As Professor Malvolia dismissed the class, a collective exhale rippled through the room. Students gathered their grimoires and scattered like bats at sunrise. Some were eager to distance themselves from what they'd witnessed, others whispering in anticipation about the next opportunity to experiment on a live human.
Mo remained rooted in place, her stomach still knotted, as Nyx hovered at her side. Their obsidian form hadn't settled since Julian's demonstration, rippling between solid and smoke like a reflection in troubled water.
"Coming?" they asked, eyebrows drawn together in concern.
Mo shook her head, her gaze fixed on Julian as he organized his notes despite the occasional tremor still coursing through his hands. "I'll catch up. There's something I need to do first."
Nyx followed her line of sight, and their eyes widened with understanding. "Want me to create a distraction?" they whispered, leaning close enough that their shifting aura brushed cool against Mo's skin. "I could accidentally…" their fingers sparked with violet energy, crackling softly between syllables, "…set the professor's desk on fire."
"And by accidentally, you mean extremely deliberately," Lucian interjected, frost crystallizing around his collar.
Mo pushed them both gently toward the door. "No, thanks. I'm afraid it will only be an additional burden for this poor chap. I've got this. Save me a seat at dinner?"
Only when they'd reluctantly departed did Mo approach Julian. "Hi," she said, then immediately regretted the casual human greeting. Three years in a bookstore had rubbed off on her in ways that would horrify her aristocratic ancestors.
Julian looked up, mild surprise registering in his tired eyes. "Hello." His voice had lost the clinical tone from the demonstration, revealing something softer beneath.
"I'm Mo—Morgana Nightshade." She hesitated. "Are you... okay?"
A small smile touched his lips. "Relatively speaking. The Trembling Veil hex isn't among the worst." He tapped his notebook. "The effects will fade completely within an hour."
"But why would you..." Mo stopped herself. "I mean, you're human."
"I am aware," he replied, a hint of dry humor in his voice.
"And you voluntarily let them use you as a magical guinea pig?"
"The research has value. Humans who encounter hexes accidentally have no preparation, no understanding of what's happening to them. My work helps develop counter-hexes, treatments." He spoke with practiced conviction, but Mo caught something else beneath his words—a careful evasion.
"That's the official answer," she said. "What's the real one? And would the humans even benefit from that data? Are they getting access to it?"
Julian studied Mo's face, his expression shifting from polite distance to cautious assessment. "You're not what I expected from a Nightshade," he finally said, neatly sidestepping her question.
Julian waited for a moment as if expecting Mo to leave. "I was born in the human world, on Earth," he said after a pause. Julian leaned against the desk, wincing as another aftershock of the hex rippled through him. The confession seemed to hang in the air between them.
Mo stepped closer, accidentally kicking an empty vial across the floor. The glass clinked against the stone as her mind raced to make sense of the strange duality she'd sensed in him. "Human with magic? But not..."
Julian flexed his trembling fingers, watching them as if they belonged to someone else. "Not demonic, not fae," he said quietly, "not anything but human with a few extra sparks in the blood." When he looked up, his eyes momentarily reflected the light like a nocturnal animal's before returning to their ordinary brown. "There are more of us than your people realize. Families who've known about the wider worlds for many generations. We exist in the footnotes of your histories."
Mo felt a jolt of recognition. While she had fled from her demonic heritage to find refuge in humanity, here was someone born human who carried magic in his veins—moving in the opposite direction but ending up in the same in-between space. She'd never considered that such people might exist, humans with just enough magic to be noticed but not enough to belong.
"How?" Mo asked.
Julian's fingers idly traced a pattern on the desk's scarred surface. Mo recognized it instantly—a protection sigil, small but powerful. The wood grain seemed to shift beneath his touch, responding this minor magic.
"Ancient pacts. Chance encounters." He paused to clear his throat as the classroom's lights flickered overhead, casting shadows across his face. "Cosmic accidents. My great-great-something-great-grandmother stumbled through a portal during a storm."
He turned away to collect a fallen quill, his movements still unsteady. "Came back changed, knowing things. It's not that we are hiding, really. It's that the demons like you don't usually spend any time thinking abut us. A footnote, as I said."
A distant scream tore through the academy's corridors—high and inhuman, before dissolving into what might have been wild laughter. Mo flinched, her body still wired to respond to sounds of distress. Probably just some routine classwork, she reminded herself, but her heart hammered anyway.
Julian didn't even blink. The horrors of Umbra Academy seemingly had become his white noise a while ago.
"We're the in-betweens," he continued, his voice softening as he ran his thumb over a small scar on his wrist that looked suspiciously like a binding mark. "Never fully part of the human world, never accepted in yours."
The words struck Mo with unexpected force. She staggered back, nearly toppling a shelf of potion ingredients—creatures and parts suspended in liquids that shifted as if still alive. For a moment, she couldn't breathe. Not because Julian had said anything shocking, but because he'd articulated the ache she'd carried for years: too demonic to truly belong on Earth, too steeped in humanity to fit within these twisted halls.
"My family is one of the few who maintain... diplomatic relations with the arcane realms. We serve as intermediaries, sometimes." Julian's careful phrasing suggested layers of politics and history. "It's why I'm allowed here, documenting what your magic does to human physiology. Knowledge is power."
Mo studied him with a new understanding. "You don't belong fully in either world."
"It seems that you don't belong either," he replied, surprising her. "I recognize the signs. The way you hesitate before using formal titles. Your discomfort during the demonstration. You've lived among humans recently."
For the first time since arriving at Umbra Academy, Mo felt truly seen. All the camaraderie she experienced with Nyx and now Lucian... it was different.
"I managed a bookstore," Mo confessed, the words tumbling out before she could reconsider. "For three years. In a small town where no one knew what I was. I started when I was sixteen. But with my powers… it wasn't hard to persuade humans that I was a bit more… mature. So, that's what I was doing, shelving novels, recommending romances to retirees, organizing an occasional poetry reading, and serving lattes."
Julian's eyes brightened with genuine interest. "A bookstore? With paperbacks and coffee and those little reading nooks?"
"Exactly that. Mismatched armchairs and a cat that knocked over the displays." Mo smiled at the memory. "Not very villainous."
"Sounds wonderful." There was honest longing in his voice. "I haven't been to Earth since I was a child. My family keeps mostly to our compound now—safer that way."
"You miss it," Mo realized.
"How can I miss what I barely remember?" Suddenly, Julian's tone was much more guarded, as if he had realized he had shared too much.
"I dream about my bookstore," Mo admitted, tracing a non-existant stain on the desk. "It's been only a couple of days. But it feels like I've lost that life forever. Like I completely abandoned the person I'd worked so hard to become."
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
They stood in silence for a moment, two people stranded between realities, recognizing in each other a shared displacement.
Julian looked away, waiting as if hesitating to spill too much. But then he shrugged and looked directly into Mo's eyes. "Would you tell me about it sometime?" he asked. His fingers instinctively touched his experiment logbook before pulling away as if catching himself in a habit. "Your life there? The human world through the eyes of someone who chose it rather than being born to it?"
Mo tucked a strand of ginger hair behind her ear, her signet ring catching the light. "Only if you'll tell me about your family," she countered. "How you navigate being human with magical knowledge without getting crushed between worlds. Without ending up as someone's... research assistant."
Their eyes met, and Mo felt something shift between them—not a magical connection, but something rarer: understanding.
"It's a deal," Julian said, offering his hand.
When their fingers touched, Mo felt a slight jolt—not the familiar surge of her succubus power seeking to ensnare, but something simpler, more human. Static electricity, perhaps. Or possibility. Behind them, a shadow shifted by the door—someone watching, listening. But in this moment of connection, Mo couldn't care less.
The academy bells tolled, their dissonant melody announcing the dinner hour. Mo withdrew her hand, suddenly aware of how long they'd been talking. "I should go before Nyx organizes a search party."
Julian nodded, slipping his notebook into his satchel. "Until next time, Morgana Nightshade, barista extraordinaire."
***
Mo slammed her spellbook shut with enough force that Nyx's budding collection of stolen laboratory specimens rattled on their makeshift shelf. A jar of something with too many eyes blinked rapidly in protest.
The three of them had retreated to Mo and Nyx's dorm after dinner, barricading themselves against Umbra's homework demands. Outside, the academy's twisted spires cut into the perpetual twilight sky, but in here—with candlelight warming their faces and the faint scent of contraband Earth coffee Mo had smuggled in—they could almost pretend they were somewhere else entirely.
The room itself was a testament to their first days of awkward cohabitation. Mo's room remained sparse and practical—a few paperbacks stacked on her nightstand, her barista apron hung as a defiant reminder of her Earth life. Nyx's side, meanwhile, had exploded into chaos—fabrics in impossible colors draped over furniture, jars of strange substances labeled with codes only they understood, and a collection of small trinkets that seemed to change position when no one was looking.
"I really thought villain school would have more—I don't know—creativity?" Mo said, tugging at her ginger hair. "Not just 'torture this,' 'hex that,' 'monologue until your victim dies of boredom.'"
Nyx sprawled across their bed, their form shifting in subtle waves—now a few inches taller, now with slightly sharper features, now back again. They'd been unusually quiet since returning from dinner. Despite their enthusiastic descriptions of Demonic Warfare class to anyone who would listen, something about the day had clearly gotten under their skin.
"Did you see how excited Professor Dreadmire was about our Calculated Cruelty project?" Nyx's voice carried from their bedroom with a hint of forced brightness that didn't match their restless shifting. "Two thousand words on innovative torture techniques. He actually used the word 'innovative'—as if there's anything creative about causing pain."
"You don't have to pretend with us," Lucian said quietly. "Not here." He hesitated, frost forming at his fingertips before he brushed it away. "Though my father would say there's much 'innovation' in pain techniques." His mouth twisted around the word as if repeating a lesson he'd heard countless times but never fully believed. "It's what they drill into us at home."
Nyx's form stuttered, then settled into something smaller, more vulnerable than Mo had seen before—shoulders slightly hunched, colors muted, sharp edges softened. They slowly walked into the shared space and dropped on the couch.
"You know, some part of me wanted to be absolutely brilliant at this," they admitted, their voice shifting. "To be so spectacularly villainous that my family would choke on their precious traditions." Their form flared dramatically, briefly taking on sharper edges. "To shove it in my father's perfectly symmetrical face that changing shape doesn't mean I'm weak—it means I'm everything he fears: unpredictable, uncontainable," they grinned suddenly, dangerously, "and far more interesting at dinner parties."
Their fingers twisted a small piece of obsidian, turning it over and over. "But watching Julian today, cataloging his own pain like it was just—just data... I don't know if I can be that."
Mo didn't need much of a reminder to see Julian's trembling hands as if she just left him. To hear the clinical detachment in his voice as he narrated his own suffering. "We have to pass these classes if we want to graduate. And if… If I want to get full control of Blackthorn Keep."
"I've been wondering..." Nyx began, their voice softer than usual, form shifting slightly as if testing the waters of a more vulnerable conversation. "With everything you've built on Earth, with your powers... couldn't you just go back? Create a new identity if needed?" They traced a pattern in the air that briefly glimmered. "Is Blackthorn Keep really worth all... this?" The question hung in the air, tentative rather than challenging.
"You think I don't ask the same question myself?" said Mo. "But now, with the council and their pestering… It is like they've challenged me. And I have to win!"
"Even if so, do we really have to become what they want us to be?" Lucian asked, his breath frosting in the air despite the room's warmth. He pulled a folded paper from his pocket, the edges worn as if he'd unfolded and refolded it hundreds of times.
"I found this in my family archives," he said. "Written by a village elder whose people were caught in my great-grandfather's territory dispute. Her hands were already freezing when she carved these words into bark. It was copied later."
The dense paper crackled as he carefully unfolded it. The handwriting was cramped, hurried:
When ice comes for the innocent,
There is no prayer warm enough to save.
No hearth fire burns as cold
As the heart of the one who commands the frost.
Yet remember this, frozen one:
We who die with eyes still seeing
Become ghosts in your mirror,
Witnesses to the chill in your veins.
Silence fell over the room. Mo thought of the Сouncil at Blackthorn Keep, who expected her to return as a proper Dark Lady—ruthless, cunning, cruel. She thought of Julian's careful eyes, watching her as if trying to determine which world she truly belonged to.
"My family has been freezing people for centuries," Lucian continued, refolding the poem. "They call it 'ice-spiking'—very traditional, very elegant. There's a specific spell for it, passed down through generations. I'm supposed to master it this year."
"Will you?" Mo asked, looking directly at his silver eyes.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I keep this poem to remind myself that I have a choice. That legacy isn't destiny."
Nyx shifted again, their form elongating as they sat up straighter. "So we just, what? Pretend? Put on a show for the professors while secretly planning to be... not villains?"
"Is that what you're doing?" Lucian wondered aloud. "Planning to be not-villains? Is it even a worthy goal, to try not to be something?"
They looked at each other, none willing to answer directly.
"Well, whatever we decide," Nyx said finally, their form shifting back to something more recognizable, more like their public self, "we still have to survive tomorrow."
Lucian nodded grimly. "Combat Applications class."
Mo groaned, her head falling back against the wall. "Don't remind me. I haven't used offensive magic in years. I've been too busy making heart-shaped latte art."
"Talking about offensive magic, do you know who you are paired with?" Lucian asked, his expression shifting to something like pity.
"Who?" Mo demanded. "Who am I paired with?"
Nyx and Lucian exchanged glances.
"The class roster went up during dinner," Nyx said carefully. "You were still talking to Julian, so we checked for you."
A cold weight settled in Mo's stomach. "Tell me."
Lucian's breath frosted again as he exhaled. "It's Valerius."
Of course, it was. Because villain school couldn't just be about learning evil—it had to be a special kind of hell explicitly tailored to each student.
"Great," Mo muttered, flopping back on her bed. "Tomorrow I get to duel my teenage nemesis, who's had years of practice while I've been alphabetizing romance novels."
***
The crimson moon cast blood-red light across Mo's trembling hands—hands that had crafted perfect lattes but forgotten how to weave deadly magic. In less than twelve hours, those hands would be all that stood between her and public humiliation... or worse.
"You know what they're saying in the halls, right?" Nyx asked, their voice unusually somber. "Combat Applications isn't just about grades. It's where reputations are made. Or destroyed."
Lucian nodded, frost creeping around his collar. "First-years who fail spectacularly become walking targets. Every student with something to prove will challenge them, again and again."
"And with your family name..." Nyx didn't finish the sentence.
Mo didn't need them to. A weak Nightshade would draw predators like blood in the water. Her provisional status at Blackthorn Keep would be the least of her worries if she couldn't hold her own against Valerius.
"Guys, guys…!" she exclaimed, pulling her spellbook back into her lap with newfound determination, "I understand, I'm doomed! So, I guess we'd better make sure we used every remaining hour to train!"
Nyx's form sharpened with resolve. "Right. We'll practice. Right now."
But even as Lucian began demonstrating a particularly effective shield charm, Mo couldn't silence the voice in her head that whispered: what if all the coffee grinding and book sorting had dulled something essential within her—something dark and powerful that couldn't simply be switched back on with a few hours of practice?
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