Shadowspell Academy: The Culling Trials, Book 3

by Breene, K. F.

  “I hate this,” I muttered, letting intuition kick in and changing my angle. “This is terrible. Why did I decide to come?” Not that I could have let Billy come instead, but I found myself wishing we’d cut and run like my dad had suggested.

  The T-Rex either didn’t catch my change in direction or wanted Ethan more, because it kept moving straight for him.

  “Levitate!” I heard, imagining him using a lovely little wand flick while standing stationary, like that woman in the last challenge.

  “It’s too heavy,” I said, changing my direction again and running back at him. He couldn’t get eaten yet. If he did, I’d have no chance. The T-Rex didn’t have a wand I could steal, and it wouldn’t care about my punches. “Use an attack spell!”

  “Surl-ah-age!”

  The word was garbled. I couldn’t see the accompanying flick. I had no idea what he was going for.

  The beast roared, a surprised, pain-filled sound. Its feet stomped and shuffled. Whatever that spell was supposed to do had worked.

  “Surlahage,” I shouted, aiming for an ankle, the easiest thing to hit, and flicking my wand in a clumsy fist. The movement was more a whip crack than a flick.

  A jet of white flew, arcing through the air and pinging into the dinosaur’s knee area. It blistered the tough skin. The T-Rex roared, though it didn’t sound as pained this time, and bent its opened mouth toward the ground. Toward Ethan.

  I swung the wand again, wanting to really explode that knee. “Surlage!”

  The second try was wrong, I could feel it. Everything felt wrong, from the movement to the instrument to the word itself.

  Gray-black light erupted from the wand this time, in a straight shot, flung with some vigor. It hit the beast’s ankle, as hoped, slashing a line of red.

  “Yes, yes!” I shouted, giddy from my accomplishment.

  The T-Rex roared, almost a howl of pain, before whipping its big head around to me. Its tiny yellow eye took me in. Oops.

  “Oh no! Oh no!”

  I turned and ran, unable to quell the instinct to flee something that big. The ground shook as the predator changed direction and charged.

  “Throw another spell. Throw another spell!” I shouted over my shoulder, probably not heard over all the commotion. “Take out its feet!” I flicked the wand over my shoulder, following my words. “Surblage. No, surfledge. Surlahedge!”

  Various streams of color zipped out. An explosion took me off my feet and flung me forward. I twisted in the air and landed on my side in time to see the last spell splat way up onto the dinosaur’s chest. The beast rocked back and forth, waving its little arms and roaring at the sky, teeth snapping together over and over.

  Another stream of light came at it from the other side. “Gar-gant-rain-ium.”

  “Gar-gant-rainium,” I said quickly, trying for the proper word flow and attempting an artful flick. It looked like something was stuck on the end of the wand and I was trying to flick it off. “Garg…antum. Dang it, I forgot the rain. Gargant-rain-ium!”

  I wasn’t great at remembering the words, they were too damn weird.

  The wand vibrated like a broken washing machine, and I nearly dropped it in discomfort. The beast roared as a spell hit it from behind. It turned, in time for my streams of brown and murky green to hit it broadside.

  “Those colors aren’t right,” I said, hopping up as a splash of red washed across the T-Rex’s side.

  It roared, worse than before, and shook its great head. Red gushed down its body, and I realized I’d opened that wound with one of those garbled spells.

  “Which one?” I murmured through my teeth, not running back to Ethan. Hitting it from both sides was better, as long as each of us could keep it from chomping down on the other. “Gargant-ium!” I slapped the wand at the air and more horrible vibrations ran up my arm. “Rain! Damn it. Gargantrainium!”

  Pus-yellow light flew out this time, hitting the creature’s hip. Blisters preceded smoke and then flame, curling up the T-Rex’s skin. A clear, vibrant green light flew toward it from the opposite side, exploding.

  The beast’s little arms clawed at the air as it shook its head again, its mighty mouth open and its body sagging a little. I could just barely see Ethan behind the thick leg, advancing with swagger, wand held out confidently, slipping into striking range to deliver his killing shot.

  “No, no, no!” I ran at him, all my senses firing. Fear driving my legs faster than they’d normally go. “Not so close—”

  Ethan shot out, his wand flicking gracefully, his body broad and powerful. His instructor had obviously been a complete idiot. He was making himself a perfect target.

  “Entitlement doesn’t work on a beast,” I yelled, readying my wand again. “Back away, Ethan! Get out of the striking range! It’s not ready to die!”

  A beautiful deep crimson stream flew through the air, slicing into the creature as it bent toward its target, its mouth open wide.

  “No! Surpledge!”—wand slash—“Geranium!”—wand slap—“Gargant-rain-um!” I was basically waving my wand like it was a whip now, something I actually knew how to do. It was helping...but not enough. The scene spilled out in front of me, a horror show I couldn’t escape.

  The beast moved faster than ever before as it shot toward a wide-eyed Ethan. The T-Rex’s teeth snapped closed on his middle with a sickening crunch.

  I sucked in a horrified breath as my murky, hideous spells slapped and slashed at the beast, one ripping a hunk of skin off its back, another peeling all the skin from its leg, and the third exploding against it. A tiny arm was flung off.

  The beast staggered, opening its mouth to roar. Ethan fell out to the side, stiff from fear-driven paralysis or the first death in this challenge. I was hoping for the former.

  I ran toward him, throwing up more spells haphazardly as I moved, dodging the clumsy feet of the agonized T-Rex. My spells hit home without the damage of the previous few.

  My wand waving. I was too panicked for Ethan. I hadn’t waved it as forcefully the last few times.

  “Help,” Ethan moaned as I got close. The T-Rex’s clawed foot slammed down, forty feet away, the creature howling in pain as it spun and clawed uselessly at itself.

  “You’re alive,” I said as I reached him, my relief short-lived. Four puncture marks in all, two in his front and two in his back, each round as a coffee mug. They almost met in the middle, and he was seeping blood and…other parts. He didn’t have long.

  This death was meant for me. I was sure of it.

  And Ethan had taken the blow.

  “We need to win,” I said, terror fueling me. “We need to win this so we can get you to a healer.”

  “I can’t feel my legs.” His eyes widened as he looked down. His arms pushed against the ground, as though he didn’t realize what he was seeing was a part of him and he wanted to get away from it.

  The tail swung overhead, enough to take me out had I been standing.

  “We gotta go.” I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him behind me to put distance between us and the creature. I didn’t know what else to do. “Give me a nasty spell. Nastiest you know.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Give me a spell!”

  “Darn-at-re. A. Dis-a-trium.”

  “What happened to the spells with actual words?” The T-Rex’s tail whipped the other way and it roared, sounding like it was so through with this crap. I knew how it felt. “Here we go. Give me your wand. It felt better than this one…”

  “Wands…intimate.”

  “Well then, we’re about to get intimate.” I snatched his wand out of his hand, looked at the stolen one in my other hand, and decided screw it.

  The creature came at me, its mouth open and hell in its eyes.

  “Darn-a-trium. Ah. Dis-a…trum.” That wasn’t right, but I flicked both wands, anyway.

  A stream of poo-colored brown magic came out of the instructor’s wand, and baby puke green magic came out of Ethan’s. Both hit the
T-Rex on its right leg, a little higher than I’d intended, but nearly at the knee. Red holes opened up in its scaly hide before an explosion of fire shot out. Heat and light and propulsive energy slapped me, pushing me off my feet for the second time and flinging me back. My head knocked the ground and black spots swam within my vision.

  The T-Rex’s roar was soaked through with horrible pain. I pushed to my elbows as its body hit the ground. Half of its leg had been blown off, blood spray coating the dirt.

  My stomach pinched and bile rose in my throat. These challenges weren’t for the faint of heart.

  “Terrible spell work,” I heard, a pain-filled, wet, gargled whisper. A smile covered Ethan’s face, and he coughed up a wet laugh.

  “Oh no.” I crawled to him, my head pounding, my body aching, the wands clutched in my hands shooting sparks with each movement. “How do I end this, Ethan? How do I end the challenge?” I dropped the wands and clutched his bloody hand in my own. “Ethan!”

  His blue eyes found me lazily, the light within them dimming. “You know…” Wet coughs racked his body. “You’re pretty…hot when you…clean yourself up. I…like ’em tall.” He laughed again, as though that was a merry joke. “Good work, Johnson.” His eyes swung the other way, as though he didn’t have control over them anymore. “You win.”

  A breath released from his mouth, and his body went slack in the pool of blood under us. His eyes were sightless.

  “No.” I grabbed his chin with my fingers and turned his face my way. “Hold on, Ethan. Please. Please, don’t die on me! The dinosaur is down!” I looked around us, wide-eyed. The T-Rex kicked the foot that was still intact, weakly waving the one tiny arm it had left, and then stilled. “The T-Rex is down! Why is this not ending?”

  Tears clouded my vision as a boot crunched against the dirt behind me. I pushed up and swung around, grabbing my knife and protecting Ethan’s body with my own.

  The Sandman stopped ten feet from me, his expression unreadable. “That was meant to be you.” He jerked his head, and I knew he meant Ethan. “You were meant to die in here. You’re a Shade, or so they thought. You shouldn’t be able to use a wand.” His eyes flicked to the two wands next to me, lying deserted. “But you chose a different path than they expected. An impossible path. You should’ve been captured twice over. Or killed. And yet, here you are, with the man who was supposed to win it all…lying dead at your side. I was right, and they were wrong.”

  Anger seethed through me, burning away the grief and fear, the guilt from letting Ethan and my crew down and reaching the end alone. I grabbed Ethan’s wand and stood on wobbly legs. “What do you want from me?” I hollered.

  His dark, dangerous eyes beheld me. “Everything.”

  Chapter 15

  That last word reverberated in the air between the Sandman and I. Everything. He wanted everything from me? What the hell did that mean?

  “What, you want to marry me?” I blurted out, my brain muddled from the concussion, from the unrelenting terror and the horror of Ethan’s lifeless body at my feet. “Aren’t you supposed to get on one knee for that?”

  There was a split second where I thought the Sandman would laugh in my face. I mean, it was ridiculous, but so was everything else.

  “Perhaps not everything,” he said.

  The Sandman took a step back, his eyes locking on something or someone coming up from behind on my left. I tensed, but no warning tingles raced through my body. Friend, not foe.

  “We are not done here.” The Sandman turned and strode away, and I thought about shooting him in the back with the wand.

  Well, screw it. I’d never second-guessed myself before—why start now? I whipped the wand in a circle, then pointed it at the Sandman’s back. The sparks that shot out were a mix of black and red, and for a moment—just a split second—I could see my rage in the magic, my anger and strength propelling it forward to slam into the Sandman’s back, spinning him around. He fell back and through something, like an invisible fence that was keeping us in. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.

  “Wild!” Pete was all but on top of me when he yelled my name, and I startled. “Holy cats, what…is Ethan…dead?”

  I dropped to my knees, tucked the wand down the back of my pants and put my fingers to Ethan’s neck. The blood that had pooled out from his puncture wounds seeped through the knees of my jeans. Warm, his blood was still warm. Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was part of my crew, because I’d already lost so much, or because of that tiny spark that had jumped so unexpectedly between us.

  A single pulse of his heart thumped under my fingers. That was enough for me. “Help me get him up, Pete!” I got my arms under Ethan’s and Pete grabbed his feet. “We need to get him over there.” I pointed at the place I’d seen the Sandman fall through.

  Wally came running, bursting out of seemingly nowhere. Her face was scratched and her clothes sizzled, but she was intact. “Oh my God!”

  That was all she said as she caught up to us, and her silence scared me more than if she’d spewed off all the numbers, all the reasons why Ethan wouldn’t make it. She took one of his hands and just held it.

  We reached the place where the Sandman had fallen out of the test…and nothing happened. We kept on running across the open plain with Ethan bouncing between us.

  “We do not have time for this!” I snapped.

  “Where are we going?” Pete struggled to speak as we ran. “Why isn’t this over?”

  I didn’t have an answer. What I had was a dying boy and…a couple of wands in my back pocket. One of which would work for me, even if I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

  “Wally, come grab Ethan.”

  “I can help.” Orin slid in from the right, out of shadows that hadn’t been there a moment before, his face beyond pale and green in spots.

  “Why can you all get in, but we can’t get out?” I raged as Orin took Ethan’s arms from me. I grabbed the wand from my back pocket. Ethan’s wand. I pointed it in front of us at nothing. But there had to be something there. Something holding us in.

  “I need a word, a trigger word, something!” I yelled and the others startled.

  “Bascilium-oroco,” Wally whispered. “It can break another person’s spell.”

  I didn’t hesitate, trusting her. Trusting my crew. Hell, I didn’t even stumble over the word for once. “Bascilium-oroco!” The word tasted like copper pennies on my tongue as I pointed Ethan’s wand at the landscape.

  The tip glowed like a lighter, heating brighter and brighter until it was like a mini sun in both light and heat. I couldn’t look at it, but felt it drawing strength from me to make this spell, whatever it was, work.

  “Say it again!” Wally yelled. “Three times, you have to say it three times with a pause in between!”

  “Bascilium-oroco!” I shouted the word and the light grew impossibly brighter until I was on my knees and the others were yelling. The wand began to heat in my hand, burning into my flesh. It smelled of charred meat, and still I hung on.

  My friends were depending on me.

  Billy and Sam were depending on me.

  Ethan’s life depended on me.

  If there was a chance this would work, that it would break the spell of this place, then I had to hang on.

  “Bascilium-oroco!” I put everything I had into that final scream, every ounce of energy and then some. The world around us shattered into a thousand colors, the light from the wand bursting through everything around us, splintering images and throwing them back in broken reflections. When I opened my eyes, the plains and the T-Rex were gone, and we were sitting on a chunk of land that looked very normal.

  Other groups of kids huddled at various points around us.

  I hadn’t just shattered our test, but everyone’s test. Someone was going to be pissed.

  But that was the least of my worries. “We
need a medic! A healer!” I yelled, stumbling to my feet. I would have dropped the wand, but it was seared to my palm. Orin was running, carrying Ethan in his arms easily despite whatever poison he’d ingested in the first challenge.

  The teachers and testers were like an ant nest that had been kicked repeatedly. I wanted to believe it was because Ethan was a Helix and Helixes were important. But the number of eyes that went to my hand, still glued to the wand, told me otherwise.

  I didn’t care. I ran after Orin, Wally, and Pete right with me. We hit the medic station at full speed, and the woman who’d cared for us each time was there. Inside the tent was hushed, for all the world like we were alone.

  Mara had her hands on Ethan in a flash, her eyes closed and eyes moving rapidly under her eyelids. “Bad, this is bad.”

  Someone poked their head in. Jared. The vampire’s eyes widened and then narrowed into a glare.

  “Jared, get his father!” Mara said.

  I went to my knees beside the cot and found Ethan’s hand with the one not seared to his wand. Wally went to her knees beside me. Pete and Orin were behind us, and we waited like that—a united crew—as Mara worked her magic on Ethan. The punctures in his side closed, the wounds on his face closed, and the pallor of his skin improved. But his chest didn’t lift and lower.

  Mara stumbled back, breathing hard after maybe thirty seconds, sweat rolling from her face. “There is nothing more I can do. He was too deep into death for me to pull him back.” Her eyes opened wide with unshed tears, but she tipped her head at Ethan and then looked hard at me. What was she trying to tell me? “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Too deep into death. What did she mean by that? Now that we were out of the trial, my head was pounding once more, all the adrenaline that had kept the worst of it at bay had burned off.

  I was shaking my head before she even finished. “No, that can’t be. He can’t die.”

  But she was already walking away, pausing only to look back at me. The tent was empty except for the five of us. Five. I refused for it to be four.

  I looked at Wally. “Tell me you can do something, Wally. She said too deep into death, that means he’s in your realm now. There has to be—”