A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(39)

I looked around just in time to see Orion go flying across the corridor opening, the white flare of that top-notch shield holder of his going off as he slammed into whatever on the other side. A cloud of rilkes went boiling after him, their wings making the shrieking bird-noise, dripping blood beneath them like rain. I could run right in and vaporize all of them with a single crystal’s worth of mana, just like the scratcher, and end up standing there heroically over gasping Orion, in front of a crowd of enclavers. And no one would even think twice when they heard about the maw-mouth. I wouldn’t even have to pretend I hadn’t seen it. I could go in there and tell everyone I’d seen it, and I’d still be a hero. Not even heroes try to stop maw-mouths.

    I turned and went after the maw-mouth. I wanted to be angry, but I just felt sick. Mum would never even know what had happened to me. Nobody would see me die. Maybe some of them would hear me screaming, muffled on the other side of a door, but they wouldn’t know it was me. And the kids who heard me screaming would all be screaming themselves, soon enough. Mum wouldn’t know, except actually I was sure she would; she’d know the way she’d know if I ever used malia. She was probably leading a meditation circle right now, a nice summer evening in the woods, and she’d close her eyes and think about me, the way she was always thinking about me, and she’d know what had happened to me, what was happening to me. She’d have to live with it in her, along with Dad’s death, for the rest of her life.

I was crying in the only way I ever let myself cry in here: with my eyes wide open, blinking hard and letting the tears just go down my face and drip off my chin so they don’t blur my vision. There was a brighter light over the entrance to the staircase. I could see the glossy surface of the maw-mouth shining with iridescent reflections as it poured itself through. It didn’t leave anything behind, no trail of slime or slick. It didn’t even leave dust behind: I followed a smooth, clean-swept track instead, down the stairs and out the landing into the freshman hall. The light was better in there. I could see the maw-mouth clearly, already uncurling limbs out in front of the doors, like a parody of open arms. Stretched wide, it looked at me with dozens of eyes, some mouths making soft whimpering noises, others just breathing noisily. One of them said something like, “Nyeg,” as if it were a word.

I gripped my crystal in my hand and linked up to all the other ones waiting back in the chest in my room, and then I walked towards the maw-mouth. I wasn’t sure if I could really make myself touch it, but I didn’t have to. When I got close enough, it finally did put out a tentacle just for me and wrapped it around my waist and pulled me in, a horrible feeling even through the shield: a really big sweaty man with sticky hands who had grabbed me too tight and was pulling me close against his body. The mouths near me started whispering unintelligible slurred moist words like him breathing drunk into my ear, only on both sides at once. I couldn’t get away from it, this thing that wanted me, wanted to get inside me and open me up. I tried. I couldn’t help trying. It wasn’t a choice. I couldn’t stop myself trying to thrash myself away from it, to twist and fight, but it didn’t work. I was just helplessly in its grip.

    And the only good my shield did for me was that the maw-mouth couldn’t quite manage to get in, yet. Like a tongue trying to push between my lips, and I was able to keep them shut, and it couldn’t get my legs open. But I’d get tired eventually, I’d have to give up. I couldn’t outlast it. And the terror and rage of knowing that I couldn’t hold out forever was the only thing that made me able to do anything else. I pushed a little way into it, and then a wave of it rolled down over my head and it stopped being anything like being held by a person, no matter how awful. It wasn’t mouths and eyes and hands, it was intestines, organs, and it was still trying to get in me, without limits. It wanted to open me up and make me a part of it, mash me up into itself, and it was the disgusting horrible wet inside of dying things, never quite getting to dead, rotting and still bubbling with blood. I started to scream, just from feeling it around me.

And I knew no one was coming ever, no matter how much I screamed, so I kept going at first. I pulled myself deeper into it, grabbing fistfuls of it one after another like some kind of rope that squished out of my hands almost as fast as I got it, trying to swim through meat. But I could feel my mana just going, a torrent pouring through me to hold my shielding spell up, to keep the hungry thing out of me, and I had no idea how much I was using, how much I had left, whether I’d even have enough left to destroy the thing when I got to wherever I was trying to go, and I was screaming and sobbing and blindly shoving onward without really getting anywhere, and I couldn’t actually bear it lasting any longer. The textbook had been right all along, take anything instead, any other death, because I would rather have been dead than keep going, even with my shield.

    So I didn’t keep going. I stopped, and I used the best of the nineteen spells I know for killing an entire roomful of people, the shortest one; it’s just three words in French, à la mort, but it must be cast carelessly, with a flick of the hand that most people get wrong, and if you get it even a little wrong, it kills you instead. That makes it hard to be careless. But I didn’t care. Could I flick my hand properly inside here? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I was just doing something that came naturally, a spell that slipped off my tongue as easily as a breath, and I flicked my hand or maybe just thought of flicking my hand. All around me the horrible stuff went worse, sludging into putrescence, but that one moment of casting the spell had felt easy and good and right, so I did it again, and then again, and again, and again, just for the relief. I threw other killing spells, every one of the dozens I knew, in case any one of them would do it, would make it all stop. But it didn’t stop. The rot and corruption just kept spreading wider around me, organs floating in a sloshing mass, eyes bobbing out of it to press against my shield staring at me, but at least they clouded over and shriveled up when I cursed them, so I kept going, just killing and killing until suddenly between one moment and the next the maw-mouth broke apart over my head and slithered down all around me to puddle like an emptied sack at my feet, disintegrating, the last few eyes already dead and empty before they sank in on themselves as the last of it came apart.