What a Ghoul Wants: A Lady of the Lake School for Girls Cozy Mystery (The Vega Bloodmire Wicked Witch Mystery Series Book 8) by Sarina Dorie

Author:Sarina Dorie [Dorie, Sarina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon.com
Published: 2021-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hexed Messages

By the time Vega finished her conversation with Mrs. Gordmayer, she only had another forty-five minutes before teacher curfew. Vega went to Mr. Reade first. She wasn’t surprised to find him still grading in his classroom. Normal teachers would probably have been in their dorm rooms by this hour on a Tuesday night right after spring break. But not Mr. Reade.

He looked up from the papers he was correcting with his owlish eyes when she walked in. “Hello, Vega. Is there something I can help you with?”

It was the kind of solicitous response that might make him vulnerable to being taken advantage of by a student. Emi was so intent on revenge, she didn’t care whom she hurt in the process. When she explained the entirety of the situation—or as close to it as she could without revealing her secrets—he nodded sympathetically.

“Have you tried talking to her about what you had hoped to accomplish with her mother?” he asked. “Did you tell her you used a glamour to impersonate her brother to try to help the mother let go?”

“I’ve tried talking to her, but she won’t listen.”

He removed his glasses and rubbed them against his shirt to clean them. “I imagine this girl must be in a world of pain. Have you ever heard the Fae story of the two-headed phoenix?”

It sounded vaguely familiar, but Vega had always preferred practical spellwork, history, and nonfiction over fairy tales.

In Mr. Reade’s typical fashion as foreign language expert wanting to use a teachable moment, he slipped into an ancient Egyptian dialect still used by Fae. “There once was a phoenix with two heads. The first head saw a delicious fig and ate it. The second head asked for the first head to share, but he wouldn’t. This enraged the second head. Later the second head saw some poison berries and said, ‘I’m going to spite my other half because it wouldn’t share.’

“So it ate the poison berries, and they both died.” His forehead wrinkled with concern. “I think your student might be like that bird. You need to be careful.”

“That’s a Hindu fable from the Panchatantra series,” Vega had learned a similar tale in college while improving her Sanskrit skills. Though that bird hadn’t been a phoenix.

“Stories are universal.” Mr. Reade leaned back in his chair. “Spiting oneself in the process of harming others is a common message worldwide because it is a problem among humans and Fae alike.”

Vega couldn’t disagree. She would cut off her own nose to spite her own face when it concerned Malisha Bane. “The phoenix in the Fae story will be reborn.” That bird would have a chance to learn from its mistakes. Unlike her students.

Mr. Reade’s beatific smile was his own reply. She supposed he meant her to read in between the lines of his story, though she was never sure if she inferred the same messages “normal” people did.

“I need to help her.” Vega’s stomach knotted with worry at the idea of something bad happening to Emi.

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