I Learned Magic for All the Wrong Reasons

Mercer’s hand stayed beside the water while Dante waited for an answer. Across the table, Registrar Ryker closed the housing summary, but Dante kept his good hand on Jett’s agreement. He wasn’t letting either man move on until someone explained how a donor knew what had happened inside Vale’s locked assessment room.

”We receive reports on unusual applicants,” Mercer replied, finally lifting his glass. Dante asked which report, but the donor said they could discuss that after clearing up the treatment arrangements. Rhea moved closer to the doorway and repeated the exchange to Vale through her earpiece.

Dante wanted to keep pushing, but Anika had Jett’s tablet open beside him, and her brother still wasn’t answering. Mercer could explain his private information later; right now, Dante wanted proof that Jett was still alive.

”You brought me here to answer questions about my name, so show me the person you’re using it to keep downstairs,” Dante said. ”I want to see Jett now, not hear that he’s comfortable.”

Iris, the archive assistant, sent the agreement to Vale while Mercer looked toward the open door. Party guests were close enough to hear if Dante raised his voice again, and the donor set his glass down without drinking.

Mercer pressed a control beside the window, turning the glass into a screen that showed a narrow bed, a strapped forearm, and Jett staring at a white light above his head.

Four more occupied beds stood behind him, close enough that Dante could see a woman in the second trying to pull her sleeve down over the black pad fixed against her skin.

Anika moved toward the image before Rhea caught her arm and explained that it was only a screen, leaving her facing a brother she could see but could not reach.

Ryker called the black pads support anchors. He said they linked people to difficult spells so the patients could take some of the strain. Dante looked at Jett working his fingers against the blanket and understood the claim: while he made a spell somewhere else, someone strapped to a bed could end up paying for it with their body.

”Jett’s support period was extended following a review,” the Registrar explained, but Iris laid the original agreement beside his tablet and asked who had signed permission for that extension.

Ryker said the records were being checked, but Iris kept the agreement open in front of him. The right to stop was written plainly on the page. On the screen, a nurse came to inspect the white light above Jett while he worked his fingers against the blanket.

Mercer told Ryker to end the demonstration, and Dante spoke before the registrar reached the controls. ”Leave it on, because if this is helping him, you shouldn’t mind us watching.”

Rhea backed him, taking a containment card from her pocket and telling Ryker to step away from the controls. He stopped, leaving the five beds visible. Dante had kept them from hiding Jett again without so much as warming his fingers, and Anika’s quiet thanks meant more than Mercer promising him lessons.

Guests applauded outside while Jett struggled beneath a strap, and Dante watched Ryker discussing permission as though nobody was hurting.

Vale spoke through Rhea’s earpiece. The responders had reached the service entrance, and the medical team needed the equipment shut off safely before removing the black pads. Pulling them off while the system was active could hurt the people attached to them. The team was working on access, not waiting for Dante to perform a rescue.

Anika asked how long that would take, and while Rhea repeated the question, Ryker shifted toward the wall controls. Dante pictured the shield Lucan had shown him across the man’s path. Warmth brushed his fingertips as the barrier appeared. Then he remembered his promise not to cast and saw Jett jerk against the strap on the screen.

Dante let the shield go at once. In the picture, the nurse caught Jett’s wrist before he could drag it against the black pad. The spell had lasted only a moment, but the change in Jett was hard to miss.

The brief warmth faded without new pain in Dante’s hand. He had felt no warning strong enough to match what Jett had just suffered. That scared him more than another burn would have, because he could not use his own comfort to decide whether a spell was safe.

”You took my visitor pass away, so why did that still reach him?” he asked, looking from Ryker to Rhea while Anika remained turned toward the screen with one hand over her mouth.

Ryker said the visitor pass helped the system find a connection; it was not the whole connection. Boxing up the pass had weakened the reaction, but the equipment downstairs was still linked to Jett. Rhea told him to give Vale that information immediately, so the medical team could use it.

A responder knocked and identified himself, and Rhea admitted him while Iris handed over the agreement. Dante pointed out all five occupied beds on the screen, making himself count them instead of staring only at Jett.

”Get the room numbers for all of them,” he said. ”If they move Jett, I don’t want us leaving the other four behind.” The responder asked Ryker for the list and waited beside his tablet until he opened it.

Mercer began listing permissions, speaking in the same calm voice he had used to offer tuition, while the responder told him the medical team required access and would record any refusal.

Dante watched the nurse raise Jett’s bed, then lower it when the strap pulled at his arm, and found himself wanting Artemis there to tell him exactly what he should leave alone.

Anika said her brother hated hospitals, repeating it when nobody answered, as though someone might finally change what they were doing if they understood how frightened he would be.

Dante remembered the shoes beside Jett’s bed and the game waiting on his monitor. Jett had expected to go home. Now he was hurting while people in suits argued about whether the right person had signed a form, and Dante could not make himself look away from him.

Mercer claimed the program had helped hundreds of students, but Iris asked him to name the person who had authorized keeping these five, refusing to follow him into a discussion of grateful graduates.

For the first time, the donor failed to supply an answer, and Dante might have enjoyed watching him struggle if Jett had not tried to sit up.

The nurse reached for the strap and called toward the open doorway, her mouth moving without sound through the feed while another member of staff rushed into view behind her.

”What if I made the pad let go?” Dante asked, watching the screen. He wanted Jett breathing freely instead of waiting for another person to approve it. Rhea told him to wait for the medical team, then asked the question he had been avoiding: had he ever seen a spell remove one of those pads?

He had watched lights appear, shields rise, and a gap open in a band of magic, then pictured those effects to copy them. Nobody had shown him how to break the link between Jett and the equipment without hurting him. This time he only knew the result he wanted, and wanting it badly did not fill in the missing step.

Anika was watching him now, her copper hair pushed behind one pointed ear and all her usual teasing replaced by a hope he had spent the weekend trying to put there.

He had made Mercer show them Jett and helped the responder ask for every patient, but none of it had taken the strap off his friend’s arm. Anika was looking at him as though he could do that too, and he wanted so badly to deserve it that he mistook wanting for another reason to try.

At school, people had listened when they wanted a joke to repeat later. Anika was waiting for an answer she intended to trust, and admitting he had run out of ideas felt like handing that trust back.

”I know what I’m doing, so give me a moment,” he said, and she believed him quickly enough to make the lie feel almost true before he closed his eyes.

He pictured Jett breathing freely with the black pad loose on the sheet, the connection finding nothing to hold, although no remembered demonstration supplied the part between wanting and happening.

Heat struck behind his eyes, followed by blood running over his upper lip, and he opened them as Rhea reached toward him and the screen broke into flickering white lines.

Jett’s arm lifted with the pad still against it, then vanished from the picture before Dante could tell whether anything had come free, leaving him staring at his own red fingers.

His knees folded as Anika reached for him, and he missed the table edge with his good hand, leaving blood across the wood while her voice became impossible to separate from the ringing.

He tried to stay awake long enough to see whether he had saved her brother, but the last thing he saw was her frightened face before the room disappeared.