Good Witches Don't Steal (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 4) Read online

  Good Witches Don’t Steal

  S.W. Clarke

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2021 by S.W. Clarke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Covers by Juan

  FREE SHORT STORY: Liara Youngblood and Lucian the demon prince clash in the prequel story The Fae and the Demon.

  Join S.W. Clarke’s reader newsletter and get The Fae and the Demon for FREE only at subscribepage.com/swclarke.

  Chapter One

  Mave Umbra was determined to break me.

  Across from me, she sat with a headmistress’s patience, her fingertips touching in her lap. When I didn’t speak, just held the mug of tea in my hands for a minute, her fingers rose in a staying motion. “If you aren’t ready—” she began.

  “No.” I set the mug down on the coffee table between us—my first failure. “I just want to get it right.”

  She’d asked about my sister. How could I describe Tamzin Cole?

  Umbra’s head tilted, eyes lidded. “Tamzin was younger than you.”

  “By two years.” My chest had heated, my hands colder. But I sustained the magic around me. “She was always sweeter, softer, easier.”

  “Describe her for me. I want to see her.”

  Damn you, Umbra. I sat back in the armchair, whose cushions had a marshmallowy give. My jaw had started an infinitesimal shaking, but I wasn’t cold. Not really—just my hands felt icy.

  I could do this.

  My eyes closed. “Blond hair, straight like straw. Green eyes like mine. Skinny as a colt. She was almost taller than me when…”

  This time, Umbra didn’t interject. Even though I wanted her to.

  I wetted my lips, a preparation. “When she disappeared.”

  There it was.

  In the other room, one of Umbra’s grandchildren shrieked; Duck, Duck, Werewolf was that intense a game. Still, I sustained the magic. With the enshroudment around me, no one except Umbra—a master of the magic—could see or hear me. I was otherwise hidden from the world. One tendril of my hair kept tickling my cheek, the air cooling my heated neck.

  Umbra had never asked about my sister. I didn’t think she’d dare. But as she had told me on our first day here: “I will try you every day, child. And if you rise to the greatest of my trials, then and only then will you master enchantments. You’ll be bombproof.”

  Bombproof. She knew exactly how to motivate me.

  The armchair gave a creak as Umbra sat forward. “Tell me your clearest memory of her.”

  In the other room, both children shrieked, thumping across the rug. My hands went to the overstuffed armrests, squeezing. “I can’t remember any right now.”

  “Tell me a memory, then.”

  She was relentless. Maybe she knew I could only think of one memory, my mind revolving on it like a spun top.

  My eyes remained closed. “It was the night before.” Before. That was how my life divided—not in terms of before and after I knew I was a witch, but before and after they disappeared from it.

  “It was the night before,” I said again. “Tamzin came to my bedroom. She knocked hard, and when I told her to go away, she said my name.”

  “What did she call you?”

  “‘Clem.’ Always that.”

  “Go on.”

  The closer I got to the pain, the harder it was to sustain the magic. I could tell it had ebbed around me, my hair barely moving at all. “She said my name like she’d never said it before. Like she was indescribably sad or afraid. And…”

  Umbra waited, the silence around us punctuated by a grandfather clock in the corner.

  I had to do this. If I was going to be bombproof, I had to keep talking.

  “She asked me if she could sleep with me,” I whispered, heart galloping. “She wanted it so badly. She never asked to sleep with me, but that night she wanted it.”

  “Why?” Umbra asked, somehow further away.

  I gave my head a shake, annoyance rising. “I didn’t know. I still don’t know. She just really wanted to be in my bed. Not our mother’s—mine. She seemed afraid, breathless, so needy. And I…”

  “And you?”

  I couldn’t remember anything else. My brain simply couldn’t access it. My throat tightened, and I knew if I let one noise escape it, I would sob—a fact which I chalked up to frustration over Umbra’s interrogation.

  The magic fell away, my hair stilling around my head. When I opened my eyes, I stared at Maeve Umbra. She hadn’t moved, her hands still clasped in her lap. A groove had formed between her eyebrows.

  “Don’t pity me,” I said. “You can be disappointed in me. You can be frustrated. You can get angry. But don’t pity me.”

  “I don’t.” She leaned forward, lifted her teacup. “But I do worry for you.”

  “Because I don’t want to talk about the worst night of my life?”

  “No, child.” She swirled her spoon in the cup, tapped it on the rim twice. When she’d taken a sip, her eyes lifted to mine. “Because your self-loathing sits on your chest like a dark creature. And you invite it to.”

  I stood from the armchair, crossed my arms as I approached the fire burning in the hearth. Kept my back to Umbra. “That doesn’t need to stop me from learning your magic.”

  “Doesn’t it?” she asked. “Did you not drop the enchantment within two minutes when the shame overcame you?”

  I reached toward the flame, hand diving into the heat until it licked my fingers. I encouraged it into my palm, played it over my hand like a ball trick. “No one else is going to press me about that night—about my sister—like you.”

  “Callum Rathmore knew about her.”

  I stiffened, my hand going still. “So you’re the sister,” he’d said that first night, outside the gates of Hell. And last May, he had promised me I would find her when I went after the blade in Edinburgh.

  Not just her—my mother, too.

  I didn’t know who I would find, or in what form. Umbra was right to test my steadiness with the magic when it came to Tamzin. I just didn’t want to be pressed. That was the truth.

  But this was the path I had chosen. To reassemble
the Backbiter, to descend into Hell, to defeat the Shade. And Umbra knew about the prophecy, and my involvement. When she’d offered to make me bombproof, it wasn’t so I could get straight As at Shadow’s End.

  She wanted me to defeat the Shade.

  I turned back to her, straightening. “Try me again.”

  In the other room, one of the children yelled, beckoning his nana. Here in Switzerland, Maeve Umbra, the headmistress of Shadow’s End Academy, was known as nana.

  She stood, swept out her robes. “The grandchildren will not be denied.” When she came forward, her hand fell on my shoulder. “We’ll do it again tomorrow.”

  I crushed out the flame in my hand. “We only have two more days here.”

  That familiar, sad look came over Umbra’s face, and her fingers touched one of my curls. “Tonight, spend time with Loki. He understands the true meaning of restorative breaks.”

  “But—”

  Umbra raised her hand between us. “A lesson I learned long ago: never argue with your headmistress when she’s instructing you to take a rest.” She winked, spun toward the doorway. “Now, which of you young kits asked for nana?” she called out. As she disappeared into the other room, delighted shrieks followed.

  Loki strolled in, tail upright, emerald eyes on me. “Don’t tell me they’re playing Duck, Duck, Werewolf again. Where does that woman find the energy?”

  I stared after the headmistress. I knew she had recognized how much talking about Tamzin had affected me. She had given me space. But all I could think of were her words as she’d held the porcelain teacup.

  A dark creature sat on my chest, and I invited it to.

  Umbra had enchanted the house outside Zurich. Her magic hung over the place like a gauzy curtain—which was very much how it looked, now that I had been trained to see it.

  A pale blue, gauzy curtain.

  When I stepped outside with Loki, the sun hung over the far ridge, almost kissing it. The land sloped down to meadows, and a road pressed its way across the landscape toward us, rising up the hills until it passed under Umbra’s curtain not a hundred feet from the house.

  This was the magic that had protected the academy for all these years. I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t properly understood until this summer. It was an enshrouding enchantment cast on a massive scale, sustained indefinitely.

  I couldn’t fathom the power that took. Even now, over a thousand miles away, the academy was still enchanted by her magic.

  Maeve Umbra was the most powerful woman I had ever met.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t even keep it steady around my own body. Press me a little, invoke my sister’s name, and I’d drop the enshroudment like it was scalding.

  “Gods,” Loki said as we came down the front path, “you act like you’ve witnessed a death.”

  Maybe I had. I’d reopened the box of that night.

  “I’m picking up the magic too slowly.” I reached down, plucked a flower to twiddle between my fingers. “It frustrates me.”

  “Haven’t you noticed by now?” He glanced up at me. “This is how slow you are with everything.”

  I pointed the flower down at him. “Eat pollen, smartass.”

  He was right, of course. For three years, I’d been wanting more, more, more. Always faster than I could reasonably learn, and always unreasonable in how I handled my own pace.

  “But,” he added, “it’s kind of a beautiful curse.”

  We came out onto the main road. “How so?”

  “You always push yourself. So you end up learning everything faster than most everyone while in a constant state of dissatisfaction.”

  I made a face. “Whoever that person is sounds wretched.”

  “Sometimes, but I don’t think her wretchedness is all her fault. She did get dealt a questionable hand in life.”

  I scuffed my shoe over the road. “So my dissatisfaction is my beauty and my curse.”

  “Exactly. You’d be a great cat.”

  We had reached the edge of Umbra’s enchantment—which, like one of her grandchildren, she’d asked me not to pass beyond. Not without her by my side. Now that the leylines were becoming corrupted, the game had changed.

  According to Witches & Wizards, abductions had seen a huge surge over the summer. Curfews had been implemented all around the world. The Shade’s army was becoming a virus. It was growing, spreading.

  There had even been reports of flying creatures during the witching hour.

  I’d talked to Eva, Aidan, and Liara a few times during the summer. They’d always assured me they were fine. Eva and Aidan most of all—she had guardians for parents, and Aidan had parents.

  Liara didn’t. But she was the most cunning fae I knew, and she hadn’t left her sister’s side since Umbra issued her warning to the academy’s students early into the summer: Stay home at night. Don’t go near your windows during the witching hour. Your designated professor will come to retrieve you when the school year begins.

  When Umbra had made the warning, she had wondered aloud in the living room whether she was being too cautious, and then decided more caution was better than an academy student’s abduction.

  Beside me, Loki turned off onto the grass, following our usual path along the magical boundary. Meanwhile, I hesitated.

  Until I was bombproof, I had to remain hidden. Curtained. Unseen by the world. Who knew how long that would be? Already I’d gotten cabin fever from a summer spent here in this house.

  When Umbra took me back to the academy in two days, she advised me not to leave the grounds. Not to join the other guardians—join Eva—on their missions until I could sustain my own enshroudment. But they still had to go out there. Every mage saved was one more to fight when the Shade’s army arrived.

  And they were coming.

  We had agreed I had to master the enshroudment by the spring, but I planned to do it sooner. I wouldn’t stay hidden from the world for the whole school year. Months back, I had made a secret resolution. I wouldn’t let Eva go out into the world alone. Not her or the other guardians. I would push myself harder than I ever had. I would wear my dissatisfaction like a mantle. Embrace it.

  By the spring, I wouldn’t just be the only witch alive. I would also be the only witch who had mastered the enshroudment enchantment.

  “Earth to witch,” Loki called. “Did you malfunction again?”

  I shot him a look, started through the grass toward him. “It’s called thinking. You should try it.”

  “Unlike some humans, I’m capable of thinking while moving.” His tail flicked as we passed through the grass. “Clem, how do you feel about all this?”

  “What, Switzerland? I think it’s like a picture, and Umbra’s grandchildren are suspiciously well-behaved.”

  “The cabin fever must be bad if you’re purposely misunderstanding me for your kicks and giggles.”

  My cat knew me too well. “Be more specific, then.”

  “The prophecy. Your future. A visit to Hell doesn’t feel like it includes a round-trip ticket.”

  My heart quickened, or maybe my feet did. “What makes you think I’ve been feeling anything at all about it?”

  “Because”—he fell into a trot to keep up with my new, brisk pace—“it’s your life. The only life you have. And to sacrifice yourself…”

  “I don’t.”

  He paused to glance up at me, then rushed forward to remain by my side. “You don’t what?”

  “I don’t feel anything about it, Loki. I don’t think about it. This is my path—I accepted that when I picked up the deceiver’s rod in the labyrinth.”

  He huffed. “You don’t feel. That sounds healthy.”

  We didn’t talk after that. Not as we walked, and not as we came back into the house to help with dinner. I spent a good five minutes scrubbing potatoes, determined to clean every groove.

  Loki knew I felt. I knew I felt. But if I allowed it out in more than drips, little thoughts here and there, it would be like turning the faucet
in front of me to high. Sometimes the faucet couldn’t be stopped. Those times, I found a place to be alone until I could press it all back down.

  Loki thought I was sacrificing myself. My only life.

  The prophecy didn’t mention what would happen to me once I defeated the Shade. Only that I would. But after all, how many people had ever come back from Hell?

  Maybe I had already accepted the possibility that I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d always felt an inevitability about my life, that it was destined to end early. Maybe…

  Umbra appeared beside me, set a hand on my forearm. “Are you scrubbing, or creating art?” She gave me a small smile, pressing my hand down until the potato dropped into the colander.

  Normally I’d make a joke about food art, but all I said was, “After dinner, can we continue with the training?”

  “Of course.” She patted my shoulder, turned away. “As we shall on the morrow, and on the way back to the academy. And we’ll even begin practicing on Loki.”

  From a counter, Loki gave a sharp report of a meow. “‘Let’s practice on the cat,’” he grumbled. “Not something the cat ever wants to hear.”

  Umbra laughed. She’d clearly understood the feeling behind his meow, at least. “You should be glad. Imagine all the morsels a cloaked cat might steal from dinner plates.”

  This time, Loki’s meow was far more pleasant.

  Chapter Two

  Two mornings later, I tied my cloak at my neck. All my belongings—including the weapon—were hidden in the tangibly manipulated pocket at its hem.