Cruel Magic (Royals of Villain Academy #1)(35)

The cat sprang out in an instant, its gaze already fixed on the rabbit. The rabbit’s nose trembled. It let out a squeaky sort of yelp and backpedaled to the corner of its cage as fast as it could go.

Banefield had known what he was doing—I’d give him that. My stomach flipped at the sight of the terrified animal, but this time I wasn’t the one provoking the terror. I could be the one to save it.

“Shoo!” I hollered, stepping between the cat and the rabbit’s cage. I flung my arms at it to motion it away. “Get away! Leave the bunny alone.”

The cat hopped backward with a startled arch of its back. As it hissed at me, a waft of fear, sharper and more potent than any I’d felt yet, rushed through my ribs to collect at the base of my throat.

The cat moved as if to try to dodge past me, and I stomped my foot. “Forget it! It’s not your breakfast.”

Another jolt of anxiety flowed into me with the smack of my shoe against the floor. The cat stalked away behind the desk. I straightened up, my pulse thumping giddily. Magic hummed from my throat all the way down my sternum. I didn’t know how much it was compared to what fearmancers normally used, but it was a hell of a lot more than I’d had to work with before.

“Excellent!” Banefield said with a pleased clap. “There you go. The first hurdle crossed.” He murmured something to the cat, and it allowed him to scoop it up and place it back in its own cage. “It may be more of a complicated process, but it’ll serve our ends for now. We can arrange scenarios as you need to accumulate energy for your magic, and you should keep an eye out for parallel opportunities in your day-to-day life.”

Like when I’d stood up to Malcolm to defend the kid he’d been harassing. Hmm. There were probably dozens of opportunities to scare off bullies from their targets every day here at Villain Academy, but I had the feeling taking up that banner was going to make me even more a target myself than I’d already become.

Not that I had any interest in becoming Miss Popularity—Victory was welcome to that title—but I really wasn’t going to learn anything if my classmates turned every class I was in into a “let’s beat up on Rory” session.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we can move past theory and get into the hands-on practice.” Banefield sat down behind his desk. “Where would you like to start? What areas do you feel you could use the most additional work in before your next seminar?”

My mind leapt to that Insight seminar where Jude and Victory had picked apart some of my most vulnerable memories, but I’d managed to put up a wall they couldn’t penetrate. All I needed was enough magic to sustain that. And my mentor’s use of the term “hands-on” had brought up another memory—of talking with Connar last night.

“I have my first seminar in Physicality this afternoon,” I said. “Can I try to, like, build something? How does that even work? Can I turn this energy into anything?” I tapped my collarbone.

Banefield chuckled. “I wish that conjuring were so easy. No, Physicality work mainly involves drawing on what you already have and, in essence, re-shaping it. You can make things appear out of thin air only if the materials are already on hand. So, for example, if you did conjure ice the other day, you’d have been pulling water molecules out of the air to create it.”

Oh. “I didn’t feel like I was doing anything that complicated.” I hadn’t really thought about it at all; it’d just happened.

“That’s the beauty of being a mage,” Banefield said. “To some extent, our powers naturally convert our will into the action we’re seeking. We’re simply honing them, learning how to use them more efficiently and effectively.”

I nodded. “Got it. So… if I wanted to make a little sculpture of something with magic, I’d need to have the material I was going to use around. Or I guess I could make it out of ice and just pull that out of the air again?”

“Absolutely,” Banefield said. “And don’t get too tied to your literal ideas of what any given material can do. That’s something you’ll branch out into as you get into advanced Physicality, if you pursue that line. There have been great mages who can transform their own bodies into animals that appear twice their previous size or conjure a massive sword from the soil beneath a field. At their base level, many things contain the same essence as many other things, and what exists can always be stretched around our will.”

I wasn’t sure I could wrap my head around that idea just yet. “Let me just try…” I dragged in a breath. “Freeze,” I murmured, letting some of the magic I’d absorbed vibrate up my throat.

Ice shimmered across the surface of Banefield’s desk, which thankfully was mostly bare. But I didn’t want some thin sheet just lying there.

I groped for the right word to capture my intention. “Together,” I said, cupping my hands to model the motion.

The ice quivered and rolled up into a lump right in front of me. A laugh slipped out of me. I’d done that.

Let’s see how far I could push this before my magic ran out. I focused on the phoenix I’d imagined all those days ago and made a stroking gesture on either side of the icy lump. “Shape,” I said.

The lump erupted into a head and wings and tail. The outlines of feathers rippled over its surface. A beak protruded from the figurine’s head and sculpted flames licked up at its base. Every detail I trained my attention on in my mind’s eye burst into being, with another “Shape” whenever my momentum started to falter.