Cleo walked briskly through the street on the way to what would be her new school. The test had to be conducted on grounds that had been properly prepared, to isolate the subject from outside forces. It was unorthodox, to be sure, since every other time the genetic markers had been used to determine one’s arcane potential they had been right, and no one had protested until her.

It was cold out, which didn’t stop the hundreds of people shuffling around from shop to shop or wherever else they were going. The city wasn’t horrendously crowded, but the area immediately around the academy was always packed. She shivered despite the warm crowd around her, a wave of chill radiating from her right shoulder.

Bare skin met the air where her robes had recently acquired an opening. The fabric was cut and stitched neatly, the seems covering some small burns that were the last remnants of the explosive deal she had made a little over two weeks ago. Well, the last remnants on her cloak, anyways.

The young witch glanced into the glass of a shop window, peeking at her reflection. Staring out of the image of her face was an eye that definitely didn’t belong to her. Reflexively, she raised a hand to her cheek and gingerly touched the skin just under her left eyelid, wincing slightly as the cold air chilled her other eye.

‘No one else can see it,’ she reminded herself again. ‘No one is going to stop you, it’s not even illegal to make deals with demons. You’re fine, you’re okay, you can do this.’

And again a wave of warmth rushed down her arm, the little bird perched next to her  ear whispering into her mind. “You really have to relax. Your stress is going to give you away faster than the dark magic. Besides, even if they COULD see your mark, they’d just think it’s a tattoo or something.”

Ayn’s words were only about half as reassuring as the demoness probably meant them to be. Primarily because, well, the demoness was what was stressing her out in the first place.

When she had planned out the deal, she had thought she would just trade the pearl for magic powers and be done with it. Demons usually screwed off to spread chaos and destruction somewhere else once their pacts were made, leaving the human they made their deal with to suffer the consequences of dark magic.

She hadn’t planned for her little trist with satan to be so public.

Her soul was safe, sure, but gouging out her own eye and replacing it with a glowing magical demon-marked pearl had been somewhat traumatic, even if it WAS painless. Not to mention having a literal gate to hell itself on her shoulder. Oh, and to top it all off, if she tried to hide either mark, they would BURST INTO FLAMES-

“Calm down, girl. You’re here. It’s showtime, sweetcheeks.” The bird winked, which it should not have been able to do and was a dead giveaway, before taking flight and fluttering up to a nearby tree. Cleo looked around and, sure enough, she had walked all the way to her soon-to-be campus. It was only five blocks from her new apartment, but it still startled her every time she remembered she was so close to her lifelong goal.

It was also slightly disconcerting the way everyone around her acted as if the school didn’t even exist. The academy was surrounded by an invisible wall in everyone’s mind, a wall that stopped them from entering not by magical or physical means, but by confirming that there was a divide between them and the scholars and students inside.

Cleo knew she was stalling. The regal pillars and carved walls of the academy were imposing and she was afraid. ‘Afraid of what? Of being turned down again? After all I’ve done just to get here? That’s ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous. Just walk in, damn it.’

The bird had settled down onto it’s branch and tucked it’s head under its wing, which she knew meant Ayn was no longer using it as a puppet. Right on cue, a few seconds later, the bird raised its head, blinked a few times, chirped, and flew off. A searing heat brushed her shoulder, and she could feel the demoness in her head, looking out her eyes and lending her magic. It had the weird and disorienting effect of reassuring her of her borrowed strength, and unnerving her by offering everything that had once been secret to her partner in crime. Not crime, just frowned upon, it’s fine, she was going to be fine.

 

Ayn was having more fun than she had any right to. This human was intense, emotional, she walked as if she owned the planet and talked as if she was so far above others that they would fall to their deaths trying to reach her. It was an intoxicating experience, looking down on the world through the eyes of a five-foot-nothing witch with everything to prove and nothing to lose.

It was also educational. Within seconds of their deal, while Cleo was struggling to gauge out her eye and Ayn numbed the pain, libraries worth of information flooded into her head. And, yes, sitcom had been an apt description.

The truth was, though she would never ever admit it to anyone, ever, the second she had laid eyes on the girl’s mind she had been hopelessly enamoured. She was a genius, but she was still rash enough to rival a demon’s raw emotion. She was confident, but so cautious she nearly strangled herself in backup plans, and backup backup plans. She wasn’t kind, but she wasn’t cruel either, she was this strange ball of spite and brilliance and wit that was after Ayn’s own black, dead heart.

Of course, she wasn’t in LOVE with the human. She merely wanted to mess with her, test her limits, see what she would do. Cleo was the kind of individual that would burn the world down for mouthing off at her, and Ayn had just handed her a match.

And so she sat on her host’s shoulder, ethereal and unseen, watching the events of The Pit with her right eye and Earth with her left. Since she was linked to the eye, it was now in her left socket too, binding her sight with the human’s.

The halls were lined with pretentious paintings of people Cleo, and by extension Ayn, knew well. Inventors, professors, those that had made important discoveries in the field of arcane science or bettered the lives of those without magical talents. They all had shifting, enchanted backgrounds that showed their many achievements. Every so often there would be a set of double doors that lead to some huge classroom or something. Cleo was holding a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it someone’s terrible handwriting, and apparently that number corresponded with a door somewhere in the huge complex that was the academy. There were 13 huge buildings, each of which had multiple levels, and each of which had sub-buildings relating to the main topic of each building. It was insane, and confusing, and way too big to memorize. And yet. Somehow, Ayn had a three-dimensional mental image of the campus with every detail imaginable right down to trees and bushes in her head, which meant that Cleo had, at some point, managed to commit every last part of the schematics to memory.

Without magic.

Ayn was suddenly even more impressed with the stubborn, impractical girl she had attached herself to. It was downright adorable, how badly she wanted to go to school here.

She was snapped back to reality by the feeling of wood against her palms, and she closed her right eye to look out of her host’s left. Indeed, they had arrived.

 

The testing room was huge, yet at the same time cramped. It was much bigger than the attic Cleo had summoned Ayn in, but it was still the smallest room in the whole building. Only about as big as a middle school classroom, it was completely empty aside from one long table with two robed men to either side of one robed woman sitting behind it. The men and woman stared at her, waiting.

Cleo was intensely aware of the fact that she was lingering in the doorway, so she made a show of gazing around the room for a moment as if dissatisfied. Every wall was covered in invisible spell circles and runes designed to isolate whoever was inside them from any outside magical interference. No one else could see them, though, since it was her implanted Arcane Eye that let her peer past the illusions covering them. She was careful to let her gaze slide smoothly over each rune as she memorized them, looking for any holes or flaws while simultaneously making it look like she was just scanning the blank wall. She found none. As she walked to the center, she raised an eyebrow at the people she was sure were there to test her. “Well?” She asked with as little emotion as she could manage.

The man on the left, who had greying hair but looked relatively young, looked to the woman in the middle, who had jet black hair and a tired face. The woman with the black hair sighed and began a wrote series of commands for the room around her. As each word of latin left her mouth, spell circles around the room lit up and began turning, and she could tell by the way the other men’s eyes began glancing around the room that the illusions had been dropped.

With a calculated series of expressions, she looked around her in mock awe that was quickly mock-concealed behind a mock-passive face. It was hard work to pretend you can’t see everything people are trying to hide from you. But, apparently, she had gotten very skilled at throwing up the cues people wanted to see in the past two weeks, because the men grinned with a disgusting mix of pride and condescension at her as she made her fake faces. They glanced at each other, as if to say, “We’ll let her have this little glance at our power, let her see how incredible our magic is, and then we’ll dash her dreams against the ground even harder when our genetic test is proven right once again and she is turned away from our astounding world.”

It took a lot of willpower not to wipe that look off their faces right then and there.

The woman with black hair looked to her now as the last of the spells slid into place and she was cut off from every source of magic she could be channeling. Every source of magic, that is, but the invisible mark on her shoulder. “My name is Barus Kein, and I will be your primary examiner for this…” she searched for the word. Turning to her companion, she whispered just loud enough to be heard, “What are we calling this stupid pity-test?”

So she was arrogant, too. Just as well, arrogant people were easy to trick and humiliate, they were too self-absorbed to properly guard themselves. The man she was talking to, this one blond, said back at a normal volume that didn’t even pretend to hide anything from her, “We’re calling it a stupid idea.”

Barus snapped her fingers and grinned at Cleo with a forced smile that begged her to complain, to object, to do something, anything to make this experience more interesting for her so that she could throw her out. She didn’t give her the pleasure. “Right! This stupid idea! As I was saying, the three of us, but mostly me, will be judging whether or not-”

“I,” Cleo couldn’t stop herself from saying.

All three examiners blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The three of us, but mostly I.” If you’re going to insult me to my face, do it with proper grammar, pompous bit-

 

Ayn was living for this. Barus was seething with barely-contained contempt for what she obviously thought of as a waste of his valuable time, and Cleo, not holding anything back, had corrected her grammar! This girl was amazing! She could barely keep herself from falling off her companion’s shoulder and rolling across the ground, laughing, but since only Cleo would be able to hear her and no one would be able to see her, she decided it was best not to unnerve her.

Barus gritted her teeth and pressed on. “If you can prove you can use magic, we’ll let you in. But you can’t use magic, as the genetic test has proven, and so you will be banned from the premises of the academy promptly after this stupid waste of time gets started. Now, let’s begin, so I can kick you out myself.”

Cleo nodded, defiant and angry behind her cool exterior. That was another thing Ayn liked about her host. She was hot to the touch, boiling under the surface like a geyser always on the verge of exploding.

The man with blond hair spoke up first. “Cast the spell, Luminate.”

He was insulting her. Even some non-changed could muster up a minor spell like Luminate under the right circumstances. It proved nothing and he knew it. But, to be fair, it was a good starting point.

The hand sign for Luminate was the simplest: an open palm with outstretched fingers. Ayn knew the young witch had managed to cast it only once before their deal, and it had taken a lot of effort. This time, however.

 

Cleo opened her mouth and spoke the spell word with perfect, practiced diction. Her shoulder burned hotter than ever as she used the first bit of demon magic to enter the walls of the academy in years. If the examiners could see her mark, they would see it’s black surface glow and break into red magma, the fires of hell pouring fuel into her veins and giving her the power she had traded her privacy and isolation for.

It was like she had flipped on a switch for some unseen lamp in the palm of her hand. The blank, bored expression on the faces of all three examiners was shattered as she produced a low-level light from nothing. It wasn’t the most powerful spell in the book, but it was stronger than any faint glow she or any other non-magical had ever produced before. Still, unless she could do something more, something to prove she was better than their tests said she was, they could end the test there and then and let her go.

And so she tried something stupid. Placing one hand in front of the other, she cast a shadow on the wall to her left and whispered another, more advanced spell she had fantasized about using many times in her studies.

The shadow of her hand, which was contorted in the shape of another spell sign, twisted on the wall without her hand moving at all. It was a simple photomancy trick, but it was enough. The light from her spell bent around her hand and illuminated the wall, twisting and shaping into the shape of a small bird. If Ayn was going to perch on her shoulder from now on like some sort of tiny familiar, Cleo could at least make it a theme. Maybe she’d get a feathered dress or something.

That was the point where Barus’s jaw hit the floor for a moment before she picked it up. Cleo couldn’t hold back a little grin of satisfaction and whimsy as she made her hand’s shadow fly around the room, flapping its wings and chirping silently. No one could deny she had magic now. The room was being recorded by a camera.

The examiners waved their hands in a silencing motion, and Cleo let go of both spells. The light flickered out in her hand and her shadow returned to normal as she turned back to face them. Ayn whispered into her mind, “Great job girl, let’s see them deny THAT!” Barus was looking over her in utter confusion. The men were flabbergasted, and peering over every inch of her, looking for some sort of trick or cheat. But of course, no one could see her Eye or her Mark but her.

The man with the greying hair spoke up first. “This is completely unprecedented. For the first time in fifty years, it seems the test must be called into question.”

The blond man spoke up next. “Now now, that’s a hasty assumption. Obviously someone made a mistake somewhere along the line, and her blood was mixed up with someone elses, or perhaps improperly examined, or some other such foolishness. The test is undeniable. Only The Changed have the power of magic, and she is obviously one of The Changed.”

Barus nodded, no longer angry or confused. “Yes… yes that must be it. I’m so sorry, miss Silvermin, that you were almost denied access to our fine establishment. We will enroll you at once, of course. Please, come this way,” she said, now with an apologetic expression. It seemed that all was forgiven. For now. Cleo had the feeling she was going to regret making her examiners feel so stupid and arrogant, but for the moment she was in. She had made it. All her dreams were coming true, and the rest of her life was set.

Or at least, that was what she thought until Barus walked in front of her and she could see her back.

Cleo realized in an instant why Barus kept her hair so short. It wasn’t a fashion choice, it was because if she grew it any longer it would be burned off by the demonic Mark in between her shoulder blades. Her robes were open-backed, letting the invisible y-shaped mark breathe. She knew it was a mark, not just by the way it glowed slightly, but by the threatening heat it radiated at all times. The same heat she felt from her shoulder.

But Cleo shouldn’t have been able to see it.

If she could see it, could Barus see hers?

Was she exposed?

No, because if Barus could see Ayn’s Mark then she wouldn’t have been surprised that Cleo had magic, it would have been obvious that she had made a deal. So why could Cleo see Barus’s?

Ayn, overhearing her runaway thoughts, whispered in the back of her head once again. “Keep moving. You’re staring. You can see it because of our Eye. I hadn’t even thought of it before, but it makes sense. When a demon uses an Eye as an anchor, they brand it with their Mark, attuning it to demonic magic. It makes sense that a demonic Eye could see other people’s Marks, but no one has ever used an Eye to see with AND as an Anchor. This is new territory, and we have the advantage. There’s a demon living in that woman, just as I’m living within you. Looks like our lives just got a lot more exciting. Good, I was starting to worry this would be boring.”