Sylvie Asleton and the Coven of Glass Read online

  Sylvie was loathe to leave the safety and comfort of the Gray. Though she had begun to understand that it was neither. It was the absence of everything and by its very being, could be nothing.

  She left the Gray with a pang of loss.

  Chapter Two

  Sylvie’s sleep was deep and peaceful. Memories of the Gray drifted about in her head, peaceful and uneventful. She made a mental note to never eat strange gumdrops again. One trip to the Gray was enough.

  Her mind was abuzz with questions and dead end thoughts. Everything she was certain of was now called into question.

  Although both nights at Brookmoors were the result of days fraught with peril and danger, they were also the best night’s sleep she’d ever had. Her usual night terrors failed to show up at their scheduled hour and she was blissfully unburdened by intrusive thoughts that vividly recalled each and every past mistake.

  She was at peace. A word Sylvie had long since forgotten.

  It was hard to tell how late she’d slept in. The room was smaller and more private than the one she’d been in previously. She awoke to a gray light filling the empty room.

  She had half expected Pyx to be there. Sylvie pushed down the pang of yearning she felt. Even Pyx’s cot was gone.

  She’d have her own place by now. Wherever it was that they housed the First Years. Sylvie made a mental note to ask the first Healer she saw about that. Maybe Professor Immau would know when she came to check on her.

  She couldn’t very well stay in the Garden forever. Though she was forced to admit that she was making an uncomfortable habit of it.

  The door on the far side of the room opened. The warm, bright light of late morning spilled in from the open-air hallway. She had expected to see the dark robes of Professor Immau walking in to check up on her.

  Instead she was pleasantly surprised to see Pyx and wearing the same clothes as yesterday no less. She carried a tray piled high with food in her arms. Sylvie felt the bite of guilt and the thrill of happiness all mingled together.

  “I see you’re up,” said Pyx, with a smile that could warm the coldest heart.

  “You see right,” said Sylvie. She sat up and propped a few pillows behind her back. “I thought you’d be in the dorms by now, what gives?”

  Pyx shook her head. “I was, but I after last night....”

  The words hung in the air between them.

  There was that pang again, this time tinged with sadness. She hadn’t actually wanted Pyx to stay with her in the cramped room, she felt guilty for it. But she couldn’t deny that it had felt good that Pyx had been worried enough to stay by her side. It seemed today was a day for mixed feelings.

  Sylvie would have to get used to that. It had been so long since she’d felt much of anything beyond despair and self-hatred it was like breathing clean air for the first time. It was strange and new. Unfamiliar.

  Pyx looked at Sylvie, watching. In the dim gray light of the room her cobalt-blue eyes blazed bright.

  It seemed Pyx wasn’t going to say anything more about it. Sylvie watched her and with a false start that she had to disguise with a cough, Sylvie finally blurted out, “You were in my dream.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s it? ‘Yep,’ is all you have to say? Pyx! You were really there, in my head. How?”

  Pyx sighed. She put the tray on the bedside table and dished out the most lavish breakfast Sylvie had ever seen.

  “Yes, Sylvie I was actually there. It wasn’t a dream either, not precisely. You were being attacked, do you remember?”

  “Of course I do! The Shrike will haunt my dreams until the day I die.” Sylvie gingerly placed her fingers along her bare throat. “I can still feel its hand clamped around my throat, cutting off my air. I wasn’t strong enough.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Pyx brandished a croissant at her. “You’re one of the strongest people I’ve known and in the short time we’ve been friends I’ve seen you do things that full-lettered Magi wouldn’t dare. So don’t give me that.”

  “But it’s true, without you-“

  “No,” Pyx cut in. “I lent you my strength, I did not fight the Shrike on your behalf. I gave you the boost you needed, but it was all you Sylvie. You were…amazing. Don’t you dare diminish what you did. You fought a Curse, Sylvie.

  “That’s like saying you walked up to a grizzly bear and took it on hand-to-hand and won. You might not understand how amazing it is yet, but you need to know it is not normal. It is not something that anybody can do, Magi or not. It takes immense willpower to do what you did, to survive so long. I felt how scared you were, what it was doing to you. I know precisely how hard it was for you and that’s what makes it so astounding.”

  There was a long silence as Pyx finished dishing out the food.

  Pastries so fluffy and flaky that they were like crispy clouds. They were swirled, spiraled, and stretched into shapes like half-open books and piled high with candies and powdered sugar. There was no doubt magic played a role in their creation.

  In fact there was still a tiny glitter of golden Cinder, magic that Witnesses like Sylvie could see. She still didn’t fully understand what it meant to be a Witness, but she was one of the few people at Brookmoors that could see the physical manifestation of magic as Cinder, the tiny gold particles that often lingered after a spell.

  Sylvie was tempted by one of the pastries until she noticed the gumdrops. Distracted by the beauty of Cinder as she was, she tried and failed to think of several things to say to Pyx, but all that managed to come out was, “Thank you, Pyx.”

  Pyx wrapped Sylvie in a tight embrace, and Sylvie had to choke back a sob that bubbled up and lodged itself in her throat. "I will always be there for you, Sylvie. Now, try some of the juice. I’m sure you’ll find one you like.”

  Pyx set out three different types of juice; green, orange, and pale-pink.

  Sylvie took the cups of juice and sipped each in turn. Pyx knew about the Seal, she knew about the Curse. She’d even stood by her side to help her fight off the Shrike as the manifestation of the Curse in her mind. Sylvie vowed to repay her for her kindness.

  To be every bit the friend that Pyx deserved.

  The green juice was tangy with a touch of sweetness and the slightest bitter flavor that vanished quickly. The orange was plain orange juice, but it was the best orange juice Sylvie had ever had. Freshly squeezed and without a single bit of pulp. The pale-pink was fizzy and sweet with the taste of lemonade and strawberries.

  A host of meats from the typical (and much loved) bacon to smoked brisket and everything in between. Not your typical breakfast fare. Sylvie even spied a few thinly cut steaks under the pile of food.

  “Pyx, where’d you get this?” asked Sylvie. She was stunned by the spread. The smell forced her to close her mouth or else drool all over her covers.

  “From the Tearoom. It’s where most of the students eat, they also deliver if you ask nicely.”

  Sylvie made another mental note to go visit the tearoom as soon as she could.

  “But you’re delivering it,” said Sylvie.

  Pyx gave her a playful smirk. “They asked nicely.”

  Sylvie was about to dig into the pile of food Pyx had set out for her, laden with pastries, sweets, and more meat than she could normally afford to eat in half a year when the smell of rich, velvety dark coffee filled the room. Pyx had unstoppered a small glass vial the size of her thumb. Sylvie shut her eyes and breathed in the heavenly aroma.

  Sylvie’s avaricious eyes watched as Pyx poured the dark liquid into a nearby mug. It was several times too large to hold the thimble full of liquid that would come out. As seemed the case with anything magical, Sylvie was wrong.

  The coffee continued to pour out long after it should have emptied itself many times over. Eddies of steam swirled and lifted off the dark pooling liquid until the mug was almost full.

  “How do you take your coffee?” asked Pyx.

  “Usually instant and with rusty lukewarm water,” answered Sylvie.

  Pyx pointed to the faint outline of the nearby doorway. “You’ve got a bathroom in there if you want to replicate the home experience. Want me to go get you some fresh toilet water?”

  Sylvie cringed. “No, thank you. Though it’s probably cleaner than the brown chunky stuff that banged out of the pipes in my apartment.”

  The other girl shook her head. “So, my question?”

  Sylvie answered with a shrug. “I’ve never had proper coffee. How about you just give me what you like?”

  The swish of Pyx’s silver-white hair tipped with fuchsia caught her eye as she shook her head yet again. “You wouldn’t like it. My diet is a little…odd.”

  That piqued her interest.

  Sylvie sat forward, eyes bright. “Like, you eat people or something? Oh! Are you a vampire? Do those exist?” She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Do werewolves and monsters like that exist too?”

  Pyx stood to full height and placed her hands on her hips. “If you weren’t so adorably clueless I’d be offended.”

  Pyx blew at a strand of silvery hair that fell over her face and pulled a chair up beside the bed. With Sylvie’s mug in hand she poured her some cream and a spoonful of sugar into the cup. “There, try that,” she said thrusting the bowl-shaped mug into Sylvie’s face.

  The coffee was creamy and robust, with only a hint of bitterness that rounded out the melody of flavors she was too tired to fully appreciate. The only coffee she’d ever had was the cheapest instant coffee she could afford in a mug full of microwaved water. This was heavenly compared to the mud she used to drink.

  “Wow.”

  Pyx nodded. She dumped cream and shoveled spoonfuls of sugar into her mug until it resembled something like creamy syrup. She sipped it. “Ah, that’s what momma needed.”

  Sylvie cringed. Her teeth hurt just seeing so much sugar. “Just watching you is giving me diabetes.”

  The other girl laughed and winked at her over the lip of her mug. She stared at Sylvie and drained the whole cup in one go. When she was done she set it down on her small table next to the empty potion bottle. “I tried to tell you.”

  “So you don’t eat people, just super concentrated amounts of sugar?” asked Sylvie.

  “Pretty much,” said Pyx, around a mouthful of pastry. The powdered sugar sprayed out as she spoke. She cursed and began to wipe herself off.

  Sylvie giggled and took to the food on her plate like it was a triathlon, each type of food sectioned into its own event. She plowed through everything on her plate one after the other. Every morsel was accounted for.

  Sylvie lost herself in the symphony of flavors. Just as she was almost growing sick of one type of food, she finished it and moved onto something entirely else. Pastries gave way to savory meats drizzled in delicate sauces.

  The heavy flavor of the meats was lightened by the sweet crispness of fresh fruits. She hadn’t realized how ravenously hungry she was until the plate was cleaned of its last scrap.

  Sylvie sipped her coffee all throughout, reveling in the flavors that revealed themselves. Had coffee always tasted like this? Did the Shrike’s Curse make everything taste like ash and cardboard? She was determined to enjoy every last drop.

  With each sip a new flavor revealed itself like an unfurling blossom welcoming the morning light. A hint of pastry, ripe berries, dark chocolate, a touch of burnt sugar, and a mellowness that she thought might be butter. She could never go back to anything less now. She was utterly and irrevocably changed.

  Pyx watched her with a single dark eyebrow arched high. “Hungry?”

  Sylvie glared. “You’d be hungry too if you nearly died to some horrible otherworldly creature.” She had meant it in a light-hearted way, but the flash of worry in Pyx’s eyes said she’d missed the mark.

  She hadn’t meant to dredge it back up.

  “Dean Magnus wouldn’t talk about it,” said Pyx quietly. She began to play with one of her cream horns. She rolled it back and forth. Back and forth.

  “When he came out of…wherever it was he’d gone he was covered in a thin layer of frost and you looked dead.” Pyx looked up at Sylvie with a wet sheen to her eyes. “You were blue, Sylvie. And you were limp.

  “He wouldn’t tell me what happened, only that I was to take you immediately to the Gardens. He rushed off back the way he came and I lost sight of him. It was raining so hard it was impossible to see ten feet out. I ran all the way here. I’m still surprised I didn’t break both of our necks.”

  A blossom of warmth unfurled in Sylvie’s chest. Pyx carried her to safety? She didn’t know what to say.

  The other girl eyed her. “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Told me what?” asked Sylvie.

  Pyx made a frustrated groan deep in the back of her throat. “I said I’d come after you if I didn’t see you out there in the winner’s circle, didn’t I?”

  She did remember her saying that just before she took her final entrance exam.

  Sylvie couldn’t help but wonder what Pyx would have done if she hadn’t been afraid of being tossed out onto the streets of New York and ran into the Graves. She’d never have encountered the Shrike. The Dean never would have intervened on her behalf. And she’d still be the same darkly afflicted person the Shrike’s Curse had made her.

  Would Pyx still have come for her then?

  She also clearly remembered thinking that it was a nice thing to say, but that Pyx would never do it. Pyx was nice and seemed a genuine friend, but who in their right mind would potentially throw away their education - magical education at that! - for somebody they just met?

  After all Pyx had gone through to help her, Sylvie didn’t doubt that Pyx would be that selfless.

  “Yeah,” she said. The chuckle that bubbled up from her belly surprised even her. Pyx’s eyes widened and then she joined in with a soft, breathy laugh of her own. “You’re too good for me Pyx.”

  “We gotta work on your confidence, Sylvie. You’re not a bad person - or whatever it is you think about yourself. You think I don’t see it? The slight ways you put yourself down, how you always seem to think it’s odd another person would want to be friendly or helpful to you?”

  Pyx leaned back in her chair, cupping her mug in both manicured hands. Her pixel heart painted nails were replaced with tiny lightning bolts against a black background that morning.

  It wasn’t quite that simple. Even disregarding the Shrike’s Curse. Pyx made it seem a lot simpler than it really was.

  Pyx shot up like somebody had stabbed her. The sudden sharp gasp and motion startled Sylvie. She would’ve spilled coffee all over herself if she hadn’t drained every last drop of the mug. It went rolling and bouncing across her lap until, fumbling, she managed to get it in hand.

  “Shit! I’m so sorry!” said Pyx. She hurried over to the wall near Sylvie’s bed. There was a click and the room filled with light. The dull silver of the windows vanished. In their place was frosted glass that let in thick streams of bright light. The lights in the room had also turned on, rounding out the brilliance. “I forgot we were eating in the dark, why didn’t you say something?”

  The truth was a lot worse than anything else she could think of, so she shrugged and hoped Pyx would leave it at that. She didn’t want to have to explain that she had lived for months without electricity since she couldn’t afford to pay the bill.

  That’s all they would be now, bad memories. From here on out she’d have a fair chance at making a good life. A life worth living. It had been an all-too-often choice: Enough money for food, or money for utilities of one kind or the other.

  “Well, you’re probably still recovering. That was my bad,” said Pyx.

  “You don’t need the light to see?” asked Sylvie.

  Pyx shook her head, her mouth stuffed with that cream horn she’d been rolling around. She plopped back into the chair she’d dragged to the side of Sylvie’s bed.

  “You can see in the dark?” Sylvie didn’t seem terribly convinced.

  Pyx gave her a flat look. “Sylvie, if you haven’t noticed I have horns, and glowing blue eyes. Is it really too hard to think that I might also have something other than permanent cosplayer bling?” She pointed to each of them in turn. “If it’s escaped your keen eye for details, I’m a magical person. Not a Magi - though I aim to be - but a being of magic.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, honestly Pyx,” said Sylvie. Pyx sure seemed agitated about heritage.

  “It’s all right. It’s just…I mean, damn Sylvie. You are either the most accepting person I’ve ever seen, or you’re denser than Grandma Yesil’s fruitcake.”

  Once again, Sylvie could only shrug.

  She was so out of her depth that she defaulted to “New Yorker Mode” where she took everything at face value. As if it were normal. If Godzilla invaded Hell’s Kitchen tomorrow, the day after New Yorkers would make fun of you for gawking, as if the behemoth had always been there and was no big deal.

  It wasn’t the cleanest tactic to deal with things, she had to admit. There was a lot to magic and magical things that utterly blew her away. If she hadn’t defaulted to such a stoic and “this is totally normal, even though I know it’s not” mask of outward appearance her mouth would be hanging open all day long.

  At least it made sure she wouldn’t be gawking at every last little thing. But truthfully, she didn’t think it mattered, not where Pyx was concerned.

  Pyx was just…Pyx. If she was magical in some way then that was an added bonus as far as Sylvie was concerned. Though now she was very curious as to what other powers she might have.

  They ate together in companionable silence. Pyx focused on the sweetest things, only nibbling on the tiniest amount of meat. She acted like a child with vegetables they didn’t want on their plate, always pushing them around until they eventually were forced to make an attempt to eat them. Sylvie stifled a giggle.

  “Tell me honestly, Slyvie,” said Pyx. She leaned in close. Her cobalt-blue eyes seemed to glow even in the bright room. They were mesmerizing. Was that part of her magic? All other lights seemed pale and weak compared to them. “How are you feeling?”