A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 214: A Swarm of Sparks

Damien

Month 8, Day 23, Monday 6:00 p.m.

When Ana returned from whatever social warfare she had been engaged with, her hair was frizzing out around her temples from sweat, but she was holding back a grin and flitting around with excess joy. She poured this energy into getting all of Damien’s friends to agree to accompany them out for a play that evening, despite the fact that a few of them might have been better off spending that time studying.

Though Alec probably also needed a break to destress, and Waverly wouldn’t study any extra even if given the chance, unless the topic happened to be magizoology or witchcraft.

The play was a dark comedy about a young man fighting to keep his idiotic family from falling into ruin and crime, with each incident accompanied by horrible social embarrassment.

Waverly fell asleep about twenty minutes in, and Brinn pulled a light blanket from his satchel, tucked it around her, then leaned her insensate form over so that her head rested on his shoulder. All without waking her.

Unconcerned with the uproarious laughter all around her, she drooled on his arm until the fabric was soaked through, but Brinn smiled happily the whole time.

When the play let out, Alec and Rhett kept laughing as they reenacted the funniest parts. Alec mimed his pants splitting open at the seat seam, then laughed so hard that he choked on his own saliva.

Sebastien watched on with concern as Alec’s face grew increasingly puce. With a put-upon sigh, Sebastien pulled his little slate table out, drew a minimalist spell array, and forcefully cleared Alec’s airways. He stepped back with a grimace of disgust as Alec spat out a huge mouthful of snot, saliva, and—somehow—a few bits of food.

Sebastien rolled his eyes and moved to Damien’s other side, as far away from Alec as he could get.

“What did you think of the play, Sebastien?” Brinn asked.

Sebastien moved over to him and idly used the same spell to pull Waverly’s saliva from Brinn’s sleeve, leaving behind a thin crust where the edges of the wet spot had been. “I didn’t really understand the humor. Why do people think it’s so funny when they see others meet misfortune? Every time, all I could think of was how those situations would be so stressful, painful…mortifying.” He cringed, then shuddered. “It was an overall unpleasant experience.”

Brinn gave him a small smile. “I think that’s called empathy.”

Sebastien raised his eyebrows dubiously as he put away his spellcasting supplies. “I don’t think most people would describe me as empathetic,” he said, his tone making it obvious that he thought Brinn had no idea what he was talking about. “Ah!” Sebastien smacked one fist into the other open palm. “It must be because I’m not a sadist.” He turned his head and peered speculatively at Rhett and Alec, looking them over from head to toe as if searching for physical signs of moral depravity.

Sebastien nodded to himself, satisfied that his suspicions were confirmed, though Damien noticed the small quirk at the edge of his lips and knew that he was joking.

Alec’s mouth dropped open, and he raised one arm, pointing at Sebastien with outrage. “I’m not a sadist! You just have no sense of humor!”

“I am a sadist,” Rhett announced, shoving his hands into his pockets. He added an exaggerated wink. “In the bedroom.”

Waverly gagged, then shot Rhett the middle finger.

Alec reached into his pocket and threw a handful of candy at Rhett. “Booo!” he jeered.

Rhett dodged, then ran away down the sidewalk, cackling loudly, which enticed Alec to give chase.

Sebastien stared after them with dismay. “Why am I friends with you lot?” he muttered to himself.

Ana gave him her lopsided grin. “Because we make your life interesting.”

Sebastien looked up at the sky and breathed almost silently, “My life is already too interesting.”

Damien nudged Sebastien with his elbow, and Sebastien nudged him back. It was the most relaxed Damien had seen Sebastien in the last couple of weeks.

This was why someone like Professor Lacer would never be a good match for Sebastien.

Sebastien should be with someone lighthearted, kind, and outgoing. As part of a couple, Sebastien should be the mature, serious, driven one. Otherwise, his relationship would probably consist of nothing more than studying, discussing, and practicing magic, with nary a romantic moment. There was a good reason for the saying, “opposites attract,” in Damien’s opinion.

After that, their group went to a fancy restaurant that specialized in exotic food from the East. Rhett ate some kind of blood-chunk and intestine soup, grinning at the looks of fascinated disgust from the rest of them. Well, the rest of them except for Sebastien.

“Food is food. Much better to use it than waste it,” he said.

Brinn looked green. “I just can’t help but think of the animal it came from whenever I eat meat. Have you ever been hunting? Ever dressed and cleaned your own kill?”

“I have,” Sebastien said calmly.

“I went with my uncle when I was eleven. Some kind of rite of passage. Asserting dominance and all that. I had nightmares for months afterward. The feel of the warm meat, the smell, the sensation of skin and muscle parting under my knife…” Brinn shuddered. “I agree that, if you’re going to do that to a living being, you shouldn’t waste a single gram. But I’d just rather not, entirely.”

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Waverly patted Brinn’s hand and passed him an egg boiled in tea. “You still need your protein.”

“What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?” Alec asked.

“A rat,” Sebastien said. He looked just as startled as everyone else, as if he hadn’t meant to say that.

“A rat?” Alec echoed, leaning forward across the low table as if he wanted to grab Sebastien by the lapels and shake more information out of him.

Rhett looked down at his soup, suddenly disappointed.

Even Waverly was morbidly fascinated. “How? Why? How?”

Sebastien hesitated, but seeing that everyone had stopped eating to stare at him, he looked away, rubbed his arms as if he were cold, and reluctantly spoke. “There was a time during my childhood when I was on my own.”

“Because you’re an orphan? Was this after your parents died?” Waverly asked.

Brinn tried to pinch her side, but she slapped away his hand and returned her attention to Sebastien. “What? Everyone knows he’s an orphan. It’s not like it’s news to Sebastien.”

Brinn pressed his lips into a thin line, pushed past her attempts at defense, and gave her a hard pinch as punishment for her tactlessness.

Waverly remained unrepentant, though she pouted as she rubbed her side.

“…Yes, after they died.” Sebastien agreed, still looking away. “I had to provide for myself for a short time. And hunger…if you’ve never been truly hungry, you can’t imagine how it will drive you to do things you’ve never considered. It’s like a compulsion. It erases your reservations and tests your principles. I managed to capture a rat. I won’t go into the details. But then I cooked it and ate it.”

“What parts?” Alec asked.

Sebastien looked back at him, ate a bite of his own food, and said, “The whole thing, of course. It tasted horrible because I didn’t drain the blood ahead of time, and I didn’t have any spices. I wasn’t very skilled at butchery, so the meat had hair all over it. I ate the organs, the brain, the eyeballs…even the tongue. The only things I didn’t eat were the skin, the bigger bones that weren’t soft enough for me to chew my way through, and the intestines. I wanted to eat the intestines too, but I knew they might make me ill, and I didn’t know how to clean them thoroughly enough that it would be safe.”

Sebastien’s gaze grew distant again as he added, “I also tried to eat a stray dog, which would probably have taken the number one spot among my most unpleasant meals, but I wasn’t strong enough to capture it. And then I was found and taken in, and didn’t have to catch my own food anymore.”

Sebastien returned to eating, and Damien knew the conversation was over. Both Alec and Waverly opened their mouths to toss out more questions, but Damien, Brinn, and Ana, working together, managed to glare and pinch them into silence, and soon enough the matter was buried under an attempt by Waverly to force Alec to swallow an entire foot-long piece of artisanal bread without chewing.

Damien imagined a young, tiny version of Sebastien, thin and dirty, crouching somewhere hidden as he gnawed on rat bones. His eyes burned, and he looked away so that Sebastien wouldn’t see as he blinked away the tears.

When they were finished with the meal, Sebastien paid for both himself and Damien, reaching into his coin purse and taking out a few gold as if it were nothing. “I lost a bet,” Sebastien explained when Ana looked at them strangely. But Damien knew that it was because Sebastien knew that he had spent all of his savings and his allowance for that term on newspapers, and couldn’t afford extravagant meals.

After the meal, the restaurant workers invited their customers up to the roof, where a fire witch was doing a nighttime show. The witch’s familiar, instead of manifesting as a coherent being of flame, had a body that was just a dense collection of sparks in different colors. It danced through the air in a beautiful, mesmerizing display, twinkling in and out of visibility like a swarm of fireflies.

Waverly was at the front of the crowd, gleeful as the fire witch directed their familiar to brush teasingly through the air around her.

Sebastien and Damien watched from farther back. “Do you think we could accomplish the same effect with a slightly modified version of the spark-shooting spell?” Sebastien asked.

“You probably could,” Damien said. “I would need a bit of practice to handle the complexity. And I don’t know how to distance my output yet, either, so I’d have to have a really big Circle.”

Sebastien nudged him, then jerked his head to the back corner of the roof, where it was darker and more secluded. Damien followed, and they looked out over the city in silence for a moment.

“Are you alright?” Sebastien asked.

Damien blinked. He had just been about to ask Sebastien the same thing.

Before Damien could respond, Sebastien continued. “I’ve noticed that you’re stressed. You’re sleeping less than usual, you keep leaving food behind at meals, and a few of your hairs have split ends.”

Damien’s hands flew up to smooth back his hair. “I have split ends?” he asked, his voice strained. “Do you have a mirror?”

Sebastien ignored his request, gazing softly down at Damien. “Is it because of the mission?” he asked, his voice low enough to be almost drowned out by the crowd on the other side of the roof.

Damien lowered his hands reluctantly. “It is.”

Sebastien let out a huff of frustration. “You know that you can set aside the mission until after the term ends? You should have done so as soon as the stress began to build. No one needs you to take on more than you can reasonably handle.”

Damien snorted. Sebastien was such a hypocrite. If there was one person between the two of them who didn’t know how to relax, who attacked every problem like it was life or death, it was definitely Sebastien.

“I’m serious,” Sebastien said, grabbing Damien’s shoulder as if to jostle him.

“It’s not the exams or a lack of time that’s stressing me out,” Damien admitted reluctantly. “I don’t want to say anything until I’m ready, but when I am you’ll be the first to know. I just need a few more days.”

Sebastien squinted, peering at him as if he could read the thoughts behind Damien’s eyes.

Damien tried to hold his gaze, but ended up looking away and taking a half-step back.

Sebastien let his arm fall to his side, then looked down at the flat rooftop for a few long seconds.

Damien didn’t want to say it, because it would likely either alarm Sebastien or spark his curiosity, but what he was working on was much more important than any exam score. He wasn’t sure if the higher-ups knew what he might find when they set him the mission, but he could see the outline of something world-shaking. And that was why he needed to be cautious. To be sure.

And it wasn’t as if one term’s scores dipping a little would matter, especially so early in their schooling. Furthermore, Damien was insulated from certain consequences by the advantage of his Family name. He would never struggle to find a job.

Sebastien sighed. “All right. But if you need help, I have resources that might surprise you. I can deal with a wide array of problems, both mild and severe.”

Damien chuckled. “What if I need to break into the University records and adjust my exam scores?”

Sebastien frowned. “It’s not just the scores we’d need to adjust, but the professors’ memories. It would be easier to bribe them to get them to agree. Or blackmail them. It should be possible.” He crossed his arms and brought a thoughtful hand to his chin.

Damien lifted both his hands, palms outward, to stop Sebastien before his friend could actually start planning a criminal operation against their professors. “It was just a joke!” he said, but a soft warmth was spreading outwards from the center of his chest.

Sebastien shrugged. “Sure. But if you needed something like that, I could probably make it happen. I’m just saying. You can ask me for help if you need,” he said, stressing the last sentence.

Damien swallowed. Not trusting himself to speak, he nodded silently.

He had exceedingly good taste in friends.