Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Read online

  That was it.

  No phone number. No website address.

  Tamsin only remembered it because of how much it wasn't trying. Other schools could do that if they were famous, or in the Ivy League, but most schools touted their programs or their small class sizes. They tried something to stand apart.

  Not Penrose.

  Tamsin held the card up and showed it to Jiro. "Here it is," she said.

  Jiro gave her an odd look.

  "You know, now I remember. I did try googling this place. But every time I did my computer crashed. I think their website must be hacked or something."

  Jiro's odd look intensified. "Tamsin," he said, "that postcard is blank."

  3

  A Cold Snap

  Jiro gave her the message on a slip of paper. They were the only house she knew that still had a landline, but her father insisted. He didn't like cellphones and found comfort in the landline.

  The message read:

  Tamsin. I'm leaving tomorrow to head back to Penrose.

  This is our last chance to meet.

  I'll be at the fifth floor of the main library for exactly half an hour at two o clock.

  Don't be late.

  "She made me transcribe it exactly like that," Jiro said with a shrug.

  "What did she sound like?"

  “Weird.” Jiro shrugged.

  “Weird how?”

  “Weird like a weird person.”

  Tamsin gave Jiro her hard stare until he relented and stopped being an ass.

  “Okay. She sounded annoyed," Jiro said. "But that could have been me. I kept trying to get her to just call you directly or leave you a voicemail or a text but she acted really offended by the idea." He paused and scratched his chin. "She sounded professional, educated, and busy. Important, I guess."

  Tamsin nodded and studied the paper, as if secrets could jump out of the absolutely plain words.

  "Are you going to go?" Jiro asked.

  "I don't know. I've never heard of this school."

  "You still haven't told mom and dad you didn't get in anywhere else."

  Tamsin sighed. "They have so much on their plate. I can't add to their stress level right now. With Dad’s—”

  Jiro cut her off. "I think it's good you haven't told them."

  "You do?"

  "They are going to lose their minds when you do." Jiro laughed as he said it. It wasn't a cruel laugh, but a knowing laugh. He'd incurred their wrath many times.

  "Not if I get into this school." Tamsin waved the postcard in the air. "You really think this is blank?"

  "It's blank. What do you mean think this is blank?"

  A shiver crept up her spine. He wasn't joking. What was this?

  The next day Tamsin tried again to google Penrose University. She tried on her phone, on Jiro's iPad, on her laptop and on the old clunky family computer that her dad played his ancient video games on. And every time the device crashed.

  She tried using Bing and DuckDuckGo and weirder search engines, but the result was the same. She turned on every script blocker and safe mode she could think of, but nothing worked.

  Researching the school was impossible. She was going to go into the meeting unprepared and blind, and Tamsin Lee never did anything unprepared.

  Her mother was in the kitchen when Tamsin came down stairs. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with red curly hair as different from Tamsin's black waves as possible. Where Tamsin was shorter and curvy, her mother was lean and lithe as a dancer. They used to joke that Tamsin and Jiro inherited all of their father's genes, but that wasn't true at all. She had her mother’s pale green eyes, her angular nose that turned up at the end, and the same wide and generous smile.

  Her mother was offering her one of those smiles now. "I hear you broke up with Thomas."

  "He broke up with me," Tamsin corrected. "Why are you home?"

  "Well, maybe I'm cooking my daughter a heartbreak brunch?" She gestured at the spread of food on the table—blueberry pancakes, a bowl of scrambled eggs, cinnamon muffins, and an Irish oatmeal dish that had been her grandmother’s speciality.

  "You're panic cooking," Tamsin noted. "You're taking dad to the hospital, aren't you?"

  Her mother nodded and spun around, causing her curls to whip up in a flash of red. Not for the first time, Tamsin felt an intense stab of envy for her mother's hair. "He had a seizure last night. It was brief, but we need to go in for more tests with Doctor Neera today."

  Tamsin took a seat at the table and filled her plate. She wasn't hungry, but it would make her mother feel better. It was the only thing she could do to make her mom happy right then, aside from announcing she got into Stanford or was marrying Chris Pratt.

  "What are your plans today, honey?" her mom asked. Her voice was cheerful but strained. What she meant was please distract me from my anxiety.

  "Oh I thought I might go and burn down Thomas's house," Tamsin deadpanned. "Or update my Facebook status to say I was marrying Chris Hemsworth."

  "I wouldn't look at Facebook today," her mother warned. She spun around again and placed an expertly prepared mocha in front of Tamsin. It was weird seeing her mother cook. Her father usually did all the cooking. He always had. Except for the rare occasion when he'd been away lecturing or presenting in some other city. And that's when her mother pulled out ancient Irish recipes from her side of the family that inevitably were too sweet, too dry, or too weird.

  They’d all have to get used to her cooking soon though.

  "What's up with Facebook today?" Tamsin asked.

  Jiro emerged from the basement wearing backwards sweatpants and his threadbare bathrobe. He had the look of someone who had been up all night playing video games. "Your boy Thomas moved on."

  "What?" Tamsin's blood ran cold with fury. The speed of her emotional change shocked her. She thought she was dealing with the breakup well.

  Inside her the door opened again.

  The windows creaked and groaned.

  "Jiro," her mother snapped. "Let's try and work on our empathy today, okay?"

  Jiro ducked his head and scratched his chin before silently filling his plate with a mountain of pancakes.

  "I don't know why I'm even Facebook friends with your boyfriend," her mom said, running her hands through her curls.

  "Ex-boyfriend," Jiro added.

  "Who?" Tamsin asked. “Who did he move on with?” The cold in her blood seemed to radiate outwards from her body. Her skin was damp and clammy. Her breath fogged the air.

  The windows groaned louder. Fingers of frost crept across the glass, obscuring the world behind a sheet of ice.

  "Melissa Peters?" her mom asked. "I don't know her."

  "Missy P," Jiro nodded appreciatively. "She's really hot. She has huge—” but he stopped talking when he noticed the windows.

  Tamsin's eyes were closed. She was trembling. Was it the cold or just plain old anger? Missy! How could Thomas go out with Missy not even twenty-four hours after they broke up. Had he been dating her on the side all along? Was she his fallback, his safety? This was the problem with dating people who planned everything—when you no longer fit into their plan, they abandoned you for someone who did. Someone blonde and bubbly who wears red lipstick and short skirts and tight shirts and—

  "Tamsin," her mother snapped. "Open your eyes. Calm down. Focus on my voice."

  Tamsin blinked. The room had gone dark. All of the windows were covered in sheets of ice so thick that the light could barely penetrate. Jiro was shivering and his breath plumed in the air.

  Her mother was kneeling next to her, holding Tamsin's hands and rubbing them to restore warmth. "Focus on my voice, little tiger. So fierce, Such strong emotions. Focus on my voice and think about how good that mocha will taste. Think about how it'll warm you up from the inside out. Think about the achingly sweet chocolate and the little marshmallows floating in it."

  Her mother's voice was a lifeline, cast into the void of her heart, pulling her back to the world.


  Tamsin picked up the drink—it was still hot—and she sipped it lovingly.

  "What the hell was that?" Jiro yelled.

  "Go to your room, Jiro," her mother snapped.

  "Are we going to pretend the house wasn't just encased in ice and now it's not?”

  "It was just your imagination, Jiro. A trick of the light. Too many video games.”

  "The hell it was!"

  Her mother glared at Jiro with one of her patented withering mom glares. It had the desired effect. Jiro gathered up his plate of pancakes and retreated from the room.

  "Thanks, Mom," Tamsin said.

  "We need to talk about this," her mother said. There was an odd look in her eyes, as if Tamsin was a stranger to her now. "But not now. I need to take your father to his appointment and then get to the office."

  "Okay," Tamsin sighed. "Good luck." She felt drained. All of her anger and joy and everything else had left her. Her body was hollow, except for the warmth of the mocha. Even her thoughts had become still.

  "I have meetings all day tomorrow, but can we set aside Saturday?" her mother asked. "You and me, a walk in the woods, and a conversation we should've had years ago?"

  Tamsin nodded. She should have asked questions then, but she was so tired.

  4

  The Recruiter

  Tamsin arrived at the library half an hour early and flipped through her interview question flashcards. She and Thomas had made them, compiling a list of the one hundred most commonly asked interview questions from college recruiters. They had drafted honest and persuasive answers to all of them.

  It had helped Thomas sail through his interviews.

  For Tamsin it was her first chance to use them.

  Why do you want to attend this university?

  What is your greatest weakness?

  Tell me about a time when you took leadership over a crisis situation.

  She was reviewing every card, repeating the answers in a low whisper until they came naturally to her. It helped her not think about whatever the hell happened to her that morning with the ice. It already felt like a dream. She was trying to block out the feeling of ice moving through her blood when a woman sat down at the table across from her.

  "I'm sorry, this table is reserved," Tamsin said.

  The woman ignored her. She was shorter than Tamsin—hardly even five feet—and very round. She wore a brown leather jacket that looked like it'd been through hell and back over a faded orange t-shirt, complimented with a flowing floral skirt that had bells sewn into the hem so that with even the smallest movement the woman jingled loudly.

  "Really, I'm expecting someone," Tamsin said a bit louder. Her ears grew hot. If there was one thing she hated more than anything else, it was being ignored.

  The woman put a sack purse on her lap and withdrew a thick bundle of sage. She had long brown hair, shot through with gray streaks. Her face was thick with freckles and a deep red sunburn marked her nose and cheekbones.

  Tamsin watched in horror as the woman lit a match and set the sage bundle alight.

  "You can't do that in here," Tamsin whispered, leaning across the table.

  No one else in the library noticed the woman.

  Finally, the woman met Tamsin's eyes. "Ms. Lee," she began, in a voice that was stern and proper and officious. It seemed impossible that it was coming out of this ragtag old hippie lady. "Ms. Lee, I am here from Penrose University and this is your last chance."

  The sage burned, but the smell was odd. Tamsin inhaled it and tasted cherries and oranges, something distantly sweet and something under it all that felt powerful. The world around them grew dim and desaturated, as if everything else in the universe was in black and white except Tamsin and the recruiter.

  "How are you doing this?" Tamsin asked.

  "Magic, Ms. Lee. Obviously." The recruiter sounded exasperated. "Now, if you could kindly tell me why you have been ignoring our messages and the exact reason you've chosen not to attend our prestigious university I'll be on my way." She produced a notebook and a pencil from her voluminous purse and cocked an eyebrow at Tamsin.

  "I don't understand."

  "It's a formality. The deans and the regents are concerned whenever a top-level recruit such as yourself refuses our generous offer." She licked her pencil with a quick flick of her tongue and stretched her neck. "So if you could just kindly tell me why, I'll be on my way."

  "I didn't refuse anything?" Tamsin said.

  "Was it Dunwich? Did they get you first? I knew they were sniffing around down here."

  "No, it wasn't Dunwich," Tamsin said. "What's Dunwich?"

  "Then it was California Poly-Arcane, yes? With your interests and background you are entirely their type. And I don't blame you, we can't match their resources." The recruiter scribbled a page full of notes. Tamsin tried to read them but it looked like shorthand.

  "I don't know who that is?" Tamsin felt like she was falling. These weren't the questions she'd prepared for. This wasn't what she'd expected. She had no flashcards for this. This interview was her only chance at college. Her only path to med school. Her only way to find a way to help her father and brother.

  "Perhaps an overseas academy?" The recruiter studied her with dark eyes. The scent of the burning bundle brought a strange clarity to the day, as if everything was too much in focus.

  Tamsin leaned in and put her hands on top the woman's notebook. "I don't know who you are. I don't understand what's going on. And I don't know any of these schools you're talking about, which frightens me, as I'm pretty sure I have memorized the names and ranking of the top one hundred and fifty schools in America."

  "Penrose is in Canada," the recruiter sniffed. "A few hours east of Vancouver."

  "What's going on?"

  Something glinted in the recruiter's eye. "You really don't know, do you?"

  "No."

  "Who's been hiding you all these years? How did you manage to stay off everyone's radar? I assumed it was a cloaking spell of your own devising, but you really don't know, do you?"

  A bubble of rage percolated up Tamsin's spine. Why wouldn't this weird woman give her any answers?

  The door in her mind rattled again.

  The recruiter smiled at her for the first time and it was not a pleasant thing. She had a smile like a shark about to eat a seal. "Let's turn this into an entrance exam, shall we? Penrose only takes the best and the brightest. And the well connected. And legacies. And, if we're being honest, a few charity cases. Tell me, how am I doing this to the world?" She gestured at the patrons of the library, who had not only turned black and white but had stopped in mid-moment.

  Before she could stop herself, Tamsin blurted out, "Magic."

  The recruiter grinned at her. The predatory aspect had not lessened a bit.

  "You're doing magic," Tamsin said. "It's the only explanation that makes a bit of sense, though it sounds insane to say it out loud." The smell from the herbs had gotten into her head. "These herbs you're burning, they screen us from the world We're being held in some pocket of time, which is why we're moving at a normal frame of reference and everyone else in frozen. Also, I can't stop talking. There's some sort of truth drug in these herbs, too. It's like all my thoughts are coming out my mouth."

  Tamsin felt more words coming and tried to hold them back, but it was like trying to stop a rain storm with your fingers.

  "You're very odd looking. The clothes you wear are strange and they make me sort of angry, though I can't say why. But your attitude is one of great authority, so I'm assuming you're a witch of some sort. A magic-user? What do you call yourselves?"

  "We call ourselves many things, dear. I've always preferred sorcerer."

  "We," Tamsin blinked. "Does that mean I'm one, too?"

  "Of course."

  "And Penrose is a school for sorcerers?"

  "And witches and warlocks and wizards and will-workers and so many more." The recruiter drummed her fingers on the desk. Her nails were long and th
ick and hit the tables with a sound like splintering wood. "You really didn't know about this until now?"

  Tamsin shook her head but her words betrayed her. "I always hoped. My Grandma Siobhan—my mom's mom—she used to tell us all sorts of stories about magic when we were little. But after she passed, I forgot about them. And there have been times when things have happened around me."

  "Like when you blew in the windows at that cafe yesterday?"

  "How did you know about that?" Tamsin gripped the table in her hands. She was getting dizzy. The herbs—something in them was reaching inside her, like a hand in a bag grasping for something lost.

  "Or this morning, when you nearly turned your house into a glacier?"

  "Have you been spying on me?"

  The recruiter folded her notebook and placed it gently back in her purse. "We've been sending you letters and messages for two years now. Why did you respond to this one?"

  "I never received any letters from you," Tamsin said.

  "By our counts we sent over sixty-five communications, including eight registered letters, three packages, four omens, seventeen dreams and who knows how many postcards."

  Tamsin shook her head. The world felt so very far away now. It was as if she was floating on an asteroid in deepest space. "I only saw the one card."

  "Don't lie to me!" the recruiter snapped, and for a moment Tamsin had a sense that her life hung on this woman's whims. She had a brief vision of a silver cord, running from her own heart up into the sky, and this recruiter held golden shears with the blades poised to snip her cord.