I was struggling a bit to settle into school.
After a summer spent with Alaric, obsessing on Bones, Dark Cathedral, and trying to improve every aspect of my protection, seeing arts, theurgy, and tracking spells, it felt completely strange to be sitting in a classroom again, discussing the ethical implications and possible side-effects of utilizing the blood of living animals in binding spells.
I felt even stranger in my Offensive and Defensive Magic practical, where I’d been paired off against Bella Chalmers, of all people, the same witch I’d seen in Bones’s lap on the carriage ride to Malcroix.
She’d hit me with an ice-shard spell, a vicious smile on her lips, and I hadn’t hesitated, not even to think about how hard I should hit back. I don’t think I’d even been angry. I made the mudra and murmured the wordssuvarna hydra shirah,stepping into the full stance, which was something like a warrior pose in yoga, only with one hand out front, and blue-green fire blurred out of my palm in a torrential cyclone that rapidly formed into my weapon of choice.
Alaric, who was in my class, found it absolutely hysterical.
Everyone else, including our teacher, Rafe Quicksilver, did not.
To be fair to them, the hydra that erupted from my hand was absolutely enormous. It also chewed through a lot of matter in the Experimental Magic Shed, as I hadn’t thought to limit it to a ghostly form, so it came out full-blown corporeal.
To be fair tome,the only person I’d spent any time sparring with over the summer had been Alaric Greythorne, who was utterly diabolical when it came to offensive spells. Endless matches with him, most of them in the cellar of the Dragon’s Keep, where they had a residents-only, professionally shielded, magical arena we could use, taught me, if nothing else, to go big from the outset. If I didn’t hit back with adequate force, Alaric cremated me.
After two or three months of that, I’d learned to slam back at him before he could grab the upper hand, and to keep hitting him so he’d remain off-balance.
It was the only way I ever won.
So when Chalmers started off aggressive, I acted more or less purely on instinct.
Chaos erupted inside the experimental magic shed.
Quicksilver ordered me back, and forbade me from casting any more spells, so I could only watch from the sidelines while he stepped between Bella and the hydra I’d cast.
It was a good few minutes before things calmed down, and by then, the entire shed smelled like sulfur, smoke, and, faintly, of blood. Green and blue smoke still billowed in waves over the curved, black ceiling when the class ended, and everyone in there was staring at me like they thought I was doing blood sacrifices at night while everyone else was sleeping, and maybe murdering people on the weekends for sport.
“Shadow. Over here.”
Rafe Quicksilver had been red-faced and sweaty by then, cords of muscle standing out on his neck, panting after he’d battled my hydra and finally managed to neutralize the spell so itwouldn’t bite a chunk out of Bella Chalmers’ arm, shoulder, leg, or maybe her face.
Quicksilver had always been decent to me.
Patient, even.
That day, he full-blown screamed in my face, in full hearing distance of the entire class, for a full eight minutes. Everyone pretended to go on with their sparring assignments, but I knew not a single person in there missed a word. I’d thought Quicksilver would keep going, honestly, maybe even after class finished, but at some point, he seemed to realize I wasn’t shouting back, or doing anything but standing there, my hands clasped.
His anger flipped abruptly from hot to cold.
He ended the lecture with a hard glare, his face only a few inches from mine, and words that hit a lot harder than he likely realized.
“Do anything like that again,” he growled, his eyes flat as a cobra’s. “And I’ll assign you to practice exclusively with Bones.” His full lips twitched when I flinched. “I suspect you’ll enjoy that a lot less, Shadow. He’s in his own magical shed for a reason.”
Everyone in school had heard the story by the time I got back to Valarian.
I tried to blow it off, but of course my friends were all intensely curious, and wanted to know where I’d learned the spell. I muttered something vague about “summer reading,” which Draken found as hilarious as Alaric had, seeing me conjure the hydra in the first place.
I’d told Miranda, Luc, Draken, and Jolie all about my conversation with Valor La Fey by then, and Arcturus being identified as Obeah. I’d told them a lot less about my summer activities, keeping my stories to a few anecdotes about London clubs, London restaurants, books I’d read, and shopping sprees I’d gone on, particularly the water markets.
I scarcely mentioned Alaric, even though I’d seen him every single day.
I told them nothing whatsoever about our project regarding the Priest.
I also didn’t tell them how relieved I’d been that the Praecuri hadn’t shown up to arrest me for murdering my aunt, or being an accessory to the murder of my aunt, or to interrogate me about what I or Bones had been doing at her house the night Ankha was killed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my friends.
Or maybe it was, I honestly couldn’t say for sure.
