Losing My Religion

Part 2, Chapter 1

Amber

I stared into the dorm supervisor's eyes, sitting in her office.

“What do you mean I can’t have a solo dorm anymore?”

She sighed, seemingly more frustrated with me than with the situation, a prospect that fueled my indignance. “Your privilege of having a dorm by yourself was provided due to contributions to the school by your coven. I shouldn’t need to explain to you what happens when the contributions dry up.”

I stood, resisting the urge to knock something off of her desk in my anger, the cup of pens, the potted plant, or the framed photo of her with her wife and kids. 

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t touch those last two. I can control myself.

At the thought of controlling myself, Lily’s face popped into my head, as it often did recently. 

I shook the thought away. It was my fault in the first place that our coven wasn’t doing as well as it had in the past; I knew my anger was misdirected.

Doesn’t mean I can’t complain anyways.

“And how am I supposed to practice magic if I don’t have a secure location to do so?”

She huffed and started typing into her keyboard. “I’ll make sure you have a supernatural roommate assigned, but that’s the most I’m going to do for you. Is there anything else you need help with?” Her tone made it clear the correct answer to the question was no.

I pursed my lips, resisting the urge to shout ‘but what about the secrets of the coven?’, knowing she wouldn’t be sympathetic. I shook my head and stormed off to my soon-to-be-vacated dorm. 

This just can’t get any worse.

—

I stared at the face of my new roommate as she stood in the open door, welcoming me into our new shared space.

I knew a lot of supernatural women – or at least knew of them – that went to our school. There were vampires, werewolves, witches, and many more. 

The worst possible option for me in terms of roommates would be someone from a rival coven. That would mean I could never study witchcraft in my room, and instead have to make the trip to our communal home, which, while it wasn’t far in the grand scheme of things, was too great a distance to travel every day or every other day.

Ignoring my rivals, the next worst option was the one I’d gotten. My mother would probably argue that demons, and succubi in particular, would be just as bad as a rival witch, but I didn’t quite agree.

Regardless, succubi were distracting at the best of times, and dangerous the rest of the time. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on your view – I at least knew this succubus.

My feelings about Lily were complicated. When we had been dating, she’d been the safe, predictable option – someone who I could rely on to be unflinchingly stubborn in her ways, a steady rock on the rough sea that was my life. It didn’t hurt that she’d been cute and sweet, even before her shapeshifting. 

But then everything went to shit, and she suddenly wasn’t that person anymore. Suddenly she was a succubus, this dangerous creature of myth, something at odds with everything I knew about her. Now, after the dust had settled, she was miles better for her own good, happier, more free, with more self-awareness. 

But was it so wrong of me to miss that stability, that safety?

‘Yes, of course it’s wrong,’ My mind told me.

Adding to the complexity further was the fact that I liked the new her too, in different ways. She was tempting, enthralling – and not just because of the one time we’d had sex. It was a joy to be around her, and I valued her friendship. 

But being roommates with her? That was a disaster waiting to happen, a temptation waiting for me to falter.

I stared at her pretty face in the doorway.

You can do this Amber, we talk all of the time, this isn’t hard.

“Hey girl, imagine seeing you here…” I finally said, a sentence that must’ve been carefully constructed to make me sound as moronic as possible. 

I pushed past her before she could respond to hide my embarrassment, wheeling in my suitcase full of things. It was convenient, having my dorm be one of two bedrooms I used, meaning I could pack light – at least for my mundane supplies. I’d already moved most of my magical materials back home, not knowing when I could use them next.

Lily closed the door behind us and followed me inside. “I’m so glad to be rooming with you. My last roommate was such a weirdo. I mean there was this one time he…” Her face lit up in a red similar to her demonic form.

My eyes squeezed shut. Don’t think about her having sex with her roommates…

I cut in, ending her embarrassed stuttering, “Yeah, I can imagine…”

Anyone else with her voice would sound refined or elegant or sexy. Somehow, Lily instead sounded cute and excitable, a sound that fired cupid’s arrows to my chest every time it graced my ears. 

She smiled up at me, and I couldn’t help smiling back. 

I’m sure nothing will go wrong when she brings ‘food’ back to her room and I have to listen… Nope, just a couple of friends rooming together, no unresolved feelings here.

—

“I’m back!” I shouted across the entrance, into the cavernous room on the other side sure to be full of people waiting to see me. 

A disquieting silence answered me. 

My brow furrowed as I removed my shoes and tip toed forwards, hand moving to the cold crystal in my pocket. This place was never quiet, something I’d normally lament but secretly loved.

The lights were off as I entered, taking in the stained dark wood arching above me, grand arches that seemed timelessly out of time. The scuffed floorboards, worn from the antics of too many children to count – including my younger self – stared back, welcoming me with a familiarity that seemed misplaced in the situation.

I inched across the room, toes finding all of the most stable parts of the floor, the deafening squeaks that resulted speaking to how loud the loudest of them were.

My mind roamed to the possible dangers, the rival witches finally giving in to their cruelty, the possibility of a magical accident, or the supernatural creatures that preyed on humans.

My free hand brushed against the wallpaper, finding the places it had been torn years ago but no one had bothered with fixing it, leading me into the dining hall.

It was similarly dark but dissimilarly quiet. 

There were dozens of shallow breaths, little shuffles and rustles that would seem quiet in any other context, but blared loud to my heightened senses. My grip tightened on my crystal.

A bright flash blinded me, followed by a loud pop bursting towards my face.

I jumped back, ready to retaliate, only to see my mother, surrounded by about two dozen girls of all ages holding party poppers, all under a banner that read ‘Happy Birthday!’.

The tension left my body in waves as my mind caught up and my mother hugged me, along with little Katie, who gave me a nervous smile. Katie was my apprentice, and honestly wasn’t that little anymore, given that she was in the middle of her second year in highschool, and was about as tall as I was.

Now bathed in the warm glow of light, I could see two cakes on the long table – both the size of sheet pans – along with a single gift bag. 

“Mom,” I whined, “It’s not even my birthday yet…”

She tutted, shaking her head. “It’s next week, and given that we only see you on Saturday… Well, we couldn’t wait.”

Speaking of not being able to wait… I watched as Katie started slicing the cakes, handing pieces out on paper plates to the most eager of the girls, with one of our mom’s staff helping to keep the queue orderly. Katie’s face was serious, treating the task of cate-cutter with an adorable level of gravitas.

As the stream of kids headed in Katie’s direction, my mom stared at me with concern. “So, you got assigned a roommate this week, right?”

“Yeah…”

I hadn’t explained the events of the previous semester to her in full detail – she certainly didn’t need to hear about me having sex with my ex-girlfriend – but she at least knew I’d broken up with my partner after they’d turned out to be a late-blooming succubus.

She raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to tell her.

“So you know Lily, right…?”

She grimaced, immediately seeing where I was going. “I can’t believe they let succubi room with normal people, that just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.”

I listened silently, feeling bad for Lily but not having the courage to speak up. I trusted Lily to respect my boundaries – hell, she’d refused to have sex with me for so long just because she thought that’s what was right – but my mom wasn’t wrong either.

She continued, “It’s only a matter of time until one of them drains a student dry and then they have a shitmess on their hands, even more so if the victim is someone important.”

I nodded. Succubi and incubi were dangerous; I’d been reading about the dangers demons posed and ways to protect myself against them for as long as I’d been studying magic. 

But Lily wasn’t, right? She was an exception, and as long as she was content finding ‘food’ elsewhere, I didn’t have anything to worry about – not that I could explain that to my mother.

The rest of the party was nice, a celebration for everyone else as much as it was for me. I opened my present, a sprig of rare enchanted herbs – something I’d been looking for to fuel my experiments – from my mother, and ate some cake, choosing the red velvet option over the vanilla.

I then spent the rest of the time chatting with all of my younger sisters, as I did every Saturday, doing my absolute best to remember where each of them was in school, what they liked and disliked, what they wanted to be when they grew up. 

That last one was much easier than the rest, given that most of them wanted to be witches like me, our mother, and our mother’s other apprentices. I never had the courage to tell them how much work it was, how little magic I could do compared to innately magical beings, or how easy it was to screw it all up.

Eventually, after the party had winded down, the littler kids had run out of energy and the older ones had drifted off to do their own thing, I was taken up by Katie to her room. 

As her teacher, I had certain responsibilities, not just in terms of her magical education, but also to hear out her problems and offer guidance, the same way our mother could. As I followed behind her, I took note of how she took shorter steps than usual and how she struggled to find her rhythm on the stairs, movements full of trepidation.

This can’t be good…

She sat down on the edge of her small twin bed in the corner and I remained standing, glancing around the room. For as opulent as the main room and dining hall were, the individual quarters were small and sparse, a necessity given their quantity. Katie’s had paler wood, plain beige sheets on her bed, a single dresser, and atop the dresser, a group picture of me, her and our mother from when I’d taken her as an apprentice a few years earlier.

She started off the conversation by avoiding what she really wanted to talk about. “So, how’s your project coming?” 

Despite the outwardly banal nature of the question, she was already wincing as she said it, knowing that if the answer was anything good, she would’ve already heard about it.

I sighed, worn down from my endless line of failures. “Mother got me some of the herbs I’d been looking for for my next attempt, but I can’t help but feel like I’m grasping at straws.”

Katie nodded along, despite the fact that after two years of studying as a witch, she only knew a few self-defense spells, and hadn’t started doing research of her own. “I’m sure you’ll get something soon, otherwise I’ll have to take your place as the cool big sister witch around these parts.” She grinned, a mostly convincing gesture that still held the tension she’d shown earlier.

“Alright, little sis, what’s going on?”

She grimaced, pausing for a moment to collect her thoughts. “So, you know Julia, right?”

I nodded in recognition at the name of my apprentice’s girlfriend. It felt like Katie was still too young to be dating, but I hadn’t tried to tell her not to, knowing it would be futile.

“So we… Um…” Her cheeks reddened.

I searched my brain. I already gave her the talk… right?

Her face scrunched up, panicked and uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to explain this, and I’m so freaking scared…” she belted out, sounding more like one continuous word towards the end.

I strode over to her, masking my own unease, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “No matter what, I won’t judge you,” I took a deep breath and then an even deeper risk, “And if you don’t want me to, I won’t tell Mother about it.”

Her eyes darted to mine, searching for assurances.

Seemingly finding them, she nodded and gestured for me to step back, wrapping the off-white bed sheet around her body, over her clothes. 

I acquiesced, a bit confused and worried, but determined nonetheless.

Then, one of the worst things possible happened.

Her body shifted, suddenly becoming replaced by a purple-skinned version of herself, horns sticking out of the top of her head, and a black spade-tipped tail poking out behind her.

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