by Eva Chase
“People asked me for ideas,” I said evenly. “I gave them one.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Her lip curled with a sneer. “Miss Super Special with her four strengths, expert at Insight, and you can’t even tell when you’re being taken for a ride.”
Had someone been messing with her head? I knit my brow. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
She guffawed. “Of course you don’t. Jude wrapped you around his finger so easily, didn’t he? Do you really think you’re anything more than a challenge for him? He’ll play you and then he’ll ditch you when he’s proven that he can.”
My stomach tightened. Jude and I hadn’t spent much time together on campus, but he hadn’t made any effort to hide our little ventures in my car either. Of course other people had noticed.
Maybe she was telling the truth, or maybe she was just trying to get under my skin. Either way, she obviously wasn’t looking out for my best interests, only to jab a knife in. I kept my voice steady.
“Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You don’t believe me. Just you wait. Please tell me you haven’t fallen for the whole charade that easily. You can’t think he actually wants you.”
As she spat out the last sentence, a door behind me squeaked. Sinclair’s gaze darted to the space beyond my shoulder, and her mouth snapped shut.
“And how exactly would you know what I actually want, Sinclair?” Jude asked in a darkly languid voice as he came up beside me.
Her stance tensed. “I was just… I—”
“You were just trying to screw me over and harass Rory at the same time. Although I’m not sure why you’d care so much who I associate with when you clearly have such a low opinion of me.”
Sinclair flung a hand toward me. “You can’t really like her. I know you. That’s not who you are.”
Jude folded his arms over his chest. “Maybe I’m trying out being someone else for a change. You should give it a shot. It’s very refreshing.”
Sinclair glowered at him for a second before shifting her gaze back to me. “It isn’t going to stick. He’ll be back to—"
“Fuck off, Sinclair,” Jude interrupted, his voice gone flat and cold, so unlike his usual tone that Sinclair faltered completely. Her hands clenched at her sides, and then she stalked away with a toss of her hair.
Jude swiveled on his heel, taking in the other students who’d assembled to watch. The glow of the overhead lights streaking through the darkness turned his copper hair even darker and his angular face even paler. His eyes had narrowed.
“If anyone else is thinking about taking on the Bloodstone scion, I’d suggest you think again—because you’ll get your ass kicked not by me but by her. And if any of you have any problem with me or where I choose to bestow my affections, feel free to tell me all about it now.” He spread his arms as if offering himself up.
No one spoke. Several figures slunk away into the dusk. Jude clapped his hands together.
“Good. If you have any problems you don’t want me taking you to task for, consider making sure that I’m definitely not within hearing when you start spouting off about them, and we’ll all be happier.” He turned to me and gave me a slanted smile. “Sorry to barge in. I’m sure you could have defended yourself, but it sounded as if my honor was at stake too.”
“It’s all right,” I said, a little dazed. Not so dazed that an automatic retort didn’t tumble off my tongue right after, though. “I guess you don’t have a lot to go around, after all.”
Jude barked a laugh. “And now it’s under attack from both sides.” He set a careful hand on my shoulder and leaned in to press the softest kiss to my cheek. There, in the middle of the green, with at least a couple dozen students still watching. Shock fluttered up through my chest.
“You are all right, aren’t you?” he murmured by my ear, and I realized the kiss hadn’t even been the point. He was giving me the chance to let him know if I was more affected than I was letting on without having to admit it in front of our peers. Because I was a scion, and scions weren’t supposed to show weakness. Because any vulnerability these witnesses observed might be turned into a weapon against me.
With everything he’d said from the moment he’d come out, he’d been careful not to imply I’d needed saving.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly under my breath, and he straightened up. His hand lingered on my shoulder for a moment longer before he withdrew it. As the warmth left my skin, it occurred to me that other than Malcolm’s pompous welcome my first evening on campus, this was the first time any of the other scions had shown any public kindness to me at all, let alone a declaration of “affection,” however Jude expected people to interpret the word.
How long would it take before Malcolm heard about this and figured out Jude hadn’t really spent the last few weeks harassing me?
Chapter Fifteen
Rory
The woman who’d come to the front desk at the health center frowned at me with a pinched expression. “I’m sorry, Miss Bloodstone, but as you’ve been told before, we don’t allow anyone other than family to visit patients undergoing treatment.”
I’d come fresh from a morning holed up in the library, hoping I could try out a few strategies to understand how the spell was working on Professor Banefield. Considering all the fuss everyone had made about me being a long-lost scion, you’d think it would at least get me visiting rights.
“He’s my mentor,” I said. “He’s the closest thing to family I have here.”
It was true, and saying it sent a pang through my chest. If my real family had been here, Dad would have been doing everything he could to save Banefield, like he’d done for so many critical patients at the hospital where he’d volunteered. I didn’t think the fact that my mentor was a fearmancer would have stopped him.
The woman in front of me wasn’t so flexible. I could tell that gambit hadn’t worked before she even opened her mouth. “I’m afraid that’s still against policy. I assure you we’ve giving him the best treatment available.”
I grimaced as I turned to leave. Their treatment wasn’t good enough for them to have figured out he was under some kind of spell. Maybe if I told them more about how it’d happened—but if I revealed what he’d managed to say to me, that might put him in even more danger.
If I could find something more definite in those goddamn library books, the staff might listen to a suggestion or two even if I couldn’t see him. I just had to be as sure as I could get. Before I spent any more time in the library, though, I had to get through my next Desensitization session.
My shoulders came up as I left the Stormhurst Building and started toward Nightwood Tower. My private sessions with Professor Razeden hadn’t been horrible, and with his guidance I’d actually managed to crack through the illusions inspired by my fears the last couple times, but I doubted I’d ever look forward to those ordeals. They were designed to prepare us to stand strong against any attack an enemy might throw at us—not much fun in that.
I was about halfway to the tower when the ground suddenly tipped beneath my feet. I stumbled, and the path shifted again, rolling as if propelled by waves.
Every time I tried to catch my balance, the ground swayed in a different direction. My stomach roiled. I stared at the path ahead of me, which rippled and dipped.
What the hell was going on? I’d experienced earthquakes and smaller tremors plenty of times in California, but they hadn’t felt like this. A few other students had been crossing the green, and their steps looked steady enough. As I stumbled again, the two closest to me glanced my way and started to stare.
Great. Now word would go around campus that on top of her regular screaming fits, the heir of Bloodstone had been tottering around on a Saturday morning like a drunken sailor.
The problem wasn’t affecting them too—so it wasn’t the whole ground. Maybe it wasn’t the ground at all, only my impression of it. An illusion messing with
my equilibrium.
I dragged in a breath and closed my eyes, focusing on the bits of my surroundings I knew were real. The hard surface of the paved path under my shoes. The crisp bite lingering in the spring air. The hint of roast chicken carrying in the air from the junior cafeteria where the staff would be preparing lunch for the younger students.
The lurching beneath me faded and then stopped completely, so suddenly I knew I hadn’t cut off the illusion’s effects myself. I adjusted my feet against the ground as I opened my eyes. A smooth voice cut through the air from behind me.
“Not so sure of your feet today, Glinda?” Malcolm sauntered around me, cocking his head as he considered my face, and my mental shield snapped into place twice as strong automatically. “You look a little seasick.”
He was switching up tactics, playing with illusion as well as his main speciality. I didn’t intend to give him the satisfaction of showing I was any more unsettled than he’d already seen.
“Mostly just sick of your stupid games,” I said.
“Oh, don’t blame it all on me. You know you’re still in over your head. You’re just too stubborn to admit it. Those bad dreams aren’t lying, though, are they?”
I raised my chin even though my pulse had lurched. “How do you know what my dreams are like if you’re not messing with them?”
“Come on, Bloodstone. Hasn’t anyone told you?” He shook his head, his eyes intent on mine beneath the gleam of his golden hair. “You yell so loud I’d bet the whole hall can hear you all the way down to the library.”
I swallowed, remembering the now-familiar rawness in my throat this morning. “Fuck off,” I said.
The dismissal had sounded a lot more powerful when Jude had shot it at Sinclair last night. From my mouth, it fell flat. I pretended not to notice and moved to stride on past the Nightwood scion along the pathway.
“It doesn’t matter how many friends you rope in or how fast you run, not when the problem’s in here.” Malcolm shifted forward to tap my head, so quickly I couldn’t jerk out of the way in time. When I whirled around, he’d already backed up, that cocky smile still curving his lips. “I’m ready to help whenever you’re ready to beg for it. Let’s see how long it takes you to wake up.”
His last words had a hint of a casting lilt, like when he was using a persuasion spell. But I hadn’t felt any tap at my mental defenses—and he couldn’t persuade me to wake up when I was already awake, right? I hesitated, waiting to see if any of my limbs would move without my consent, but as far as I could tell, I still had full control over my body.
I was letting him get to me, reading more into his taunts than was there. “When you beg for forgiveness for being such an asshat, then maybe I’ll consider it,” I retorted, and marched on.
My legs moved perfectly normally under me, but as I hurried on, a brief wave of dizziness washed over me. A blurry movement at the edge of my vision brought my head jerking around. No one was there, just the empty field leading out to the forest.
Malcolm was watching me act jumpy. I pushed myself onward to the tower.
I stopped again at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement room. The shadows that filled the crevices around the steps and the stone walls unfurled and reached toward me with filmy fingers. My heart hiccupped, I blinked hard, and they snapped back into place.
Okay, Rory, Malcolm’s nowhere near you now. Get a grip on yourself.
Professor Razeden was waiting for me outside the desensitization chamber, his tall gaunt figure a little like something out of a nightmare itself. He gave me a subdued smile when he saw me, even though I was giving him extra work on his weekend.
His dry, even voice had guided me enough by now that it centered me pretty much instantly. “Miss Bloodstone, right on time. Are you ready for another go?”
“Absolutely,” I said, ignoring the niggling uneasiness that had followed me down. “Let’s see if I can make it through with a little less coaching this time.”
“There’s no shame in needing the instruction,” Razeden said as he ushered me into the black walled room with its arching ceiling. “Your peers have had years to build up their defensive strategies. Believe me, I had to talk every one of them through plenty of sessions. Get into position to begin.”
I stepped into the middle of the room beneath the artificial glow of the overhead lights. What lovely horror was my mind going to conjure up this time? The spells on the chamber, when triggered by the professor, worked with a combination of Insight and Illusion, delving into our minds and projecting our greatest fears around us in terrifyingly vivid clarity. People who’d gotten more practice tended to end up with more metaphorical situations, apparently. So far mine had all been disturbingly literal.
“Slow, steady breaths,” Razeden reminded me from his post near the door. “Start out calm and it’ll be easier to stay there. Whatever comes, remember that you’re stronger than it. You’re real, and it’s only an illusion.”
Right. Easier said than done when you were staring your worst nightmares in the face in full living color, but at least I hadn’t crumpled into a ball sobbing recently.
“Go ahead,” I said.
The room went pitch black. Then a different space wavered into view around me, the lines solidifying with a blink.
My pulse thumped faster as I recognized the scene. There hadn’t been many details of the building in the photos from the report on my birth parents’ deaths, but a couple sessions ago my mind had constructed its own version of a vault-ceilinged grand hall where a force of joymancers had burned them to a crisp.
Like before, I found myself standing between the two groups of mages, staring up at them from a great height, as if I were a helpless toddler again. The joymancers shouted at the fearmancers, who shouted back. Even though I didn’t think they’d been a part of the actual attack, my real parents stood with the intruders, Dad’s face flushed an angry red, Mom’s hair flying wild. My birth mother jabbed her hand at them accusingly.
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t force out more than a babble of sound. When I waved my arms, they didn’t seem to see me. I took a wobbly step and fell to my knees.
No, no, no. I didn’t want to go through this whole thing again. Last time I’d had to watch them slice and sear each other until bodies had littered the floor. My only victory had been willing the images to disappear after the fact rather than needing Professor Razeden to end the illusion for me.
His voice reached me as if from far away. “Don’t try to interfere with what they’re doing. Accept that you can’t stop the confrontation. Focus on walking away.”
Walk away. Don’t let myself care what they did to each other. It was already done anyway.
I pushed myself back up. One careful step, sliding my foot across the polished hardwood with my shaky toddler balance, tuning out the words whipping back and forth even more viciously around me.
“You fucking bitch!” Mom yelled, sounding like herself and yet like a stranger at the same time, and one of the fearmancers cried out. My arm shot up despite my best intentions as if I could ward off the spells they were starting to hurl at each other.
My hand had been empty a moment before. As it snapped out, the air twitched around my fingers, and a glimmering shape darted from them as if I’d flung something.
It whipped across the room and hit one of the joymancers right in the throat with a spurt of blood. A razorblade, metal gleaming amid the scarlet flow.
My stomach flipped. What the hell? That hadn’t happened last time. I hadn’t been able to affect either side at all.
“Don’t pay attention to them,” Razeden said. “Keep your eyes on that door.”
Apparently he didn’t have any tips related to my sudden affinity for weaponry. I guessed the same strategy still made sense. Clenching my jaw, I tore my gaze away from the illusionary man whose throat I’d just slit.
One step. Two steps. Someone screamed. My balance swayed, and my arm jerked as I tried to catch myself.
Another razor flashed from my fingers, into the fearmancer side this time. It sank into my birth mother’s belly. She flinched and bowed over the wound, blood spreading across the fabric of her dress.
“No,” I whispered, curling my fingers into my palms. “No—”
My protest cut off with a gasp of pain. I stared down at my hands, at more razors digging through my palms as if I’d shoved them there. The throbbing echoed up my arms. My head spun.
Razeden’s voice sounded even more distant now. “One foot after the other. You can do this.”
No special tips for stabbing myself? My next step sent a fresh jolt of pain through my body. Sweat trickled down into my eyes.
A fiery spell whipped past me with a flare of stinging heat. I ducked, my hand bobbed down, and a blade plummeted from it right through my foot. It pinned me to the floor with another spear of agony.
“Keep walking,” Razeden said, and a laugh sputtered out of me that turned into a groan. Every part of me ached, and the smell of burnt flesh coated my mouth. My stomach heaved as if to propel what remained of my breakfast up my throat.
I hunched over to pull the razor from my foot, but I couldn’t use my mangled hands. The pain radiated deeper, thumping inside my head.
“I can’t,” I gasped out. “I can’t! Make it stop!”
The sounds and smells of the carnage vanished. The pain leached from my body, leaving me simply trembling there crouching on the floor. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
At least I wasn’t sobbing. I swiped at my eyes and looked up. Professor Razeden had walked partway over to me, but he stopped at my movement.
“What happened?” he said in his usual even tone. “You looked as if you had a good grip on yourself at first. What threw you off?”
