Cruel Magic (Royals of Villain Academy #1)(67)

Right. They weren’t real. I just had to prove to myself that I was strong enough to withstand them. I pressed my hand to my chest, trying to feel the hum of magic there amid the burning.

My legs ached as they jittered on beneath me. “Don’t make me laugh,” Declan went on with a sneer. “Everything you’ve done since you got here has been a mistake. You keep shooting your mouth off without a clue how to back it up.”

I dodged the razor disc, and Connar swung his arm. The air shoved me into the spinning edge as if he’d shoved me from across all that space. The blades sliced through my side all the way down to my ribs. I cried out again at the spear of pain that shot through my chest.

“Fight back!” Razeden hollered from beyond my view. “Shield yourself and hit them hard.”

“Stop,” I mumbled, but the word didn’t catch any magic inside me. I tried to concentrate on the steel wall I’d snapped into place around my mind the other day, but at the same moment Jude switched up his illusion. The heat fell away just in time for a cloud of shrieking wasps to descend on me. Fresh pain pinched all over my body where their stingers jabbed me.

Where was my magic? I did have it. I should be able to do something.

“Away,” I murmured, with a surge of energy from behind my sternum. The wasps shuddered, several of them disintegrating into the air like the nothing they were.

Then Malcolm’s voice rang out again. “Hand to your throat.”

My arm jerked up before I could stop it. My fingers clamped around my throat. I tensed my muscles to wrench them away, but they didn’t budge.

“Squeeze,” Malcolm said.

My hand clenched. My breath cut off with a ragged gasp. A deeper ache shot through my throat and the sides of my neck as I fought for air. I had to stop him. I had to shut them all out.

“You think you’re so perfect, but you know we have the real power here,” Declan said. “You’re on your own. Why would anyone want to help you when you can’t even hold yourself together?”

I strained, but I couldn’t reach my magic past the choking pressure on my throat and the panicking through my chest. I couldn’t grasp hold of one more shred of the energy inside me.

My head started to spin. I dropped to my knees.

The Desensitization session faded away around me, leaving only the bare floor, the black walls, and the two professors watching my hand fall limply from my throat.

I’d failed an imaginary assessment. If I didn’t perform better at the real one, I’d end up in an even worse position than the torment I’d just survived.





Chapter Twenty-Seven





Declan





Every time I stepped into the room where the meetings of the pentacle were held, a little vise closed around my gut and didn’t let go until I was in my car driving away again. The other barons dipped their heads with due respect and smiled their thin smiles, but I could hardly call any of them friendly colleagues.

And then there was Aunt Ambrosia, both my closest living blood relative and the person who’d most like to see my blood spilling all over this fine hardwood floor, always hovering at my side watching for the slightest slip.

She still had the right to sit next to me at the large rowan-wood table with its pentacle etching, the two of us on either side of the Ashgrave point. Until I finished my last year at Blood U, her word would hold some weight here.

“You look a little tired, Declan,” she said in her syrupy voice as we took our seats. “I hope the additional workload isn’t wearing you out too much.”

Today, her black hair coiled in loops over her ears before cascading down her back. It was a style my mother—her sister—had often worn when she’d been baron. I’d seen it in many of the old pictures. Aunt Ambrosia’s dress, heavy velvet that didn’t fit the season, recalled my mother’s fashion sense too. It made me feel ill watching her trying to transform herself into the long-gone woman whom I’d barely known, as if the imitation would make it easier to take my mother’s place.

I’d taken on the teacher’s aide position specifically to show how much work I could handle, and I didn’t imagine I looked any more tired than usual. If I did, it had nothing to do with schoolwork. More likely the memory of a hot mouth against mine in the dark.

“Everything is going well, but thank you for your concern, Aunt Ambrosia,” I said.

“Have you heard from your brother lately? It is such a shame having him so far away when we have an excellent school right here.”

I resisted the urge to clench my hands. Needling me about how I’d influenced my younger brother’s life since I’d taken over guardianship of him from her three years ago had been one of her favorite bones of contention.

Marguerite Stormhurst, Connar’s mother, jerked open the curtains to let what light and warmth the windows allowed to enter the gloomy space. She moved with the same athletic power he had, but her body was wiry rather than bulky with muscle.

“Do you still have Noah in that school in France?” she asked me in her blunt way. “Do you really think they’ll teach him anything over there he won’t learn just as well here?”

“I figure it broadens his horizons to spend some time studying with fearmancers he’d never have met otherwise,” I said. “And now that I’m an aide at the university, it wouldn’t be right to risk inadvertent favoritism. When I graduate, I’ll have him transfer over here the following semester.”