Royals of Villain Academy 2: Vile Sorcery

by Eva Chase

  Hadn’t it been obvious? I motioned to my hands. “The razors. They just came out of nowhere, and I couldn’t stop them, and the illusion of the pain got so intense…”

  Razeden’s normally impassive expression had turned befuddled. “Razors?”

  They hadn’t exactly been subtle. “Yeah,” I said, frowning. “They hit a couple of the other people, and then they stabbed my own hands… You must have seen them.”

  The look Razeden was giving me made my stomach churn all over again. “I didn’t see any weapons at all—definitely not any on or around you. Are you… are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I couldn’t exactly imagine—” I stopped. That was what I’d done, wasn’t it? They hadn’t been part of the room’s illusionary effect, the one that projected out for everyone in the space to see. They’d only appeared to my senses. Like the undulating of the ground outside right before Malcolm had taunted me.

  How the hell could he have done this, though? Even if he could have cast from all the way outside the tower, which from what everyone I’d ever talked to had said was doubtful, there was no way he could know what the desensitization chamber was showing me to make his illusion fit. If it’d been one of the times when he and the other scions had appeared to harangue and assault me, I’d have happily shredded his fake self with a handy pair of knives.

  Razeden was still eyeing me as if I’d started talking in tongues. “It was a separate illusion,” I said quickly. “It must have been. I swear I saw them—I felt them—but if you couldn’t, then it wasn’t part of the exercise.”

  “There’s no one here who could have cast an additional illusion.”

  “No one could from outside the room?”

  He shook his head. “It’s warded. No one wants outside magic influencing the process we go through in here, even accidentally.”

  But then—

  The memory rose up in my head of Malcolm’s last ominous remark, the lilt I thought I’d heard in his voice. The ghostly flickers that had crept into my vision when I’d left him behind to head down here. My throat constricted.

  He couldn’t have known exactly what I’d see, how the shadows would lie on the floor, on my way here either. It was as if my mind had generated those illusions just like it fed into the spells on this room.

  “Is it possible to cast a spell on someone’s mind that’ll kick in when you’re not around?” I asked abruptly. “Or, I don’t know, that you can quickly trigger after the fact even if they’re shielded right then?” Malcolm definitely hadn’t broken through my defenses. I knew what that felt like.

  Razeden frowned. “I wouldn’t say that’s unheard of, but it’s uncommon. To embed a spell that securely and effectively takes sustained casting over a long period of time while the subject is vulnerable. Even from within the dorm rooms, it’d be difficult for anyone at a student’s skill level to direct a powerful enough spell through one of the walls. I assume you’ve kept your bedroom secure so no one else would have access.”

  “As far as I know, I have.” Deborah would have noticed if anyone was sneaking in and casting spells on me for ‘sustained’ periods while I slept, anyway.

  “There’s also a certain level of magic that can be transmitted via a person’s familiar,” Razeden said, “if the caster has access to the animal and not their intended target.”

  Yeah, no. Even when the scions had kidnapped my mouse, they’d only had her for an hour at most. Since then, she’d stayed more out of the way than I did.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’m making excuses.” Maybe Malcolm had managed to slip past my shield without my noticing? My head was starting to ache just trying to figure it out. “I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end. Today was a bust.”

  “You’ve made progress. Every attempt teaches you something.” Razeden paused when we reached the door. “If you believe someone is interfering with your training, Miss Bloodstone, you must do whatever you can to push back, just as you push back against the illusions in here.”

  Not, “Come tell me about it and I’ll help.” Not, “Take it up with the headmistress.” Push back. Because that was all part of the Villain Academy training too, wasn’t it?

  I restrained myself from making a face, but the comment stirred something in me, connecting to the thing Razeden had said about familiars.

  I’d been so focused on learning to defend myself and figuring out what was happening with Professor Banefield that I’d set my most important mission aside. No matter what else happened, I still needed to figure out a way to push back against this entire university and the people who ran it like a battle royale.

  Almost every mage here had a familiar. All of the scions did, as far as I knew. I might not be able to get into the mindset of a fearmancer all that easily, but animals were animals. How much could I influence what went on here if I made the sort of “friends” no one would expect?

  How much could I unsettle the guy who was making a career out of unnerving me?

  I walked back to Ashgrave Hall tentatively, watching for new illusions, but if Malcolm had sparked some effect in my head before, it appeared to have faded away. The uneasiness still coursed through me despite my best efforts to tamp down on it. Setting my jaw, I stopped by my dorm room for just long enough to grab some leftover chicken out of the fridge. Then I headed out to the small wooden building at the far edge of the eastern field.

  The door wasn’t locked. The inside of the building looked bigger than the outside, with a hall and just three doors leading into the inner rooms. Right now, only the one closest to the door had a name tag on it. Shadow.

  There was a little barred window at waist height. I knelt down and peered into the space on the other side. A dry but distinctly doggy smell tickled my nose.

  Nails clicked against the concrete floor on the other side. Bright eyes gleamed with the light filtering through the window on the wall inside the wolf’s stall. Malcolm’s familiar peered back at me with a huff of hot breath.

  “Hey, boy,” I said softly, remembering how Malcolm had talked to the wolf after he’d sicced it on me weeks ago. “You must get pretty lonely cooped up in here all day. Thought I’d come keep you company for a little bit. I brought a snack.”

  The wolf started to growl low in its throat, but the sound cut off the second I poked a piece of chicken through the bars. It snatched the chunk up in a flash and gulped it down. Its muzzle sniffled against the window for more.

  “Are you going to be nice?” I asked it. “No more of that growling?”

  The wolf let out a thin whine instead. I smiled. “All right, all right. I’ve got plenty.”

  After I’d fed it the rest of the chicken, the wolf licked its chops, looking immensely satisfied. My heart thumped as I held my hand up to the bars, braced to jerk it back if need be.

  Shadow sniffed my fingers. He bared his teeth for a second before he seemed to think better of that move. Instead, he nuzzled the bars.

  “Good boy,” I murmured, and dared to give the wolf’s snout a quick rub. Shadow held still and even nudged a little closer to accept the contact.

  A sense of satisfaction filled my own chest. I wasn’t ready to interact with the animal—and all his teeth and claws—without bars between us for protection, but I’d taken a step in the right direction. I’d have to keep wolfish tastes in mind on my next grocery shopping trip.

  As I watched Shadow prowl around his stall, another implication of the familiar connection clicked into place in my head.

  Did Banefield have a familiar? What if his enemies had conjured his illness through it so they couldn’t be tracked directly?

  I just hoped I could keep my mind steady enough to find out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jude

  I’d known the reckoning would come. It was only a matter of when. Word didn’t take long to travel around campus. Less than twenty-four hours after I’d put Sinclair in her place, one of my dormmates knocked on my bedroom door.
<
br />   “Malcolm’s asking for you,” he said hesitantly.

  I sighed and got up from my desk. Fucking Sinclair letting her fucking claws out. As if she had any right to think I owed her something more than our occasional casual interludes between the sheets when she’d been hanging all over Chandler Viceport last week and who knew how many other guys before that.

  Things could have been just fine going as they were until Rory was more sure of me, but no, now we were going to have explosions.

  There were a lot of insulting things people could have said about me, and a decent number of them were true, but I wasn’t going to be a coward. After all the faith I’d asked Rory to have in me, I owed her better than that. So I headed out to meet the self-appointed king of the scions.

  Malcolm was waiting in the hall outside, his expression impenetrable, but it was fair to say it wasn’t happy. “Come down to the lounge?” he said, his voice as emotionless as his face. He didn’t want an audience for this hashing out. Any sign of division between the four of us would only reflect badly on all of us.

  “Sure,” I said with forced cheer. “I could use a drink.”

  Malcolm didn’t say anything on the way down. When we came into the basement lounge, Connar was at the pool table, taking what looked like an aimless shot at the scattered balls. He straightened up at the sight of us, his jaw tightening. He might not be the sharpest tack in the box, but he knew this conversation wasn’t going to be a pleasant one.

  Declan hadn’t graced us with his presence, but he was no doubt busy with aide business or baron business or whatever other responsibilities he’d added to his plate now. Sometimes I wondered if the guy had started to thrive on stress the way the rest of us were fueled by fear.

  I walked straight to the bar cabinet and went about mixing myself a Jack and Coke. Malcolm stopped by one of the couches, folding his arms over his chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Killbrook?”

  The temperature of his tone had dropped by about fifty degrees. Between that and the switching to last names, he might as well have aimed the tip of a sword at my throat.

  “Making myself a drink,” I said breezily. “I’d have thought that was obvious.” I lifted my glass as I turned to face him, giving the dark liquid a little swirl.

  Malcolm glowered at me. “You know what I mean. What the hell is going on between you and the heir of Bloodstone? We’re supposed to be shaking her up, not cozying up to her. And I told you to keep your hands off.”

  My smile hardened. “You told me not to ‘hit and split’, if I recall correctly. I’m not planning on splitting. And shaking her up was your plan, not mine. It’s gotten rather boring, don’t you think? I’d rather appreciate who she is than rearrange her into something else.”

  “Who she is is a joymancer-sympathizing, feeb-loving party-crasher who thinks we’re all assholes and is doing whatever she can to stick it to us.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe we are assholes?”

  Malcolm tossed his hands in the air. “Fine. We’re assholes, which we need to be because we’ve got a whole bunch of other assholes to keep in line when the time comes. She’s chipping away at all the authority we’ve had here, all the authority we’re going to need when we’re barons.”

  I grimaced. “Is that your father talking or you?”

  Maybe that hadn’t been the wisest jab to make. Malcolm’s eyes flashed, and his voice came out even tighter. “We should want the same things. She doesn’t give a shit about the pentacle or everything they’ve built. She’d probably be happy to see it all come crashing down, the way she talks.”

  He might be right, but then, I didn’t think we’d given Rory much reason to be happy to stand beside us either. I took a sip of my drink, the mix of sweet and sour tingling over my tongue. “Well, so far she hasn’t seemed very impressed by the authority we’ve managed to exert over her. I’m comfortable with changing my own approach. You feel free to do you.”

  “It’s starting to work,” Malcolm said. “It might have already worked if you’d been holding up your end. We’re in this together. We’re supposed to have each other’s backs.”

  A sudden surge of anger welled up inside me, hot and prickling. “Are we? And when exactly have you ever done anything for me?”

  For a second, the Nightwood scion just stared at me. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m looking out for the rest of you all the time. I got us this room we’re standing in right now, didn’t I?”

  “Which you enjoy just as much whether we’re here or not.”

  “That’s not— Fine. How many times did I get the seniors you kept mouthing off at to back down when you first got here? Or smooth things over with one teacher or another because you’d had one too many of those and couldn’t keep your snark to yourself.” He motioned to my glass.

  My shoulders tensed. I might have hit the alcohol a little heavier than had been smart my first year here, but I’d had plenty of shit I needed to drown. Shit I never could have told the guy in front of me about, because he’d have tossed me out of here faster than I could blink. He was loyal to a fucking concept, not me.

  “You like playing the big man who has everything under control,” I said. “Back then, I let you. I could have handled all that myself like I do now.”

  “If you believe that, you don’t have a very good memory.”

  Connar stepped closer to us with an appeasing gesture. “Guys, I don’t think—”

  “How about this?” Malcolm barreled on. “I probably saved your fucking life that one night, making sure you didn’t choke on your puke when you downed that whole bottle of scotch. I was the one who found you. The three of us sat there for hours working out how to conjure some of the alcohol out of your system to make sure your heart didn’t stop beating. Or do you think you could have handled that on your own too?”

  I’d shoved that night into the deepest depths of my memory. It came back at his words with a sickening rush of cold. My tongue flew before I’d had time to think about my response. “I’d bet I could have. I wouldn’t be the first freshman to ever get blackout drunk. And were you even thinking about me or only the fact that if you’d had to go to Ms. Grimsworth about it, she’d have kicked us out of here and you’d have lost your precious lounge?”

  Malcolm’s voice came out in a snarl. “You—”

  “Guys.” Connar stepped between us, shoving us back from each other, his own expression tensed. I’d heard him snap at plenty of other people, but never at any of us. He looked from Malcolm to me and back again. “Just stop. We shouldn’t be arguing like this.”

  “He should remind himself what loyalty is,” Malcolm muttered, but he turned away with a rough exhalation. Because of course he could get himself back under control just like that. How much could a guy who held himself in that rigid a fist ever care about anyone but himself?

  I downed the rest of my Jack and Coke and resisted the urge to toss the glass at Malcolm’s head to see how he’d respond to that. “I suppose I’ll take my leave, then. Have a wonderful night.”

  “Jude,” Connar said as I stalked to the door, but I ignored him. His first loyalty was to Malcolm, always. I didn’t need to hear him explain to me how wrong I was too.

  All the buried emotions the fight had stirred up churned in my gut as I climbed the stairs to the main floor. The thought of shutting myself away in my bedroom made me sick. I hesitated in the hall outside the library and then strode out across the green to Nightwood Tower.

  The main music rooms for orchestra practice were on the lower floors of the tower, but there were a few smaller ones for private practice tucked away near the top. I’d often thought the layout had been planned that way on purpose to give the scholarship students’ lungs an extra work out on the way up. You couldn’t really play until you could breathe the music.

  No one was in the tower at this time in the evening. I didn’t pass a soul on the way up to the piano room, which was exactly the way
I preferred it. I’d come to Mr. Hackov, the main music professor, for further instruction beyond what I’d taught myself, but he was the only one in the school who’d ever heard me play. He was the only one anywhere who’d heard me play. I could only imagine what Dad would make of this little hobby I’d picked up.

  I closed the door, sat down on the bench, and rested my fingers on the keys. My hands moved automatically, falling into the patterns of the Beethoven sonata that was one of my more recent acquisitions.

  The muscles in my fingers stretched, and as I leaned into the melody, the world narrowed down to just me and the instrument and the rising song. The notes spilled out around me and through me, washing over everything else and covering it back over much faster and more thoroughly than anything in a bottle had ever been able to manage.

  I wasn’t quite so lost in the song that I missed the squeak of the door. My body froze, my head jerking up.

  Rory was standing there by the door that was just a few inches ajar, her fingers curled around its edge. She froze too, with a guilty expression. “Hey,” she said warily.

  If she’d walked in on me getting out of the shower, I’d have felt less naked. And not the kind of naked I’d imagined getting with this girl. Fuck.

  I dropped my hands to my lap and cast about for my composure, pulling my mouth into a smile I hoped look casual. “Hey, yourself. What are you doing up here?”

  She eased inside and closed the door gently behind her, but she didn’t come any farther into the room. Her dark eyes searched mine with an intentness that made my mouth dry up. She’d seen more than I’d have wanted her to, that was for sure. A reoccurring theme with the heir of Bloodstone.

  “I was in the library—I saw you and Malcolm going downstairs. I figured when you came back up, we might be able to talk.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And instead of talking to me right away, you followed me over to the tower and up to the fourteenth floor without saying a word.”

  She bit her lip. “You seemed to be in a hurry. I wondered where you were going.”