As seniors, Cassian and Simon have more projects and essays than written exams, but they still find time to help me and Alyssa as we prepare for Cadigan’s midterm.
Ian swears Cadigan will grade me fairly, but I’m not taking any chances. Not with everything I know about him. I plan to cast every spell in my practical exam perfectly and leave him no opportunity to mark me down for sloppy casting. I’ve been working too hard to let a professor’s hatred of me stop me from acing his class.
“Oh saints, girlie,” Alyssa mutters. “How is it that you’re so good at Draughts and Potions, but you can’t cook to save your life? It’s thesame damn thing, just with a stupid amount of memorization.”
“It’s a gift,” I say with a breezy shrug.
Our Draughts teacher, Professor Kincaid, plans to test us on brewing four different potions during our practical exam, but she hasn’t told uswhichof the ten potions we’ve studied she’ll be testing us on. We’re expected to memorize them all.
“Like I’m ever going to make a potion without the recipe in front of me,” Alyssa grumbles, her head thunking down on her open textbook.
I mark my page on triple transmutation circles and words of power in my spellcrafting textbook and turn to the other omega and pull out a stack of multicolored flashcards with a grin.
“I’ll help you memorize all ten potions if you help me with our unit on early infant child rearing for Omega Seminar,” I offer.
We study late into the night, taking turns making coffee runs down to Café Ciel in the basement. In groups of two and three, we review and quiz each other, just as we did last year. It’s so refreshingly normal that I can almost forget about the facility in the forest, the trapped omega test subjects, the collars. As the late-night hours tick on, I’m just a normal academy student, cramming for midterms, not an omega being crushed by the weight of devastating secrets.
Not an omega who’s vowed to bring down the alpha her father intends her to mate.
Not an omega whose own father is next on her list.
By the time the librarian finally kicks us out at two in the morning, I’m exhausted but proud, confident that I’ll ace my midterms.
I forget, just for a night, that our exams begin on All Saints’ Eve.
* * *
Professor Cadigan’sIntermediate Casting midterm is the first one I sit when midterms begin, and the one I’m most worried about. I’m confident in my casting and in my knowledge of the material, but I’m not confident that he’ll grade me fairly.
I whiz through the first page of our written exam, my pen flying across the page. It’s as I’m flipping my exam paper over that pain sears through my skull, sharp and piercing.
No.No. Not now.
My vision goes fuzzy.
The precognition burns through my mind, and I drop my pen. It clatters to the table, ink splotching over exam questions I can no longer make out.
An omega marches down familiar hallways—the very hallways Alyssa and I walked down this morning to get to our exam. I recognize the omega. I saw her in the Radcliffe Industries lab, trapped behind glass, guards pelting her with hex after hex. Their hexes didn’t hurt her then, or maybe they didn’t land at all. Some kind of shield? A protective affinity I can’t even begin to understand?
It doesn’t matter now.
She passes classroom doors, marching ever onward to Professor’s Cadigan’s classroom, her eyes blank and her scribe raised, a collar around her neck.
Pain rips through me, and my vision clears.
“Campus is under attack!” I cry out, jumping up from my seat.
The classroom erupts into chaos, everyone talking over each other. My classmates stir from their seats, just as I did, drawing their scribes, and their thoughts rush into me, pure panic. Pure pandemonium.
“Miss Rose! What is the meaning of this?” Cadigan demands, but it’s all an act. Because heknows.
Everything goes utterly silent, and I hear one thought, crisp and clear.
Cadigan. Apprehensive, but excited. Self satisfied.
The timing couldn’t be better.
“Can’t you hear them coming?” Marcus demands. “Juniper is right. Campus is under attack. Lock the door!”
