A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(8)

    So once you’ve decided that you’re going somewhere out of the ordinary, you’re better off going as fast as you can, before you or anyone else can think about it too much. I headed straight for the nearest landing, and waited until Orion and I were far enough down the stairs that nobody else was in earshot before snapping at him. “What part of leave me alone didn’t you understand?”

He’d been walking along next to me with his hands shoved in his pockets, slouched: he jerked his head up. “But—you just said, let’s go—”

“I should’ve told you off in front of everyone, then, after they’ve all decided you saved my life?”

He actually stopped right there in the middle of the staircase and started saying, “Should I…” We were between floors with no landing visible, and the nearest light that wasn’t completely burnt out was a sputtering gaslight twenty steps back, so our shadows darkened the stairs below us. Pausing for as much as a millisecond was a grand invitation for something to go wrong up ahead.

I’d kept going, because I wasn’t an idiot, so I was two steps down before I realized he hadn’t. I had to stretch out and grab him by the wrist and tug him onwards. “Not now. What is it with you, are you actively trying to meet new and exciting mals?” He went really red and fell back in with me, staring at the floor even harder, as if I’d scored an actual hit, no matter how stupid that was. “The ones that come your way in the ordinary course of things aren’t enough?”

    “They don’t,” he said shortly.

“What?”

“They don’t come my way! They never have.”

“What, you just don’t get attacked?” I said, outraged. He shrugged a shoulder. “Where’d that soul-eater come from, then?”

“Huh? I’d just come out of the bathroom. I saw the tail end of it going under your door.”

So he had actually come to my rescue. That was even worse. I stewed over his revelation as we kept going. Of course, it made some sense: if you were a monster, why would you attack the blinding hero who could blast you to pieces without half trying? What didn’t make sense was his side of it. “So you reckon you might as well make a name for yourself, saving the rest of us?” He shrugged again, not looking up, so that wasn’t it. “Do you just like fighting mals or something?” I prodded, and he flushed up again. “You’re unbelievably odd.”

“Don’t you like practicing your affinity?” he said, defensive.

“My affinity is laying waste to multitudes, so I haven’t had much opportunity to try the experience,” I said.

He snorted, as though I were joking. I didn’t try to persuade him. It’s easy to claim to be a massively powerful dark sorceress; no one’s going to believe me until I prove it, preferably with hard evidence. “Where do you get all the power, anyway?” I asked him instead. I’d often wondered. An affinity makes certain spells considerably easier to cast, but it doesn’t make them free.

    “From them. From the mals, I mean. I kill one, then I save that power to fire off the next spell. Or if I’m low, I borrow some from Magnus or Chloe or David…”

I ground my teeth. “I get the idea.” He was naming off all the other students from the New York enclave. Of course they did power-sharing, and of course they had their own power sink to boot, like my crystals, except some enormous one that every student from New York had been feeding into for the last century. He literally had a battery to pull on for his heroics, and if he could pull mana from killing maleficaria—how?—he probably didn’t even need it.

We reached the landing for the shop level then. The senior hall was still further below, and there was a faint glow of light coming up the stairs from there. But the archway opening onto the classroom corridor itself was pitch black; the lights had gone out. I stared at the open maw of it grimly as we came down the last steps: that was what his moment of hesitation had netted us. And if mals never went for him, that meant whatever was lurking around down there was going to go for me.

“I’ll take the lead,” he offered.

“You’d better believe you’re going to take the lead. And you’re holding the light, too.”

He didn’t even argue, just nodded and put out his left hand and lit it up using a minor version of the same incandensing spell he’d used on the soul-eater. It made my eyes itch. He was all set to just march straight into the corridor; I had to yank him back and inspect the ceiling and floor and prod the nearby walls myself. Digesters that haven’t eaten in a while are translucent, and if they spread themselves out thinly enough over a flat surface, you can look straight at them and never realize they’re there until they flap themselves around you. The landing is a high-traffic area, so it’s especially popular with them. Earlier this year, one of the sophomore boys rushing to get to class on time got caught, and he lost a leg and most of his left arm. He didn’t last for long after that, obviously.

    But the whole area round the landing was clear. The only thing I did turn up was an agglo hiding under one of the gas lamps, shorter than my pinky and not worth trying to harvest even for me: only two screws, half a lozenge, and a pen cap stuck onto its shell so far. It scuttled away over the wall in a panic before diving into a vent. Nothing reacted to its passage. At night, in a dark corridor on the shop level, that wasn’t a good sign. There should have been something. Unless there was something especially bad up ahead that had scared the others away.