by Lan Chan
23
I sensed that Agatha now considered me a lost cause. When I walked into our tutorial the next week, Hugh was the only one present. Today he had dispensed with his cloak. Instead, he had a bear skin draped around his shoulders. Noah immediately went on the defensive. The mage did absolutely nothing to calm the situation.
“Before you ask,” Hugh said, “yes, it’s real.”
I jumped in front of Noah and was pushed forward five steps before he could check himself. Hugh’s laugh came from deep within his chest. “Don’t tell me the wolf is an animal lover.”
He was such a moron. His ignorance of the customs of other species spoke of a towering arrogance. Most shifters were animal lovers. Though they were the apex predators, they considered themselves the caretakers of their lands. Gaia help you if you hurt an animal in their presence. Which was why I had to hold Noah back when Hugh produced a cage of rats with a sweep of his purple magic.
I made a face. I wasn’t terrified of them like Lex but I didn’t love them either. “Since you can’t seem to bring yourself to perform the real deal,” Hugh said, “I thought we’d start building you up to it.”
Noah almost busted my eardrum with his snarl. “Can you please go and sit in the corner?” I pleaded.
“Why are you continuing with this class? If you can’t do it, then we’ll find another way.”
“What other way?” I wanted to know. “What other way can you think of for beating Lucifer when the time comes? He makes the malachim look like less than ants!”
We both knew I was right. “You can’t kill someone,” he said.
No, I could not. It was time to face that fact. But maybe I could bleed them a little, and if I did it often enough, I could hold a reserve of energy. That was a good theory in practice and a lot of very big assumptions. Noah stomped to the far side of the room and sat glaring at us as Hugh set the cage of rats in front of me on the floor.
He crouched down beside me. I kept waiting for him to produce a knife, but he did nothing of the sort. “What are you waiting for?” he asked.
“How do I extract their blood?”
“Like this.” He whipped his hand out and caught one of the rats in a phantom hold. The others raced around the cage in a frenzy as the rat in his grip squirmed and squealed. My stomach roiled. I was totally going to dream about this tonight. Purple light began to gather around the floating rat. It shrieked, its long tail flailing and hitting the metal bars of the cage. I was going to lose my breakfast.
Without a second glance, Hugh fisted his hand, and the purple cloud became tendrils that burrowed into the rat. Not just into its mouth, nose, and eyes, but through its skin in all places. That same throbbing bulge occurred as the rat’s essence was sucked out. When he was done, Hugh dropped the rat’s husk. It was now just a parched layer of skin and fur. The other rats converged on it, tearing it to pieces in fear.
The purple ball of light that hung above the cage was now three times its original size. “Hardly seems worth it,” Hugh commented. But there was a sickening fervour in his eyes that I didn’t trust a single bit.
“I can’t do that,” I informed him. “Low magic doesn’t work that way. To gain something, I have to lose something.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “How tedious.”
Maybe it was, but right now, I was kind of glad for it. Even though I despised having to cut into my own skin constantly to draw blood, it served as a small reminder that power came at a price.
Hugh snapped his fingers and a scalpel appeared beside my hand. In the cage, the rats doubled their screeching. Somehow, they knew that something awful was coming. “We don’t have all of time to do this,” Hugh reminded me.
“I’m going to have to touch one of them.”
“That appears to be that case. It’s distasteful but there’s no helping it.”
Distasteful was too light a word. If I tried to stick my hand into the cage right now, they would bite the hell out of me.
“I’m going to prepare the blood.” Otherwise known as trying to stall for time. Taking the vial of Lex’s blood from my pocket, I drew a circle around it and then dripped two small drops into the centre of the circle. Next, I prepared my own blood and mixed them together. Now...now there wasn’t really anything more I could do but bite the bullet.
Looking into the cage wasn’t enticing. The rats never stopped moving. They bit at the metal of the cage and each other. There were now seven of them left in there. Big, fat ones that I suspected had been collected around the marsh of the fens. Their pink tails were longer than their bodies by a mile. How in the world was I going to do this?
“Perhaps we should have started with mice,” Hugh noted, his tone less than impressed. “Or something else you find repulsive. Name an animal you dislike. Or is there someone in particular you don’t care for that will make this easier? Somebody blonde and busty perhaps?”
Behind Hugh’s back, Noah was growling in a steady rhythm now. When I didn’t respond but just kept looking into the cage, Hugh made a frustrated sound. “This is utterly ridiculous. Would it help if I held them down?”
Without waiting for a response, he grabbed the seven rats with his magic. With a flick of his hand, the cage flipped open. One by one they floated out in a straight line in front of me.
“Pick one,” he said. “Any of them will do. There are thousands more where they came from. They’re worthless animals who live in darkness and feed on anything they can get their hands on. They spread disease and breed like there’s no tomorrow. Ridding the world of these seven is a service.”
He pressed the rats down against the floor so that their arms and legs were the only thing that could move. Their black eyes darted, their mouths opening to give sickening screams. “Do it,” Hugh urged. “They’re lower than low.”
For some reason, I saw Lucifer in my head at that moment when he’d appeared to Lex when she died. He’d had the same flippant tone in his voice. We had meant nothing to him. We were less than a thought. We were vermin that he wasn’t at all concerned about exterminating. My fingers released. The scalpel fell from my hands.
Hugh barked out a word in a language I didn’t recognise. Before I could retract my hand altogether, he snatched my wrist.
Noah surged to his feet, but Hugh threw his other hand out and spat another word. Noah went flying into the wall, his arms and legs splayed out just like the rats. Face serene, Hugh pulled me forward.
“You should learn to grow a spine,” he said. “Even Alessia could kill when she needed to.”
Purple light appeared around me. I picked up the scalpel again without wanting to.
“Let go of me!”
In my chest, the blood alchemy surged. It raced down my arm and coursed through my fingers only to come up short. Shit! I’d dispelled the blade in the Reserve. “Stop, please!”
More purple magic gathered around me.
“It’s not that difficult,” Hugh said. “Let’s see if we can experiment and come up with another way to make this work. After all, isn’t this what school is about?”
Before I could do anything to stop him, he grabbed my arm with his magic and forced me to stab the scalpel into the rat it front of me. We both screamed at the same time. The rat’s back legs bucked as though it was trying to run but its leg slipped in the pool of blood that was gathering beneath it. My body locked as I tried to fight the magic compulsion.
Tears stung my eyes even as the blood alchemy bubbled up inside me. “Good,” Hugh said. Once more he whipped my arm out. But instead of stabbing a single rat this time, he drove me to make a sweeping motion that sliced right through all of the rats at once. They died instantly, their bodies bursting in a gory splash of blood and guts.
I knew that there was no way the scalpel itself was the thing that cut them. It was far too clean. The second the scalpel touched them, a corresponding light clapped inside my mind. It drew the blood alchemy forward, and I felt an electric charge as the drops of blood in fro
nt of me lifted in the air.
“Yes,” Hugh said, eyes bright. “That’s a good girl.”
The world turned into a flash of red and pink as the Ley sight stole around me. It bathed everything in a glow that I didn’t feel. My heart was beating so furiously it felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. Ice and heat blossomed in alternate waves across my skin. Tears ran down my eyes as I watched the crimson of my magic eat into the silver and black of Lex’s blood. Wind howled in my ears.
“That’s right!” Hugh laughed.
“Sophie!” Noah screamed.
Hugh shuffled back from me as the drops of blood in front of me twisted and rolled into each other. My blood, always the lesser of the two, was rapidly ingesting Lex’s. As it did, the crimson of my magic increased in volume, the colour darkening. Hugh continued to laugh but he didn’t see what I saw. He didn’t feel the way the soul tether in my psyche was fluctuating, as though the Ley dimension itself was trying to cut me off. To remove me like a cancerous cell.
Sobbing, I couldn’t do anything but sit there helplessly as Hugh continued to force me to hold on to that awful blood magic. And then he did worse. While Noah was plastered to the wall and I was incapacitated, Hugh opened up a portal.
“No!” I screamed as loudly as I could in the vain hope that somebody outside would hear. The flare of purple magic around the perimeter of the room dampened the sound. The portal snapped open as the inside brightened to reveal a red sky. Desperate, I tried to access the MirrorNet but I was still well and truly locked out.
Inside me, the blood barrier became a thin sheaf as the mating link railed against it. But instead of trying to get out and stop what Hugh was doing, I felt it attempt to sink claws into the soul tether, as though it was trying to hold me in place.
Darkness flashed across my vision.
Through the portal, I heard the sound of thudding feet. “Stop it, please!”
Hugh didn’t give me a second thought. “You can stop it, Sophie dear,” he said. “Can’t you feel it? All you have to do is make the leap and all that power you’ve been craving could be at your fingertips.”
The truth in his words gathered in a dark pink cloud around my fingers as an abraxas demon stepped through the portal. In true demon style, it went for the first thing it saw: Noah.
The shifter roared, fighting with all of his strength of free himself from Hugh’s binding spell. His muscles roiled beneath his skin, but whatever Hugh was doing was also stopping Noah from shifting. Eyes the colour of buttercups glared out of a face gone wolf, even if he couldn’t shift.
“Hugh!” I screamed, but the mage wasn’t listening. He’d turned his back on me.
“You can stop it,” he said. “Take the demon out before it hurts your friend.”
The demon stomped towards Noah, its fangs so long they dug into its bottom lip. The twisted thing stamped its grotesquely large feet, rocking the room and making me slide into the bodies and blood of the rats.
Noah roared again in rage. Something in my mind shattered. The mating link stretched itself to the limit, straining the blood barrier almost to a breaking point. In my head, I felt the curiosity of a lion. In that moment, I gave up.
The transmuted power that I had been holding in snapped out in a vicious whip. It launched itself through the air and grabbed Hugh in its grasp. He gave a shocked scream before it rammed him headfirst into the wall. The second he lost consciousness, the portal closed.
Noah fell to the floor in a graceful crouch before leaping at the demon. He shifted mid-air, his wolf a dark brown that matched his skin tone perfectly. The demon attempted to swipe out at him, but Noah was a ball of unrepentant anger. He ducked the swipe and went straight for the demon’s throat. Bringing it down to the floor, Noah locked his jaw and twisted his head. The crunch of bones and tendon sliced through the room a second before he sank his claws into the demon’s chest. With a twist, Noah tore the demon’s head right off.
He padded over to me, his eyes half red. I couldn’t speak, my mind too full of horror.
That was when the door burst open. Jacqueline and Doctor Thorne came racing into the room, but I was too numb to react.
“Sophie!” Jacqueline said. She tried to reach for my hand, but I flinched. Not because I didn’t want comfort but because I was afraid there was still residual magic clinging to me. I couldn’t risk hurting her. A pop burst in the air and Marshall appeared.
The sight of him so beautifully golden made me blindingly aware that I was sitting in a pool of rodent blood and guts. I lowered my gaze to the floor.
“Come on,” Jacqueline said. “Infirmary for you.”
When I didn’t move, she became firmer. “Sophie. Get up. Move your arms and legs.”
The bluntness in her tone made me raise my head. I found myself looking into a wolf’s clear yellow eyes. You can do this, they seemed to say. If I can survive the nightmare of my family’s death, you can get up now.
And I did, though every step felt like I was walking through quicksand. One foot in front of the other. That’s what I told myself until we stepped outside and I found myself looking into the stunned faces of at least three dozen Academy students. The horror in their eyes had me wailing inside.
I felt what little ground I had managed to claw back slipping from beneath me. With one experiment, I was back to being Enock Mwape’s great-granddaughter.
There was nothing physically wrong with me of course. Marshall left to deal with the body of the demon and to do whatever he was going to do with Hugh. My hope was that it would involve an angel blade.
“What happened?” Jacqueline asked.
The glass of ambrosia trembled in my hand. I took a big swig of it, knowing that I needed to settle my nerves before going back to the Reserve. When I felt ready, I told her everything.
Noah stood like a tree by the base of the bed. He hadn’t said a word and only left me for the time it took to change his shirt. “Can you please make a call to Andrei?” I asked him. “Tell him I really need to speak to him.”
After he left, Jacqueline informed me she’d contact the Council about removing Agatha and Hugh from the vicinity.”
“Wait!” I said before I could even think about it. I swallowed.
Jacqueline took my hand in both of hers. “He forced you, Sophie,” she said. “This surely isn’t the way you want to learn. If you should be doing this at all.”
I set the ambrosia glass down and picked at the sheet. “I know. But it’s the most progress I’ve made so far.”
She brushed my hair behind my ear. “You’ve made more progress than you can imagine. You just can’t see it right now. Power for the sake of it isn’t worth having. Especially if it comes from an abhorrent source.”
I was still contemplating her words when Noah returned. Jacqueline was right. At the same time, all I could think about was that I’d gathered enough power to take down a mage. An approving voice piped up in my head. Good, it said. You’re learning. Maybe one day soon you’ll be worthy of the power you’ve been given.
The power I’d been given. My great-grandfather’s power. I glanced up into Noah’s eyes and the fog that had blanketed my mind cleared.
“Let them stay,” I said.
“I don’t know if I can have that on my conscience after what happened,” Jacqueline said.
“I’ll put up safeguards.”
“Are you sure?”
I only nodded. The certainty wavered when Noah took me back to the Reserve. It was obvious that news had spread about what happened because the shifters were out in force again. They watched me as I walked from the portal field until I cleared the residential area. I blew out a breath. And then it died in my throat as we approached the Thompsons’ house and Max was waiting for me on the steps.
24
The look of death on his face said he knew everything. How that was even possible when Noah hadn’t given him a briefing yet was beyond me. Worried, I looked inside me at the mating link and sighed in
relief when I saw that it was intact. Max’s burnished-gold eyes flicked once, and Noah melted away from me.
“I’m fine.” I came to a stop two metres from where he stood. “Please don’t make a fuss.” I glanced up into the second floor. “Where’s Charles?”
Max didn’t say a word. Nor did he move from his position. Great. He’d lost his mind and sent his brother away. I was tired. My feet hurt and I really needed another shower. The one I’d had in the infirmary was perfunctory. I was still in too much shock to have done a proper job of cleaning myself. There was still soap behind my ears. Saying any of that to him right now would equal being treated like an invalid while he hovered around me.
The memory of his razor-sharp words continued to lash at me a week later. The thing was, he’d been right. I wasn’t mated to him. I wasn’t pack in any way. So I had no right to suggest to them how they should run things.
Trying to stay out of his way hadn’t seemed to work, though. When I took a step forward, he moved with me, and I knew he was just waiting to get me inside before he pounced.
“Maximus,” I said. “You’re dreaming if you think I’m going to go in there with you right now. Can you think about this for a minute? I haven’t given you any indication that I want to be with you. In fact, your cooler is full of food from dozens of other women.”
He was still non-verbal, but the cording of muscles in his arms told me he was on the edge. I started to take steps back. His head turned, eyes narrowing to slits that radiated a quiet menace.
With strength that I hardly had, I drew a protection circle around myself. “Max! If you move an inch, I’m going to scream so loudly it’ll wake the dead.”
In the near distance, I heard soft voices. The Reserve had come out to watch. Bloody great. Max’s jaw clenched. Confusion had me pausing. This was bad. Whatever control he had managed to construct around his beast was eroded. I didn’t understand why he hadn’t just charged into the Academy if things had gotten to this point. My gaze swept the length of him, taking in everything about him, using the detached practicality that Sandra had taught me in the infirmary. A month ago, I would have dry-retched at the sight of an open wound. But practice and exposure meant that I was able to catalogue the horror for a later time. Crying in the bathroom had become a regular fixture. But it was better than breaking down in front of the patients who were the ones really hurting.