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CHAPTER

42

RAYNA

I spun around to find an Element Wielder in the doorframe, electricity sparking from their fingers as if prepared to fry me alive for the intrusion.

Time to play drunk again. I sagged against the wall behind me and nodded at the open window. “I just needed fresh air. I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Ew, get out of my room before you make a mess!”

The Element Wielder hurried toward me to swat me out like I was a buzzing insect, the sparks dying at her fingertips. I staggered toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t notice the pen still laying on her desk with the drawer open. If she’d just turned her back to it, I could use my magic to—

Another door banged open across the hall. Quinn’s.

But it wasn’t just Quinn who stepped out, flushed and breathless.

Wilder—my ex from Alderwick—stepped out, too.

I had one moment to take them in before I was blinking rapidly, hurrying away. Down the hall, to the spiral staircase, stumbling over my feet for a completely different reason now.

“Wait! Rayna!”

Quinn caught up to me, stopping me with a hand clamping my shoulder. When I turned, her face was ashen.

“Listen,” she panted. “I-I swear, I didn’t purposely start dating him to… to hurt you or anything. It just happened. We started talking at the beginning of last year, right after that party where we both ran into him, and one thing led to another and—”

“Quinn.” I shook my head. “It’s fine.”

Truly, it was. How could I explain to her that I couldn’t care less about her dating Wilder, but that I felt guilty for snooping on her two years in a row and discovering a secret she’d obviously been trying to hide? He must have been the male voice Dazmine and I had heard on the other side of her door last year.

No, the only betrayal that rippled through me was the fact that she’d once ridiculed me for going to a Mind Manipulator party. She claimed to hate Mind Manipulators because her mother was one, yet Wilder was one, too.

Quinn seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. She yanked her gaze up to the ceiling and breathed out, “He’s different than her. He’s never controlled me, never made me do anything I don’t want to. I didn’t realize they could be like that. I thought once you got that power, you became an asshole.”

“No,” I said softly. “Your mom was just an asshole all on her own, Quinn.”

She jerked her head back down. There was a moment where we stared at each other, and I could almost believe we were still the same two girls from Alderwick. Sitting cross-legged in a tiny treehouse in the jungle, gossiping about one of the smallest villages on the island as if it were our whole world.

Then another voice called my name. More frantic than I’d ever heard it.

“Rayna!”

The spiral staircase thump, thump, thumped as Gileon barrelled into view from the topmost floor, chest heaving, his once-slicked hair poking up in spikes like quills. A cloud of rhinoceros beetles surrounded him, buzzing over each other so loudly I couldn’t pick out what any individual beetle was saying.

“Gil! Are you okay?”

My thoughts jumped straight to Fergus during our first year. How he’d bullied Gileon mercilessly. Had someone else been picking on him? I scanned his face for cuts or bruises, only to find nothing. Nothing but a shimmer of cold sweat.

Gileon didn’t even seem to notice Quinn standing there. He grabbed me by the elbows, forehead furrowed and voice shaking.

“I was getting really hot so I went to the roof to cool down, and all of Nuisance’s friends found me. They say Coen’s in trouble in… what was it?”

The beetles buzzed out the same word over and over again.

“Wasteon. Wasteon. Wasteon.”

Gileon nodded. “Yeah. Wasteon. Dyonisia was waiting for him there.”