Bending down, he grabbed my wrist and twisted, making me yelp.
Yanking my whole body backwards as I struggled to get free, I dug my nails into his hand, trying to break the skin, and when he grabbed that hand, too, I kicked at his shin, hard. He evaded the kick, but released me, and I threw a palm towards his nose, aiming upwards.
My hand hadn’t even reached the vicinity of his face when I felt his magic leave him in a hard pulse.
I flew halfway across the room.
I crash-landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. It felt like I’d been thrown by a giant from a great height, directly at the floor. I couldn’t get my mind to work for a few seconds. My vision blurred like he’d hit me with a brain blow spell, but I’m pretty sure I’d just landed so hard, I’d stunned myself on the padded floor.
I lay there, gasping, fighting to breathe past the pain.
I flashed back to my first year in Overworld school in England, the fights where I ended up in the dirt, where I didn’t have any clue how to fight back. I was back there again, feeling completely powerless, like I couldn’t do anything, like I was weak, pathetic, bloody useless.
Bones leisurely walked over to stand over me.
I started to speak another spell, but he held up a hand in a mudra I’d never seen. The air abruptly left my lungs. I fought to breathe, and for a moment, his face didn’t move. He stared at me like a spider might stare at a fly.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re stopping for now. Agreed?”
My body tried reflexively to suck in air but my lungs wouldn’t cooperate. Every speck of oxygen had been yanked out by his spell, and now he held my chest in his fist, caught in a fixed exhale by whatever spell he’d used. Somehow it reached my panicking, pure-survival-mode brain that he was waiting for my acknowledgement.
I nodded. Then, so there’d be no mistake, I hit my arm against the floor, tapping out.
He released the spell.
I sucked in a harsh gasp of air, choking on it, my lungs burning.
For a long-feeling few minutes, I could only lie there, pulling as much air into my lungs as I possibly could, my whole body hurting. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything else. Tears streamed down my face as I stared at the dark ceiling, smelling smoke and blood that had to be coming from somewhere on my body, since I certainly hadn’t bloodied him.
“Good,” he said.
I turned towards him, still wheezing, sure it had to be sarcasm, or gloating, or some other means of mocking me, but he was only looking at me thoughtfully.
Stranger still, his eyes held a gleam of something that looked a lot like satisfaction.
22
Unanswered Questions
Present Day
November 11th
Valarian College Dormitory
Malcroix Bones Academy
Icouldn’t get out of bed the following morning.
Well, I suppose Icoulddo, technically, since I did eventually get up, but the effort felt like a whole new torture, somehow worse than the nearly four hours he’d put me through the day before. It wasn’t just my body, although I did find bruises on large swaths of my skin when I finally got to the shower.
My magic felt drained, too, which was almost worse.
I soon learned those feelings wouldn’t be unusual.
Nor did those types of mornings grow any less as the weeks passed.
The day after every one of my fight-training sessions with Bones, I struggled to get out of bed, and generally walked to my first hot shower of the day like a ninety-year-old with a spinal injury.
