CHAPTER 1
I am a DESECRATION
“I don’t really matter. I’m only a girl.”
“You did not just say that!” My best friend worked her neck in classic Izzy-style. Her eyes, green at the moment, glinted with outrage. The shaking of her head caused unruly red curls to escape from underneath the hood of her cloak.
“Well, it’s true,” I argued back. “We’ve been through this so many times, Izzy. You know the guys are the ones that count. They’re the magic wielders and we…just aren’t. We’re the mothers and the party planners.”
“Ha! You’re hopeless, Addie.” Izzy shook her head. “You only see yourself as a future wizard breeder. I refuse to buy into that way of thinking.”
“It’s the way it is,” I said with a sigh, because it was our reality and it just wasn’t going to change.
Izzy huffed. She began pacing back and forth in the glorified broom closet that was our favorite school hideout, her feet clacking against the concrete floor. There wasn’t a lot of room, but Izzy made the most of the space she had. I knew my friend was only starting to get riled up.
“Adriana Marquesa Victoriana Evangelista, it’s your birthday, too!” She speared me with a glare. “Don’t you watch norm television? Wizards are stuck in the dark ages, and you know it! At least norms make an attempt at equal rights for women, but wizards don’t even try, and I am tired of it.”
I had a moment of paranoia. What if our little hideout in the school basement had an eavesdropping spell? I looked around the tiny room—not that I’d be able to see a spell even if there was one.
With relief, I remembered my other best friend, Hugo, had promised there wasn’t any magic in the room. Izzy and I were probably safe. Besides, no one ever came here. Even the norm janitors didn’t use this room anymore. I sighed and plopped down on the industrial-sized overturned bucket, one of two that served as our seats. In between the buckets sat a wooden crate that made a good card table or a place to set our lunches. Izzy and I had spent many lunch breaks in this small, dingy room. It wasn’t anything to look at and it smelled faintly of ammonia and mildew, but it meant privacy, which was a precious commodity to both of us. Living in a wizard keep was how I imagined it would be in a norm college dormitory—people everywhere, all the time.
I pressed the button to unlock my lunchbox. The intricately scrolled golden case, imbued with magic, opened like a flower blooming. A silver thimble-sized sphere morphed into a mug of steaming hot cider, and the bronze cylinder lengthened and folded out to reveal Chicken Cordon Bleu with steamed broccoli. Yum!
“Hello! Knock-knock! We’re talking, Addie!” Izzy waved her hand in front of my face. “And you know I’m right.” She gave me a half-smirk.
“Izzy, you have to be more careful about what you say!” I shot her a stern look. My lunch forgotten, I ran my hand over my own cloak, pulling it tighter around me as if it would somehow protect me from Izzy’s sacrilegious and dangerous opinions. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t heard them all before, but lately she was so passionate about everything. It was starting to make me question things. And questioning wizard society wasn’t a prudent pastime for me. I was the daughter of the High Chancellor. My father didn’t appreciate or, more accurately, tolerate anarchy of any kind.
“Hello again, Addie. I keep losing you today. I was saying that Hugo has told us we’re safe in here.”
I could have argued that we couldn’t know for sure unless he checked the little room every day, but I didn’t bother.
“Anyway,” Izzy continued, “as I was saying, I’ve really had it with wizard society. I mean, we’re the most technologically advanced society in the world, but we’re more antiquated when it comes to the genders than any third-world country. You have to see that, Addie.” She stopped pacing to tug her cloak off, casually tossing it across the room.
“Izzy!” I gasped.
“What? I detest our cloaks. Besides, newswomen don’t wear cloaks, and that’s what I’m going to be.”
“Yeah, sure you are.” I’d heard this a dozen times, and the shock had long since worn off. I’d gone through the list of cons with her so many times it had become my mantra: being ostracized, censured, and ultimately retrained, which was a euphemism for having your personality magically stripped away in order to be reconstructed into the perfect robot wife.
“I am! You just watch me. I’ll do the first big wizard exposé. The norms will be riveted by the shocking truth that we are living among them, and running their top companies, yet the female wizards are merely glorified baby-makers with no magical powers to speak of.”
With a shake of her head, Izzy’s red curls transformed into deep brown soft waves, her eyes flashed from her genetic green to ocean blue, and her skin darkened into a South Beach tan. She effortlessly wielded the one power open to wizard girls: glamours.
“This is Isadora Van Horn with News Five, coming to you from the secret stronghold of the North American Wizards’ Guild hidden in the heart of the Catskills behind a magical veil. Adriana Evangelista of the house of Nostradamus—” Izzy stuck an imaginary microphone in my face— “is it true you are part of a secret wizard society where women are basically breeders with arranged marriages who take care of households, throw parties, and make babies, and that’s all?”
I decided to play along. “Yep, I sure am.” I pasted on a big, fake smile and batted my eyelashes.
“And do you see the pathetic irony of it all, Miss Evangelista? Your society spawned geniuses like Galileo, Archimedes, Copernicus, Nostradamus, Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Merlin, and Prospero—not to mention the fact that most of today’s famous “tech wizards” are actual wizards. Within a society continually positioned on the cusp of modern technology, why is it that these women are possessions, sequestered in their homes and schools behind an impenetrable magical veil, while wizard men go out into the norm world every single day?”
“The men protect us from the Sorcerers. They have the magic to keep us safe.” Frustrated, my lips tightened. I always had to remind Izzy about the tradeoff for our safety.
“Isn’t it true the female wizards are immune to magic?” newswoman Izzy persisted.
“No, that’s not correct at all. We are immune to the offensive magic of wizards such as energy bolts. It is believed that we might possibly be immune to a sorcerer’s minor dark enchantments, but it’s an untested theory. In the end, we are vulnerable and wizard men have the magic to keep us safe. So we obey the rules and take care of them in return.”
With another dramatic sigh, Izzy sat down on her bucket, her glamour melting back to her usual red hair and green eyes. “You’re no fun. You don’t have a rebellious bone in your body. What am I going to do with you, Addie?”
“Put up with me anyway.” I fluttered my eyelashes and tilted my head, going for a little comic relief. Although we had our occasional disagreements, I wouldn’t trade either of my best friends for anything in the world. They were like the sister and brother I wish I had.
“Well, I guess I’m stuck with you, and since I am, let’s talk about this birthday extravaganza tonight. How do you think it will play out?”
“Father and Mother will probably give me a new designer dress and a gift certificate for a chaperoned shopping spree. And, of course, you’ll go with me to New York City and help me spend lots of money.”
“Of course I will,” Izzy said with a big grin that evaporated a moment later. “But tonight will really be your twin brother’s show.”
“Please! It’s always The Zarius Show,” I blurted.
“At least you’re admitting it. I’m sorry, Addie, but he’s the worst of the spoiled brat wizard boys we know. He thinks he’s all that because he knows he’ll replace your dad as the High Chancellor of the Wizard Council.”
“Yep, and he’ll be the center of our birthday celebration for sure. After all, he turns sixteen—”
“So do you, Addie.”
“—so he’ll be formally recognized as a wi
zard. If all goes as planned, his familiar will bond with him.”
“And yada, yada, yada…Zarius, Zarius, Zarius. At least it’s a party and we don’t have to wear our cloaks. Yay!” Izzy waved her hands in the air and then turned her brilliant smile on me. “What are you going to wear, and are you going to glamour your eyes and hair to match?”
With my pale skin, light brown hair, and hazel eyes, my natural coloring bordered on boring. “I’m sure I’ll glamour. After all, I don’t have much going for me without it.”
“Addie, give me a break. You’re gorgeous! Glamours or no glamours, you’re beautiful.”
“So says my biased best friend.”
“That’s not true. I’d give anything to have those big exotic eyes of yours.”
“Anyway, I don’t know what I’ll be doing until I see what kind of dress my father and mother are giving me. I’ll decide on my glamours then.”
The sound of footsteps outside sent my heart racing. If Izzy got caught without her cloak on school property, we’d both get detention for a week. And worse, my father would murder me.
“Your cloak!” I whispered. I stretched out my hand as if I could somehow grab Izzy’s cloak from several feet away.
In answer to my thoughts, Izzy’s discarded forest-green cloak flew across the room, coming into my open hand.
I blinked at my hand and the cloak I clutched in my fist. My knuckles went white and my outstretched arm began to tremble. A thunderous drumming echoed in my ears and my limbs, and I realized it was the pounding of my heart.
Finally, I met Izzy’s shocked stare. We gaped at each other for a moment. Then our gazes whipped back and forth between the corner where her cloak had been and my hand, where it currently was. And then to the door, which fortunately remained closed.
I realized I’d stopped breathing. Gasping for air, I dropped Izzy’s cloak like it was on fire.
“Addie,” Izzy gasped, “you just did magic.” She pointed a finger at me. “You just did MAGIC!”
“No. Shhh! Don’t even say that.” I shook my head spastically, then clutched it between my hands. “No! No! No!”
“Yes, yes, yes! You did,” she sang back.
“It didn’t happen. It couldn’t have.” I kept shaking my head so vehemently that I started to get woozy. “I’m a girl. It’s impossible!”
“It is impossible. But you did it anyway.”
I couldn’t seem to stop shaking my head.
“Ha! Your brat of a brother would look like such a total idiot right now. Bet he couldn’t do what you just did; his magic hasn’t come that far yet.”
“No,” I said, still in major denial. I could hear my father’s voice ranting: a woman wielding magic is a desecration!
“There’s some prophecy about this…” Izzy tapped her palm against her forehead several times. “Hugo mentioned it a while back. Shoot! I can’t remember.”
“I can’t be part of some prophecy—my father will kill me.”
“Yeah, he isn’t exactly the understanding type,” Izzy agreed, drawing her brows together. “That’s why we can’t tell anyone about this. You’d be a virtual prisoner of the council, and you could even be retrained.”
I was sure my brain would explode at any second. In a single moment, I’d become the antithesis to every precept of wizard culture, a desecration of our beliefs. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what was happening to me.
“I mean it, Addie. We can’t tell anyone about this—well, except for Hugo. Seriously, they’ll poke and prod at you and find some way to control you. I’m sure of it.”
I didn’t keep secrets from my parents. I always did what they expected of me. “Maybe my father wou—”
“Wouldn’t cart you off to be retrained?” Izzy cut me short. “I’m sorry, Addie, but don’t kid yourself. Your father is the head of the council, and he’s the most uncompromising of all when it comes to enforcing the wizard laws. The illustrious Manfred Evangelista will do whatever needs to be done to protect wizard-kin, even if it means treating you like a lab rat. A pampered lab rat, maybe, but caged up all the same.”
I closed my eyes, shutting everything out. “Maybe it was some random wild magic that just happened by, like Fae magic,” I suggested unconvincingly.
Izzy raised a single eyebrow, achieving a look of utter incredulity. “Really?”
“Okay. Not wild magic. I think you’re right. We need to keep this quiet until we know what to do about it.”
“Just Hugs,” Izzy reminded me, using the nickname we’d given our friend.
“Yes, Hugo, but no one else.”
Izzy’s expression transformed from sober to exuberant. “This is amazing. You have magic.” She shook her head and kept smiling.
The bell rang, signaling five minutes until the end of the lunch period. I pressed the “close” button on my lunchbox, my meal morphed back into miniature size, and the box folded in on itself. I hadn’t eaten a single bite.
We both stood, Izzy wearing a look of pure exhilaration, while I’m pretty sure I looked the polar opposite.
“And, Addie, try not to make anything fly across the room anymore. No more wish magic.” She smirked at me. “Pretty sure if that happened during class, it would be a dead giveaway.”
“I’ll try.” Great. I hadn’t even thought about it happening again. But what if I couldn’t control it? I didn’t want to be retrained or trapped in a laboratory, never to come out.
Happy sixteenth birthday to me!