“When the trial starts,” I told Sindy, setting down my spoon, “you run. Find the safest place you can.”
“No.” Her hazel eyes flashed. “I’m staying with you.”
“You know I’ll be the target.”
“All the more reason you’ll need someone watching your six,” she said firmly.
I opened my mouth to argue, then stopped. On second thought, it might be better. No one could overpower me now, not with my power awake and hidden. If she stayed close, I could make sure she walked out alive.
“All right,” I said. “But you stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run. No arguments.”
“Deal.” She reached across the table, bumping her fist against mine. “Together.”
“Together,” I echoed.
But even as I said it, I knew the trial would be unlike anything this academy had witnessed. Gods would descend. Blood would spill. And I’d have to reveal at least some of what I could do.
The secret couldn’t stay hidden much longer.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Bloom
Blood on the Sand
We gathered in the courtyard between Founder’s Spire and the Midnight Banquet Hall. Over a thousand students crowded onto the black granite cobblestones.
Gothic arches framed the space, their stone carved with gargoyles, ravens, and mystic symbols.
Every student wore battle gear stamped with their house crest.
Students from Ravencrux House wore black leather armor reinforced with metal plates.
Witches and mages from Stardust House wore purple robes enchanted for protection.
Kingsley students wore amber and deep blue armor that gleamed like fish scales. They looked polished, prepared, and eager. Many of them were already grinning.
Headmistress Stardust moved through the crowd with her aides, separating students into three groups. They broke up houses on purpose. When a brunette aide tried to pull Sindy away, to place her with a Stardust-heavy group, my fingers closed around her wrist.
I looked up and met Headmistress Stardust’s gaze. No words. Just a flicker of power, cold and clear, behind my eyes.
Something shifted in her silver stare—pride, surprise, or worry. After a beat, she nodded to the brunette. “Leave them.”
Then she was gone, her radiant white robes billowing as she departed to join the gods in the colosseum.
My group had twice as many Kingsley members as any other. I felt their glares like heat on my skin. They didn’t matter, and I paid their hostility no mind at all.
I wondered if the other houses had held strategy sessions or given pep talks. Nero had done both before we were herded into the courtyard.
Dante had gathered us in the tower’s gothic hall. With Nero stripped of his professor status, Dante had stepped into the role, but no one could take Ravencrux House from Nero himself. Dante was his mouthpiece plus muscles.
Nero had watched from the top of the stairs, silent and imposing, while Dante addressed us.
“You’ll fight as a team,” the archdemon’s voice boomed, “as members of House of Ravencrux. And your duty is to protect Miss Bloom Aurelius, your leader in the arena, with everything you have.”
A male student protested immediately. “She’ll be the target. She’ll get us all killed.”
