With the Malfoid memes being so out of control and viral, I’ve decided to try my hand at a little cozy fantasy slice-of-life tsundere magic academy. That’s quite a mouthful, but overnight I came up wth a pretty good story, and I’m going to try putting it up here and on Subscribe Star for paid subscribers to see how it goes.
If you like Harry Potter or Japanese fantasy light novels, this is for you.
So without further ado, I left a sample for you in hopes it can get some good free subscribers on board. I appreciate the support as it takes a lot of work to run Fandom Pulse here and this is quite the undertaking on top of it!
Chapter 1:
From the Register of Kept Places, St. Brendan’s Collegium
Merrow, Weston. Place held since birth. Ring setting: iron, as for his mother. Key to be sent on the day his stone ripens and not one day sooner. The Provost asks that the key not be delivered by gull, by cat, or by Mr. Corrigan, who has been told twice.
Every compass in Merrow’s Pawn & Loan pointed at me.
Twelve of them sat in the glass case by the register, brass and plastic and one Boy Scout model with a cracked face, and every needle swung my way the second I walked in from the back. I’d played it off as a trick for customers since I was eight. Most of them figured I had magnets in my sneakers. One lady from Victorville asked if I was a government experiment, and Aunt Delphine told her yes and charged her five dollars to see it again. They never pointed north like they were supposed to, not while I was around.
It was a hundred and eight degrees that Saturday, my fourteenth birthday. The swamp cooler on the roof made a noise like a dying goat. Even though it was my birthday, I still worked and didn’t mention it. It wasn’t like we were going to celebrate anyway.
Delphine sat on her stool at the end of the counter with a crossword and four pieces of nicotine gum going at once. She’d quit smoking the year I started kindergarten and had been chewing angry ever since. The aluminum bat leaned on the shelf behind her, next to the Bible and the box of rubber bands. All three got used about the same amount.
The bell over the door jangled at ten after eleven.
A trucker came in, or at least a guy dressed like one: mesh cap, Peterbilt T-shirt, a wallet chain that hung to his knee. He carried a hard-shell guitar case by the handle, out from his body, like it might bite him. Something was wrong, very wrong.
“Nice case,” I said.
“Nineteen-seventy Gibson inside.” He laid it on the counter and popped the latches. “Worth two grand, easy.”
It was a sunburst Hummingbird with a crack in the pickguard and somebody else’s fingerprints all over the frets. This was no fake. That part he hadn’t lied about.
I picked it up and he flinched, and I noticed something odd about the way he did. People flinch when you touch their stuff, but they flinch toward it. This guy leaned back, like he was glad to be rid of it.
I looked at his hands. They were big with sunburned knuckles, but he had fingertips as soft as a baby’s. Anybody who plays guitar regularly has calluses you could strike a match on. This guy had never played anything louder than a car radio.
“What do you tune it to?” I asked.
“Normal.”
“Normal what?”
“Guitar normal.” He scratched his neck. “Look, kid, is there a grownup I can talk to?”
Delphine didn’t look up from her crossword. “He’s the grownup. I’m the muscle.”
I strummed once. The tuning sounded in Drop D, a little flat. Another lie I’d caught him in. I turned it over. On the back of the headstock somebody had stuck a tiny sticker, a white dove inside a circle, the kind churches hand out at summer camp.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“My uncle. He passed.”
His eyes went to the door when he said passed. They’d gone to the door on uncle, too.
I set the Gibson back in its case, gently. “I’ll give you sixty.”
His eyebrows went up. “Sixty bucks? For a Gibson?”
“Sixty for the case. The guitar I can’t take without paperwork.” I slid the ticket pad across the counter and clicked a pen. “State law. I need your driver’s license and a thumbprint, and it all goes to the sheriff’s database by Monday.”
That was true. It was also the point where honest people reach for their wallets and the other kind reach for their keys.
He backed away from the counter.
“Forget it,” he said. “This place is a joke.”
“Your guitar,” I said.
“Keep it.”
The bell jangled. A pickup with no tailgate tore out of the lot and fishtailed onto Main Street, and the dust hung in the heat a long time after.
Delphine turned a page. “Dove sticker?”
“Grace Fellowship, down in Hesperia. They did a car wash fundraiser in June. I bet they’re missing a band.”
“Call ‘em.” She snapped her gum. “And kid. There’s no reward in it.”
“I know.”
“Just so you know it.”
I decided to call anyway. Nothing at Merrow’s was free, and that cut both ways. If you didn’t pay for a thing, you didn’t keep it. Delphine had been teaching me that since before I could reach the till.
I found the church’s number on a flyer still pinned to our corkboard. A youth pastor named Ruiz picked up on the second ring and made a sound when I said Gibson, like somebody had handed him back a kidney. He said he’d drive up after lunch. He said God bless you, twice. I had no idea what to do with that. Nobody had ever blessed me over a guitar before. So I said you’re welcome, and wrote Ruiz, 1 pm on the back of my hand, and hung up.
When I set the phone down, Delphine was watching me over her reading glasses.
“Fourteen,” she said.
So she’d remembered. I shrugged. “Yep.”
“Huh.”
She went back to the crossword, but her pen didn’t move. She was looking at the compass case instead, at twelve needles all pointing at me, and her jaw worked that gum like it had done something to her.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. Go check the cooler pads.”
I went. Behind me, every needle in that case turned to follow, patient as a debt collector.
I didn’t know yet that I owed anybody anything.
