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Synopsis

Lennon Carter's life is falling apart.

Until she gets a mysterious phone call inviting her to sit the entrance exam for somewhere very few have heard of - Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah.

Lennon has been chosen because - like everyone else at the school - she is special. She possesses the innate gift of persuasion: the ability to wield her will like a weapon and to use it to control others and, in rare cases, matter itself.

After passing the gruelling exam, Lennon must now learn how to master this devastating power. While persuasion takes a heavy toll on her body and her mind, she is captivated by all that surrounds her - her studies, Drayton's lush, moss-draped campus, her brilliant classmates and, most of all, by Dante, the charismatic adviser who both intimidates and enamours her.

But as Lennon becomes more adept at wielding her uncanny abilities, she uncovers more about the unsettling history of Drayton and Dante's tragic and violent past, and is increasingly disturbed by what she finds.

For it seems that the ultimate test is to embrace absolute power without succumbing to corruption and darkness... and it's a test she's terrified she is going to fail.

Excerpt

1

There was something in the bathroom mirrors. Lennon first noticed when she was standing between them, preparing for her own engagement party. One of the mirrors hung above the sink behind her; the other hung above the sink in front of her. Standing between the two, she gazed with glassy eyes at the reflections of herself reflecting one another, on and on, shrinking into the dark and distant ether.

Every one of them looked miserable, which was to be expected.

Lennon had realized some time ago that her misery was less a problem with the wedding than with her. She had been in a bad way for months-unmoored, discordant, occupying her own body with a sense of unease, the way one might in an airport terminal or the lobby of a rent-by-the-hour motel. Her own flesh and bone a kind of liminal space.

She'd hoped things would change with the engagement. So she'd attended the cake tastings and the dress fittings, and she'd made a deposit on the venue and secured a film photographer, who would be flying in from out of state for the occasion. She'd sent wax-sealed invites across the country to her family members and a few seat-filler friends. And now here she was, alone in her bathroom regretting everything and so desperate to be somewhere, anywhere, else that she would've almost rather died than face the engagement party outside her bedroom door. It was something of a miracle, then, that she finished her makeup. Her body seemed to perform the act without her, and when it was done, she stared at all of her faces in the mirror and saw someone, many someones, that she didn't know.

And then she slapped herself.

One hand raised-all of the other Lennons in the mirror raising their hands with her-and a sharp pop across her freshly blushed cheek. The slap carried down through the legion of her reflections and then stopped.

One of the Lennons in the mirror didn't strike its cheek. It didn't move at all really, except to smile, its lips pulling up at the edges, as if the corners of its mouth were attached to strings that had been sharply tugged. Then it sidestepped out of line, edging up through the ranks, walking toward her. It was like her in almost every way-bony bronzed arms sparsely tattooed, thin high nose spattered with freckles, long braids unfurling halfway down her back-but there was one glaring difference between Lennon and the defecting reflection in the mirror: she had eyes, but this... thing did not. It strode toward her, smiling all the while.

Lennon wheeled to face the mirror behind her, saw nothing except the same girl moving toward her, through the shifting ranks of the line. Panicked, she glanced around the bathroom but saw that she was alone.

The defector was edging closer now, stepping gingerly around its peers, sometimes weaving between them, letting its fingers trail along their bare shoulders as it passed them by. It stopped only when it'd reached the reflection nearest Lennon and stepped up onto its tiptoes so that it was an inch or two taller. The aberration in the mirror slid its hands around Lennon's waist from behind, the way that a lover might. It opened its mouth and pressed a kiss into the soft juncture where neck curves into shoulder.

Lennon stumbled, backing into the sink, arms wheeling, swiping a jar of cotton balls off the counter on her way to the floor. It shattered on impact beside her.

There was a beat of silence, followed by a knock at the door. She knew it was her fiancé, Wyatt, checking in on her. She was now more than an hour late to her own engagement party, and she could tell from the strained tenor of his voice that he was running out of patience. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, fine! I'll be out in a second." Gingerly, Lennon scooped up the glass shards and placed them in the trash, risking glances at the mirror all the while. The thing was gone, but she swore she could still feel the wet crescent of its kiss at the curve of her shoulder.

She scrambled to her feet and fled the bathroom.

The house was full of Wyatt's faculty friends from the university where he worked. One of them, a WASPy woman in a tasteful tweed blazer, abruptly stopped whispering when Lennon emerged from the bedroom. She bore the decided stink of significance, which to Lennon smelled a lot like Chanel No. 5. The woman looked at Lennon, slightly startled, as if she were an intruder instead of someone who lived there.

This was the uncomfortable reality of her life in Denver. The obligatory check-ins from vague acquaintances upon the event of a police murder, or the subsequent protests that followed it. The offhanded inquiries about the details of her DNA makeup, her nationality, her place of birth, the texture of her hair, and if it was really hers. Then there were the acquaintances at Wyatt's dinner parties who inquired about the color of her eyes and how she'd come by them and what or who she'd been crossed with. Then came the questions about her parentage, and her parents' parentage, because those same acquaintances now wondered if the parents of her parents had eyes the same muddy hazel as hers. It was a gentle othering, or perhaps more aptly, a distancing, that made Lennon feel it was impossible to connect with others in the close and complicated ways she wanted to. She'd since stopped trying.

Lennon, still badly shaken by her encounter in the bathroom, forced a smile and shouldered her way through the house, a midcentury-style ranch with an interior courtyard, complete with a cactus garden and a large koi pond stocked to capacity. Every year Wyatt forgot to remove the fish before the first freeze of winter. She remembered one of the first nights they'd spent in the house. There was a blizzard raging outside and they'd lost power and were forced to sleep on the floor of the living room, in front of the fireplace for warmth. Come dawn, Wyatt woke with a start and a muttered "Fuck."

He snatched a bucket from the supply closet, shuffled into the kitchen to fill it with warm water from the sink, and took a meat tenderizer from the drawer before staggering outside, trudging through calf-high snowdrifts to the very edge of the koi pond, where he dropped to his knees and began to hammer the thick crust of ice. He removed several heavy plates of ice from the surface of the pond before proceeding to extract each of the eight koi by hand, placing them in the bucket of warm water to thaw. He then hauled them all into the house and put them straight into the bathtub, which he filled with warm water.

Lennon had sat on the bathroom floor, arms folded on the edge of the tub, chin atop them, watching the koi stir back to life. She even touched a few of them, let her fingers skim along their slick spines as they emerged from their slumber. But one of the koi did not rouse to her touch. It floated motionless at the bottom of the tub. Panicked, Lennon plucked it from the water and hastily swaddled it in a hand towel. Cradling the fish to her chest, she carried it to the kitchen, where Wyatt stood, stress-smoking a joint. He took the half-frozen koi corpse from her bare-handed, leaving the damp towel behind, and studied it by the pale morning light that washed in through the windows.

"You know, it's not the cold that kills them," he said, as if to absolve himself. The dead fish dribbled water onto the freshly cleaned kitchen floor. Wyatt didn't seem to notice. Or if he did, he didn't care. "They suffocate. They can't breathe under the ice."

"Can't they breathe the water?"

"They breathe the oxygen in it," he said, rather matter-of-factly, and turned to throw the koi corpse into the trash. It struck the bottom of the bin with an ugly thump. "But under the ice there isn't enough."

Lennon began to love him then, foolish as it was. She had been so young then, and it had seemed to her that Wyatt knew everything about everything. She thought him the smartest person she'd ever met and thought herself all the more alluring for being the recipient of his sparing love... or if not that, then the object of it. Had he bent to one knee and asked her to marry him then, she was confident she would have said yes, being the bright-eyed little idiot that she was.

As it turned out, she would wait another year before Wyatt proposed (if one could even call it a proposal). He had broached the subject in the front yard, not on one knee but standing beside the empty koi pond. All of the fish were dead and gone, lost to another winter, soon to be replaced by new and expensive imports, long-finned butterfly koi flown in from Kyoto.

Wyatt had no ring at the time, or question to ask. He knew what the answer would be already. He'd simply said that he liked the idea of marrying in the fall.

Tonight, the koi appeared comfortable, swimming beneath the cover of their lily pads, their faint fins moving like fabric in the wind. A few guests-academics and admin whose names she didn't know-stood smoking and sipping cocktails around the water's edge. They waved at her, with some awkwardness, and Lennon waved back as she cut quickly across the courtyard.

She found Wyatt in the kitchen, slicing paper-thin slivers of lime alongside two of his colleagues. He was good-looking, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, his forearms shapely and covered in a soft down of curly brown hair. He had wide-set blue eyes, and he was tall and gangly with pale skin faintly freckled; a large, distinctly aristocratic nose; and a boyish, canted smile, which he flashed at her, forcibly, as she stepped alongside him.

"I'm sorry," she said as he pulled her into a hug. "I don't know if it's those new meds or what, but I think I saw something in the bathroom-"

"We'll talk later," he said through gritted teeth, smiling all the while.

Wyatt's closest friend and fellow professor, the blond and wiry George Hughes, stood beside him aggressively shaking the contents of a cocktail strainer. As he worked, he relayed the intricacies of his latest research trip to Russia. A PhD in architecture, he had gone to study some significant brutalist structure there. "It's the most amazing building. The spirit of communist antiquity quite literally made concrete. I had to travel almost sixty miles north by snowmobile to reach it, and I hiked the last half of the journey on foot, limping along with a pair of broken snowshoes that barely clung to my boots, and they still wouldn't let me in to see it."

Beside George stood their friend Sophia, measuring small scoops of ice into their respective copper mule mugs. On that night, she wore her hair-which was the pale beige of a peanut shell-combed carefully over one shoulder. Her sweater was a tasteful gray, half-tucked into the waistband of her slacks. She puckered her lips and kissed the air in Lennon's general direction by way of greeting. "If it isn't the blushing bride."

Lennon made herself smile.

Copyright © 2024 by Alexis Henderson

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