A sharp, unfamiliar pang of jealousy flexed along my arms, my power humming right beneath my skin. I glanced at Alaric, who rolled his eyes in response and shook his head.
“How will you ever become the greatest of our generation if you don’t learn to rely on your own strength, Celeste?” Alaric quipped, taking a step back and standing next to Elias who still seemed to be lost in thought, mumbling to himself.
I fought a smile as the feline smirk on Celeste’s face fell pathetically. She stood up straight, her hands stretched out as dark smoke started to pour out of her fingertips.
Alaric’s voice whispered in my ear. “Everyone manifests their power in their own way. Celeste uses smoke, and it seems you use light.”
“And what about you?” I asked, turning to look into his eyes.
“I like fire,” he spoke, his breath fanning my face.
A chill ran down my spine as I turned to focus on the illusion Celeste was creating. Her brow furrowed in concentration as her fingers seemed to paint shapes in the air before her, the smoke twisting and turning into a slightly shorter version of the shadowed Stonebound. The smoke trailed from the Stonebound to Celeste’s fingers, and while her face remained stoic and calm, I noticed beads of sweat starting to form at her hairline.
“All right.” Dr. Duvall clapped, the sound jolting me as it echoed through the chamber. She walked over to Celeste, pulling a blindfold from her pocket. She wrapped around Celeste’s eyes, her illusion shuddering just a bit. “Elara and Rowan, please step forward with Mari. The three of you must avoid detection while Celeste uses her illusion to hunt you down. You have five minutes.”
Elara scoffed, her gray eyes taking me in while her twin brother, Rowan, simply stepped forward, his hands at his chest in a prayer formation. Seraphine clapped her hands together loudly again, but refracted light of a shimmering glow began to pool outward from Seraphine’s aura. The room hummed, just as it had before when Alaric created his illusion of the maze. The room was broken up into sections, and suddenly, all three of us were separated into individual corridors, but the walls continued to move, shrinking and growing at intervals. The roar of Celeste’s shadowed Stonebound echoed through the space, but muffled, like we were behind a sound barrier.
I turned to the right, trying to get distance between me and Celeste’s illusion. All I had to do was avoid detection for the next five minutes. And not embarrass myself.
I moved quietly and slowly, trying to find a relatively good hiding spot. I moved further into the next corridor, finding Rowan standing still, eyes closed, hands still clasped together. He was mumbling something under his breath when I noticed the ground around him frost over, an icy ring moving outward from where he stood in an oval shape. The shadowed Stonebound moved into the room from the other side, Rowan right in its line of sight.
The instinct to yell for Rowan to run stuck in my throat as the air around him suddenly froze too, encasing him in an icy bubble. The Stonebound moved around Rowan, seemingly unable to detect him. I slowly backed up, seeking a new hiding place when I walked right into Elara. I spun around, surprised to find her smiling sweetly before she shoved me back into the room. My fall caused the Stonebound to look directly at me.
“Let’s see just howspecialyou are, Pollard,” Elara spat, turning on her heels and running in the opposite direction.
I turned to the shadowed Stonebound as it flickered, but made its way toward me, screeching once again. I held my hands up, the power I had used still pulsing beneath my fingertips.
“Please,” I begged to my fingers, to the power that thrummed within my chest. “Please, help me. Do something.”
The amulet at my neck started to glow and heat just before the bright light that was my power flew out of my fingertips, breaking through Celeste’s illusion as if it were glass. The rest of the illusion of the moving corridors and walls faded away. I sat on the floor about twenty feet from Rowan, who was still encased in ice, while Elara glared at me from the other side of the room, a shield of crystal encasing her. I breathed deeply, suddenly feeling weak and exhausted, as if I had run a marathon. The muscles in my arms and hands spasmed, cramping with such intense pain that I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out.
It was quiet for a few brief moments before loud clapping echoed, coming from the open chamber door.
“Well done.” Richard Gaines’ loud, booming voice echoed through the room as he bounded in, still clapping slowly. “Well done, Mari. It seems, maybe, Alaric was correct after all. There is promise in you.”
Alaric was at my side before I could blink, his green eyes searching mine as he helped me up.
“Are you okay?” he asked after pulling me to my feet.
“I think so,” I mumbled as my hand went to my necklace. “I think this helped.”
Alaric looked down, taking the amulet in his hands, hissing when it burned him slightly.
“Yeah, it has a protection ward embedded inside of it,” he nodded. “I noticed it in the library when I gave you my ring. You said it was your Nana’s?”
“Yeah, been in our family for a while.”
“And she wasn’t a Bloodwright?” His eyebrow cocked in curiosity.
“Not that I know of, no.”
“Speaking of your ring,” Richard’s voice boomed again, forcing us to break our conversation. “We need to discuss the current situation with the two of you being Twinflames and all.”
Celeste paled, her eyes growing wide with shock. “Twinflames? Withher?”
My cheeks flushed with embarrassment as Alaric stood in front of me, blocking me from the others, acting as a shield.
“What did you think, Celeste? When you saw us in here training?”
