Chapter 16
Vivi had never been in the witchery department before, and she was surprised to see it was a lot like the regular buildings on campus, just nicer. The floors were marble instead of linoleum, the walls wallpapered in a dark green damask pattern and the chairs in Dr. Arbuthnot’s office were velvet instead of the hard plastic and polyester Vivi’s office featured.
But the office was still small, there was still only one window, and as Dr. Arbuthnot passed Vivi a cup of tea, she noticed a stack of papers at the edge of the desk, waiting to be graded.
“Would you like to tell me what you were searching for in Special Collections?” Dr. Arbuthnot asked now, coming to sit on the other side of the desk from Vivi and Rhys.
Vivi didn’t know about Rhys, but she felt like she’d been called to the principal’s office, and she sipped her tea, trying to regain some composure. Between the kiss and the ghost, her brain felt like it had been scattered into a million pieces, and she knew she would need every shred of that brain to go toe-to-toe with the head of Witchery.
“We’ve had a magical mishap of sorts,” Rhys said, smiling as he lifted his own teacup to his lips. “Something went wrong when I was charging the ley lines, as is my responsibility as a member of the founding family of this town.”
Charm and authority, usually a winning combination, but Vivi saw Dr. Arbuthnot’s expression harden. “A mishap,” she repeated, her voice flat, then busied herself with collecting papers on her desk. “Well, this mishap has apparently released a ghost from a very powerful binding spell, so I suggest you fix it as soon as possible.”
“A binding spell?” Vivi leaned forward. She’d heard of those before, but they were intense magic, far more serious than anything she’d ever attempted. “The ghost we saw today had been bound?”
The corners of Dr. Arbuthnot’s mouth turned down, but she nodded. “Piper McBride, back in 1994. One of our best students. Unfortunately became too interested in the darker arts, and when she attempted contact beyond the veil, she ended up accidentally sacrificing herself. This is why we’re so strict about certain types of magic being forbidden. Mess with the wrong thing, it kills you, as Piper learned, sadly.”
Dr. Arbuthnot placed the papers back on her desk, her expression distant. “And when a witch dies as a result of shadow magic, we have no choice but to bind their spirit.”
Vivi had never heard of that, but it made sense. Magic was energy, more or less. Do too much, it could drain your life force right out of you. And if you died doing something especially powerful, that energy had to go somewhere.
Like making a ghost.
“But now,” Dr. Arbuthnot said, her tone brisk again, “the magic binding Piper’s spirit is broken, so she’s free to wreak havoc. Which is obviously of concern to us.”
Linking her fingers, Dr. Arbuthnot placed her hands on her desk, studying Rhys and Vivi. “The normal parts of the college and the more . . . specialized parts live in harmony. Something I think you know very well, Ms. Jones. But ghosts in the library are obviously going to be very upsetting to the administration.”
Vivi actually felt like a tiny piece of her soul was withering under Dr. Arbuthnot’s gaze. “Absolutely,” she agreed. “Which is why—”
“Which is why you will fix. This,” Dr. Arbuthnot replied, biting off the words, and Vivi nodded so eagerly, she almost spilled her tea. “Yes. Yes, of course we will.”
“Good.” She stared at them for a moment, then waved one hand toward the door. “You can both go now.”
Both Rhys and Vivi put their teacups back on her desk so quickly they rattled, and made for the door.
Once they were back across campus and safely ensconced in Vivi’s office, Rhys took a deep breath, flopping into the chair opposite her desk. “All right, I see your point now.”
“Thank you,” she said, pressing one hand to her chest like that might stop her heart from galloping out of it. “They’re intense, right?”
“Extremely. And how exactly are we meant to rebind a ghost?”
Shaking her head, Vivi walked around the desk and sat in her chair. “No clue. But we have to.”
An idea occurred to her then, taking shape so fast she could almost see it. “Rhys,” she said, laying both palms on her desk.
He eyed her suspiciously. “Yes?”
“This is what we have to do. It’s going to take us a while to figure out how to break the curse, but while we do, we can at least solve all the issues the curse caused. Like how we fixed things at the store last night.”
Rhys was looking at her like she’d grown another head. “We didn’t fix that, though. Your aunt did.”
Vivi just shook her head, some of that god-awful guilt finally abating. They could do this, between the two of them. Right the wrongs they’d inadvertently caused. “But you were able to convince those girls that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. That could’ve been an absolute shit show, but it wasn’t.”
“First of all, it was definitely shit show–adjacent,” Rhys said, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it from the back of his chair. “And secondly, Vivienne, we can’t just put out fires left and right. Especially when we don’t even know what those fires might look like.”
“Maybe not,” Vivi said, leaning back. “But we can try.”
“I enjoy your optimism, Vivienne, I really do.”
She pulled a face. “Don’t be cynical, Rhys. Not about this.”
“I’m not usually,” he said. He blew out a breath, scrubbing a hand over his hair. It flopped perfectly back into place, absolutely doing The Thing, and Vivi groaned inwardly. It really wasn’t fair. All the bad parts of the curse, and none of the silly bits? What kind of trade-off was that?
A complete bullshit one as far as Vivi was concerned.
Rhys’s phone suddenly buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out, with a frown, muttering, “Ah, bugger it all.”
“What is it?”
“Something’s gone tits up at work,” Rhys said, not taking his eyes off his phone as his thumbs moved frantically across the screen.
There was a cold sensation in the pit of Vivi’s stomach all of a sudden. “Is it because of all this?” Is it because of me?
“’Course not,” Rhys replied immediately, glancing up briefly to flash her a smile. “Shite happens in the travel business.”
He was lying. Vivi knew that. For one, he wasn’t very good at lying, his eyes somehow giving him away, and two, she knew that part of Rhys’s magic involved luck. What better skill to have when you planned trips for people? If something was going wrong, it was because of the curse, which meant it was indeed because of her.
Rhys would be totally fair if he blamed her, but instead, he was trying to make her feel better.
That was also just deeply unfair.
“Mate!” he said brightly into the phone, posture tense even as his voice was all charm and ease. “Heard you’ve run into a sticky wicket.”
Sticky wicket? she mouthed at him, and he rolled his eyes, shrugging as he shifted in his chair.
“No, no, not a problem at all,” Rhys was saying even as he was frantically searching her desk for something.
Vivi handed him a pad and pen, and he gave her a thumbs-up as he leaned down to scribble across the pad.
“I can absolutely get that all sorted for you, not a problem.”
For the next ten minutes, Vivi sat at her desk and watched as Rhys somehow transformed from the louche, carefree charmer she knew into the most competent man on the planet.
Phone calls were made. Notes were written out. More phone calls, and then several emails. At one point, he rolled up his sleeves and sat there across from her, phone pressed to his ear, elbows resting on his widely spread thighs, and Vivi nearly swooned.
When he was finally done with all his calls and emails and texts and who knew what else, Rhys flopped back against the chair, slouching so low that his head rested against the back of it, and Vivi did not take a flying leap from her chair to straddle his lap, which really showed a lot of restraint on her part, she thought.
Still, something must have shown in her face because he looked at her curiously.
“What?”
Shaking her head, Vivi cleared her throat and reached for the least sexy thing she could think of, a copy of her syllabus.
“Nothing.”