Royals of Villain Academy 2: Vile Sorcery

by Eva Chase

  “Hey.” Declan let go of my hand to brush a few strands of my hair behind my ear. “I can’t say I don’t regret anything, but I’ve still got no regrets about what we did together.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Best day of my life, if we leave out the way it ended.”

  “That’s kind of an important part.”

  “And I’ll deal with it, because it’s mine to deal with.” He hesitated. His voice softened. “Come here? One last kiss, before we’re all the way back to reality?”

  My body shifted toward him automatically, my head tilting. He kissed me with a lingering desire that brought the flutter back into my chest and dulled the edges of my anguish.

  I didn’t know if everything would be okay, but with that, I at least believed that he didn’t blame me. That we were okay.

  I just couldn’t believe that fact would be enough to shield him if the rest of the world came at him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Rory

  The voice slid into my sleep, winding through the last fragments of a dream. “Wake up.”

  My eyes popped open to my dim bedroom, morning sunlight seeping from around the curtain. My body had curled tight defensively beneath the covers while I slept. A sharp smoky smell filled my nose and seared down into my lungs.

  I jerked upright, searching for the source of the scent, half-expecting to find my room on fire. But it wasn’t flames that shifted along the walls. Before my eyes, the shadows of the furniture thickened against the fainter darkness.

  They crawled along the walls and lunged toward the bed, maws forming in their wavering forms. One that looked like a snake sank its fangs into my foot through the sheet with a bolt of pain. I bit my lip trying to swallow a yelp as I scrambled back on the mattress, my pulse thudding so loud it seemed to echo through my head.

  This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. I closed my eyes, shook my head, and looked again. The shadowy creatures loomed larger around me. And then the bed began to move.

  It shuddered under me and hitched upward as if flying off the floor. The shadows clotted. The front of the wardrobe on the far wall sagged as if melting; the curtain billowed into the shape of a demonic face like the one that guy had conjured weeks ago in class.

  Not real. Not real. I hugged my knees and buried my face against them, my breath coming ragged. But it wasn’t enough not to look. The shadows nipped at my skin with icy mouths, alternately scraping me raw and pricking me with pain. An eerie groan filled the room, and then a hissing sound rose up, like bubbling acid eating away at something nearby. Through all that, the bed continued to sway beneath me.

  I yanked my mental shields around my mind as tightly as I could, but that changed nothing. However much this was coming from inside my head, it was a seed already planted. And triggered. Wake up. It must have been Malcolm who’d done this. He’d sent his voice to me from wherever he was. How could I shut him out if he could hit me anytime he wanted without any warning?

  I tried to dig inside my head for that malicious influence and rip it out, but my thoughts kept scattering with the horrible sensations around me. The nips and the noise and the sickening rocking carrying on and on. I clutched my knees tighter. A sound like a choked breath reached my ears, and every muscle in my body stiffened.

  It was the gurgle of Mom’s throat being severed. I’d heard it enough times in my dreams and in the desensitization sessions since to recognize it even without seeing anything. The thump of her body lolling, the fleshy tearing of the magic that had carved into Dad’s chest…

  I clapped my hands over my ears, but they couldn’t shut out the sounds. I had the feeling if I let myself look, I’d see their bodies slumped right here in the room with me. A bloody metallic smell laced the air in place of the previous smoke.

  Tears welled up behind my closed eyelids. I clenched my teeth against a scream.

  Was it really worth it, keeping up this battle, having to endure this horror just on principle? Malcolm was never going to back down as long as I kept resisting. All I’d have to do was lie and pretend I’d seen the light, make a little show of surrender, and he’d end his campaign of torment. Maybe everyone who’d hassled me would leave me alone if he took me into his good graces, Victory and her crew included.

  He would take me in. He’d meant what he’d said in the kennel the other day, just like Declan had meant what he’d said about the scions being their own sort of family. If I bent to Malcolm’s will, they’d welcome me into their circle. It would be so fucking easy.

  The thought filled my head for a moment with a twinge of temptation, and then a deeper nausea swelled to overwhelm it.

  No. No. I was not going to give in to a sadistic asshole who believed provoking someone’s worst nightmares out of them was a reasonable approach to getting his way. I was not going to let every other student at that school become even more convinced that torture was the path to victory. Fuck no.

  The tears trickled down my cheeks. The chaos around me raged on for longer than I could keep track of. I pulled back as deep into my mind as I could go, focusing on my brightest memories: my first trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. with my parents on my thirteenth birthday. Splashing through the waves with them at the local beach as a kid. The first moment I’d really felt and controlled my magic, known how much power I could wield. The way Declan had looked at me two days ago just before he’d kissed me.

  Eventually I became aware of a small furry body against my hip and the quiet and stillness all around me.

  Are you back? Deborah asked tentatively. Are you okay, sweetheart?

  I swallowed thickly and swiped at my damp cheeks. “Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m okay enough now that it’s over.”

  My dormmates were moving around in the common room getting ready for the day. I stood up on shaky legs and peeked out just long enough to confirm that Malcolm wasn’t hanging out there among them. Victory and her friends were sitting on one of the sofas, only the backs of their heads visible over the top, paying no attention to my room at all.

  I ran all through the building when I saw the state you were in, Deborah said, her voice reaching me more faintly because she wasn’t touching me. I didn’t see anyone actively casting, just like before.

  Of course not. That would be too easy. I went to my window and yanked the curtain aside.

  When I pushed it open, I could lean out into the warming air and get a good look at the grounds below. A few students were already heading to the Stormhurst building, and a couple were standing by the lake, but none of the scions were among them. The area near my side of Ashgrave Hall was vacant.

  Frowning, I turned my attention to the building itself. Malcolm was reaching me somehow. He lived in the dorms here too—Deborah had determined on an earlier foray that his room was the one at the opposite end of the building on the same floor as mine. My gaze traveled over that side of the building.

  The stone wall looked the same as it always had. When I’d studied it before, nothing had stuck out as concerning, but now my eyes halted on a small knob-like protrusion near the window closest to mine, belonging to one of the girls in my dorm.

  The object was hard to make out from some twenty feet away—I must have seen it before and assumed it was just a normal part of the design. I would have again now if something about the shape of it hadn’t triggered a prickle of recognition.

  The curve of it, the impression of a hollow, gave the same impression as at least one of the pieces I’d had to work with in the puzzle garden the other day.

  From watching the other girls come and go, I was pretty sure that room belonged to Cressida. It wasn’t hard to imagine Malcolm managing to get in there for long enough to fix something to the wall outside. If he’d told her he was going to screw me over, she’d probably have given him an all-access pass.

  She wasn’t going to give me a pass to march into her room and get a closer look. I studied the ridges of limestone that formed the rest of the buildi
ng. “Deborah?” I murmured.

  My familiar darted across the floor to me, and I scooped her up to hold her by the window ledge where she could see outside. “Over there by the next window, there’s something sticking out of the stone that I think might have magic in it—or be built for conducting magic somehow. Do you think you could handle the climb over there to check it out?”

  Deborah considered. With that groove there, it shouldn’t be too much trouble. I’ll go slowly.

  She hopped off my hand onto the sill and picked her way onto the thickest ridge of stone that ran along the side of the building. I watched, braced and starkly aware of the five story drop below, as she scurried along it toward the protrusion.

  It only took her a minute to reach it. She climbed a little higher to sniff the shape, and a little shiver passed through her body. She darted back to me twice as fast as she’d gone.

  It’s had magic in it recently, she said as she scrambled inside. It’s built to store and amplify spells, as far as I can tell from the shape of it. We use pieces like that in our joymancy work too.

  Store and amplify spells. Amplify them enough that they could reach me in my bedroom without any more targeting than that? My queasiness returned, but a punch of resolve came with it.

  “No one’s going to be using that piece anymore,” I said. “Come here?”

  She let me scoop her into my hand, and I kept her tucked out of sight against my pajama shirt as I stepped into the common room. I didn’t look at the other girls, didn’t show any sign at all that I was about to infringe on anyone’s privacy, just marched right over to Cressida’s door as if I had every right to head straight in.

  She hadn’t bothered with a locking spell while she was right there in the common room. A small smile caught my lips as the doorknob turned in my grasp. “Hey!” a startled voice called out behind me, but I was already striding inside.

  I dashed to her already-open window through a mist of lily-and-musk perfume and leaned out. The sculpted stone fixture was just within arm’s reach. I grabbed it, yanked, twisted, and yanked again with a mutter of magical encouragement. It popped off the wall so abruptly I nearly tumbled right out the window.

  I caught myself and yanked myself back into the room, shoving the fixture into the pajama pants pocket I’d never realized I’d be this relieved to have. Just in time, because a second later, Cressida burst into her bedroom.

  “Get the fuck out of my room,” she said in a taut voice. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said with an apologetic shrug as I headed over to the door, and held up my hand to reveal Deborah. “My familiar went roaming around farther than she should have. I was just getting her out of here before she disturbed you.”

  “Like I’d be scared of a stupid mouse,” she sneered, but a little wariness had come into her eyes—in memory of the last time she’d been part of a plot involving my familiar, no doubt. “I didn’t put her in here.”

  “Oh, I know! I think she just got turned around and lost her way. It’s all good now. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “You do that,” Cressida said to my back as I crossed the common area to my bedroom, but she sounded more apprehensive than angry now.

  If I was lucky, she didn’t have anything to do with Malcolm’s scheme other than letting him into her room. There was a decent chance she didn’t know what he’d placed just outside her window or what spell-casting he’d done, considering he’d been secretive about it even with Jude. But I wasn’t going to count on luck. As soon as my door had closed behind me, I set down Deborah and pulled out the stone fixture to examine it.

  It did have similarities to pieces in the maze. I ran my thumb over the smooth surface, and a jolt of recognition shot through my head.

  I’d had the feeling of holding this object in my hands before—no, of holding it in Malcolm’s hands when I’d dipped inside his head that day in Persuasion class. This was one of the impressions I’d glimpsed. I just hadn’t had any way of understanding it until now.

  Maybe I couldn’t prove it, but he’d definitely been the one who’d put this thing in place.

  My jaw clenched as I considered how a spell would flow through the piece. Deborah had said it’d had magic in it recently, but I wasn’t sure how accurate her magical senses were inside that mouse body. Were there more spells waiting to mess with me inside the thing right now?

  If there were, how the hell did I get them out? In the puzzle maze, I’d needed to apply my own magic to the pieces’ natural functions. This was a different problem altogether.

  I hesitated for a moment before getting up. I had one person nearby who might be able to answer that.

  This time, the two girls still in the common room looked my way the second I came out. I suspected Victory and Sinclair had joined Cressida in her room to check whether I’d done more in there than I’d claimed. Well, then they couldn’t interfere with what I was doing now. I rapped my hand against Imogen’s door.

  She opened it with hair damp and mussed from a recent toweling. Her stance tensed. “Rory? I—”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said firmly. “Now. You owe me.” I didn’t care how uncertain she was about continuing our friendship—I wasn’t looking for friendship. I was looking for a Physicality specialist.

  Guilt flashed across her face, and she stepped back to let me in. Even if my weirdness over the last several weeks had made her cautious, she recognized she had a lot to make up for. Good.

  “Congrats on the league win,” she said as she closed the door.

  My mind was so far elsewhere that it took me a second to process her words. They still didn’t quite click. “What?”

  “Insight won. It was announced last night. Didn’t you hear?” Her mouth twisted wryly. “I’ll be helping serve all of you people a big fancy dinner tomorrow.”

  Last night I’d been reeling from my encounter with my grandparents and the damage they might do to Declan. I wasn’t surprised I missed the news. I couldn’t summon much enthusiasm over the win. “I guess I was too caught up in studying. That’s great. But that’s not—" I held out the stone fixture. “Do you know what this is?”

  Imogen took it from me and turned it over in her hands. “It’s a conducting piece with a holding pocket.” She glanced at me. “Do you know what that means?”

  I nodded. “I’ve got the gist. Can you tell if it’s ‘holding’ anything right now?”

  She peered at it more intently, mouthing a few words under her breath. After a minute, she lowered the piece with a long exhale. The effort had left her face drawn. “There’s a little something in there. Not much. I can’t tell what the function is.”

  “You know how to stop this thing from working, though, don’t you? That’s got to be a Physicality thing—it’s all about the physical structure.”

  “It is,” Imogen agreed. “That’s how pieces like this work. I could tell you approximately how to make something like this. But the way they’re constructed, the magical resonance contained in the design—these pieces resist any attempts to reshape or unshape them like crazy. Maybe one of the professors would be able to break the symmetry, but I’m not even sure about that. I definitely can’t.”

  In that case, I didn’t have much hope. I sucked my lower lip under my teeth in contemplation. “So there’s nothing anyone can do to break one of these?”

  “I didn’t say that, although the other way is still pretty tricky.” Imogen looked at the piece, her wry smile returning. “You can’t brute force this thing into changing, so you’ve got to come at it from a different angle that it’s not built for. With Insight aimed right, you could probably get a gist of any spells inside it. And I’ve heard of people ‘persuading’ the resonance to shift to throw the structure’s natural capacity off. If you’re strong enough. Those aren’t my areas—I wouldn’t have a chance. You, though…” She handed it back to me with a curious expression.

  I had all four strengths. A quiver t
hat was almost giddy ran through me. I focused my gaze on the holding side of the conducting piece and whispered my Insight casting word, too quiet for Imogen to hear.

  It didn’t feel like falling into someone’s head. Only a piece of me seemed to tumble forward, with just a flicker of sensation meeting me in response from deep inside—a sensation that delved and burrowed with a prickling of hooked claws. I didn’t like that at all. It definitely wasn’t anything I wanted aimed at me, whatever exactly the spell was.

  Could I persuade it out? Or persuade the form of the piece to alter so it couldn’t hold the spell or conduct it anymore? I knit my brow as I inspected the structure again. The connection between the holding area and the amplifying part—that seemed like the key. If I could shift it even a little…

  I pulled more magic onto my tongue and trained my attention on that area. “Bend,” I ordered it, tasting the shape of the channel with the word.

  I got no sense of it budging. Maybe I was focusing too much on the physical aspect still. Imogen had said to persuade the “resonance” of the thing. The way the shape mimicked the flow of cast magic.

  “Come out,” I tried again, thinking instead of that flow, the way the energy would bend with the structure. Nothing. I grimaced, my voice rising just a bit. “Let go.”

  A twitch passed from the stone into my hand. My heart lifted. I peered into the channel and spotted a tiny crack that had opened up in the middle of it.

  Imogen let out a breathless laugh. “You did it. It won’t work anymore like that—not unless someone else persuades it whole again, I guess.”

  Or Malcolm stuck another conducting piece in place. But the hitch of Imogen’s breath had jerked my mind in a totally different direction with a rush of hope.