She was a maleficer.
I’ve always had a really remarkable nose for picking out maleficers. I knew Jack was a mana-sucker with human blood under his fingernails even when everyone else in our year thought he was a charming lad, friendly and generous by Scholomance standards. I knew Liu was dabbling—in a much more restrained way—when everyone else only considered her a bit aloof and awkward.
Malia isn’t like drugs. When you first start messing with the stuff, that’s when it leaves marks—blackened fingernails and milk-white eyes, an unpleasant sticky aura, things like that; Mum calls them symptoms of lesions in the anima, which is the badly defined word we use for whatever it is in wizards that lets us build and hold on to mana, unlike mundanes. The term has as much scientific validity as aether or the four elements or humors—a fair number of wizards have gone in for medicine and neuroscience trying to find the anima, and no one’s had much luck yet—but everyone hates not having a name for it, so anima it is. What we do know perfectly well is that the more you mess with malia, the more damage you do to whatever it is, and the harder it becomes for you to keep building and holding on to mana of your own. Sometimes people with damage of that sort show up at the commune, wanting Mum’s help. She doesn’t help them the way they really want her to; she doesn’t do spirit cleanses and patch them up and send them off to do it again. All she’ll do is give them a chance to spend however many months or years it takes, working off their debt in the woods with her. Mostly they go away again, but a few of them have stuck it out.
But when you commit to the maleficer lifestyle, give up making mana of your own at all and switch to using malia exclusively, that’s when the path really smooths out before you. Serious maleficers don’t have to worry about people getting uneasy round them, or even any outer signs, at least not until they cross the finish line far up ahead and the worn-thin outer fa?ade peels away, years of accumulated psychic pollution exposed all in a rush, and they graduate to their final form, the ancient stringy sorcerers and hideous crones that show up in fairy stories, mashing bones in a mortar and pestle. It’s a puzzle no one’s going to solve: do they look that way because that’s what people think of when they think of evil mage, or have the stories been told because at that stage the maleficers get desperate enough to even go after mundanes, having to work harder and harder and more grotesquely to extract enough malia from hapless victims to keep themselves from falling apart entirely?
Ophelia wasn’t in the end stage, certainly. Oddly, she also wasn’t especially beautiful, which most maleficers are until they aren’t anymore. She was an ordinary, well-kept middle-aged woman, slim in a way that suggested she exercised every day and practiced portion control, with a smooth cap of short-cropped brown hair and clear grey eyes horribly like Orion’s, with posh mundane clothing and a light coating of expensive makeup. Or rather, that’s the woman she looked like. At the commune, a lot of the regulars would sneer when those women turned up for the yoga weekends; I’d liked that it wasn’t just me sneering for once. But Mum had always said that it was good to care for yourself, however you chose to do it.
That wasn’t what Ophelia was doing. She was just wearing the skin of it on the outside, like camouflage. It was really good camouflage, too. Aadhya and Chloe and even Liesel were smiling, charmed and made welcome, until they saw my face. Aadhya immediately put her hand in her pocket, I’m guessing because she had some kind of protective artifice in there, and Liesel shifted a step back, putting herself in a position to fire off an offensive spell from behind a shield. Poor Chloe’s face went almost comically horrified.
Ophelia was smiling too, until she came round and saw my face, and then she paused and said, “Well, I guess that makes things easier for me,” in a brisk tone, the smile folding up and packing itself away like a raincoat made unnecessary by a change in the weather. “But you’re probably freaked out. Do you want to go somewhere more public?”
What I wanted more exclusively with every passing second was to get as far away from her as I possibly could. She wasn’t like Jack. Jack had been a tiny pathetic worm of a parasite just trying to gnaw himself a way to survival. She was a pillar of darkness in a clear sky, the promise of mushroom clouds billowing, with all the power of New York enclave behind her. She was what I’d been trying not to become, my whole life, and I couldn’t imagine anything I could do against her. I desperately wanted an ocean of mana; if Alfie had offered me the London power-sharer again in that moment, at the cost of having him tag around behind me his entire life, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat, yes, just give it to me; yes, please, hurry.