Dark Wizard's Case by Kirill Klevanski

Author:Kirill Klevanski [Klevanski, Kirill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 38

The door creaked, unwilling to open. Massive and ponderous, the sunlight glinted on cracked varnish, broken ornaments, and some greasy spots.

The twisted, rusty hinges made opening the door quite the ordeal. Little Alexander used the old reading room as his personal asylum, one only penetrated by the few who dared enter the west wing of the castle.

Yes, the west wing. Just like in the cartoon with the living furniture pieces he’d watched with Robin a short time before.

“There you are, Sasha,” a female voice with a thick eastern European accent said from next to his ear as he sat in a deep, giant armchair upholstered in chintz.

Just like the door, the west wing, and really the whole manor house, the armchair was old, smelling of dust, mold, and cat poop.

The Follen manor had lots of cats.

“Anastasia,” Alexander smiled, closing his textbook and trying to hide it behind his back. That definitely wasn’t enough to escape the Russian witch’s warm, brown eyes.

She was tall, taller than Robin. And beautiful. If Alexander were older, he’d have called her sexy, but in those days he didn’t know much about sex. Actually, all he knew was that it was one of things most frequently bought and sold in High Garden.

She almost never wore dresses, preferring a shabby Star Wars hoodie, threadbare Levi’s jeans, and Converse sneakers. She had only one pair of Converse, but she put in different colored laces every three days.

And is it even worth mentioning that she was dating Robin?

Neither the height difference nor the age gap bothered them.

Robin had turned seventeen the previous week, Alexander’s third at Follen, while Anastasia was coming up on her twenty-second birthday.

That provided an endless supply of jokes for the other students at Follen School of Dark Wizardry and the Forbidden Arts. (That was what Robin called it, a reference to some Hogwarts or other. Alexander had no idea what kind of place that was, though his older friend promised to show him a bunch of movies about a bespectacled wizard the next weekend.) Everyone agreed that Robin and Anastasia had probably come together as the only adults outside Professor Raewsky at the school.

“Why aren’t you playing with the other kids?”

Alexander had laughed at Anastasia’s accent at first. She sounded like a character straight out of an old spy movie. He’d teased her until she poured a bucket of cold water over him.

Unsurprisingly, that had cooled him off.

“Are they hurting cats again?” Dumsky squinted.

“Um…” Anastasia pretended to fall thoughtful. “Patrick and Jessie call it a game. Irma and Ganesh agree with them.”

“Little bastards.” Jumping to his feet, Alexander was about to dash for the door when he literally bumped into Robin.

As always, the latter was wearing a suit, a narrow tie, and a stripeless hat. There was a cigarette in his fingers.

Robin was a heavy smoker.

A very heavy smoker.

He said smoking used to take the edge off the hunger when he was begging for food in the High Garden streets. Alexander didn’t believe that. How could smoke replace food? Robin was presumably just making up excuses for his bad habit.

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