Young Writers Society

School was lifeless without Mia. All the teachers seemed to drone on in the same toneless voice about the same unimportant things. Finnley’s hand scribbled notes but he had no idea what he was writing. His mind was somewhere far away, over the pine forest and the mountains and back to California. It wasn’t what he wanted to think about, but now he couldn’t help it. Too many of his barriers had fallen.

A little ways into his lunch period, where he sat picking at his bland food, one of the staff members walked over to the table where he sat by himself. “You’re needed at the main office,” he told Finnley, but had no further information for him when he questioned why.

It wasn’t the dean’s office, which was probably a good thing, and he really had nothing better to do with his time, so Finnley packed up his backpack and went. In the office, a woman sat holding a phone to her ear, nodding along to whatever the person was saying. She glanced at Finnley out of the corner of her eyes and held up a finger. Just a minute.

Finnley sat down in the chair by the wall — these offices seemed to be very well-stocked in chairs. It was as if the very room was admitting that there would be lots of waiting within. It didn’t take long for the woman to say goodbye and hang up the phone. She sighed, running her hands through short hair, and turned back to Finnley.

“Finnley Bale?” she asked, though she must’ve known it was him. She didn’t wait for a reply, in any case. “I just got a call. Your friend Mia is awake and doing better; her uncle has requested that you come see her.” The woman didn’t look pleased that he would get to skip out on part of the school day, but Finnley was filled with a sudden spark of joy. Mia was better! He had wanted to talk to her so much that his heart was hurting with the emotion.

“I have a pass to let you out—” the woman was saying, but Finnley could hardly hear her. He snatched the paper from her hands, said a quick thank-you, and was out the door in a single breath. If he’d been more athletic he would have sprinted straight to her apartment, but instead he settled for walking very quickly.

Barely a second after he knocked on the door, it swung open to reveal a weary but smiling Uncle Fred. He beckoned Finnley in, and he made a beeline for Mia’s room. The door was ajar and he pushed it open to find a beautiful sight. Mia was up, looking much better than she had before, and sitting on the bed.

Upon seeing Finnley, a grin split her face and as he stepped towards her they hugged each other tight. “I missed you so much!” Finnley cried, smiling at his friend. The circles around her eyes weren’t as prominent, and her skin had lost its sallow appearance. “I was so worried for you.”

“I’m doing better now,” Mia said, and behind them Uncle Fred stepped in and closed the door. Looking around at the noise, Finnley noticed that all the plants in the room were dead. He didn’t need to examine them closely to know that they all had that same spell on them. He looked to Fred for explanation.

“There are several things I need to discuss with the two of you,” he said, and though his smile faded, his eyes were still alight with happiness. “Finnley, you saw the plants and the spells on them. They were there to transfer life and energy to Mia.”

Mia looked at the dead plants and frowned, her brow furrowing as she thought. Finnley was delighted to see even a frown on her face. “But I just had to sleep it off, didn’t I? I mean, it took a lot out of me, but it wasn’t something I couldn’t return from. Why the plants?”

“It wasn’t just the lack of sleep,” Uncle Fred said. “There was something about that horse — breathing in the fire, perhaps — that made you sick. Not like a disease, mind you, but…”

Finnley had been thinking about this, and with those words something clicked in his mind. “Mr. Vaughn said that you two had to… disenchant the horse, I think it was? That meant that it had to have been enchanted in the first place. By someone with magic. That would explain why it was always in Mia’s dreams, pushing her towards it.”

Fred nodded solemnly, and Mia’s gaze darted back and forth between the two, blazing with curiosity. “We did disenchant it. It was just a normal horse, with spells all over it. They fed partly off of the horse’s energy, and it died when we released it, but they used someone else’s energy too. We couldn’t tell whose, other than the energy color was red like flame.

“Its attack was so pointed that whoever did the magic had to have been targeting Mia,” Fred explained. “Though I’ve fought monsters before, this wasn’t like any of the ones I’ve seen. It’s something beyond my abilities completely, and even Mr. Vaughn seemed troubled by it.”

There was silence between the three of them for a moment. Finnley looked down at his feet. There it was: his suspicions about another magician were confirmed.

Mia asked the question Finnley himself had been wanting to know the answer to. “What are we going to do about it?” Despite all that she had just been through, her eyebrows were drawn into a focused line and her arms were crossed. Determined and action-oriented as always. It was so good to have her back.

“I don’t know what we can do,” Fred replied uneasily. “Finnley, you’re continuing your magic, right?”

“Yeah, I think I can now,” he said, and he could feel Mia’s questioning eyes though he didn’t meet them. He would tell her about Dr. Lark and his deal with his mom after Fred left.

“Good. You’d better talk to him about that other magician,” he advised.