To anyone else, it’d look like I had tanked the Call Familiar spell. But I know better, and Orok knows better.
He presses closer to the wall like he’s trying to climb it and grumbles, “Where is he.”
Then chirps loudly and grabs his ankle. “Motherfucker—”
He kicks blindly and I smack his chest. “Don’t kill him! I’ll have to call him again, and I don’t have another vial prepared, and it’ll be a delay we can’t afford.”
“Hebit me.”
“Because Nick knows you don’t like him.”
“Because hebites meevery time you call him.”
I scramble into one of the pouches on my component belt—the leather contraption around my waist that holds an array of pockets, loops, and buckles to store whatever spell supplies I might need—and pull out a tiny top hat on a string, brandishing it at Orok with a smile. I click my tongue until I feel a soft brush against my calves, and I bend down to tie the hat onto Nick’s head so we can more easily tell where he is.
“Happy?” I say to Orok, who continues to rub his ankle. “Geez, you big baby.”
“Gods know what kinds of diseases familiars carry.” Orok holds firm that his physical strength and size compensate for any shortcomings he might run into by choosing not to call a familiar. How he expects punching to have the same effect as the occasional magic boost, I have no idea.
“Gods know what kinds of diseasesyoucarry,” I mutter at Orok and scratch Nick’s chin now that I know where it is. He rumbles against my fingers. “Ready to power me up, buddy?”
Nick answers with a screeching bark that sounds like a dog with laryngitis.
I shush him, and he nuzzles his cold nose against my palm.
Orok’s phone pings and he checks it with a passive-aggressive exhale. “Oh, look. Another picture of another end-of-semester party currently happening. And, oh, wait—yep, yep, we’renot in that picture. Because we’re here.”
I face the door again, trying to refocus on the incantation. “Toddle on off to whatever party you’re missing. I can handle getting revenge on the Conjuration Department all by myself.”
Nick chirrups.
“I mean, Nick and I can handle it.”
He purrs happily.
The first few words of the incantation roll off my tongue, boosted now by Nick’s connection, the magic he pours into me from the Familiar Plane. It won’t last forever and is generally considered to be a last resort during spell work, but the cheerful squeaks Nick’s making confirm that he’s glad to be here, so why should I feel guilty for wasting a high-level spell on a prank?
What’s the point of magic if you don’t get to use it for silly shit anyway.
“The Conjuration Department only retaliated for what we did to them,” Orok says quickly.
I stop the incantation again and look at him.
His pale skin is washed out in the safety lights that cast the hallway in a faint milky white, but is that exasperation on his face?
“What’s with the tone?”
He shoves his phone into the pocket of his purple Lesiara University hoodie. The bright gold Manticore logo has a scorpion tail curving around a snarling lion face. “They’ll retaliate for this, too, and on and on, and we fuckinggraduatein the spring. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, focus onthatinstead of this dumbass rivalry?”
I sparred with him once. And only once. His words hit now like his fists did then, in rapid succession, chest then stomach.
Yeah. We graduate in the spring.
Yeah. This rivalry is dumb. Evocation and conjuration are under the umbrella of the Mageus Studies Department, but unlike other focuses, we havesimilar needsandaligned goalsaccording to university funding, so we’ve been in the same building for decades—which put us at odds long before I enrolled at Lesiara U. I just took what was a simplewe’re clearly better than themattitude and cranked it up a few notches: spelling their dried insect wings to fly around the storage room or all the books in their library to scream upon opening.
And for a while, the Conjuration Department responded in kind. Fake plastic spills on our expensive equipment, dozens of pictures of famous conjuration wizards taped all over our walls.
Until I put a spell on their lab’s door to make it look like it’dvanished—it was just an illusion; it didn’t go anywhere—and the Conjuration Departmentdid not like that.
