

  "Probably the wrong person. They'll question Onassis, of course."

  "I'd make that mistake too. I hope you didn't make this puzzle too hard. You're a genius, even if none of them realize it."

  "They'll get to it eventually, and then our hurdle will get canned. Probably lose his license, too."

  "I still don't know why you have to get rid of him."

  "He's a sympathizer, first of all. And second, he's protecting the biggest threats to the long game. Daddy said so."

  "I don't get why, though."

  "He's one of them, of course. Why else would I have asked you to pull his sealed record?"

  “How did you open it?"

  "I only peeked, and that’s my little secret." The voice sighed. "But I can’t show it to anyone else."

  "Shouldn't we be trying to prove he’s been lying instead of this frame job? A familiar got hurt."

  "We can’t prove that unless he reverts, which he won't; the conditions aren’t likely for a withered old fool like him. Besides, Hawkins must know and just not care. This is better."

  "What if you're wrong and he does revert? Won’t they go easy on him, as they did on the Morgenstern girl?"

  "I have a backup plan: an accusation to make. He'll still be removed from the equation, which will only help with the inferiors invading our campus."

  "If Hiram were here, we'd never have to endure this whole degrading ordeal."

  "True, but we also wouldn't have the opportunity to teach the inferiors a lesson right here on this campus."

  "Point, set, match."

  "I love it when you talk sporty to me. Come here."

  Okay, so I'm a bit shady. I've listened in on all kinds of back-alley deals and clandestine meetings. I'm from a part of Providence owned by organized criminals. Being in the background of my family's dealings with them gave me a taste for selectively overhearing private matters, but I had zero interest in the carnal activities of a couple of bigots.

  That's right, I'd just listened in on a conversation between magisupremacists, which my parents had been assured weren't tolerated on this campus. I removed my finger from the wall like it had suddenly heated to the temperature of boiling oil.
After that, I extricated myself from the broom closet as quietly as possible. The last thing I wanted was to get caught by that dastardly duo.

  If I'd been Grace Dubois, I would've tried peeking through the window to discover the identity of the couple in the classroom. If I'd been Aliyah Morgenstern, I might have burst into the room, hands ablaze, and confronted them. Logan Pierce would have called in the authorities. But I was Dorian Spanos, consummate coward. I couldn't do any of that, even though Mercy took off from my arm and fluttered in that direction.

  "We're out of here, come on," I mouthed. Mercy always understood me, even when I didn't include volume while talking to her. Gryphons have amazing hearing, which explained how she heard me in the egg in the box on the windowsill through that magically warded glass.

  She followed me because familiar bonds were stronger than anything in either world. And coincidence, the truth behind the myth of fate, warped and weakened even the most ironclad rules and regulations turned against it. The connections we made with others, when true and from the heart, could overcome almost anything, even a psyche full of fear like mine.

  One warm spring morning at the Academy, something was wrong with Mercy's prenatal aura. When I realized she couldn't get out of her egg, I acted immediately. My roommate woke blearily, unwilling or unable to fathom my anguish over an egg on a windowsill.

  I reached a hand out and pressed it to the glass, summoning all my strength and focusing on lowering its temperature as much as possible. The wards should've prevented this. They probably would have if I wasn't so desperate and hadn't also felt a fear that mirrored my own from the other side. It pushed my conjuring power to heights I'd never even heard of, let alone felt before.

  The egg stopped rocking back and forth, as it had been for the last few minutes while Mercy failed at breaking out of it. I sensed her in there, stilling physically to muster her magic. Her efforts were downright Herculean, heroic in a way I never imagined anyone who cared for me could be.

  In that utilitarian cinderblock room, I screamed without thinking, without stopping to adjust my pitch lower first. My voice went full soprano without cracking, but the glass did. That had little to do with the sound coming from my mouth, though. It was mostly ice, a deep arctic freeze.

  And then the crack imploded, shards of metal-laced glass flying inward through the window. My hair took on a grainy feeling like I'd laid in sand at the beach, and a patter like hail falling on a frozen pond sounded behind me. My face was wet in spots but with blood, not tears. Coincidence was on our side. Mercy and I were destined to save each other.

  I reached through the small opening in the wall. If I'd been thinking I wouldn't have. I would've feared hurting my unhatched friend with my ice-rimed fingers.

  But as it happened, the cold was exactly what Mercy needed to escape her egg. She'd been an ice gryphon all along, half-Arctic Fox and half-Arctic Tern. She hatched to the sound of the school's alarms blaring, and the first spoken words she heard outside the egg weren't mine but my horrible roommate's.

  "Sissy's got a trash gryphon."

  Before I could respond to his indignities, the door burst open. The Academy's brute squad dragged me off to the captain's office. Yes, they called the head of the Academy “the Captain.”

  They locked me in a room alone with Mercy until my parents showed up. Because they're amazing, that only took half an hour. Rhode Island is a small state, but they lived on the other side of two bridges from the Academy.

  They home-schooled me for the last few weeks of that year, then pulled some strings and got me in at Hawthorn Academy on probation, but still an improvement in my academic life. My social one, too. Until the poisoning, anyway.

  "Caw!" Mercy kept trying to fly toward the classroom, but I stood at the doors leading to the lobby already. I wasn't going, and my familiar knew it. I reached out and pushed the door, and she sailed through over my head. I would've walked in and mingled with the crowd in the lobby or the caf, but I couldn't yet. The experience alone in the academic wing had me too shaken up for that.

  My sister had died because she knew too much and pushed too hard. She got caught up with the wrong guy, and he used her for his own ends. When she stood up to fight, they struck her down forever. I owed it to my parents and Mercy not to end up in the same situation. Maybe this time, instead of cowardice, running was the better part of valor.

  I gazed at the stained-glass doors for a moment, trying to compose myself. The mural on them was titled Long Division, depicting a scene straight out of the Under. I couldn't stop the tears. I just couldn't handle it anymore—the stress of being in a new place with magi who had no idea what they might be in for.

  My family had already lost enough to shifter crimelords and magisupremacists. Now here I was, trapped on a campus with more than one and no idea whether they were students, staff, or faculty—because I had run away.

  I needed to talk to somebody, knowing that instinctively. Who could I trust? Obviously, the people I'd overheard were still in the academic wing. It'd be easy to jump to the conclusion that anyone out in the common areas right now wasn't them. But they couldn't be acting alone.

  I wouldn't go to the headmaster because he'd start an investigation. The student handbook said that in cases of serious allegations, accusers couldn't remain anonymous. There was no way to be sure who at Hawthorn Academy was safe to talk to, except for the one person they’d mentioned.

  Aliyah Morgenstern.

  But when I found her in the cafeteria and tried approaching her, Dylan had nearly bit my head off. I left, heading into the hallway between the lobby and the school's entrance, which wasn't blocked anymore. I leaned against the wall, thinking about requesting to call my parents to ask if I could go home. Chickening out again.

  "Caw." Mercy butted her head against my cheek. When she did that, an idea cracked through the heat of my panicked thoughts like an ice cube dropping into a fresh cup of coffee.

  I could wait until October when the extramural guests arrived on campus. I'd definitely find allies against organized bigots amongst their ranks. Not all magi were magisupremacists, but all magisupremacists were magi. Other extrahumans could probably be trusted. In October, I could make psychic, shifter, and changeling connections, and then I'd have help with all this.

  "I love you, Mercy." I stroked the fur on her hindquarters, and she curled her bushy tail around my wrist. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

  Chapter Three

  Aliyah

  At the end of dinner, Dylan headed toward the stairs. I couldn't handle any more socializing, but the café was shut down anyway, along with the lounge beside it. I wasn't sure what to do, so I paced around the lobby, trying to think of somewhere to be alone.

  I walked down the hall toward Penelope's window, just to have room to stretch my legs without passersby looking at me. When I reached the end, I turned around and headed back. I thought about checking the gym, seeing if it was open. Maybe I could run some laps. But I remembered Coach Pickman saying it was being cleaned that night.

  That left me no choice but to head toward the stairs. Maybe it'd be best to sleep off my bad mood. While dodging through the crowds of chattering groups in the open space, I kept my eyes down to avoid getting sucked into any conversations. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

  My shoulder made contact with someone, and I looked up into the face of the last person I wanted to see.

  Or maybe you do want to see him. Give him a piece of your mind, why don't you?

  I typically didn't heed advice from the voice in my head because that way lay madness, but nothing about this entire day could reasonably be called sane. My mouth opened, spewing thoughts and opinions before I could stop their escape.

  "How dare you!" I put my hands on my hips, glaring into Alex Onassis's eyes. "She's in intensive care, you asshole."

  "What?" He blinked, taking a step back. His basilisk reared up on his shoulder, mimicking his movements.

  "I understand yo
u're no friend of Darren's, but hurting his poor innocent dog? That's beyond the pale, even for you."

  "Clementine's in trouble?" His face paled and his jaw dropped. "I wouldn't hurt her in a million years."

  "You expect me to believe that?" The right side of my mouth curled up in a sneer. "She was poisoned with neurotoxin, your specialty. I have direct and personal experience with that."

  A gaggle of first-years stood transfixed by our confrontation, but I didn't care.

  "I didn't!" He held a hand up to his cheek as though he'd been slapped. "I wouldn't poison someone's familiar. What kind of monster would do that?"

  "You tried to whammy a sauna full of magi last semester." I snorted. "You wouldn't have stopped if I hadn't gotten in your way, either. I know you wouldn't think twice about it with other extrahumans."

  "I'm not evil." He shook his head, the hand he’d held to his face before now trembling in front of it. "Familiars are off-limits. And we shouldn’t be talking."

  "It's true." Elanor Pierce sauntered over. "Pick your battles wisely, Aliyah. Your bully is showing."

  "I'm not a bully." I blinked.

  You could've fooled me.

  "I'm not." I wrung my hands, focusing on Elanor instead of the voice. "But if you'd been in the infirmary, saw what happened, you might be asking the same questions."

  "Not in that tone or in that state." Elanor raised her eyebrow, jerking her chin at my fists.

  "Oh." I glanced down, seeing the glow around them. I hadn't set my blazer on fire; this was solar magic. All the same, my lack of self-control disturbed me. "Sorry."

  "Is it true about Clementine?" Elanor crossed her arms over her chest, tilting her head. "Was she really poisoned?"

  I nodded. "Nurse Smith called my grandmother in and everything."

  "I gotta go check on Darren." Elanor dropped her arms. "If you guys have a knock-down drag-out, I'm reporting you both to the headmaster. You're both on probation. Stay civil or get the boot."