Cruel Magic (Royals of Villain Academy #1)(47)

The fixture blinked on, and my entire bedspread started glittering. What the hell? I walked over.

Every inch of the duvet was scattered with tiny shards of glass, many of them burrowed right into the fabric. I’d slice open my fingers trying to dig them out. Somehow I had the feeling there were more underneath too.

A shudder ran through me. Victory had styled her conjuring to provoke emotional pain as well as physical. The mess on the bed echoed the smashed bits of my charm bracelet.

“For fuck’s sake,” Imogen muttered, coming up beside me. “I can give my dad a call. The maintenance staff can clean this up for you.”

Resolve tightened around the hum of magic in my chest. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to have to go running for help. I think I can handle it.”

I focused on the glinting slivers of glass, remembering how I’d pulled ice right out of the air the other day. This should be easier, right? I wasn’t conjuring so much as simply moving.

“Come together,” I murmured, drawing my hands toward one another at the same time. The shards quivered. Some of them rose off the bed, collecting in a clump near the foot. Others seemed to stick in the fabric.

I dragged in a breath and focused harder. “Come together.” Willing every bit of glass from within the duvet and beneath it, pulling them toward each other with the energy vibrating at the base of my throat. Prickles raced across my skin as I worked them all free.

“Come together,” I whispered one last time, but I couldn’t sense any more glass in the bed. I turned my attention to the floating ball I’d made of them.

What to do with them now? The hum in my chest stuttered. I didn’t have much accumulated power left.

I could leave Victory a different sort of present. A smile tugged at my mouth, and I pressed my hands even closer together. “Mold and stick.”

The shards melded together into a solid lump, all the sharp edges melting away. I released the shape, and it dropped onto my bed with a muffled thump.

Imogen picked up the thing and laughed. “It looks like a very posh version of a poop emoji.”

I grinned back at her. “That’s what I was going for. Might as well let Victory know exactly what I think of her attempt.”

Imogen tossed it to me, and I brought the lumpy mass over to Victory’s room. I didn’t have a chance against her locking abilities, so I left it sitting just outside her door. She’d figure out what it meant.

“Let’s see if we can really keep her out from here on,” Imogen said when I rejoined her. “How did you seal the door last time?”

“I tried reshaping the latch so it wouldn’t slide out when the doorknob turned.” I twisted the knob to examine it. “I guess she smoothed it back out.”

Imogen nodded. “You’d think a physical mechanism would be the best defense, but mental ones are actually harder for people to break. Next time, see if you can mix a combination of persuasion that they really don’t want to come in and the illusion of feeling sick or scared or something like that. Scared is the best, of course, because then you get magic out of it too.”

“Of course,” I said, with a pinch of real queasiness. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get used to the casual way in which the students of Villain Academy fed off each other’s distress.

My gaze slid to the wardrobe. So far I’d been lucky and none of my tormentors had messed with that. I couldn’t count on staying that lucky. I owed it to Deborah to make sure I defended her as well as I could.

“I could use a little help figuring out another spell,” I said, motioning Imogen into the room and closing the door. “If I wanted to make sure anyone who looked in my wardrobe didn’t see one specific thing in there… That’d take an illusion, right? Are there any special tricks to doing that effectively?”

Imogen cocked her head. “What are you trying to cover up? It makes a difference.”

I hesitated. But if I couldn’t reveal this to Imogen after all the ways she’d been here for me so far, why was I even hanging out with her? I didn’t have to tell her the whole story about technically having smuggled a joymancer into the school, only the part that would seem relatively normal for a mage.

“I have a familiar,” I said. “But she’s—well, she’s a mouse, and it seems like the vast majority of the other animals around here would happily have her for dinner, so I’ve been keeping her out of sight. I don’t really want to know what Victory or the rest of them would do if they found her.”

Deborah’s voice reached my head distantly. Are you sure about this? This girl is a fearmancer, isn’t she?

I couldn’t answer her without raising questions I didn’t want to answer. Imogen raised her eyebrows. “A mouse? Interesting choice.”

“It’s a long story.” I knelt down by the sock drawer and eased it open. “I don’t want anyone seeing anything other than socks in this drawer, even if they start digging around in there. How hard would that be?”

Deborah stayed hidden amid the rolls of fabric. She didn’t risk saying anything else to me. Maybe Imogen thought I’d gone completely around the bend and was hallucinating this mouse, but she crouched down beside me, humoring me.

“If you want the illusion to hold even when things are moved around, the easiest way to make that stick is to take everything out of the drawer and start from there. Cast an illusion that people will see the bare base while you’re looking right at it. Then add a few socks and layer another illusion on top. And so on in a bunch of stages until it’s full again. Unless a person is paying really close attention, they aren’t likely to notice they’re being misled.”