And here was the proof.
Or was it more like proof of the kind of magic he could do? She saw what he had at his hip. Attached to his belt with a loop of leather. Simple looking, for someone like him—just plain, dark wood tapering down to an almost sharp-seeming point. But unmistakable all the same.
A wand. He had a whole actual wand.
One that he could just use anytime he liked.
She even thought he might, right then and there, on her. His hand hung very close to it, open and just a little tense.Like a gunslinger, she thought, waiting to draw and shoot her dead.
And it would shoot her dead, too.
She had absolutelynothingto defend herself with. No wand of her own—students didn’t even get one until they had mastered the basic forms. And she was nowhere near mastering anything at all. Sometimes she had strange dreams, and when she woke things had shifted around. But nothing concrete. Certainly, nothing that could hurt him. And he plainly knew it. It was all over his smug face. It was in the way he stood there, blocking her path. “Are you going to let me past?” she stuttered out finally.
Then watched his lips peel back over those unsettlingly large teeth.
Like some approximation of a smile.
“Maybe you should just try,” he said, accent exactly as shecould have predicted. Every word seemingly dragged from low down in his throat, and so clear and clean it made her think of cut glass, the good crystal, crisp air.
Old money, she thought automatically.
And it made her bristle. Her face heated; she went to go around him in a blundering rush. But he stepped to his left when she stepped to her right, and she almost ran right into him. She got a wave of his scent, like winter air when you open a window. Something seemed to brush the back of her hand, the flat of her thigh.
However, when she looked, she could see she had never actually gotten close enough to touch him. It was just the space between them, so strangely heavy it rubbed against her. It left her wanting to scratch, to shake it off. She thought of spiders running across her skin and dropped a bag.
Then two more followed when she went to pick it up.
She scrambled for them, on her hands and knees now, and was sure she heard him laughing. But when she glanced up, red-faced and sweaty and full of things she wanted to spit at him, the look on his face stopped her dead. His eyes had darkened to the deepest black she could imagine, entirely lightless and empty. And there was a kind of strain about his features, a tension—as if he was trying to force himself not to do something.
And she suspected this something was very wicked indeed.
It made her heart jump in her chest, just seeing a hint of it. Every angry word fell back down her throat so abruptly she had to swallow to stop them choking her. Then somehow, she found herself scrambling back across the floor. Heels digging into what was probably marble, hands behind her, frantically sliding.
While he stood there, calm and still and cruel-eyed.
Almost impassive in a way that somehow felt more terrifying. She could only stand ten seconds of it before she turned, and stumbled to her feet, and ran back the way she came. And she only stopped when she realized:
She had left her suitcases behind.
Chapter Two
She expected him to do something terrible to her belongings. After all, that was what bullies usually did. Michael Matheson had once hung her PE shorts from the falling-down eaves of their high school roof. Her life was littered with boys throwing her books, her homework, her bags into places she couldn’t reach them.
She couldn’t imagine this would be different. She’d get to the assessment hall and find her underwear hung across it like a banner. Or arranged on the floor to spell something out. She would almost make it through and find the wordsfat assblocking her path. Then end up being decapitated by some lobbed spell, because the sight of it had thrown her.
But when she finally made it, there was nothing of the kind.
There was just a great drafty room, divided into four lines of extremely nervous-looking students. And he didn’t even seem to be among them—though she knew he was definitely supposed to be. At Harrowhall, it didn’t matter how many years you’d been attending, or what kind of advanced level you’d made it to, or how many perks you had attained prior to right now.
You faced the assessment, all the same.
And you risked losing every bit of privilege you’d managed to grab, she thought, as she took in all the greedy gazes, lighting on anyone who looked particularly weak. Which, of course, only made the whole thing scarier. Her heart was a trapped rabbit in her chest when she finally forced herself to join one of the lines. Sweat prickled beneath her arms and over the nape of her neck. And her head swam with everything she’d tried to memorize from the guide.
Cupped, closed, clenched, she murmured to herself over and over.
Though she wasn’t entirely sure what good that would do. There was no guarantee that knowing the names of the basic forms would make magic happen. All she knew for sure was that so far, there was nothing. Nothing when she’d tentatively tried in her bedroom at home. Nothing now, as she fumbled through each move.
Furtively, because nobody around her seemed to be doing the same. In fact, the girl behind her—as pretty as Mina was plain, doe-eyed and skin glowing a deep brown, hair as lustrous as black ink from a pot—looked positively mystified by what she was doing. Her lips parted, as if to ask. But then she seemed to draw back, embarrassed. As if it was wrong to even inquire about it, somehow.
