Chapter Two

The Eligible Mage

Veda

From my rain-spattered living room window, I watched Salinger’s arrival at the school. He was dropped off in a van from the airport. He didn’t have an umbrella and his near-black hair was dampened as he gathered his luggage and started up the steps.

Though I would not have liked to admit it, I was rather impressed with his clothing. He wore a chunky black turtleneck sweater under his black coat. My sense of textiles said the coat was cashmere and the laced boots on his feet were leather. I liked natural fibers. I also liked the way his hair curled slightly away from his ears.

I would have liked to postpone meeting Salinger for a day or two. The delay would give my catty cousins their chance to impress him, romance him, and perhaps even seduce him, but I had a tutoring session at the school and I couldn't be late. It was Saturday and I had a full day ahead of me. I hoped he would miss seeing me.

I gave him ten minutes to get to the inner offices where he would meet up with June. She was the school’s librarian and arranged everything for the open library on the first floor and the hidden library on the second.

I had hoped he would be out of sight when I came in, but he had been accosted by all four of my crazy girl cousins before he even made it to the office. He was looking from one face to another, obviously enjoying the attention.

There was my cousin, Clementine. She was a year older than me, nineteen, and evil. Her hair was dyed as light a blonde as you could get in a salon. She was fair with light blue eyes and extremely white skin. She was also bigger than the other cousins, tall and athletic with muscles like a cheetah. She wore all white (and transparent) clothing. Her blue and purple tattoos rippled through the sheer of her shirt sleeves. I always thought she looked like she had been brutally beaten the night before and the bruises showed through.

Then there was my cousin, Intarsia. She was a redhead only because she dyed her hair tomato red, but she grew it long and curled it impeccably. She was the prettiest of the four, except for one thing. She wore green. Green should have complimented the red of her hair and the green of her eyes, but one thing ruined it. The green hue of her lips made her look like a science experiment gone wrong. I suspected she was evil too, though I had never seen much evidence of it.

My cousin, Fair Isle, had black hair like me that she kept cut short in a long-banged pixie. She was close to my weight and height and she had also chosen black as her color. She and I should have resembled each other more than any of the other cousins, except she had a thing for piercings. Her tongue was pierced in three different places. She had pierced both her dimples, her eyebrow, her nose and if it hadn’t been my business, I would have lost count of how many times she'd pierced her ears. Most of the time she covered one ear with an ear cuff. The fact that she looked more evil than the others didn't mean she was.

The runt of the cousin litter was Pearl. Not that she was much of a runt, she was the same size as the rest of us. It was just that she was the youngest in our cluster of cousins. She was one of those girls who can't seem to get her straggly hair out of her face. She had not yet chosen a color and, instead, wore stripes. The baby card was always played in her defense whenever she did something evil which I believed was more often than we knew.

The thing about these evil cousins of mine was that their evilness was never directed toward me. They had plenty of drama amongst themselves, but no fight ever broke out that involved me. Firstly, if there was a quarrel over a boy, I would back down. I didn’t need a boyfriend. Secondly, I was an only child and my mother was rarely in the city. This made me the 'pitiable cousin' and the other four felt it was their duty not just to be my cousins, but to be my keepers. This was especially the case with Clementine.

I crossed the threshold into the school and expected to see bloodshed among them. Instead, each of them had on their best clothes and their best behavior.

I meant to walk by without saying a word, but Salinger called out to me. “Hi!”

I paused. He couldn't possibly mean me, but I turned at the risk of looking like a fool to see if he really was calling me. It would be ruder to walk on and I couldn't do that in a school for decorum.

He was calling to me and I got that close-up look at his face I never could have got through my living room windows. His hair was nearly black, curled slightly, and cut perfectly. The black of his hair and eyelashes made the amber of his eyes all the more startling. He was much paler than I had expected, looking both Asian and Native at the same time. In truth, he had no Asian blood. He was half Inuit and half Caucasian, which lightened his eyes to light brown with black rings. It was the shape of his cheekbones and the upward curve of his lips that reminded me how splendid his bloodlines were. The shapes of his muscles and bones that protruded from under his clothes, spoke of strength and firmness. From head to foot, he was very impressive, the right height and build for a magazine cover. For the first time, I thought that perhaps my cousins had not wasted their time pursuing him.

Knowing he was not just perfect but also exotic, he came toward me with confidence. “You must be June. I'm Salinger.”

Pearl cackled while the others exerted more control.

My expression was innocent. “I'm sorry. You have mistaken me for June Borage. Please excuse me,” I said coolly, but not too coolly. I remained poised, even though he had mistaken me for a woman forty years older than me who wore her hair in a silver bob. I turned on the heel of my exquisite knee-high boot and continued on my way.

“That's Veda,” Clementine explained. “She's younger than me. What made you think she could be June?”

“Where's she going?” Salinger asked.

“Probably to meet her student. She usually has a full day of tutoring on Saturday.”

I pumped up the stairs and passed out of earshot.

My student was an eleven-year-old boy who was getting elocution lessons from me. It amounted to a reading lesson. I read a line, pronouncing it properly, and got him to read it back, except his reading was appalling.

That was why I got annoyed when I heard the cousins' shrieking giggles from the classroom below. The school was like that. You couldn't hear what was going on in the classroom next to yours if it had been on fire, but you could hear what was happening in the room above or beneath you. Where was June? Hadn’t she met Salinger and separated him from the cousins? I went over to the heating vent to yell some hypocritical words about silence when I overheard what they were saying.

“Does Veda have a boyfriend?” Salinger's unfamiliar voice asked.

“Only Antony!” Intarsia answered with a hoot.

I ground my teeth together. I hated it when they twitted me about Antony. He was their cousin too. Being brought up with the understanding that if we didn't get mage husbands, we wouldn't get husbands at all, none of them even worried about inbreeding. Even so, they hadn’t considered Antony as a potential match until his growth spurt. Before that, Antony had been a bony boy with no appeal, until he suddenly put on weight in the form of muscle. He'd grown sideburns that suited him remarkably and turned into a man overnight. I agreed he was very handsome, but for me, it didn't matter, because as he grew better looking, he only looked more like me.

Through the vent, I heard Salinger explain, “I know him, he's my cousin. My mother and his mother are cousins.”

“Which means we're not related at all because we’re related to him on his father’s side?” Intarsia asked.

“Right. But there's someone else I want to meet. My mother's cousin, Emi. Do you know where I could find her?”

“She's married!” Fair Isle practically screamed.

“I'm not trying to date her. She's probably ten years older than me. She's the one who made your library and she's the last author of a book in your coven, isn't she?”

“Yeah, but we don't see her,” Clementine explained. “I suppose you can meet her at the art gallery, but you shouldn't. Neither the Borage nor Fastille family talks to her now.”

“Because she married a nobody?” he queried.

“Because she married a nobody.”

“I suppose Antony won't let that happen to Veda,” Salinger drawled.

“Why do you keep asking about her?” Fair Isle burst. “You might as well know, she doesn't care about Antony or any other guy. I have taken at least four of my boyfriends from her and she has smiled and given them to me.”

“Why would she do that?”

Fair Isle smirked, “Because she's smart. She knew they were perverts, druggies, domineering jerks, so she gave them to me with a smile, because she knew she wasn’t quitting a good thing.”

“So what? Even if they had turned out to be princes, what were you going to do with them? They haven't got the blood.”

“True,” she gushed.

I felt like vomiting, so I turned around and got back to the lesson. My student sounded worse than ever. I shouldn't have zoned out.