by Eva Chase
This triumph wasn’t the only one I had to celebrate. A couple hours ago I’d gotten a frantic call from my grandmother cajoling me to intercede on her and my grandfather’s behalf in a “misunderstanding” that had brought the blacksuits to their doorstep. “I’ll look into it,” I’d told her blandly, which wasn’t really a lie. I was curious to find out what Declan had dug up on them. But they’d face whatever their due punishment was.
He and his family should be safe from their machinations now. We’d see whether any sanctions laid were enough to get them off my back, but they had a lot less to threaten me with now.
“I need a top-up!” Shelby called, bringing around the tub she’d filled with paint for the students around the other side of the building. Benjamin exchanged a grin with her as he poured more in from the bucket. Was that a bit of a blush in my friend’s cheeks? Maybe she’d found even more than I’d expected with this project.
“So, you pulled it off,” a sour voice said.
My head jerked around. Sinclair had come up beside me, stopping a few feet away. She regarded the Naries with a frown. “Why the hell you want to do them all these favors to screw over the rest of us, I don’t know.”
“They’ve never been assholes to me,” I said. No need to point out the other side of that fact—most of the mage students had been.
Sinclair shrugged. “You’ve spent so much time coddling them, maybe you haven’t looked after everything else you really should have.”
I looked at her more sharply. “What are you talking about?” I had no idea what punishment Victory had faced for my trick with the voice illusion or whether she’d realized I’d orchestrated it, but her eyes had narrowed every time she’d seen me the last few days. I’d suspected yet another retaliation might be coming.
Sinclair smiled at me—a thin, tight little smile with about as much warmth as an icicle. “Sometimes it’s a trade-off. You can’t save everything. Let’s just say it’s the cat’s turn to play.”
The cat. Panic shot through me, and at the same time, as my thoughts leapt to my familiar, a distant sensation prickled into my chest. Something small and frantic, tinged with the urge to flee.
I was picking up a hint of Deborah’s feelings through the familiar bond. I spun around, my gaze snapping to my bedroom window high above us. What the fuck was Victory doing to my mouse now?
My legs tensed to run up to the dorm, but the vague impressions that reached me from my familiar gave me the sense that she was moving downward—toward me. Through the building? I stayed braced where I was, training all my attention on those clues, tuning out Sinclair’s gloating presence completely.
At the front of the building, the door swung open. A snicker I recognized instantly as Victory’s reached my ears. “Any second now,” she said to someone.
I started to storm around the hall to confront her, but I’d only made it two steps before I felt Deborah’s presence getting fainter. She was moving in the opposite direction. I backtracked and came around the other side of the building, my pulse thumping. What was going on? If she wasn’t coming to me, where was she going?
Footsteps scraped the ground on the other side of the building. Then a small white shape sprang from a tiny opening I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise between two of the hall’s stones. Deborah dashed away across the field toward the garage, her pale body flashing amid the blades of grass.
“Wait!” I called after her—and another furry shape bolted in the same direction. A much larger, cream-and-brown colored shape that dashed after Deborah with a flick of its slim tail: Victory’s cat familiar. With a few bounds, it was already closing the distance.
I had no idea how Victory had contrived to get Deborah out of the dorm—some sort of spell targeting her emotions, maybe, given the distress that had been thrumming off her before she’d even emerged?—but I had no doubt at all what she’d ordered her familiar to do if it caught the mouse. I threw myself after them as fast as my legs would carry me.
If casting magic on my familiar was fair play, I could do the same to hers. They were racing ahead of me so quickly, though, that I had to be careful to make sure whatever I cast hit the right target. If I slowed Deborah down instead, I’d be signing her death sentence.
I pushed myself faster, my legs burning. Thumps behind me told me I was being followed, but I couldn’t spare the focus to glance back. I narrowed all my attention onto the larger furry shape charging ahead of me.
“Stop,” I shouted with a surge of persuasive magic, but I mustn’t have aimed well enough. The cat ran on. I groped for an alternate strategy. “Box.”
Like the walls I’d used to protect me from Malcolm’s persuasive designs in the past, the physicality spell was crude but effective. A transparent but solid structure snapped into place around the cat. It was racing along too fast to register the change in time—its face smacked right into one wall. It rebounded with a screech.
Deborah was still running. I could barely make her out in the taller grass behind the garage now, but I didn’t want to shout out her real name. My enemies were smart enough to question whether I’d really have named a normal mouse “Deborah.”
“Squeak!” I called instead, resorting to the name I’d called her by for the four years before I’d known the mouse contained a human’s spirit. “Squeak, come to me!”
Either she’d forgotten that name belonged to her or she was too terrified to process anything. I was just coming up on the garage when her little white body scrambled up the concrete side of that building. Her claws scrabbled against the roughly textured surface, and she skidded halfway down again. I lunged forward and caught her in the middle of her second attempt.
My hands closed around her trembling body. She squirmed in my grasp. “Deborah,” I whispered to her. “Deborah, listen to me, you—”
Terror coursed from her into my chest. She flailed around and sank her teeth into my thumb, so deep the spike of pain made me yelp.
I managed to keep my grip on her, but other voices started hollering from behind me. I whipped around to see not just Victory but Cressida and Sinclair loping toward me.
Victory had just reached her familiar. She grimaced and shattered the spell I’d cast around the cat with a snapped word and a jerk of her hand. Then she pointed toward me.
Cressida called out a casting word. I didn’t know what her intention was until a bolt of energy smacked into my hands, heaving them apart. Deborah’s panicked form plummeted back to the ground.
“No!” I leapt after her, and Victory said something else in a cutting tone. A force like a steel bar slammed into my shins. I tumbled forward onto my hands and knees, a rock scraping my palm.
Deborah was dashing toward the forest now. I didn’t think she’d be all that much safer there, where she’d have other predators to contend with. Victory’s cat barreled after her in hot pursuit.
I shoved myself back onto my feet, my thoughts whirling as I tried to think of a spell to stop the animal that wouldn’t be easily shattered, a way to stop the three girls from stopping me yet again.
Too late. The cat coiled its muscles and threw itself into a pounce. A choked cry slipped from my lips—
—and a dark body hurtled out of the woods to slam the cat to the ground.
Malcolm’s wolf pinned the Siamese under its heavy paws, its lips pulled back in a growl. Victory and her friends jarred to a halt around me. The cat yowled, the wolf gnashed its teeth in warning, and Malcolm himself stepped out of the forest.
“What the hell, Mal?” Victory protested, half pouting, half seething. “Get your familiar off of mine!”
“We’re just making sure no one else’s familiar meets an untimely end,” Malcolm said, folding his arms over his chest. “Are you going to call off the cat?”
Now I was just as confused as Victory was. Stunned speechless might be more accurate. Thankfully, she had no problem asking the questions I would have for me.
“Are you serious?” my nemesis said, flingin
g her arm toward me. “I was messing with her. You should be helping me, not getting in the way.”
“I don’t think so.” Malcolm stepped forward to stand beside Shadow. “From now on, scion business stays between scions. I don’t want to see any of you hassling anyone in the pentacle, including Glinda here. Are we clear?”
Victory stared at him. “But— You said— This is fucking ridiculous, Malcolm. You know what she—”
Malcolm’s voice cut through hers, cool and firm. “Are. We. Clear?”
There was so much menace in his expression that she faltered. Half of her interest in harassing me had come from wanting to make good with him, I suspected, at least to begin with. And he, for some bizarre reason, was pulling that rug out from under her.
“We’re clear,” she said tightly.
“And if I call Shadow off your familiar, where are you going to take him?”
“Back to my dorm.” Her lips pursed. “Do you really—”
His eyes hardened even more. “Do I really need to remind you that arguing with me isn’t a good idea?”
The other two girls stood silent, shocked or wary or both. In the midst of the tension, it occurred to me that while Victory was focused on Malcolm, this was the perfect time for me to remind her just how bad an idea coming at me was.
I fixed my gaze on her and rolled a persuasive spell off my tongue like the lash of a whip. “You will not cast any more magic.”
Her mental shields had wavered in her bewilderment, and she hadn’t been paying attention to me anyway. I felt the spell spear straight through her protections into her mind. Victory flinched and jerked around to face me. “You—”
“Making sure you have to keep any promises you’re making,” I said as calmly as I could. My hands were still shaking where I’d clenched them at my sides. Deborah was out there somewhere, still in the grip of the magic Victory had possessed her with.
When Malcolm and the other scions had stolen my familiar before, they’d only tormented an illusion of her. Victory had meant to slaughter the real animal. I wasn’t so self-confident I believed the all-encompassing spell I’d just cast with my still-developing talents would last very long, but long enough to make Victory regret what she’d done today was all I needed.
She opened her mouth, maybe to try to mutter a spell, because her voice didn’t emerge. She couldn’t do it. She glared at me and turned back to Malcolm. “I’m going. If you want me to take my familiar with me, call yours off him.”
Malcolm snapped his fingers. That was all the command the wolf needed. It bounded away gracefully, and the cat sprang up with its back arched. When Victory clucked her tongue to it, it streaked across the field to her side. She scooped it up with comforting murmurs, aimed one more glower at me as if this whole situation was somehow my fault, and stalked off with her lackeys flanking her.
“That was cold, Glinda,” Malcolm said with an amused gleam in his eyes. “Slipping that spell in like that.”
“She deserved it.” And I didn’t particularly want the Nightwood scion’s approval. I let out a ragged breath and scanned the field. My thumb throbbed where Deborah had bitten it. I tucked it, welling blood and all, against my palm. “If you wouldn’t mind going somewhere else with Shadow, I’d appreciate it. I still have to find my familiar and wake her up from whatever Victory cast on her.”
“You should be able to get a sense of her through the familiar bond.”
“I know. I don’t need your help.” I paused. “And if you’re sticking around waiting for me to thank you for stepping in just now, don’t think I’ve forgotten that you’re the one who egged Victory on in the whole ‘destroy Rory’ campaign in the first place. I don’t know why you’re telling her off now, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust that it’s from the goodness of your heart.”
“Rory…” His jaw tensed. At the tap of his fingers, Shadow trotted to his side. “I meant what I said to her. Anyone who takes you on will have to answer to me. Whatever we still have to work out between us, that’s between us, and we can do it like colleagues, no more campaigns of destruction.”
Oh, he’d just decided that, had he? How wonderful for him. I didn’t know what he thought we still had to work out. All I’d ever wanted was for him to stay the hell away from me.
“Great,” I said. “Maybe next time a new scion turns up, you can follow that philosophy a few months sooner. Can you please leave now? I have no problem with your wolf, but I don’t think my familiar is going to calm down while there’s one around.”
Malcolm looked as if he almost said something else, but whatever it was, he thought better of it. He dipped his head to me with an unreadable expression and strode away, Shadow following at his heel.
I took several slow breaths to steady myself, and a thin thread of emotion crept back into my chest. Deborah. I walked closer to the forest, calling out a little louder now that there was no one around to hear me other than her. “Deborah? Deborah, it’s okay now. There’s nothing hunting you. It’s just me here. Rory.”
I paced along the edge of the forest for a minute before the underbrush rustled. A little white head poked from between the leaves. Her voice traveled distantly into my head. Lorelei?
Relief washed through me. I knelt down and held out my uninjured hand to her, and my familiar scampered onto it, trembling but still in one piece.
“There you go,” I said softly. “I’ve got you. You’re okay now.”
I tried not to think about the fact that she might not have been if it’d come down to just me—that I might owe her life to the last guy on Earth I’d have wanted to owe anything to.
Chapter Thirty-One
Rory
“You know,” Jude said, “technically this competition is over. You can stop working on your project now.”
I shot him a mock-glower where we were standing in the field outside the clubhouse. “You know I didn’t work on this just for the competition.”
The tang of new paint still hung in the air, but the building was completely finished. A couple hours ago, before the Nary students had headed home for a week’s break before the fall term started, happy voices had been carrying through the windows. We fearmancer students had an assembly to announce the winner of the project competition in a few minutes, but I didn’t need any official recognition to feel triumphant.
Jude grinned at me. “Yeah, well, it was worth a try. You push yourself awfully hard. I guess it’s a good thing you have the two of us around to make sure you take a breather now and then.”
“It is,” Connar agreed with a chuckle. He straightened up from where he’d been kneeling a few feet from Jude. “I think that ward’s completely solid. We’ll still want to check on them periodically, but no one’s taking this building down without a lot of concentrated effort.”
I wasn’t sure what warmed me more—his effortless use of “we” to mean the three of us or the memory of the treatment I’d gotten during the last breather these two had arranged for me.
Jude’s eyes twinkled as if he knew what I was thinking about. He grabbed my hand and tugged me closer to him. “And I don’t think Ms. Grimsworth will look kindly on that kind of destruction once this project is named the winning effort of the summer. Too bad none of the Naries know to thank you.”
“I’m okay with that,” I said. I wished I’d been able to do more. This was a step in the right direction, giving them an escape from the mage students who preyed on them, but it still gnawed at me that the school encouraged the rest of us to prey on them at all.
That would end once I could dismantle this place with the help of the joymancers. I had trouble picturing exactly what fearmancer society would look like in the aftermath, but at least I could now say there were people ready to lead who didn’t prioritize cruelty. And the documents Professor Banefield had led me to would hopefully get me one step closer to that goal. We had a week off for the end of summer after this assembly, and I planned to spend all of it tracking down more informa
tion to better understand the pieces he’d given me.
Connar glanced at his phone. “We should get going if we want Rory at the assembly to receive her prize.”
Jude sighed dramatically. “And here I was hoping we could take the opportunity to break in the new building with a little… action.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
I swatted his arm. “We’re not going to go desecrating the place we just finished shutting people like us out of. We’ve got the whole rest of campus to make use of.”
“Hmm. True.” He kissed my cheek. “And what do you say we find some part of it to make use of before we all head home.”
A flush spread all through my body. “I might be on board with that,” I said, my pulse thumping even faster when I saw the hunger that had lit in Connar’s eyes too. “But assembly first. We don’t even know that I’m going to win.”
Jude scoffed. “If you don’t, I’ll stage a protest. Let’s go, then, Ice Queen.”
Many students were already heading toward the Stormhurst Building. We merged with that current, letting it carry us along to the gymnasium where our summer project had first been announced. The platform was set up at the far end as before, Ms. Grimsworth standing near the podium speaking with Professor Crowford. At the sight of him, remembering his name on my mentor’s list alongside the barons, my skin tightened.
As we waited for the rest of the students to trickle in, my phone chimed. I fished it out to see Lillian Ravenguard had texted me. I understand the summer project results are being announced today. Let me know how yours turned out!
All of me tightened seeing those friendly words. I had no idea just how complicit Lillian might be in the horrors I’d faced since arriving here—and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to take her to task. Since I’d retrieved Banefield’s records, I hadn’t spoken to her at all, and things could stay that way for the time being. I shoved the phone back into my purse without replying.