Romans de J. E. Harper

Grief, it turned out, moved through the Spire on a schedule set entirely by the administration, and by Thursday, they'd decided ours was ready to be managed.The flyers went up overnight, taped to the stone archways with a cheerful, laminated efficiency that felt almost obscene. Community Healing & Solidarity Circle — Great Hall, Lunch Period — Attendance Strongly Encouraged. Strongly Encouraged was academy-speak for mandatory, but we'd rather you thanked us for it."They spelled her name wrong on the memorial banner," Kiana muttered as we filed in with the rest of the sophomore and junior wings. She was right. Someone had stitched CLEMENTINE THORN in looping gold thread above the dais, missing the final e entirely, and nobody in the administration had noticed (or cared) enough to fix it before three hundred students filed in to grieve beneath the typo.I found a spot on the end of a bench near the back, close enough to the doors that I could leave if the

The confrontation in the courtyard was already drawing a crowd by the time Celestia and I tried to slip past."She didn't just walk out of the wards!" Dread was snarling at Mr. Harrison, the school's head of security, who was currently looking like he wished he’d chosen a career in taxidermy instead.Dread wasn't a werewolf himself, though you wouldn't know it by the company he kept. He was a puck—a shape-shifting fey of low, chaotic magic. In the grand, snobbish social hierarchy of our world, pucks were positioned barely a step above werewolves, who were as good as mud. Because Dread chose to lead and run with a pack made almost entirely of werewolves, the academy’s elite treated him with the exact same brand of cold, nose-wrinkling disgust they reserved for flea-bitten werebeasts.Right now, he was standing up for one of his own. "Clementine is a freshman," Dread barked, his shoulders tense. "She’s terrified of being alone, and she left her pack-scented

Most people would be grateful for their father to wake up early and make them pancakes, but in a house where breakfast was regularly threatened by semi-sentient, levitating pastries, being the only person without a drop of magic was a daily exercise in survival.My adoptive father chose to channel his formidable powers into the domestic arts of kitchen magic and also taught alchemy at the academy. This morning, he was humming a jaunty tune while conducting a symphony of flying silver dollar pancakes with a spatula that double-served as a wand.Beside me at the mahogany table, my sister Celestia was glaring at her plate like she wanted to incinerate it. Celestia was a perfectly normal witch. Or, as she would bitterly describe it in her diary (which I totally didn't read for personal entertainment), an aggressively average witch. In a family of magical overachievers, being average was basically a terminal diagnosis, and Celestia wore her secret misery like a heavy if

Magical athletics are, as far as I can tell, just a highly institutionalized method of committing legal manslaughter under the guise of school spirit.By Friday afternoon, the entire academy quad had been converted into a volatile carnival of team rivalries for the upcoming Autumn Broom Polo Tournament. If you thought regular high school football fans were intense, you hadn't seen a faction of third-year fire-witches actively trying to enchant the stadium banners to project literal, roaring pyrotechnics every time their team scored."Move it, human!" a voice barked from above.I ducked instinctively as a shadow streaked past, missing my head by a matter of inches. It was Jessalyra, the undisputed star of the Obsidian Spire Broom Polo team. She was a fierce, sylph-blooded fourth-year who could pull off a flawless vertical spiral dive without losing a single hairpin. Right now, she was hovering upside down on a sleek, silver-trimmed racing broom, effortlessl

Magical people were, as a rule, completely incapable of basic problem-solving.Give a warlock a locked door, and he will spend forty minutes chanting high-tier evocation spells to blast it off its hinges, accidentally setting fire to the curtains and blinding three bystanders in the process. It never occurs to him to just look on top of the doorframe for the key.This inherent mental block was why Arithmancy was the only class where I didn’t feel like a walking target. Arithmancy was the mathematics of magic—the rigid, structural code that kept reality from collapsing whenever someone cast a spell. And as it turned out, the universe’s source code ran entirely on standard calculus."The variable for the defensive kinetic dispersion is fluctuating," Professor Vane announced, her voice echoing off the stone walls of the amphitheater. She tapped a glowing chalk grid on the blackboard. "If a high-grade fire hex impacts a standard crystalline barrier at a forty-

At seven in the morning, the Pacific was a bruised, churning slate grey, and the narrow strip of wet sand connecting the mainland to the academy’s island was slick with kelp and minor curses. To my left, my sister Celestia was having a stand-off with her third-year Transfiguration textbook. The textbook, which had developed a predatory set of leather teeth over the summer, snapped viciously at her knuckles every time she tried to open it."Just cast a minor binding hex on the spine," I muttered, adjusting the straps of my satchel."I tried!" Celestia snapped, her voice carrying over the roar of the surf. She pinched her fingers together, whispering a low incantation. The book lifted about three inches, flipped upside down, and dropped open, pages-side down—or rather, teeth-side down—into the wet sand. "See? I’m aggressively average, Layla. In a family of magical overachievers, I’m practically a statistical error.""You have magic, Cel. That automatically puts you above me in the food