Cruel Magic (Royals of Villain Academy #1)(31)
Pros: I’d prove I wasn’t scared off. I might learn more about how things worked around here while the students were more relaxed. I could even have some fun, maybe.
Cons: Various people might harass me some more. I was getting pretty used to that. Otherwise, none that I could think of.
Imogen would be there with me. If anyone got too obnoxious, I could always head back to the dorm.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”
Imogen gave me a nudge toward my bedroom. “Go put on a dress—nothing too fancy—and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
As far as I was concerned, everything I’d inherited from my mother’s wardrobe was fancy. I settled on a soft knee-length halter dress in pale lavender and grabbed a trim black jacket to pull over it, since I was pretty sure it was still going to be chilly down by the water.
The charms on my bracelet rustled as I pulled the sleeve over them. I hadn’t taken it off except to shower since I’d gotten to the school, and I planned to keep wearing it all the way through, like a physical manifestation of the promise I’d made to my parents: I would get them the justice they deserved.
Deborah poked her head out of the sock drawer. You look nice, she said, her voice more distant in my head because she wasn’t touching me. Special fearmancer occasion?
“Just a student party,” I replied. “I’ve got to keep up certain appearances.”
Maybe it’d scare them a little that I was still confident enough to show up at all, and I could collect some more magic just like that.
When I reached the front entrance to Ashgrave Hall, Imogen was waiting, her athletic figure hugged by a mint-green dress that flared out halfway down her thighs. Maybe I was underdressed. But she gave me a thumbs up and a grin, and motioned for me to follow her out the door.
As we left behind the main triangle and came up on the Stormhurst Building, the tang of wood smoke reached my nose. A bonfire flickered in the distance, its light stuttering with the silhouettes of dozens of bodies moving around it.
“How are the Naries not going to know they’re missing out?” I said. The dressier flats I’d picked up at a little shop in town whispered over the grass when we veered off the main path onto a trampled dirt one. Strains of music carried across the field along with the smoke and the light.
“Oh, they can’t see any of this,” Imogen said in an offhand way. “You know that parts of the school are magically disguised so the Naries don’t even know they’re there, right?”
Professor Banefield had filled me in on that. “So they don’t stumble in on us in the middle of turning each other into toads or something. But the whole lake isn’t hidden.”
Imogen laughed. “Of course not. Just for the party nights—we usually have one or two a month while the weather’s warm enough—the teachers give us the go-ahead to put up a temporary illusion and repelling wards. Any Nary who looks this way will see the regular quiet lake, and they’ll feel a distinct lack of desire to get any closer.”
I appreciated the kindness Imogen had extended to me over the last few days, especially when she clearly didn’t need to, but the flippant way she talked about the Naries still itched at me. At least she didn’t call them “feebs” like most of the students here seemed to. When I’d finally asked Banefield about that, he’d admitted it was short for “feeble.”
We don’t encourage that sort of derogatory slang, but we don’t believe in censoring the students’ self-expression either, he’d said in a very responsibility-dodging sort of way.
It really did look like every senior on campus had come down to the lake for the party. Most of students drifted around the blazing bonfire, chattering and drinking. Several had wandered down the dock to the wide platform at the end, a few of them daring to dip their feet into the cool water. Others hung out on the rocky shoreline.
Someone had pulled a table out of the boathouse and laid it out with bottles of wine and platters of hors d’oeuvres that would have seemed more fitting at a dinner party than a college bash. A couple of ice-filled coolers with the necks of beer bottles poking from them gave a more down-to-earth touch.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk getting tipsy, but I let Imogen grab me a beer. One shouldn’t affect me too much. As she opened hers and then mine with a clink of the lid, a lightly sardonic voice piped up.
“Oh, look, even Frosty has come out. Watch you don’t get too close to the fire! We wouldn’t want you to melt.”
My head jerked around to find Jude smirking at me from near the fire pit. The other scions stood around him, and Victory, Sinclair, and a few other girls from their crowd lingered nearby, all of them watching me. Jude took a swig from the bottle of wine he appeared to have confiscated for private consumption and handed it to Malcolm.
“It’s the wicked witches who melt,” Malcolm said, the firelight turning his hair an even brighter gold. “I’m not sure what’d happen to Glinda. Maybe she’d burn.” He sounded as if he was considering finding out.
My gaze darted to Declan just a little behind him, even though I knew better than to expect anything from him now. His hazel eyes glinted with reflected flames under the sweep of his black hair, and then he looked away.
For a moment when we’d been alone in the classroom the other day, I could have sworn something had sparked between us. A hunger in his expression that had set off an answering flare in me, no matter how annoyed I’d been with him. But it had vanished as quickly as it’d come. Whether he cared more than he was willing to show or not, he was as walled off to me as Jude had been during the Insight exercise.