I never suspected a thing about what he really wanted, until the day Elaine stayed home sick. Concerned about her, I skipped my last class and came home early. The house seemed too quiet, and an energy I had never sensed before hung in the air like cloying, oily perfume. The second I walked in the door, I found myself tensing up.

It was my first encounter with black magic, the power of Creation itself twisted to maim and destroy everything it touched.

Elaine sat on the couch, her expression calm, her spine locked rigidly into perfect posture. I now know that Justin had put the mental whammy on her while I was gone, but at the time I knew only that my instincts were screaming that something was wrong. A wrongness so fundamental it made me want to run away screaming filled the room.

And besides. Elaine only sat like that when she was making a statement—generally, a sarcastic one.

I still remembered it, plain as day.

Justin appeared in the kitchen doorway, on the other side of Elaine, and stood there for a moment, looking at me, his expression calm.

“You skipped class again.” He sighed. “I probably should have seen that coming.”

“What’s going on here?” I demanded, my voice high and squeaky with fear. “What have you done?”

Justin walked to the couch to stand over Elaine. Both of them stared at me for a long moment. I couldn’t read their expressions at all. “I’m making plans, Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice. “I need people I can trust.”

“Trust?” I asked. His words didn’t make sense. I couldn’t see how they applied to the current situation. I couldn’t see how they would make sense at all. I looked from Elaine back to Justin again, searching for some kind of explanation. Their expressions gave me nothing. That was when my eyes fell to the coffee table and to the object lying quietly next to my well-mauled paperback copy of The Hobbit.

A straitjacket.

There was something quietly, calmly sinister in the congruence. I just stared for a moment, and the bottom fell out of my stomach as I finally realized, for the first, awful time, what my instinct had been screaming at me: I was in danger. That my rescuer, teacher, my guardian meant to do me harm.

Tears blurred my vision as I asked him, in a very quiet, very confused voice, “Why?”

Justin remained calm. “You don’t have the knowledge you need to understand, boy. Not yet. But you will in time.”

“Y-you can’t do this,” I whispered. “N-not you. You saved me. You saved us.”

“And I still am,” Justin said. “Sit down next to Elaine, Harry.”

From the couch, Elaine said in a quiet, dreamy monotone, “Sit down next to me, Harry.”

I stared at her in shock and took a step back. “Elaine…”

Justin threw kinetomancy at me when I looked away.

Some instinct warned me in the last fraction of a second, but instead of trying to block the strike, I moved with it, toward the front picture window, weaving my own spell as I went. Instead of interposing my shield, I spread it wide in front of me like a sail, catching the force of Justin’s blast and harnessing it.