We got the all-clear sometime in the late afternoon. I had tired of playing with my new toy and grabbed a short nap, only to be awoken as a flurry of delayed notifications arrived on my phone all at once.

Most of them were what I would have expected. Yukiko sent a general test message to the group to see if communications had really been blacked out. Maiko said that club time was cancelled, but she would be there if anybody wanted to visit. Kiyo had texted me several times with protestations about her loneliness without me before giving up. Rose sent a report that her brother Albert was alive, though the H.M.S. Edinburgh had nearly been overrun.

“He’s back in the hospital,” she texted, adding a little eyerolling emoji.

“Again? I guess he really can’t stay out of there!” I typed back.

“How did you know about that?” asked Rose.

Blast it, she had confided that to me in my Nurse Kazushi disguise, hadn’t she? “You spend every morning telling me all the details of your family’s goings on. It’s come up.” For all I knew, it really had. She was right, I had a tendency to tune her out. She seemed to accept that account of things.

I sent Kiyo the requisite follow-up, telling her that I had missed her too. She surprised me by not responding immediately. I wondered if anything was the matter with her, and then I put two and two together. If you put Kiyo alone in her dorm room with no internet access, she was bound to be glued to her GoSato. I put worrying about her in the “to do” pile and inspected the other messages. There were a bloody lot of them! I hadn’t realized just how much time I spent on SatoChat until I saw a whole day’s worth of texts arrive at the same time.

More important was the text from Maggie, telling me that she was fine after the battle.

“Wait,” I typed back, “you’re in Sumatra?”

“No, I’m in a League airport in Taiwan, on my way home,” she replied.

“They sent you there?”

“They needed all of the combat-worthy wizards they could get.”

“I get that, but you didn’t give me any warning! I found out when the fighting was already over.” I wasn’t the fastest typist in the world, but my thumbs flew furiously across my phone’s screen. “Why didn’t you tell me? We’re partners in this enterprise, damn it all!”

“Thank you for your concern, little Magpie,” she said. I could just imagine her detached little smirk. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“Don’t flatter yourself! What if you had died? Would the you-know-what have still gone out?” Maggie had long ago set up an automated program that would reveal that I wasn’t the real Soren Marlowe if she didn’t manually stop it every day. It’s why I hadn’t silenced her myself. Not assassinating a helpless Haru in his hospital bed was one thing, but Maggie had been a constant threat since I had arrived at the school.

“Hm, I suppose that is still there, isn’t it?” She replied with a shrugging emoji. “That reminds me, I need to take care of that for today.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

What in the Dark Lord’s name… She hadn’t done her daily check in? I saw red. Before I knew what I was doing, I had already placed the call.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Am I on speakerphone?”

“No, but why-”

“You listen here, you self-important witch!” I jabbed at the air with my finger, imagining her smug face before me. “I’ve put up with enough garbage from you! This constant threat ends today!”

She stammered for a moment for collecting herself. “Where do you-”

I cut her off again. “No, it’s my turn to talk, not yours! You’re going to get back here and you’re going to delete whatever you have cooked up to expose me, and you’re going to send me the proof that you did it!”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll go to the Headmaster right this minute and come clean! I’m sure they’d love to know what Holy Brother Ratte looks like, after his stunt this morning!”

I’d said it in the heat of the moment, but the hasty verbal shot hit home. I heard cloth brush her microphone as she dropped her phone and barely caught it.

“You wouldn’t,” she said after a moment’s delay.

I paced through my room, reveling in the shock in her voice. “Why shouldn’t I? You’re so damned careless that you could expose me by accident! Why wait for it to slip your mind? This way, I can see the Wizard Corps coming!”

There was a long silence. I worried she might call my bluff. I smirked as I glanced towards my new disguise wand’s place beneath my pile of “liberated” junk. Hell, it wasn’t nearly as much of a bluff as it had once been. I had a shot at escape, if I were truly desperate.

“I see. Where did this come from?”

“You can’t be surprised, with the way you’ve treated me! I’ve listened to your problems, kept your secrets, and even done your dirty work! I’ve earned some respect, and you’ll start by taking the damn knife away from my throat!”

“I suppose you have proven yourself…”

“Damn straight! Now, what will it be? I’m sure the Headmaster would be willing to pencil me in.”

“That was an oversight,” Maggie said. “One I should have corrected already. You’re right. We are partners, and I should act like it. You’re in private, right?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t be shouting about the Brotherhood if I weren’t.”

“Good,” she purred. “I always thought you were a pushover. I like this sudden confident streak.”

“Oh?” She’d teased me a few times, but unless my ears deceived me, that was real desire in her voice. If Kiyo could ignore me for her game, then I could flirt a little. I leaned back on my bed. “How much do you like it?”

“My plane is taking off soon, so I don’t have long. I’ll find another way to express myself. Later.”

I wondered what she meant by that. I didn’t have long to wait until my phone buzzed again. Maggie had dipped into a bathroom to snap a quick picture.

What a picture it was! She wore a black Wizard Corps field uniform with the blue trim of a support wizard. More accurately, she wore most of it. The front of her jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a frilly brassiere. I’m sure it wasn’t approved combat attire. Well, hang the Wizard Corps, it met my standards! Her lip was curled back in a come-hither grin. I’d caught glimpses of her before, but apparently my imagination was deficient. Maggie Edwards was a redheaded work of art, with curves like a fine vase. Her porcelain-white skin was marred only by the scar my demonic All Heal spell had left on her stomach.

The text beneath gave me pause. “Who needs your little shadow?”

Well, that spoiled the forbidden joy of ogling a teacher. She just had to make me think of Kiyo, didn’t she? I told myself a devil didn’t care about fidelity, but I found myself thinking of Ms. Jones too much to enjoy myself.

Having been reminded of her, I sent Kiyo a message, but she didn’t reply again. I found that disturbing, but there was nothing to be done about it. I couldn’t exactly march into the girls’ living area to check in person. My stomach growled, and I decided I could go do something about that.

I did get the confirmation message from Maggie later that night, with a screenshot that a folder labeled “Faker” had been deleted. That was one less worry on my plate, which was fortunate, since by the time her follow up message arrived, the plate was rather full again.