by Eva Chase
“You could do spectacular magic,” I insisted as we came up on his car. “And you will again if I have anything to say about it. He owed you a whole lot more than he ever gave you.”
Jude let go of my hand but stayed close enough to brush his fingers over my cheek before he went to the driver’s side. “I’m just trying to stay realistic, Rory.”
I didn’t know what I could say that would take away the pain that rang through those words. As long as I’d known him, Jude had struggled to believe he was enough—for me, for his friends, for this school, for his entire community. And that was while he’d been the most talented illusionary mage on campus. If his capacity for magic never came back, if he could never cast more than tiny spells ever again… I hated to think what he’d believe about himself then.
All I could do was keep showing him how much he mattered to me no matter what his abilities were. I slid into the passenger seat beside him. “I’ll still want to be with you no matter what kind of magic you can do. You know that, don’t you?”
He chuckled. “I know I can’t imagine you saying anything else.”
“And I’m paying for this dinner, by the way.”
“Hold on there.” He gunned the engine and whipped out of the parking spot smooth as silk. “It’s my magic that’s been draining away, not my bank account.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I know you don’t need me to. But I’m picking the restaurant, and I don’t want any complaints about it. Anyway, my bank accounts are holding up just fine too, and you’ve paid every time we’ve been in New York.”
“When we go to my apartment, you’re my guest. It’s simply what’s polite.”
“Like you usually care so much about politeness.” I elbowed him lightly. “Consider yourself my guest at this place.”
The restaurant I’d chosen was one I’d been to with Shelby a few times. I hadn’t yet found anything on the menu that left me unsatisfied, but it wasn’t fancy, which was why Jude might have turned his nose up a little if I hadn’t put my foot down ahead of time. The little building held just eight tables, catered to by a husband and wife. The wife was the head chef, and the husband worked as the sole waiter. It had a homey feeling that I never quite got anywhere on campus.
The owners cared a lot about their patrons, clearly. The husband beamed at us as we came in and made a point of mentioning the new pasta dish on the menu, probably because I’d swooned over the one I’d tried last time. His wife passed by the kitchen doorway and shot me a wave. After I’d taken the pasta suggestion and Jude had asked for a steak, my date watched with some amusement as the man hustled off.
“How often have you been here?”
“Three or four times in the past couple months. I think they try to pay attention to anyone who starts to become a regular.”
Jude broke apart one of the fresh rolls from the basket on the table and inhaled the crisp doughy scent with a sigh. “They know how to bake. That’s a good start.” He contemplated the rest of the space with its simple décor, the exposed brick wall at the other end of the room, a tinkling of folk music drifting from speakers overhead. “I’m guessing you’d have come with your Nary friend before. Have you heard much from her?”
He had a certain investment in Shelby. One of his illusions had startled her into breaking her wrist, and he’d somehow arranged to have it magically healed despite the school rules forbidding that kind of intervention, so that she could continue her musical studies at the university. With a little help from me, she’d gotten hired on at a prestigious orchestra not long ago. Thank God I’d gotten her off campus before the full-out torture had begun.
“I got to see her first official performance last week,” I said, a smile crossing my lips at the memory. She’d looked so intent in the midst of the other musicians, gripping her cello, but it’d been a joyful sort of intensity. I’d never seen her grin quite as brightly as when she’d taken her bow at the end. “She’s loving the work. A lot better than still being stuck at Blood U.”
“Especially the way things are now.”
“Yeah.” I cringed, remembering the events right before I’d gone to meet him. “They’ve filled her spot in my dorm with a new Nary student. Some of the other girls launched right into her. I don’t know how any of them are going to survive even a month without having a nervous breakdown.”
“The pricks around campus have to ease off once they’ve gotten their fill of flinging their power around,” Jude said, but the corners of his mouth had slanted downward. He ripped the roll into a couple more pieces, but didn’t move to eat any of them. After a stretch of silence, he added, “It’s partly my fault, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
He waved his hand in the vague direction of the university. “The fact that so many people there think it’s okay to give the Naries nervous breakdowns. I used to hassle them all the time in the subtle ways that we had to resort to before. I talked shit about them. Most of the other kids looked up to me as a scion. I made it seem okay to think that way.”
His voice had gone raw. A lump rose in my throat. I reached over to clasp his hand. “The way most fearmancers look at them, I don’t think you swayed them that much. They’d still have had their parents and friends and whoever else saying it was okay. And now you can be a model for rising above that crap.”
“If anyone’s paying attention.” He frowned at our joined hands. “I helped make this stupid policy happen, and that just means I’ll have to help even more to tear it down. Whatever it takes.”
Chapter Eleven
Malcolm
Even if I hadn’t thought the Naries deserved better, I’d have believed most of my peers on campus looked like a bunch of jackasses. They’d had a few days to get used to the new rush of power, and still every time I crossed the green, one idiot or another was making some over-the-top spell to harass the nonmagical students. I expected the only reason the Naries came out onto the green at all was their dorms and classrooms weren’t any safer. Some of them holed up in the clubhouse Rory had arranged for them, the magical protections on which were holding, but they couldn’t live in there.
Didn’t my classmates realize how pathetic their demonstrations made them out to be? As if they couldn’t find ways to generate the fear that powered their magic in any way that wasn’t a total horror show? I could command enough nervous respect with just a glance and a shift in my stance to keep me well-fueled. They were probably wasting most of the magic they were collecting making their terrorizing spells so grandiose.
So much for fearmancer discipline.
When I came out of the tower to some genius splitting cracks across the whole lawn while a couple of Naries scrambled to avoid tripping, exasperation and pity collided inside me. I let them spill out in pure irritation.
“Do you mind?” I said to the junior who was controlling the spell, letting plenty of acid seep into my tone. “Some of us have important things to do, places to get to. If you’re that magic-starved, find a better strategy—one that doesn’t make you look like a clown and inconvenience the rest of us.”
The junior’s face paled at the sight of me. He mumbled a couple of quick words to close up the gouges in the soil and scurried away with a hastily tossed out apology. And a healthy boost of fear, which hadn’t required any spell-casting at all, let alone tormenting people who didn’t have a chance at defending themselves.
I hadn’t heard Rory coming out of the tower behind me. She touched my arm as she came up beside me, the brush of her fingers provoking an instant flood of heat despite everything else I’d been feeling.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever not react to the affection she offered so easily now. Not that she could offer all that much here in public view. We were still keeping the more intimate part of our relationship secret until I could be sure it wouldn’t cause even more problems for her with the barons.
“That’s the strategy I’ve been taking too,” she said quietly. “Focus on how the harassment affects us rather
than the Naries. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.”
“It should be enough for them to cut it out by itself,” I muttered. Didn’t my father and the other older barons see how pathetic this policy made them look? They’d turned the school into a caricature of itself. We might as well officially rename the place Villain Academy now.
But Dad had brushed off the disparaging observations I’d passed on to him, telling me it would all come together well in time.
“They don’t seem likely to back off without being forced to.” Rory’s other arm tucked across her stomach as if to hug herself. When I glanced at her, worry lines had formed at the corners of her mouth. She’d been holding it together incredibly well, but I couldn’t imagine how much watching this catastrophe was hurting that big heart of hers. Watching and pretending she didn’t hate every second of it.
“Are you doing all right?” I asked. She’d been through an awful lot in the past half a year, no small part of it at my hands. Most of the rest hadn’t been anything I could really help her with. I was a Nightwood, even if my parents had forgotten what they’d always taught me that name was supposed to mean; I’d taken lead with the scions my whole life. I was going to find a way to make this right for the woman beside me or die trying.
“You know…” She shrugged with a twist of her mouth. We couldn’t talk all that openly out here anyway.
“Let’s go down to the lounge,” I said. No one outside the pentacle of scions would intrude on us there. I was supposed to meet up with a few of my dormmates soon, but that could wait.
Rory crossed the green with me. Inside Ashgrave Hall, we headed down the stairs to the big basement room I’d claimed for the scions’ use during my first year on campus. Not everything we’d experienced down there had been pleasant, but walking into the broad space with its pale walls and leather seating, breathing in the cool air with the slightest tang of alcohol from the bar cabinet, I always felt a little more centered.
The Bloodstone scion let out a rush of breath and leaned back against the closed door. She closed her eyes for a second as if gathering herself. When she opened them again, her indigo gaze fixed on me, as intent and fond as the moment not that long ago when she’d told me she loved me.
The memory sent a giddy tremor through my chest. I hadn’t expected to hear those words from her, not any time soon. I’d thought I had so much more to prove. But she’d seen me, believed in me, without needing an endless stream of groveling. Not that I’d have avoided the groveling if that’d been what it took.
My body moved of its own accord to do what I hadn’t been able to outside—what I hadn’t had the opportunity to do in days. I stepped up to her, slipping one hand over her cheek as I set the other on her waist, and drew her into a kiss.
Rory swayed into me as she kissed me back. Everywhere our bodies touched, mine caught fire. I tugged her even closer against me, kissing her harder, coaxing a pleased sound from her throat with the teasing of my tongue.
There wasn’t much I’d rather have done than strip the clothes off her and bring her to the trembling, moaning bliss we’d shared before, but right now I didn’t really want to get into that somewhere anyone, even my friends, might interrupt us. I was willing to share, and I appreciated what the other scions brought into Rory’s life… but some moments I wanted to just be for the two of us.
Besides, Rory was already nudging me back with an amused if also hungry gleam in her eyes. “I thought you suggested we come down here so that we could talk.”
“What can I say? I’ll take my opportunities as I get them.” I tucked my arm around her waist, reining my other desires in. “Have things taken a turn for the worse with your mother?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s pretty much the same. It’s just harder, as things get worse, to keep my mouth shut as much as I have to. What if I don’t find out anything from her after all? How can we convince the barons they’re wrong? And we still don’t even know what they might have in the works that could be even more horrible.”
“I don’t like going along with them either,” I said. “But—look what happened to Connar and to Jude when they pushed back openly. We’re strong mages, but I’m not so reckless as to think it’d be a good idea for us to go up against four barons with decades more experience than we have. What would our end goal even be? Brainwashing them into submission?”
Even as frustrated as I was with my father, after seeing Connar in the grips of that kind of spell, the thought of ordering around anyone possessed like that nauseated me. Maybe the barons weren’t better than that, but I damn well was.
“I don’t know.” Rory sighed. “If more families were willing to push back, there’d be a point where they’d have to listen, right?”
“I have been chatting up a lot of my classmates. There are a few I’m pretty sure are uncomfortable with the new status quo—they definitely haven’t been joining in with the fearmongering. The difficult part is going to be getting them from uncomfortable to defiant. No one’s going to be all that keen on talking back to the barons.”
“Of course not. If we can figure out enough people who feel that way, though, it might be easier to encourage them all to stand up together.”
As her brow knit, she worried her lower lip under her teeth in a way that made me want to go back to kissing her.
“I’ll keep putting out feelers,” I said. “There’ll be more families who are on the fence or outright against the new policy. Then all we’ll need is a call to action, and we’ll know who to turn to.”
“Right. So, I’d better get a move on figuring out what a useful action would be.”
“Hey.” I set my hands on her shoulders, gazing down at her. At this beautiful, determined, passionate woman I’d somehow failed to properly appreciate when she’d first blazed into my life. “We’ll get there. I know that, because I know there’s no way in hell you’ll give up until we do, and I’ve seen enough times that when Rory Bloodstone sets her mind to accomplishing something, you’d better believe she’s going to make it happen.”
The corners of her mouth quirked upward, and I couldn’t resist leaning in again. The soft brush of her lips against mine set off such a potent combination of protectiveness, admiration, and lust that my heart literally skipped a beat.
How the fuck was I ever going to give this woman up? She was everything I could possibly have wanted in a partner, and she was the only person like that I’d ever met.
I didn’t give a shit about heirs or succession or even being officially tied together. There were other Nightwoods; there’d be other generations even if I didn’t provide them. The pang in my heart said it clearly as anything: I’d have happily ruled as Baron Nightwood alone and accepted whatever time I could get with Rory around that role if it meant I still had her. I wouldn’t have been going along with this bizarre relationship the five of us had right now if that wasn’t true.
But Rory would need heirs, and for that she needed an actual husband. What were the chances he’d accept her having other lovers on the side? Rory wouldn’t have been Rory if she’d have been okay with sneaking around on someone she cared about.
So I didn’t say any of those thoughts out loud. I just kissed her once more and murmured, because this time I wanted to say it first, “I love you.”
Rory wrapped her arms around me in a brief but tight embrace. “I love you too,” she said back, the words lighting me up inside just as much as they had the first time. The fact that she could love three other guys at the same time, and show us all so much caring, was just one more incredible thing about her.
“Did the pep talk help?” I asked with a crooked smile as I eased back.
“A little.” Her own smile turned mischievous. “I did manage to convince Malcolm Nightwood to see things my way, so maybe I should give myself a little more credit.”
I guffawed and gave her hair a light tug. “You definitely should. Go get ‘em. I’ve got to kick some ass on the squash court now.”
<
br /> Her smile and her touch and even her sweet scent lingered with me as I headed up to my dorm to change into more sport-appropriate clothing. When I made it out to the squash court next to the main gym in the Stormhurst Building, the three guys I’d arranged to play with were all waiting, their stances vaguely impatient until they saw me and snapped to attention. None of them was going to admit he was pissed off that the heir of Nightwood had taken his time coming down.
I grabbed a racket, spun it in my hand, and launched right into my real purpose for suggesting this game. Rory needed me to be holding up my end of the deal—and I intended to find every potential ally I could as soon as possible.
“Got held up leaving class,” I said, keeping my tone casual but watching my companions’ reactions carefully. “Another idiot throwing around spells at the Naries, not caring whose way he gets in. I never thought I’d say this, but I kind of miss discretion.”
Chapter Twelve
Rory
The Uber driver dropped me off just before the looming gate of the Bloodstone residence. I pretended not to notice the curious look he shot me. After he’d driven off, I crept to the gate and opened it with a soft murmur of Bloodstone magic, easing it aside just far enough for me to slip through the gap.
I didn’t want to give anyone in the house obvious warning that I was on my way. For the same reason, I’d parked my own car in the nearest town and gotten that Uber.
I’d been supposed to meet my mother at one of her offices today. She’d texted me a couple hours ago calling off our plans, saying unexpected business had come up that she needed to handle on her own. Declan was out at the Fortress of the Pentacle doing some research in their records—he’d been able to confirm she hadn’t ended up there.