Page 8 of Strange Familiars
Just as the explosion hits.
4
Gwendolynne
Fortunately, since no one else at Seamere is as nosy as Harrisford-fucking-Briggs, I manage to get Percy safely inside my dorm room before encountering anyone else. He tumbles out from his knitted prison, clawing my stomach with his hind limbs as he does so.
“Ouch!” I cry, but Percy doesn’t seem to notice, or he doesn’t care. He just darts under the bed, navigating stacks of paper and odd socks and embarrassing amounts of dust. I drop to the floor and flatten myself, peering into the darkness—he’s crouching in the corner, blanketed by shadows, every now and then emitting a shower of sparks.
Figuring he might be hungry, I rustle through my bar fridge for something potentially suitable. It’s too late to get any actual cat food tonight, but I’ll go first thing tomorrow. In the meantime we’ll just have to make do.
The inside of the fridge is dark; the magelight has long since blown and I haven’t bothered to replace it. All I find is some wrapped cheese, hardening at the edges, and a half-empty carton of soy milk. My snacks drawer isn’t much better—it’s mostly cereal, and things that are easy to stuff into my mouth when studying, like nuts andpretzels and an old pack of leathery beef jerky my mother once bought me “for the iron.” Finally, I scrounge up an old tin of tuna-for-one and empty it into a bowl.
I set it down on the floor beside the bed. Percy vehemently ignores me. He also ignores the beef jerky I toss at him, and the piece of cheese that I’d pulled out in desperation.
“Seriously?” I ask him, incredulous. “You don’t likeanyof this?” But of course there’s no answer. The Office of Magical Animals at the Ministry is the only entity that issues permits allowing a person to keep a familiar. And it’s only once they’ve granted one that they’ll perform the bonding ritual enabling direct communication between a permit holder and their pet.
I already know I’ll never be able to get a permit. Seamere rules forbid it, first of all. And besides, there’s no way I could afford one.
Plus, I don’t even know if the Mason-Prices will bother to cancel Percy’s current permit. Probably not, since they’re so loaded with money, they wouldn’t care about getting the partial refund, especially now they think he’s dead. To me, without a permit, Percy will always be nothing more than a regular old cat. And he’ll stay bonded to the horrible Magecorp CEO, Mr.Nathaniel Price.
Suddenly, something occurs to me, and my blood runs cold. All my extremities feel numb. I clutch at my face, barely feeling it.
The Prices think Percy is dead. But Percy is not dead. He’s very much alive. And humans can communicate telepathically with their animal familiars. Which means…
“Percy,” I say, dropping back down to the floor. “Whatever you do…Don’t speak to your master, yeah? Nathaniel thinks you’re dead. In fact, hewantsyou to be dead. If you say anything, they’ll figure it out and send someone after you. But if you stay quiet…”
Percy continues to stare out of the darkness at me, his one eye glowing a reflective green. After several drawn-out seconds, the eyedisappears briefly as he gives me a slow blink, and I know he’s understood.
Letting loose a relieved sigh, I push myself off the floor and then flop into the worn seat of my desk chair. I lean my elbows on my desk for a second, massaging my forehead, dreading what’s coming next.
Most of the other students, the ones whose families can afford to send them to Seamere without needing scholarships, can buy unlimited stores of magic. To them, buying magic is no more onerous than stocking up on pens, or parchment, or textbooks, or spare robes.
Me? I have to purchase the bare minimum whenever it’s affordable and then diligently ration it out. I need magic for everything I do: studying, sitting exams, working shifts at Saint Gertrude’s…even charging the battery of my strap.
While there are some smaller companies that sell magic, Magecorp and Linksphere are the two main distributors, and they have a complete choke hold on the market. They harvest it. They control the supply chains that circulate it around the globe. And they trade the familiars that allow humans to more efficiently channel and store atmospheric magic. They haven’t started breeding them yet—but everyone says it’s just a matter of time.
It’s a massive, massive industry, which we learned in Economics of Magic 101 is actually agoodthing. Magecorp—headed by Nathaniel Price and Harrisford’s father—and Linksphere are two of the biggest employers of magical humans worldwide. And while stores of magicarepricey, the economies of scale mean that without these two corporations regulating the market, magic would be even more prohibitively expensive.
I don’t understand it fully, but it makes sense. The quaint little corner stores that sell magic do so at a far higher cost. And as much as I wish I could support them, I simply can’t, not when they sell at such inflated prices. Here on campus, I’m forced to buy it online, orfrom the Magecorp and Linksphere vending machines in a pinch. So I can’t really complain about the market when I, like so many in the magical community, am one of the cogs that keep it turning—even if Magecorp does result in unfortunate side effects like the existence of Harrisford Briggs.
Sighing, I push my sleeves up to get to work, ignoring my clammy palms. Whenever I can’t afford to buy magic, I have to replenish my supplies by using an extremely obscure rationing spell, which makes what I have stretch further. Back in first year, I had to trawl through some pretty complex magical textbooks to figure out how to do it.
Since it’s so horrible, most people don’t bother—they’d rather just buy more. That’s not a luxury I have, however.
Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve studied medicine. The truth is, magical doctors need less magic to do their jobs than we vets do. Something about the way we treat so many species drains our magic more quickly, more thoroughly. But those thoughts are fleeting, and honestly far between. Even on the hardest days, I wouldn’t change it. I chose to go into vet school—even though both my pay and my status in magical society will be lower than other careers—because I love animals. Because I want to help.
Also, honestly…humans aredisgusting.
I unwrap a scalpel and close my eyes, beginning to mutter the incantation, one that I know so well I could probably recite it in my sleep. But I’m interrupted by a loud moan and then the unmistakable whack of a headboard banging against the wall. The walls here are paper-thin, a fact that I’ve become uncomfortably aware of since Bridie Masters, my neighbor, started hooking up with her new boyfriend, Danny Wong.
Damn it! They’ve broken my concentration, and after everything that’s happened today…I’m exhausted.
“Masters! Wong!” I thump the wall between our rooms. “Keep it down!”
There’s a pause, and a giggle. “You could always join us, Gwen!” Bridie’s singsong voice floats across the plaster.
I wrinkle my nose. “Just quieten down, will you?”
