‘That’s right.’ I squirm in my seat, wondering what else she might have overheard over the course of our classes.
‘Do you mind if I …?’ She stands and gestures to me as she walks around to my side of the desk. ‘I’d like to try something if it’s all right with you.’
‘Oh, sure,’ I stand up.
She offers me a soft encouraging smile before gesturing for me to hold out my hands. Her fingers are soft and warm when they take hold of mine. She places both of my hands on top of each other, palms facing down, then cups her hands around mine. Her eyes flutter closed.
We stand there for several breaths, encased in silence as I watch her eyes move about behind her closed lids. Her lips purse as she concentrates. It feels like forever before she finally opens her eyes and lets go of my hands.
‘I am very curious about you, Arianell. I have never seen someone with such a powerful block over their magic before.’
‘A block? What is that?’
‘It means you need to dig deeper.’
‘Y-you sensed my magic?’
Her head starts to shake and the hope I didn’t know I was holding onto slips from between my fingers and pools at my feet. ‘I sensed that you have a block, a very strong one at that. If you can break through that and figure out why it’s there, it might be possible there is magic laying beneath.’
Possible.
‘How do I do that? I don’t even know what to look for.’ A block? I’ve never even heard of that before, let alone know how orwhyI would have one.
‘I’ll have a look in some of the books I have lying around and see what I come up with. I’m going to be blunt here, Arianell. I’ve never peered inside of someone and felt such pushback. It was like you were forcing me back out of your head. It was rather jarring. Not even your brother felt like that, and I find siblings to have rather similar magic signatures.’
‘My brother? You felt his magic signature? What was it like?’
‘Your brother was much like Mr Davis when I first met him. Full of potential – only he knew it.’
‘That’s because he was good at everything.’
Amusement dances behind her eyes. ‘He was good at a lot of things, Arianell. But noteverything.’
‘Sure.’ Maybe she didn’t know him very well.
‘I’m serious. In fact, your brother was failing his Sympathetic Magic class. I caught him and that little menace of a third year, Jed Griffin, cheating one morning when I was relieving Professor Kroff.’
‘No,’ I gasp. ‘That doesn’t sound like Lukas.’ There is no way my brother would cheat or need to.
‘It’s true. He’d been having Jed Griffin help him pass that class since first year. I was about to take it to the board and make him resit every exam since first year but then … well then …’ Her words die off, and a small frown passes over her face.
Though I know what she was going to say.
You can’t exactly punish a student when he’s already dead.
FORTY-THREE
Stars, I’m exhausted. I feel it in my bones. I swear I’ve never had so much happen to me all in one day until I arrived here. There’s never justonething that comes out of the woodwork, it’s always everything, all at once. And I’m scared that soon I’m just going to lay down and not want to get up to face whatever the day holds next.
Like now, as I walk up the stairs to my room, the thought of locking myself in there and not coming out calls to me like a siren song. I just want to hide. I’m bone tired, I’m mentally drained. I almost died! Again! And Sebastian and I … Stars, I let him touch me – taste me. Worse, I liked it.Morethan liked it. It tipped my entire world on its axis and now I don’t know what I’ll do the next time I see him.
Or what I’ll do if he sleeps in my room again tonight. Though, surely it won’t be him. He wouldn’t, not after the way I left him to leave with Tilly.
I’m not ready for it, I decide. I’m not ready to find out. I don’t want to walk in there and find him waiting for me because what the hell will I say?
The fact that I’m more concerned about how intimate we got than I am over slipping off a cliff is more than worrisome; it’s downright psychotic. Something is broken inside of my head.
The door to my floor passes by as I continue to walk up the stairs. I’ll face my room soon, but first there’s someone else I need to talk to. I just hope he’s here.
