Unreal Alchemy Read online

  Phoenix Boy smiled at that point, though it wasn’t a happy or relieved smile. It was a ‘you can’t make my day worse than it was before I saw you’ kind of smile.’ “I’m good. I’ll take a printed copy of that transfer form. And do you know where I can go to look for accommodation options?”

  I waved at the general direction of the bulletin board. “It’s probably too late to register for a room in one of the residential halls, but there’s a bunch of flatmate and share-house requests over there.”

  I was going to make up for my previous utter lack of professionalism by leaving it at that, and I totally wasn’t going to draw attention to one flatshare flyer in particular, but Phoenix Boy found it anyway. Unsurprising, since Sage and Dec had been up half the night decorating the flyers with fierce fluoro pens, and had insisted I use pins shaped like tiny battle-axes to attach it to the board.

  “Join the Manic Pixie Dream House,” Phoenix Boy read aloud with a bemused tone in his voice. “Must be able to endure one flatmate’s long drumming sessions, and the other flatmate’s constant smell of wet art materials (mostly clay). Brace yourself for meals made mostly of dead animal, and weekend gaming marathons in which the flat fills up with angry nerdboys and rattling dice.”

  “They’re friends of mine,” I admitted.

  “Do they have mixed feelings about letting someone else share the flat with them?”

  I laughed, the weird tension of the help desk finally leaving the conversation. “They’re not quite hauling up a drawbridge, but they don’t want another disaster — that’s pretty much a list of reasons why their last flatmate flipped out and stuck them with his share of the rent with no notice.”

  “Ouch,” said Phoenix boy, still staring at the flyer. “Are they — students of the Real or the Unreal?”

  “One of each.”

  That surprised him. He spun around and stared at me, as if the idea of a mixed household was completely off the chart crazy. “Seriously?”

  “It’s not that unusual,” I said, blinking. Just how sheltered was this boy? Had he never had a friend from the College of the Unreal before? I wasn’t sure whether to throw him at Sage and Dec for his own sake, or warn him off their chaos.

  “Huh,” was all he said, and when he walked away with the transfer forms, he took a tab from the Manic Pixie Dream House with him.

  Chapter 2

  Sage Doesn’t Hate Karaoke Night (But He’s Not Gonna Sing)

  THURSDAY

  So I heard this rumour that most universities don’t have an all night coffee house like Cirque De Cacao to rely on for their karaoke needs?

  Man, most universities must suck.

  Cirque De Cacao is smack dab between the Real and Unreal campuses. You’d think it’d mostly be Unreal students cos of the screwy effects that coffee has on magic, but the manager was sensible enough to set up a serious hot chocolate menu to lure in the witches who don’t want to face down their senior tutors next morning with a caffeine hangover sucking all the Real from their veins.

  Assuming that magic is stored in our veins. I never really thought about that. Maybe it’s in the pores.

  Me, I was raised in an anti-magic household, and I’d been drinking hardcore espressos since I was eleven, so maybe it’s not a surprise that I didn’t know about my affinity for Advanced Real Engineering until I tested off the charts at the end of high school.

  These days, I limit coffee drinking to uni holidays, and when I’m sick of making the TV go fzzzt-bang just by being in the same room as me. But it was still weeks before the new semester started, and that meant I could drink a cappuccino without fucking up my grades.

  Unfortunately, it also made me a Holly magnet.

  “Sage Sage Sage Sage!” Three seconds after Skinny Goth Waiter served my drink, Holly whipped into the booth opposite me and leaned over so far that her nose nearly dabbed into the chocolate-dusted froth in my cup. “Omigod that smells amazing.”

  “Get your own,” I said, batting at her with a napkin.

  “Can’t, I have to visit the Mums tonight so they don’t fuss about me and Hebes staying in town again this weekend, and train tickets are wicked expensive. Gonna have to be the broom.”

  I gave her a flat look. “Hol, you can’t fly straight at the best of times. That sound like a dumbarse idea.”

  “Yeah,” she admitted, chewing on a fingernail. “If I hitchhike instead of broomstick, I can have a coffee now. I really want a caramel macchiato.”

  “You’re not hitch — huh.” I glared at her. “Yeah, you can borrow my car.”

  Holly gave me her rock star smile, the one that makes her glow like she’s singing this song for You And No One Else. A lot of blokes and even more girls have done stupid things because of that smile, and I wish I could say I wasn’t one of them.

  Seriously, I’m not even attracted to girls, and she is my least favourite girl who looks exactly like she does, so how does she get away with this every frigging time?

  “Thank you, Sage,” she crooned, picking up a coffee stirrer from the end of the table, and drawing a heart in my foam.

  “Next time just fucken ask.”

  “So,” Holly said, moving on to the next topic with a gleam in her eye. “I hear you have a hot new flatmate, which means we have a hot new housemate.”

  “How did you know about that? It happened an hour ago.“ She claims getting the gossip is not her magic power, but all of our mates know better than to try and keep a secret from Holly. That one time we set up a surprise party for her, she got to the place an hour before we did and scared the hell out of Hebe when she arrived with the cake.

  That went down in history as the ‘Five Second Rule is extended to Ten Seconds When Cake Is Involved’ Party. We all swore we’d never do it again.

  “It’s true, then?” she said eagerly. “You do know who he is?”

  “Of course I know who he is, I just met him and agreed he could have Matteus’s old room for the semester. I wanna know how you know who he is.”

  “Ferdinand Chauvelin,” she said with relish. “He’s one of the Basilisk Kings.”

  I winced. “Shit, Holly. Why’d you have to tell me that?”

  The Basilisks were the founders of the College of the Real — some of the most powerful warlocks in Aussie history. Their kids (grandkids now, as the new generation takes hold) get automatic entry to the hallowed halls. So of course, they swan around acting like they own the place.

  After spending the last two years keeping my head down and avoiding all that legacy politics bullshit, I’d gone and let it into my flat. Sure, I’d figured that Ferd had a ‘born with a silver dragon in his mouth’ kinda vibe, but Basilisk King was a whole different bag of dice.

  “I’m not holding that against him,” I went on, refusing to let Holly get to me. “Bloke’s all right, a bit jumpy, that’s all. He’s got a crush on Hebes.”

  That had been the best part of the roommate interview, when Dec managed to get the new bloke to admit he had heard about our place because of the pretty girl at Student Services. The revelation that she was my ex girlfriend and yes hey, I was the drummer in that band, and yes that song is about me and Hebe, and… let’s just say that Dec was cackling like a mad goblin by the end of it, and I’d given up on awkward explanations and had gone all the way to laughing like a drain.

  Better Ferd knew what he was getting into now, with our crazy incestuous little group.

  “On Hebe?” Holly’s face lit up like an enchanted toadstool on the really good drugs. The matchmaking force is strong with this one.

  “Full on crush. Hearts in his eyes.” I was throwing Hebe under the bus here, but if Holly was concentrating on fixing her sister up with the new bloke, she might lay off spreading all his dirty laundry around campus.

  I had underestimated her. She shrugged off my distraction technique and doubled down on gossip. “Remember last year when there was some kind of explosion in the Thaumaturgery and a student ended up in hospital? I think it was him
. Ferdinand Chauvelin.”

  That was worthy of a blank stare. I call it my drummer wall because it’s (apparently) the expression I get some time into the second set when I can’t think of anything but the beat. It’s great for being vaguely intimidating to anyone who isn’t Holly. “Do I even want to know why that’s your working theory?”

  “Well, I know he’s friends with that bitch Viola Vale – you know the one, she’s like the Basilisk High Galactic Empress — and Jules Nightshade, too. Both of them went really quiet on social media after it happened, and Juniper heard that Omar said…”

  “Wow,” I said and drank some coffee. My Real senses unwound and faded to black as my body took in the hot milk and the caffeine. “Your brain, Holly.”

  “It’s mostly Facebook,” she said modestly. “The new app on Mirrorweb is amazing.”

  I shook my head at her. “You have time to stalk a complete stranger across computers and mirrors but you don’t have time to watch that box set of The Bromancers I lent you?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Sage, no one who has a life has time to watch a box set of anything.”

  “You are the worst person I have ever met.”

  “I know,” she smiled happily. “So, what can you tell me about this Ferdinand who apparently is going to marry my sister and make beautiful magical nerd babies with her?”

  I gulped more of my coffee down, because Holly was still looking like she might stick her face entirely into the cup. “He just walked in the door. Ask him yourself.”

  Ferd Chauvelin needed help. That much was obvious. Holly and our bandmate Juniper had dragged the poor bastard to the comfy velvet couches in the corner of Cirque de Cacao and were practically in his lap. He looked completely bemused as two thirds of Fake Geek Girl grilled him about his life, his past, his future, and all kinds of things he obviously didn’t want to talk about.

  I could have rescued him, but I wasn’t gonna, because Holly had left her phone on the table and…

  Okay, I’m not proud of this.

  I was reading her messages.

  Ferd was a hell of a distraction, but he was by no means the most important thing happening to us this week — and by us I mean the band. And me. And Holly. And…

  It’s complicated, okay? But I had to know what the hell was going on, and short of actually having a shouting match with her (it might start out as a conversation but it was going to end up with us screaming at each other if my suspicion was right) this was the best way.

  Good thing I drank the coffee earlier. Without it suppressing my abilities, I wouldn’t just have exploded the phone, I probably would have brought the whole cafe down around our ears.

  Because, yeah. Suspicion confirmed. Shit.

  Holly came back to the table, breathless and beaming. I slipped her phone under a napkin so she wouldn’t see what I was up to. “It’s all fixed,” she announced. “Ferd’s going to sing in the second set, so you have to as well, I know you hate karaoke night…”

  “I don’t hate karaoke night, I just hate how many people sing our songs to attempt some kind of stealth audition because they know we’re gonna be here. And I’m not singing. No way.”

  Holly’s phone went off. My expression froze for a second too long to play it off as an accident, and she snatched up the napkin. The name ‘Campion Merryweather’ flashed on the screen.

  “Back with him again, I see,” I said humourlessly.

  “Were you — did you take this? Were you reading my messages?”

  “He’s bad news, Holly,” I growled, though I had lost all moral high ground when I cracked her password.

  She squeezed her phone tightly between her fingers. “You’re not my brother or my boyfriend, Sage, and even if you were either of those things, this is still a dick move. Keep your car, I know someone who can give me a lift.” She stormed off, answering her phone as she went.

  Me feeling guilty about reading her messages was not the reason that I felt like there was an industrial steel-capped cauldron weighing down the pit of my stomach.

  If I was still a smoker, the alley out the back of Cirque de Cacao would be a great place to hang out, but tonight it was cold and grey and sorta depressing. I stayed out there anyway, while the karaoke music started up inside.

  Holly was right. I was being a dick. But the thought of Campion fucken Merryweather back in our lives, that put ice down the back of my neck.

  Who was I to complain if she wanted to ditch the band? I was just the drummer.

  “This is where you escaped to.” Hebe came out of the coffee house like a breath of warm air, bringing my jacket with her. She shoved it in my general direction, because she is the best. “Did you have to tell Holly I have a crush on your new flatmate? Now she’s trying to matchmake me through karaoke lyrics. It is the most horrifying thing I have ever experienced and I blame you.”

  I huffed out a laugh. “Could be worse.”

  She leaned her cheek on my shoulder, and my arm came easily around her. “I don’t have a crush on anyone,” she muttered.

  “Whatever you say, Hebes.”

  A buzz of magic burned through my skull. Some powerful workers were nearby, I could tell even through my caffeine haze. Powerful and angry. It tasted like the Real cafeteria in Finals Week, all fire and brimstone.

  I slid my own phone — wrapped in cords and packed with salt so my skin never came into actual contact with it — and pulled up a familiar app.

  “What’s that?” Hebe asked curiously, then wrinkled her nose. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Warlock’d,” I said absently. “It’s like Grindr but for magic users. Lets you find hookups who are power-compatible.”

  “Ew,” she said, punching me lightly (but not that lightly) in the ribs. “Wait until you’re not hugging your ex before you go trolling for talent.”

  “I’m not that tacky, darling, just trying to get a sense for who’s around.”

  A blond face that I knew blew up on my screen. Jules Nightshade, arrogant Basilisk King prick who shared half my classes. Huh. His powers were mostly water and ice-based, which suited his personality down to the ground, and didn’t account for the burning crackle in the back of my head.

  The back door crashed open.

  Hebe and I were snugged under the overhang, right in front of them, but the people who had just exploded out of the door didn’t even see us. I glanced over and saw (rather than felt) that she was weaving her favourite spell, the ‘don’t notice’ shield that Holly and I spent all of high school trying to convince her wasn’t appropriate for every single social occasion.

  Okay, this time it came in handy.

  Jules Nightshade was practically dripping icicles and sarcasm all over the alleyway. The girl next to him was Viola Vale, a grad student from the Practical Mythology department, and there was that fire I’d been feeling in my head. Little sparks came off her fingernails and the ends of her eyelashes as she matched Nightshade for fury and cutting remarks.

  In between them both was our Ferd — and yeah, he’d been living with me and Dec for less than a day but he was ours now, gotta protect your own. He was just as mad as his so called friends, but I didn’t get a buzz of magic off him at all, not even a pale shadow.

  Either he was really damned good at shielding his core, or… no, there was no or. According to his college record, he was top of his class in shadowmancy and had already been marked for a future career in Grey Ops. He was being mentored by Professor Hekate.

  I’d only drunk one cappuccino. I should be able to sense something from him. What the hell was wrong with me?

  “…just don’t know what you’re doing with these people,” Viola hissed. “It’s beneath you.”

  “While you’re screwing around feeling sorry for yourself, we’re trying to prevent you losing everything!” Jules growled.

  “I already have lost everything!” Ferdinand yelled back at them both. The fire and ice of their magics rose and fell in an angry cloud around the three
of them.

  “We should go,” whispered Hebe.

  She was right — I’d invaded enough privacy for one day. With Hebe’s ‘don’t notice’ charm still wrapped around us, we slipped back into the coffee house just in time to hear one of my favourite songs of all time mangled by a first year Healing student who was high on sugar and marshmallows.

  So that was Thursday.

  Chapter 3

  Friday Night Set List - revised! By! Holly!

  FIRST SET:

  Last Straight Girl in the City

  Coffee Shop AU With You

  Someone is Wrong on the Internet (Social Justice Warrior Remix)

  Time Agents Stole My Sister

  Bisexual Superhero Agenda

  Box Set Road Trip

  Witches Roll Dice, Bitches Sage says we can’t have it as our finale every show, but who are we kidding?

  [smoko]

  SECOND SET:

  Stupid Songs About Victorian Novels yes Juniper you have to sing it this time, it’s amazing, shut up

  Manic Pixie Dream House

  Big Gay Break Up Song

  Put Me On Athena Owl’s Roller Derby Team

  Witches Roll Dice, Bitches

  MISCELLANEOUS:

  ?? So Real (So Unreal) Sage says this isn’t a Fake Geek Girl song. So what the hell is it?

  ???

  Chapter 4

  The Elegant and Articulate Diary of Miss Juniper Cresswell, Gentlewitch and Scholar.

  SATURDAY

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady of moderate intelligence who has an unhealthy adoration of Unreal Literature of the nineteenth century will inevitably end up writing a journal.

  It is likewise inevitable that said journal should end up sounding somewhat like a pale imitation of Austen and Eliot, but hopefully nothing like Dickens, otherwise the young lady in question may have to put a wand to her head and hex her own brains all over the wall.