five
ella not-so-enchanted
She is somewhat alarmed to realize that Peter now thinks they are friends.
"Ella!" he calls the moment he spots her.
She suppresses a sigh and does not slow her pace. He'll catch up eventually.
Peter seems to have an uncanny knack for finding her at the exact moment she is not explicitly busy doing something else. For example, he just so happens to be in the courtyard between the end of her class and her shift at the Student Center; he simply appears right as she's leaving the library; and now, he's munching on Funyuns as he trots across the greenway separating the English and Science buildings.
If she didn't know any better, she would think Peter had some kind of magical low-jack on her. As it is, he's an untapped potential, possesses only a grain of magic, and currently has fake-onion dust on his upper lip. She honestly doesn't think he's capable of stalking anyone.
Intentionally, that is. Because he's unintentionally stalking her very, very well.
"So, where are we going?" Peter asks once they have left the safety of the campus gates. His face is a bit flushed from the cool October air nipping at his skin; he's only wearing a thin navy hoodie, a thin Rick & Morty t-shirt, and jeans.
"We aren't going anywhere," she says firmly. "I am going to a bookstore."
"Oh, yeah? I'll come, too," Peter smiles, neatly side-stepping her desire to exclude him from this outing. "I've been meaning to go into town anyway. I know you work at the Student Center, but to be perfectly honest, the store is lacking in options and I need my Pop Tart fix."
"We sell Pop Tarts," she tells him in spite of herself. "Literally can't miss them, they're pretty much the only thing anyone buys. That and Ramen. Both have their own shelves."
"Not S'mores ones and those are the best. Accept this uncontested fact."
Ella does a fairly good impression of Carlisle's long-suffering sigh, casting her eyes heaven-ward. "You're exhausting."
"I hear that a lot, actually."
Somehow, Ella isn't exactly surprised.
Being without a car in Charmstone is no particular hardship; everything worth doing is in walking distance, even from the Viridity campus. It's not like anyone has ever gotten lost in Charmstone, if such a thing is possible, that is. Most of the town blooms around the town square, which boasts an intricate assortment of old-fashioned light posts, wrought-iron benches, and three small garden sections. Admittedly, it had taken Ella a while to figure out that the gardens themselves formed a triskelion, which supported the main wards etched into the cobble-stone foundation beneath the benches and which protected the town from human suspicion. She only put it together after seeing a much stronger assortment in the three main courtyards inside the Viridity gates, right where those ley lines converged.
Every time she passes the wards in Charmstone, though, she shivers. There is something wrong with them that she can't quite place. Imperfection, maybe. The leys have grown weak in the town proper, which probably isn't the best thing that could happen.
But surely something that major is on the radar of the magic-users in town, right? Someone has to be working on it. In all likelihood, it's probably already on the ledger to be discussed at the next town meeting. Ella pushes it out of her mind and tunes back into Peter's ongoing diatribe against the unfairness of mid-term testing, which according to him, is some form of inhumane psychological torture.
She eyes his warily. "You do realize that finals are going to be worse, right?"
Instantly, his face falls. He had apparently overlooked that fact in his quest to be victimized by a set of tests that weren't as hard as Ella thought they might be. She's almost confident that she made it through Algebra II bearing no scars, though the same might not be said for her Introductory to Art History course. She'd never been the best at memorizing dates.
Her sense of direction, however, has always been spot-on. Peter follows her diligently as she paces down the side of the storefronts directly facing town square - including Sam's Diner, where she is due to meet with Bree in about an hour - and then swings into a narrow side-street that is already cast in sundown shadow. For such a small town, Charmstone does actually boast a few specialty stores, and of the two bookstores in town, the one she has in mind is definitely the less commercial.
Which is fine because Ella isn't looking for just any old book. She's looking for a book about herself - about magicians. Because for all that Carlisle's bibliophile ways have led to an extraordinarily large collection of books - which might eventually turn into a revolution against him if the books ever become sentient and affronted by his not-so-organized-organizational-system - he doesn't seem to have much literature on magicians.
Really, just the one book. And in that one book, just a short paragraph. And it's not even a good paragraph, as it basically says nothing of import except for this:
Magicians are rare - those sorcerers and sorceresses with blood-claim to The Trio - who have been bound and unbound for a millennia and who are always in opposition to the others, as was the way for The Trio and as will be the way for all magicians hence.
Which, okay. Ever since she read that, it's been ruminating in the back of her mind - months of questions built up and no answers. In her free time, she'd taken to combing through the Viridity libraries, which are even more extensive than Carlisle's. But she's been coming up blank. There is no mention of The Trio, no explicit talk of magicians, no hint as to what it meant to be bound or unbound. No answers.
Honestly, going to Bokhandel is a last-ditch effort.
"Whoa," Peter breathes behind her as they catch the first glimpse of the bookstore.
It's a dark place on the outside, cloistered all on it's lonesome near an alley-way on the far side of the back street. The sign out front is dilapidated, broken clean in half but still hanging over the door, one side lower than the other. And the lone window display is dirty, stacked high with all kinds of junk and musty old books. Ella forges onward, Peter at her side, but the inside of the bookstore isn't much better. It smells dank, the air ripe with dust and carbon dioxide, and the swaying lights on the ceiling are dim, lending very little illumination to the blue-blackness covering every inch of the place.
Peter launches into a series of harried sneezes. And Ella suppresses a shiver, her magic standing to attention, not unlike the way her hair raises on her arms, the back of her neck.
"Hello?" she calls out, edging around the sharp corner of a shelf. "Is anyone here?"
Peter sneezes again.
Ella sighs, pushing a hand through her hair. She squints in the dim lighting, trying to read the sideways print on the spines of the few books that are on the shelves - far less books than what should be in a bookstore, actually. She shakes her head, ready to backtrack in defeat -
"You've come," says a shallow voice, raspy at the edge and low, the exact kind of voice someone possesses once they've spent a lifetime smoking.
Ella spins around on her heel, magic snapping into focus.
It's an old woman of papery, sagging skin and crinkly grey hair, neither of which make her hooked nose seem any less repugnant. Her eyes are equally as disturbing, a sort of icky, sickly pale yellow-green, which compliments the spider-web-thin green tinge of her lifeline. Ella looks at the old woman and immediately feels nauseous; the old woman is something, alright, and it's nothing good.
Still, she pulls her shoulders back, unwittingly bumping into Peter, who is wiping at his nose with the sleeve of his hoodie. "Are you the owner?"
"This is my shop," answers the old woman.
Ella eyes her surroundings. "Are you…closed?"
"Oh, no, child. Never closed, always open, especially for you."
"Right," Ella says flatly. So effing creepy.
"Did you need help finding something? Hmm?"
The denial rises on her tongue quicker than the strike of a scorpion. "No, there's nothing for me here. We're leaving now. Sorry to disturb you."
Ella curls her fingers around Peter's wrist, forcibly removing both of them from the bookstore and hightailing it toward the town square. Peter's shoes scuffle against the sidewalk as he tries to keep his balance with her long strides, but Ella doesn't pause for his comfort. She can't. She has to get away from that place - that wrong, itchy, seasickness place.
"Jesus, what was that?" Peter asks when she lets them stop.
Ella shakes her head, pushing down the urge to vomit. Her minds eye flashes that sickly yellow-green gaze of the old woman over and over - until it becomes obvious what she and Peter had just walked away from.
"That, Peter, was a hag."
"Like, for real?"
Ella casts a lingering glance back to the bookstore, instantly catching that awful yellow-green gaze behind the dirty window. She clenches her jaw and turns away. "Don't go back there," she tells Peter.
He nods, wide-eyed and sniffling from allergies.
(If only it were that easy.)
A/N: I'm weaving all the sub-plots through to the main plot, but each arc of this story has it's own sub-plot. So I guess I'm layering sub-sub-plots into the main plot? Anyway, there's a lot going on. We're juggling here, people. Welcome to the circus.
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.
~cupcakeriot