Hot on their Trail

I had been tracking Sharzin for the better part of the day as she skulked through the shadows of the School of Procedural Disorder. My goal was simple. It was to find out what she had been up to recently on this side of the academy. While she did have classes in the area, now that Rionriv and I had pushed her to take a few of the more advanced Arcanohistory courses, her spending time anywhere other than Phyllis's mall on her off days was more than a little suspicious.

Racing after her distorted blur, I found myself at a crossroads between a coffee shop and a bookstore. The light of the open space left the rogue nowhere to hide, but with the setting sun, it wouldn't be long before the growing shadows would make it impossible to track her. Time was running out, and the trail had gone cold.

"Crap," I muttered, investigating the space for any sign of her small body. "Where'd you go, you little gremlin?"

With the recent help Aesandoral had given me in tailoring my hypervigilance to locate Sharzin, I froze in the centre of the street. As students crossed my path, some noticed me and began to whisper. Even I had gotten a name for myself this semester as the boy who didn't attend classes and was always hovering around the up-and-coming triop. But as people stopped to gawk and others approached to ask me questions, I ignored them.

Focusing instead on the faint gust of wind that swept by my ears, I relied on the sounds beyond the crowd. That was when I caught her. She hadn't made a sound, but was still betrayed by the faint rustling of a cloak and the small patter of quick, quiet steps. Her shadow whispered to me, calling from the left. I leapt into action, pushing through the small group of girls who huddled to my side as I charged in the direction I knew Sharzin was moving.

Luckily for me, my gait was more than enough to close the distance the rogue had gained on me. Catching up in mere moments, I watched as her shadow slinked in beside a building and took up position in the shade of a trash can. Not wanting to be seen, I held back a block, crawling into my own private shadow and setting up a spot to survey her.

I waited for what felt like hours, watching her unmoving form as she in turn watched the building at a junction just a block ahead of us. I knew that just beyond the magically guarded doors and randomly patrolling security guards, deep within the windowless cube of a structure, was a library of rare and lost tomes. In fact, I was intimately familiar with the space we currently staked out, having explored it once before when looking for the tome needed to get the triop out of their final exam.

"But what do you want with it?" I whispered, stifling a yawn. "And how long are you going to wait?"

That was when she moved. As the arcane lights began to flicker to life and the shadows cast by the setting sun stretched across the building's entrance, her cloaked form shifted. I watched as she flickered in and out of existence, her body only briefly appearing in the flickering light of the magical lamps. As I moved to catch up, I noticed the glass door to the building open a sliver before closing behind a moment later. She was in.

Reaching the door seconds after her, I gave the barricade a tug before fumbling around in my bag for the keycard Phyllis had made for me at the start of the previous year. It would grant me access to any building, including this one. All I would need to do was swipe it against the lock, and I'd be in and able to continue my pursuit.

"Where?" I mumbled to myself, pulling my bottomless bag off my hip and digging in my arm up to the elbow. "Phyllis keycard. Come on. I know you're in—"

"Hey, Iz," Sharzin spoke up, her voice dulled by the glass separating us. "Looking for this?"

Glancing up, I caught sight of Sharzin and her smug grin. In her hand, she held my keycard up to the window, showing it off proudly.

"Sharzin, when did you—?"

"When you were stalking me, dummy." She responded, tucking the card away. "Thanks, though. It would have been a lot tougher to get in here without it."

"What are you three up to?" I interrogated her, gently knocking my fist on the glass. "What are you looking for in there? I can help."

"Don't worry about it." She responded, slowly bleeding backwards into the shadows. "You have bigger problems."

"What?"

"Hey, kid," A group of campus security officers announced as they approached on their rounds. "Get away from there."

"Crap!" I growled, looking once more to the shadows within the building, before fleeing from the magical rent-a-cops.

—ooo—

It had been a few days since stalking Sharzin, her movements having grown even more elusive since she discovered me tailing her. After failing yet again, giving up the pursuit of her somewhere deep in the School of Theoretical Arcanoanalysis, I decided to skulk my way back to the central campus, where I would wait to catch Rionriv. Having knowledge that the sorceress's class on Advanced Transmutational Correlation would be ending within the hour, I positioned myself at a cafe close by to spy.

As I sat there, sipping a fantasy pumpkin-spiced latte, I acknowledged the uncomfortable pit that had formed in my stomach as of late. Everything that I had been doing these last few weeks felt wrong. Like a betrayal of the group that I had, in only a year, gone through so much with. It was one thing to be concerned. But they had told me that nothing was going on, and I didn't believe them. No matter how hard I tried, something deep inside me refused to accept their word.

Watching the door from which I knew Rionriv would emerge any moment, I couldn't help but feel like a jealous lover. The suspicion I experienced reminded me of my time with Madi. How I felt when I could smell the other men on her after she arrived home from parties she went to without me. It reminded me of how it felt to be left in the dark, unwanted and lied to. Only useful as a punching bag, and then dropped once I was used up.

"Damn it," I whispered, shaking my head in an attempt to rid the thought from my mind. "No. It's—it's not the same."

With a soft sigh, I attempted a few calming breaths before lifting the latte to my lips once more. As I did, I caught sight of her. With perked up ears and a suspiciously swaying tail, Rionriv emerged from the building and looked around.

Shit. I thought, sliding down into my seat and hiding myself behind the latte. Sharzin must have told her I was stalking her.

I watched as the sorceress reached for her temple, whispering something behind her other hand before turning to leave. But she didn't go left. She moved in the opposite direction of her next class, Intermediate Arcanodynamics, and was instead heading towards the School of Natural Cycles.

She doesn't have any classes in Natural Cycles this semester. Sitting up immediately, I eyed her as she walked away before, with a burst of magic, she took to the sky. Crap!

Abandoning my coffee, I raced after Rionriv. With a pulse of magic to my feet, I kicked off the ground and leapt to the rooftops above the central campus, straining to maintain a clear line of sight. Focused on her, I trusted my steps to carry me forward, launching myself from one building to the other in frantic pursuit of the weretigress. But even with the magic I normally devoted to boosting my movement, her flight spell had only gotten more powerful over this semester.

As I kicked off one building, attempting to clear a particularly large gap or risk losing her, I tried out a new skill I had learned while eavesdropping on the triop. While I hadn't actually reviewed it and had been more preoccupied with picking up on nonexistent codes between the girls, I remembered the gist of the skill. Involving the adjustment of how much magic I channelled to different points of my body, it was meant to enhance or reduce the area of a spell, or, in this instance, to use magic to help me jump.

Feeling the arcana swell in my foot, it evenly pushed outwards like it always did. Though this time, in the final moments before I lunged, I focused all of the power towards a single point near the toe of my right foot. Pushing off, I expelled the magic like quickly releasing a pressure valve, and, in a way, it worked.

I flung into the air, no longer in control of my movement as the burst of magic had been too much to handle. Soaring skyward, I tumbled uncontrollably before gravity took hold of my body once again. With several seconds of freefall, I took the time I plummeted to the ground to think about my mistakes, before eventually colliding with a pile of stacked boxes. 

Dizzy but luckily still conscious, thanks to the ruby on my wrist, I jumped to my feet. Fumbling like an idiot in the wreckage, I managed to free myself and reach the rooftops once more. It was only then, as I glanced around, eying the empty sky, that I accepted I had officially lost sight of Rionriv.

This game of cat and mouse would repeat itself the entire semester. Days turned into weeks, and before long, autumn was well underway. The leaves had changed colour and begun to fall as students prepared for exams in the coming month. And in that time, I had gotten no closer to figuring out what my friends were up to.

With finals right around the corner, I sat down with my companions to ask about what the plan was for the year-end exams. To this, I received curious looks from Sharzin and Aesandoral before Rionriv reiterated that I didn't need to do anything to help them pass the next round of testing. This, of course, unsettled me. Over the last two semesters, it had been all but a royal decree that I guarantee they pass their exams. But suddenly, now, they wanted nothing to do with me.

Running out of time, I was determined to get to the bottom of this semester-long secret. This, of course, meant pulling out all the stops when it came to interrogating the one member of the group that I knew I could pull information from. A task that would require substantial amounts of liquor and space from the others.

So, one day, while Sharzin and Rionriv were in one of their advanced magic courses, I asked Aesandoral out on a date.