That’s the problem with this world. With enough magic, you can get away with anything. The rulers of the Under World could demolish the earth if they decided to. No mortal investigators want to risk their wrath, not for one human girl.
Someone of no consequence.
So, if the trail led them toward someone toodangerous, they’d drop the case faster than a hot potato and pretend the evidence didn’t exist. Which is what I assume happened in my sister’s case.
My parents hired an independent investigator, after the official investigation was dropped. At least this way, if they found the killer, they’d know never to work with them again. Maybe they’d brew their own brand of revenge.
I heard that discussion in the middle of the night a few weeks after we found her body.
Except, after a week—aweek—they dropped their investigation too and refused to tell me why.
They told me all the sappy stuff about mourning and celebrating her, remembering the good yada yada yada. Her journal turned up in my room without a word that week.
And I took matters into my own hands. I spent an entire night pouring over her words. I learned she was dating someone new, someone who “reigned supreme,” at a nearby magical academy.
I also found a half-completed application to Shadow Hills Academy inside the investigator’s box, left abandoned in our closet.
I’d crossed her name off the application and filled it out for myself. It had been a full two weeks past the admissions deadline, so I’d sent in apersonalnote to the headmaster along with it.
And that brings me to now. Sitting in my cold, dingy dorm room in a magical school, holding my dead sister’s journal.
Liz wrote less than fifty short entries in it, which means only major events or times she was feeling especially emotional made her pull it out. I find myself wondering if she purposefully hid that she wrote in it or if I’d just never noticed.
The first three entries are sappy and silly. She talked about her first year of regular human school and how she sometimes missed being part of the supernatural world—something she never mentioned to me. She admitted that I was right; we were better off using our talents to get ahead in the human world where we could be some of the most influential women in whatever field we decided to enter, instead of being barely tolerated in the magical world.
Our parents are famous potions masters, which is cool. But we had still witnessed them be threatened over and over, called unimportant and weak. We’ve had our house ransacked by trolls after our parents refused to help them murder a enemy family. We’d lived with bodyguards for an entire year in sixth grade because of kidnapping threats from a rival potionist.
That’s the truth of how we became friends with Jarron and Trevor.
We saw them every once in a while, usually only one at a time, when their parents would make a quick trip into the shop for a meeting.
Dozens of guards would show up, blocking off the whole block. When I was a child, I didn’t realize how bizarre that really was. That was when they were only occasional clients. But when the royal family of the Under World chose my parents for a regular contract, it nearly cost us our lives.
A witch potionist believed she deserved the contract simply due to the magic in her blood, and she tried to force my parents to back out of it by threatening Liz and me.
We had no idea it was happening at the time. We just thought our parents were being paranoid, but come to find out, the car accident, house fire, and Liz’s stomach virus that year were not freak accidents. The witches plan backfired, of course, when the underworlders got involved.
In order to protect their investment, the royal family made their presence known in our lives for several months until the threats magically disappeared.
Poof.
In fact, I haven’t heard a peep about that witch since.
This is only one piece of why Liz and I separated ourselves from the supernatural worldentirely. I was getting ready to start high school and Liz, a year behind me, was still in Junior High.
We were at an age where we were just beginning to realize the truth of the world our parents are so deeply intrenched in.
We began to see the magic swirling around us and how it was used against us regularly. We saw how even our friends would change—literally—when their magic became stronger and stronger.
I refused to be afraid of what was around every corner. I refused to care about people I wasn’t safe with. People who would eventually realize how minuscule we were, in the grand scheme of things, and leave us behind.
Our parents gave us the option of going to a boarding school instead of staying at home, and they were noticeably relieved when we chose to leave the magical world. So we found a boarding school we could attend together.
Liz and I loved it.It was thrilling to feel powerful for once.
We never fit in to the posh crowd, which was fine by me, but we had our own form of power. A power I quickly became addicted to.
Liz has a few entries about our first couple weeks in England. Being parted from our parents was hard on us both, but it was exciting to see the world and be out on our own.
