by Alicia Rades
I gathered magic in my hand to retaliate with a defensive spell, but Ryan was quicker than me. He shot his hands out and used his telekinetic powers to throw me backward.
My elbows skidded along the gravel. Ryan was quick to get to me. He jumped on top of me to hold me down and punched me straight in the nose. Red flashed across my vision, and blood spurted everywhere.
I grabbed him around the neck and threw him off of me. I used the momentum to slam his body into the dirt. I jumped on top of him and wrapped my hands around his throat. I squeezed tightly, enjoying the satisfaction of shock cross his features. He grabbed my wrists and tried to twist them off him, but I wouldn’t budge. His lips curled into a rage-filled sneer.
A second later, an invisible force slammed into my wrists, throwing my arms outward and catching me off guard. Damn Mentalist powers.
I could feel Ryan trying to lift me off him with his magic, but he wasn’t strong enough yet to do it. I regained control of my hands and grabbed his shirt.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” I shouted.
“You are,” he spat. “I’m not letting you ruin this.”
“Ruin what?” I demanded.
Ryan never got a chance to answer. A foot slammed into my guts, launching me off of Ryan. I rolled a couple of times in the gravel. When I looked up, Declan was standing over me, fury etched in his features.
“Traitor!” he snarled, cracking his knuckles.
Why were these idiots still hung up on that? So I left their group. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?
I swung my leg out and knocked Declan off his feet, but I didn’t have time to stand up before all five of the Treacherous Tarantulas were surrounding me. One quick glance toward their car, and I saw they’d finished with Grant. He was lying there clutching his stomach and groaning in pain.
I held my hands up in surrender. “Guys, please. We were really just—”
A heavy boot smashed into my face. All I saw was a shadow coming closer and closer, then felt the ungodly pain shooting through my face. A crunch sounded, and my ears rang. When the darkness cleared from my vision and refocused, Ryan’s bruised face was right in front of me.
“This beating’s long overdue, Taylor,” he seethed. “And for once, your brother’s not here to stop it.”
Heavy footfalls began to rain down on me from all directions as each of the Treacherous Tarantulas took their turn beating me to a pulp. It was hard to tell where the pain was coming from. Everything hurt.
“How’s it feel, Lucas!?”
I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and brought my hands up to protect my face, but Ryan’s voice sounded like it was coming from all around me.
“How’s it feel to finally be the one on the ground?” Ryan taunted. “I bet Eric’s looking down on you from Alora thinking what a pussy you are. He was a pussy, too—”
The sound of tires crunching across the gravel was like music to my ears. All five of the Tarantulas halted at once. They whirled around, but I just lay there trying not to spew my guts.
Ryan started laughing, and the other four quickly joined in. I finally peeled my eyelids back to see what was going on. My heart lifted at the sight of Nadine’s silver sedan stopped in the middle of the parking lot. Nadine and Talia shared a similar wide-eyed expression, like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Nadine’s gaze met mine from behind the wheel, and her features quickly shifted. Her eyebrows dropped over her eyes, and her lips pressed into a thin line.
Ryan chuckled and stepped in front of the vehicle with his arms held wide. “What are you going to do, bitches? Come at me?”
Nadine shot one look at Talia, and Talia gave her a subtle nod. Without hesitation, Nadine narrowed her gaze on Ryan and stepped on the gas. The car hurled through the parking lot, speeding straight toward the Tarantulas.
Ryan must’ve thought Nadine was playing chicken with him—or he was trying to stop the car with his powers and failing miserably—because he didn’t back down until the very last second. Ryan and his cronies leapt out of the way.
“What the fuck, you crazy bitch!?” Ryan screamed as he jumped back to his feet and dusted the dirt off his leather jacket.
Nadine yanked on the wheel, and the tires spun as she turned the car around back in Ryan’s direction. She shot him the finger, then placed her hands firmly back on the wheel.
“Crazy hoe!” Finn yelled.
“Let’s get out of here!” Ryan shouted at the same time.
Ryan grabbed the bag he’d dropped, and the five of them scurried into his vehicle. Nadine’s car hadn’t moved an inch, but she kept her narrowed gaze on them and her hands tight on the wheel. The Tarantulas tore out of the parking lot without so much as a glance back.
Grant groaned and pushed himself to his knees, shaking a fist in the air. “Not so tough now, are you?”
Of course, they didn’t hear him.
Nadine shifted into park, and she and Talia jumped out of the car before she’d even cut the engine.
“Lucas!” Nadine cried as she ran over to me.
I clutched my stomach and pushed myself to a sitting position, but it was difficult. It felt like I was bleeding out everywhere.
Talia sprinted toward Grant. “Goddess, let me help you. We should get you to the hospital.”
Talia pulled Grant to his feet and supported him as he limped over to Nadine’s car.
“Lucas,” Nadine said breathlessly. She dropped to her knees beside me and gazed into my eyes with deep concern. She placed her hands on either side of my face.
When Nadine laid her hands on me, it was like magic. My heart lifted, and all the pain seemed to melt away. I couldn’t even feel the gravel beneath me, as if I was floating.
“Nad…”
“Shh, Lucas.” Nadine stripped off her zip-up sweatshirt and balled it up to place beneath my head like a pillow.
I must’ve been really out of it, because when I lay back and looked up at her, it looked like there was a halo surrounding her. She truly glowed.
Without thinking about it, I reached out and ran my fingers across the side of her face. “Nad, you’re here.”
“Yes, I am,” she said in a rush. “And you have a broken nose. We’re going to the hospital.”
“We will,” I assured her. “Just let me rest a moment.”
“Lucas, what hurts?” she asked frantically. “Tell me what hurts.”
I shook my head. “Nothing, Nad. It’s all good now.”
Nadine threw herself over me and buried her face into my shoulder. Her knee brushed up against a bruise forming on my hip, but I didn’t care. She was hugging me, and that made everything better.
“Lucas, I was terrified for you.” Her voice was muffled in my hoodie. “When we drove in and saw them, I…” Nadine drew away to look me in the eyes.
I grabbed the sides of her face. “You got here just in time.”
Her eyes began to sparkle with tears. “If we’d gotten here just a little sooner—”
I swallowed. I was pretty sure I was swallowing blood, but it didn’t really register. “No use in worrying about what could have been. Thank you.”
Before I knew what I was doing, I dragged Nadine’s face close to mine, and I pressed my lips to hers.
Chapter 12
Nadine
Kissing Lucas was beyond anything I ever imagined it would be. You know in the movies when the guy gets the girl and he sweeps her off her feet, then everyone starts clapping and this beautiful, teary-eyed music starts playing? Then they cut forward a few months and he’s carrying her out of the church on their wedding day, everyone’s throwing rice and is all happy, then they drive off into the sunset and nothing can ever hurt them again?
That’s what Lucas’s kiss felt like, but better. It was like nothing bad could ever touch me.
Lucas’s hand came up to cradle the back of my neck. A fire ignited deep within my belly, and I relaxed into the kiss. My lips parted, and his tongue slid inside my mouth.<
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It felt as if the ground had dropped away, like we were spinning in midair and the whole world had ceased to exist around us. My heart lifted in my chest before the adrenaline settled in and sent my heart pummeling against my rib cage.
My hands tangled in Lucas’s hair, and I dragged him closer to me. He kissed me harder, like I was the very breath he breathed. My nipples hardened beneath my shirt, begging for more.
Lucas drew away, and his soft eyes roamed over my face. I was frozen in place, unable to move, blink, or breathe. Several quiet moments passed as we stared deep into each other’s eyes, until I thought my lungs might burst.
It was the only indication I had that time was still moving forward.
“I’m sorry,” Lucas whispered. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
I shook my head and finally took a breath. “It’s okay, Lucas. I’m glad you did.”
I hesitated as my gaze roamed over his bruised features. I longed to kiss him again, but right now wasn’t the time. “Let’s get you to a hospital.”
The next few hours passed at an ungodly slow pace as Talia and I waited in the emergency room for Grant and Lucas. When they were finally released, Grant had four stitches above his eyebrow, and Lucas’s broken nose had been set. We took the guys back to their dorm room, then brought them ice cream before turning in for the night.
We didn’t see them the rest of the weekend. I tried visiting Lucas on Saturday, but no one answered the door, even though I was pretty sure I heard footsteps behind it. I could hardly sleep over the weekend as the kiss replayed over and over again in my mind. Every time I thought about it, my heart lifted in my chest.
And then I remembered that I hadn’t seen Lucas in days, and my pulse quickened for entirely different reasons. He was obviously avoiding me again, and I was ticked off about it. One minute he’s kissing me like his life depends on it, and the next he falls completely off the map. I was getting really sick of his mixed signals.
Tuesday morning, I awoke with a terrible shooting pain in my left hand. My whole body was stiffer than normal, and it took at least fifteen minutes of lying in bed trying not to scream before I could shift and get into a more comfortable position.
Lupus was like that sometimes. I had good and bad days, and it was all totally unpredictable.
Talia noticed I was lying in bed longer than usual. “Hey, girl. Are you going to take your bath this morning?”
My neck was so stiff I couldn’t even work up the strength to shake my head. Screw my body. Why did it hate itself so much?
“Eventually,” I told her.
“Well, you better hurry up,” she said as she brushed her hair. “Miriamic History is in half an hour.”
I groaned and reached for my phone on my bedside table. She wasn’t lying.
“I think I’m going to skip today,” I said. I didn’t want to, since it was the one class I struggled the most with, but I hadn’t skipped all semester, and I figured I deserved a pass at least once. Today just wasn’t happening.
Talia turned from the mirror and shot me a concerned expression. “Are you going to make it to Conjuring Basics later today?”
“Yeah, I’ll make it.”
Talia frowned and grabbed her bag. “Okay. Feel better.”
I scoffed. “I’ll try.”
It was another hour before I got out of bed, and another hour after that before I finished my bath and got dressed. I was feeling a lot better, but all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. I had a few hours before Conjuring Basics, and I needed to get some homework done before I went, but I couldn’t bring myself to work up the energy. I couldn’t recall a day this bad since before my diagnosis.
Eventually, I got so hungry that I knew if I didn’t head down to the cafeteria soon, I’d end up passing out before I got there. I ate, then headed off to Conjuring Basics.
“Before we jump into our next lesson,” Professor Carlisle said, “let’s review what we already know about conjuring.”
Professor Carlisle was a short, elderly Seer with salt and pepper hair and an equally gray cat who looked like he was on his last life. You’d think at first glance Professor Carlisle was too, but he had this energy about him that suggested he had many years left.
He continued. “Earlier in the semester, we learned that conjuring is bound by many rules. You can’t conjure something out of nothing, and you can’t make one thing disappear from somewhere and end up in another. Imagine a pocket universe that follows you around everywhere you go. To subconjure, you take an object from your hand and place it into this pocket universe. To conjure, you take something from that universe and place it into your hand.”
Professor Carlisle held out his hand, and a cane materialized out of nowhere. “Conjured.”
He smiled brightly and did a little tap dance at the front of the room. At the end, he kicked the cane and made it spin around in his hand. It disappeared right in front of our eyes. “Subconjured. See? Simple.”
A few people clapped at the demonstration, but it was half-hearted.
I couldn’t wait until I had magic so I didn’t have to lug around my textbooks wherever I went. It’d be so convenient to have my wallet at my fingertips without having to actually carry it around. I mean, I’d be fine with it if the fashion industry just gave women pockets, but I guess that was more of a stretch than actual magic.
“What we haven’t talked about yet this semester is conjuring’s limitations,” Professor Carlisle said. “Let’s say I wanted to fill my pocket universe to the brim. How many items do you think I could take with me?”
A hand raised at the front of the room. “Five?” the girl guessed timidly.
Professor Carlisle pressed his index finger to his lips. “Mm… not exactly.”
“Ten!” someone else shouted, but Professor Carlisle shook his head.
“A hundred!” another voice came.
Professor Carlisle didn’t stop shaking his head as more and more students piped up with their guesses, the numbers growing each time. I couldn’t help but think that my classmates were idiots. This obviously wasn’t the kind of answer Professor Carlisle was looking for.
I raised my hand, and his eyebrows shot up. “Miss Evers?”
The room went quiet, and I cleared my throat. “Wouldn’t it depend on the size of the objects and not the amount?”
His eyes brightened, and he smiled. Professor Carlisle had one of the most expressive faces I’d ever seen. “Precisely. But how big do you think our invisible bag is? Could I, say, fit a car in it? Or an entire library of books?”
He looked directly at me, but I didn’t know how to answer his question.
Professor Carlisle clicked his tongue. “No guesses?”
Some jock in the front row leaned back in his seat. “I bet you could fit a car.”
Our professor cocked an eyebrow. “You think so, Mister James?”
“Sure,” he claimed. “I’ll betcha ten bucks after my Evoking Ceremony I’ll subconjure a car.”
Professor Carlisle smirked and stepped up to him with his hand out. “You’re on.”
The two of them shook on it, then Professor Carlisle turned to the door at the front of the lecture hall. He stepped behind it and put a door stopper in front of it to keep it open. Practically the whole class craned their necks to see what he was up to. I couldn’t see anything, until he shot back into the room sitting on a chest of drawers that was on wheels. He sat with his knees crossed and his arms held in the air, like he was making a grand entrance to a Vegas show or something. The chest of drawers spun once. He jumped off and nearly stumbled over his cat, but he made a clean landing. The class clapped and cheered for him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a chest of drawers!” Professor Carlisle gestured to it. It was dark mahogany and looked a lot like the dressers we had in our dorms, except it was longer and shorter. “This is approximately the size of your unique pocket universe. So by all means, Mister James, if you manage to subconjure a car, I’d be very in
terested to see that.”
Professor Carlisle turned back to the chest of drawers and conjured his cane, then started tapping it against the drawers. “This is all the space you get, ladies and gentlemen. In my opinion, it totally beats a duffel bag, and it definitely saves you money when you fly.”
The class chuckled.
A girl at the front of the room raised her hand. “What happens if you try to subconjure too much, if your space gets full?”
“Let me ask you this,” Professor Carlisle replied. “What would happen if I tried to fill this chest of drawers too full?”
“Well... the drawers wouldn’t close, obviously,” she said.
“Exactly,” Professor Carlisle said. “It’ll push back. Things will start spilling out. Simple as that.”
The jock eyed the chest of drawers. “So, what happens if you subconjure a person?”
Professor Carlisle raised an eyebrow. “Why, Mister James? Do you have plans to kidnap somebody?”
James sent a nervous glance around the room at the people who were laughing. “No. I just wondered, you know, could you survive it? The pocket universe?”
“I don’t know,” Professor Carlisle answered. “That’s another limitation to conjuring. You can’t subconjure a living thing.”
One of James’s friends leaned over to him. “There goes your kidnapping plans.”
“Shut up.” He shoved his friend.
I raised my hand, and Professor Carlisle called on me. “I’m curious, can things get lost? Like, if I wanted to subconjure something to hide it from someone, would they ever be able to find it? Or say I subconjured a valuable family heirloom, but I died before I had a chance to pass it on. Would it be lost forever?”
Professor Carlisle pressed his lips together firmly. “That’s a very good question, Miss Evers. And this is why I advise you never subconjure anything of value. That said, there are ways to retrieve items from someone else’s personal stash. However, it is a very complicated spell that requires more than one individual to perform and is only done on rare occasions. Why, Miss Evers? Is there something you’d like to retrieve?”
