She punched him on the arm and the pair continued to bicker. I glanced thoughtfully over at Brock, who still looked miserable, the cloud of an idea forming in my head. I excused myself, then drifted over to the laundry room to see if this time I could find my jeans. I scouted up and down a couple of shelves, before eventually realising that they were sat there, in plain sight, next to pile of orange robes. Picking them up, I stroked the soft denim lightly, then jogged up to my room and stripped off the robes, changing quickly. Both my t-shirt and Deborah’s skirt were still under my bed so I retrieved them together. I sniffed the t-shirt, and it didn’t seem too bad, so I pulled it on over my head. The skirt, however, I took back down to the laundry room and shoved into a washing machine, and added a bit of powder before turning it on. Then I headed out.

The academy gates opened automatically for me when I reached the end of the driveway. Well this was a whole lot easier than when I was trying to sneak out without being noticed, I thought wryly.

I wandered down the quiet country road, wondering where in the hell I actually was. It didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that an entire five years’ time could pass me by and I still wouldn’t be any the wiser as to which part of the country I was in. I figured it was probably a deliberate act on the mages’ part. Even though it was still technically winter, the night was only just starting to edge in, with the sky turning a dark purple and the stars only just beginning to appear. There was hedgerow lining the single lane country road. Yep, it could be pretty much anywhere.

Before too long, the twinkling warmth of what I presumed to be the local pub began to appear up in front of me. This was a true country inn; the sort that townies would travel miles and miles for, in order to enjoy an ‘authentic experience’. What the owners of it thought of their more regular clientele from the academy I could only begin to wonder.

As I neared the building, the letters on the old-fashioned hanging sign began to become more legible. ‘The Ball and Chain’. Hmmm. Would that be the crystal ball and the mages’ slavery chain, then? I snickered quietly to myself, before entering. Thomas was already up at the bar, hunched over a pint of something amber-coloured and frothy. He looked odd out of his robes, in that strange way that teachers always seemed to do when you caught them out of their natural environment of school. I beckoned over the barman and requested the same as Thomas was having, then settled down myself. It felt damn good to be out of the academy – and without any other tasks or problems or counselling sessions to have to worry about.

“Hey,” I said, aiming for light and friendly. Clearly, I could do chatty small talk with the best of them.

“Hey,” Thomas greeted me back. Well, at least he wasn’t much better.

The barman set the brimming pint in front of me. I took a sip and then leaned back on the stool, eyes closing momentarily in pleasure. Yeah, Corrigan and his mates could keep their champagne and caviar lifestyle. A pint of beer and a bag of pork scratchings would more than do me. I sipped again and sighed and sighed happily.

“So, do you come here often?”

I looked up at Thomas and then realised what I’d just said, and began to snort with laughter. He grinned back at me and batted his eyelashes dramatically. I snorted harder, fighting to retain control of myself then clinked my glass against his.

“I actually try and avoid it as much as possible during the week,” he said seriously once I’d managed to calm down somewhat. “It’s generally not a good thing to be here when the students are.”

I eyed him carefully. “So, given the chance, you wouldn’t, er, you know, liaise with a student?” Thinking of Brock, I figured that the least I could do was to be absolutely sure that Thomas was immune to the charms of Deborah.

“Liaise?” He looked remarkably offended. “Is that what you think of me?”

“No, no,” I protested. “It’s just…” I blew air out the corner of my mouth. “It’s just that one of the girls likes you, you know, in that way, and one of the boys likes her, and I want her to like him, but…” my voice trailed off.

He stared at me. “Fucking hell, Mack. Less than three weeks and you’re already fully embedded in teen drama town. Do you not have anything better to do?”

“Hey, I need some distraction and entertainment if I’m going to make it through the next five years.” That thought depressed me. “Sorry, let’s change the subject.”

Thomas was silent for a moment, as if considering something very deeply. Then he tightened his grip on the glass, and twisted round to look me in the eye. “No, let’s not. Look, Mack, I really am sorry for how I treated you when you arrived. I’m not proud of it. You’re in a shitty position and, other than a few rather spectacular blow-outs, I think you’re doing really well.”

I smiled at him, but didn’t say anything, curious about where he was heading.

“Not only that, but you’re helping the kids out with those Protection lessons. The Founder knows I’d love to be able to teach them the way that you are. Of course, we’re bound by the curriculum the Dean sets out.”

“You sound bitter about it.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are things that I definitely wish were different. But the Dean’s really okay.”

I must have looked skeptical because he stared at me seriously. “No, really I mean it. He is good at his job. He cares about his students and about his teachers. But he doesn’t like the Arch-Mage and you’re kind of His Magnificence’s pet project. So it probably wouldn’t matter what you did or who you are, he’d want you out of here.”

“That’s just not fair,” I pointed out.

Thomas laughed. “Come on, Mack, surely you know by now that the last thing life is, is fair? Has it never occurred to you that maybe it suits the Arch-Mage just as well having you here? He’s not an idiot, he’d have known what you’d be like and how the Dean would react.”

“What I’d be like?” Careful, Thomas, I thought irritably. I might kind of like him now but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still piss me off.

He rubbed his forehead. “You know. All angry at the world and stuff. By keeping you here the Arch-Mage gets to exert a little power because he knows you’ll piss off Michaels. It’s His Magnificence’s way of putting him in his place without anyone getting hurt. It’s pretty clever really.”

Just the tiniest flicker of bloodfire in the deepest pit of my gut answered Thomas’ words. “No-one gets hurt? Are you fucking kidding me? There’s a harmless elderly woman stuck in bloody Tir-na-Nog in a coma!”

Thomas put his drinks down and his hands up, palms facing towards me in a gesture of peace. “Yeah, and you’re not the kind of person to sit back and wait for five years, or however it long it takes to graduate, before she’s released from stasis. So if you were the Dean, what would you do?”

“What do you mean what would I do?”

He sighed. “Imagine that your first reaction to being threatened or put in your place isn’t to violently attack someone. Put yourself in the shoes of the Dean being made to look after a student who you don’t want and who you know is just there to remind you that you’ll never be the man at the top. What do you do?” There was a faintly desperate edge to Thomas’ voice.

I thought for a moment. Killing the student would probably be the easiest, I reckoned, but seeing as how that might not be an option… “You would do something to make the student flunk out. To prove that you were right all along that they should never have been there in the first place.”

“Yes,” said Thomas patiently. “And how would you do that?”

“Well, I guess I’d just sit back and watch them self-destruct. Or attack another mage. Or destroy a priceless painting. Or fail every single discipline.”

“And in case those things don’t work?”

“Then I might do something to help them along a little bit, I suppose. Something to make them look really bad. Like…,” I threw my hands up in the air. “I don’t know. Help me out a bit here, will you?”

“Where does every student have to go no matter what they are studying?”

“The cafeteria?” I asked, feeling rather stupid.

Thomas stayed silent.

A dawning realisation hit me. I was having an epiphany. And not the good kind. “The library,” I said slowly. “You’d plant a trap in the library. Like maybe having an area that’s off limits. That’d make that student think there were some dangerous spells there. The kind of spells that would help them get little old ladies out of trouble. And then that student would go looking for a spell book to help them out with that, and when they found it you’d appear out from behind a corner and accuse them of cheating or lying or being dishonorable or whatever.”

“Bingo.”

I felt slightly sick. “That fucking bastard,” I whispered.

“But you’ve not done it though, have you? You’ve shown that you’re a more honourable person than that.”

I wondered how much of that suggested honour was down to the fact that it just hadn’t occurred to my dim-witted brain that I could even find such a book until Solus had pointed it out. What if I hadn’t been quite so preoccupied or quite so thick? The little flicker of bloodfire was burgeoning and growing, licking its way along my veins with an ever increasing ferocity. Blood roared in my ears.

“Whoa, Mack, calm down.” I must have looked about ready to murder someone, because Thomas stood up off his stool and reached out for my arms. “Seriously, calm down. I’m telling you about this for a reason.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?” I snarled.

“Because I like you! I didn’t want to, but I do. So I don’t want you to do anything stupid and I do want you to get your little old lady out of the state that she’s in. So calm the fuck down,” he reiterated.