get that with any hot girl that will talk to me,” T.J. said with a quick glance at Ashley.
She either failed to notice or chose to ignore. Instead, she was still looking at me curiously. “The elves have different abilities; glamour is often one of them. Eirwen is really strong with it. The way to defeat it is to hold a piece of iron or steel in your bare hand. But you didn’t fall for it, D, even without iron. How?”
Wiping the remaining tears from my eyes, I watched as Caeco casually swiped her own sushi through the remaining wasabi on my plate, popping it into her mouth without any visible reaction. I felt myself frown but only pushed my plate in her direction, noting the glimmer of amusement in her eyes. I finally addressed Ashley’s question, which had everyone else curious.
“Hello… warlock here… remember?” I asked.
“You know what? I got paired with that foreign witch, Zuzanna, today, as my escort. She kept asking questions about you.” Ariel said. “She’s a bit freaked out that you’re a dual-affinity warlock, something she’d never heard of, and she’s really impressed with your skill. Then there’s the comment that vampire chick, Katrina, made… you’re like the only witch that Chris Gordon trusts.”
“Not true. He trusts my aunt,” I said, spearing another sushi roll and dipping it in soy sauce this time. Caeco had turned me onto sushi and I liked it, but definitely not the wasabi sauce.
“Yeah, Zuzanna had a whole bunch of questions about your aunt as well,” Ariel said.
“What? What did she want to know?” I asked, food forgotten.
“If O’Carroll was really her last name, where she was from in Ireland, stuff like that,” Ariel replied, eyes wide at my response.
“Listen, we’ve strayed off topic. We need to get back to the important stuff—how hot was this elf girl without her magical makeup?” T.J. asked.
“Well, she was pretty, I guess, quite pretty, but no more so than the girls here,” I said with a wave around our table and at the other tables. “It was the illusion that made her standout from other girls.”
My glance had made eye contact with all four girls at my table and now they all sat upright, with expressions of surprise and unconcealed pleasure.
“You blarney speaking smooth talker, you,” Ashley said.
“Well, if ye don’t mind me saying, good blarney is always based on the truth, jest more of it, ye see?” I responded, smiling. My comment had been sincere, though, and they all knew it.
“Are all warlocks such bullshitters?” Jetta asked, giving me a smile to take any sting out of her question.
“Aunt Ash won’t call me a warlock. Says I’m not one and she hopes I’ll never be one. Won’t tell me what that means, though. She just says that the meaning of the word has been lost over the years and now people use it to refer to any male witch. She says that’s not right,” I said.
“Have you researched whatever she’s talking about?” Ashley asked.
“Yeah, nothing on the web and most of my non-digital sources have given me zilch. There is one source, but I promised I wouldn’t go there yet.”
“Hey, we got class in like five minutes,” Mack suddenly said, looking up from his phone. I think he’d been Snapchatting a girl from one of his college classes and must have noticed the time.
We grabbed our plates and headed to the clean-up station. Caeco and Justin turned off in the direction of the gym while the rest of us went to the Explorations classroom. I snuck a quick kiss before letting my little killer head out. Jetta smirked at me and Mack made a little heart shape with the fingers of both hands over his chest.
Inside our classroom, a note on the smartboard told us to head to the basement level.
Downstairs, following the rest of our classmates, we found an enormous open space, broken up by massive support pillars.
Miss Berg was waiting for us near the overhead door that led to a ramp up to ground level. Bricks and lumber were stacked near her, as well as a kiddie pool full of water and some tools.
“I’ve received all your suggestions, which ranged from somewhat simple to overly verbose,” she said, her eyes moving over us. “I think to start off, we’ll construct an obstacle course with these materials and then we’ll practice moving avatars through it. So let’s dig in and put a serious course together. I have some plans here for