“Yeah.” She moved closer and lowered her voice. “There are lots of fun time-saving spells, but the academy magic classes prioritize defensive and offensive magic. It’s all part of their agenda to make sure witches and mages are the most powerful of the various magical factions.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Not here,” Glynda murmured, looking around to make sure nobody could hear us. “Let’s head back to our building. I’ll explain there.”
Glynda sat on my desk chair while I towel dried my head. I’d invited her into my room without a second thought, despite the warning Moira gave me when I first arrived. Glynda had been nothing but kind and sweet so far, and honestly, I figured we both needed a friend here.
“With the vampires out of the picture, the mages and witches are fighting for dominance with the shifters. The Mage Council holds a lot of power, but they don’t have overall control. Tiberius Vane, Alaric’s father, has been trying to wrest power away from the shifters. The current leader of the Shifter Council, Maximus Lightfoot, only took over last year after the previous leader died in an accident.” Glynda’s lips flattened into a line, and I paused in my attempt to comb out a tangle in my hair.
“Was it not an accident?” Accidents happened all the time, but admittedly, it was hard to kill a shifter. Their healing abilities were legendary. Or so I’d learned from the books I’d read.
“An accident where his head detached from his body? Hmm.”
“Oh.” Glynda made a good point. Beheading a shifter was one way to ensure they didn’t survive. Same with vampires. Which made me wonder… “What happened to the vampires?” I knew very little about them other than the entire species had mysteriously died out several decades previously.
“The bloodborne virus happened.”
“The what now?” I pulled on some socks to keep my feet warm and sat on my bed to braid my damp hair. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what happened.”
“A virus hit the human population forty years ago. Hardly any humans got sick enough to need hospital treatment, so nobody really took much notice.”
My brow scrunched in confusion. “Not sure why that matters to vampires?”
“Who did vamps mostly feed on?”
“Um, anyone?”
Glynda laughed. “They mostly fed on humans because magicals are strong enough to fight off their compulsion.” Her smile faded. “A side effect of the virus was that it changed human DNA. When a vamp fed on an infected human, they got very sick almost immediately. Nobody knew because vampires didn’t live in groups.” She shook her head sadly. “By the time people realized, most vamps were dead.”
“Stars, that’s awful!”
Glynda sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Yeah. My mom had a vampire friend who died in the first wave. Mom only found out when she wentto check on her and found her desiccated body. She was so upset. They’d been friends for decades.”
My eyes pricked with tears as I imagined the horror of such a mass-extinction event. All those beings lost forever. Then I felt even worse for not knowing anything about the virus. Why had no one told me? Surely this was important enough that all magicals needed to know. What if the next human virus started killing off other magical species?
“Didallthe vampires die?” I asked in a small voice, hoping she said no.
“Some believe a few vampires survived, but it’s impossible to be sure because, if they did, they almost certainly went into hiding.”
“But how would they have survived?”
“Those that had a magical blood partner might have been okay. There were a few immune humans too, so if a vampire had a human source with natural immunity, then they would have been safe. But who knows? The Vampire Council disappeared overnight, and vamp news dried up.”
Neither of us spoke for a good while.
“I feel like I should know all this.” Being shielded from the world had begun to feel like a curse.
Glynda sat forward. “Did your parents not talk about this stuff?”
“I don’t know who my parents are,” I admitted. Glynda immediately looked at the floor, her cheeks flushing in embarrassment at inadvertently touching on such an awkward topic.
“Oh, I’m sorry…”
“It’s fine.” I shrugged. “Can’t miss what you never had! Besides, I was raised by a bunch of lovely witches who kept me safe, so it’s not like I got thrown into the system.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
“My adopted family never talked about politics. We live on a farm in the middle of nowhere.” I didn’t bother mentioning how Adam kept me out of sight and never let me attend school. Glynda seemed like she’d had a more conventional upbringing, and if I let slip about Adam’s weird rules, she’d think I was weird too.
