Wand: A Fantasy of Witches, Wizards, and Wands

“I understand you’ve been excused from the rest of your classes today?” Duchaine said as he led Nick into his cabin. Nick settled into a rocking chair near the door while the warlock tossed his busted brass goggles into the fire and dropped a log on top. When he looked back, Duchaine’s face was scrunched up. “You didn’t just see me destroy the evidence.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Nick played along.

His eyes wandered over the cabin while Duchaine prepared some drinks. Next to the gray stone fireplace, left of the log pile hung the net they’d used to capture the glimmerling. On another wall two thin boards propped up on cinderblocks served as a bookshelf, the thin wood bowing under the weight of a few dozen beefy tomes and books of magic. To Nick’s surprise he also noticed a tattered hardcover set of his all time favorite fantasy series.

“You like Harry Potter?”

“Shh.” Duchaine set a steaming mug on the end table beside Nick. Taking his own chair, he inhaled from a tapered cup of spiraled bone. “Most of the teachers around here hate those books with a passion.” He took a careful sip, followed this up with a long belch.

“Why?”

Duchaine shrugged. “I suppose it’s because the books make magic look easy and wizards lazy. Conjuring things up with a flick of their wands.” At the mention of wands, they traded a glance, and then quickly looked away. The warlock cleared his throat. “About these tests. We’ll need someone to keep an eye on you for the next two days, make sure you don’t conk out or unconsciously shamble back to that efrit. Know anyone who might be a sport?”

Nick nodded, gave him a name.

“Okay,” Duchaine said, jotting down a note. “Make sure your friend Richard gets this. Also, I’ll need to put you under a slight Mesmer and ask a few questions. You good with that?”

The Mesmer. The dreaded technique warlocks used on buffers when they stole into the Preserve and saw something they shouldn’t, or if they accidentally discovered genuine knowledge concerning the wizarding world. Before the Mesmer—that mystical method of ferreting out information and destroying undesirable memories—the warlocks had been forced to perform countless lobotomies to keep their secrets safe from the buffer community.

Nick nodded. He didn’t really have a choice, and neither did Duchaine. “Um, what exactly does it mean to be enthralled to an efrit?”

The man gulped the last of his hot chocolate and then pulled out the drawer of the end table. From its narrow chamber he retrieved a pendant embossed with the mark of Anton Mesmer, a brilliant eighteenth century Shaman medicine man. “Drink your chocolate. It’ll help you relax,” Duchaine ordered. When Nick had downed the entire contents of the cup, Duchaine set his rocker directly in front of him. “Efrit’s are basically evil djinn, right?”

Nick nodded, not familiar at all with Efrit 101, but swiftly growing indifferent as the concoction numbed his mind.

Duchaine raised the pendant to use it as a pendulum, swinging it back and forth. “When someone interacts with an efrit, they open up their mind to a form of hypnotism. Just like what we’re doing here, only the efrit uses his eyes and markings in some method we still don’t understand.” Duchaine lowered his voice to a hushed, mellow tone. “You are getting sleepy. When an efrit enthralls a person, that person feels an inexplicable desire to return. And when he does, the efrit places him into a short but powerful dream state. Your eyes are closing. The efrit then releases its victim. But by then an unbreakable connection has been forged. The victim will return again and again, seeking the hypnotic dream states, until eventually he craves them more than anything else in the world. You are now completely under my suggestion.”

Duchaine carefully lowered the pendant into his palm. “At this point the victim is completely enthralled to the efrit. And all the while the efrit has been feeding off its victims’ chi, draining his life force. With enough stolen energy, the efrit could send his victim into a permanent dream-state—or as buffers call it, a coma.”

Duchaine’s voice, two octaves above a whisper, reached Nick through the haze: “Did you converse with the efrit in my cage?”

Escaping in a gentle murmur, Nick uttered the word ‘yes.’

A pause. “Okay. That’s okay, Nick. Now, what did it say to you?”

Nick shifted in his rocker. Sweat began to bead on his forehead. “I don’t want to say.”

For the first time since entering the cabin, Duchaine was speechless. Making people talk while under the influence of the psychoactive tea concoction with its powerful blend of chamomile, Clary leaves, and sandalwood oil, along with the infusion of their own powerful will, was the first trick a warlock learned; and something they didn’t teach in the Institute. Once they were under, subjects could not resist speaking the truth.

Yet here was Nick, a mere boy, resisting.

“Tell me what the efrit said to you,” Duchaine’s voice didn’t so much breach the barrier of will-suppressing drugs and hypnosis as meld with it. “Tell me the truth.”

Nick hesitated. A niggling itch in the back of his mind warned against sharing. Even so, the compulsion to spit out the truth nearly forced him to speak it. But then the Rule asserted itself: Don’t invoke what you can’t banish.

Sweat drizzled down Nick’s forehead, slithering from his hairline down into his eyes. The salty tang burned. Fighting the tea and hypnosis only served to exacerbate the sweat and the overbearing sense of heat. Don’t invoke the truth, you won’t be able to banish it once it’s out. Nick gripped the rocker’s wooden arms. His body started thrashing, straining against the spell at work against him, Nick opened his eyes.

Duchaine stood, dropped the pendant. “How did you do that?”

Nick wiped his eyes dry and blinked. “I don’t feel so good. I think I need to lie down.” At the door, he paused. “Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep. My stomach’s too upset for that. You want me to give Richard the heads up about keeping an eye on me?”

For a few seconds it seemed the warlock was too stunned to respond. But he shook it off. “No worries. I’ll write a note and get it to him. He’s in your dorm, right?”

Nick nodded and then headed outside, where mosquitoes immediately attacked. He had to swat at them for the rest of the way to the labyrinth. Barely able to keep his eyes open, and battling a migraine that was just beginning to nestle into a spot right behind his eyes, Nick walked up to the ward.

His shoulders sagged. Before passing the ward, he removed a blueberry Nutri-Grain bar from his pocket and ate it in two bites. Nick dropped the wrapper and entered the labyrinth.

Later that evening, lying in bed studying Fantastic Beasts, Nick felt the overwhelming drive to get up and run down the halls of the school. Such was the potency of the Monster drink he’d guzzled an hour ago. Finally, when he could recite the list of glimmerling tendencies and capabilities verbatim, he heard Richard’s bed creaking, the boy stretching over to blow out his candle. Now Nick just had to wait to hear some snores . . .

He lowered his text book as he heard murmurs from Richard’s bed. Was he already asleep? Did he sleep-speak? No, that wasn’t it. When he heard the faint words ‘Lord, help me open their eyes’ coming from the other bed, Nick realized what was going on. Richard was praying. To what god was anyone’s guess. Perhaps to Death himself, Lord of the Dead and the unofficial mascot of Dorm Necromancy.

Nick blew out his own candle. Within fifteen minutes Richard was snoring away, the sounds creating a breathy annoying cadence beside those of Bruno. Figuring it was finally safe, Nick got out of bed and tiptoed his way out of the monitors’ bunk and down the long sleeping quarters, past dozens of beds filled with sleeping boys. He was nearly to the common room entrance when something shrieked behind him.

Cringing. Some villainous creature was staring up at him from the floor. Its glowing green eyes pierced the darkness.