The Culling Trials 3 (Shadowspell Academy #3)(37)

“Awesome. Well, I would like to be proficient enough to cause havoc. What do I say?”

He sniffed and shook his head before taking a deep breath. “I’ve trained for this. I can do it in my sleep.”

He lightly touched his head. He hadn’t trained for this when at anything other than a hundred percent. Welcome to real life, Wonder Bread.

“Right.” I nodded in determination. Clearly, he wasn’t going to teach me to use magic without a little prodding. “Then jog on out there and start throwing some spells. I’ll be right behind you, with this tiny knife.”

His gaze cut my way, and he watched me grab for my knife. He sighed. “Look, we can’t really practice in here or the spells will bounce off the walls and hit us.” I grimaced and directed the boom part of the wand toward the cave opening, where the T-Rex waited.

I doubted the predators of old would’ve been so patient. Or tolerant.

“You’re better at overall combat,” he went on. “I’m obviously better with the actual spells. So we’ll have to work together—”

“That’s what some of us have been doing all along…”

His blue eyes flared. “Do you want to win this, or not?”

“Sorry, sorry.”

Outside the cave, the T-rex shifted and lifted a foot. This one landed farther away, back toward its initial position. Its default setting, I guessed.

“What we can do is this…” He licked his lips and crawled nearer the opening. “Use your—the wand. React with it how you would normally react with a knife. If you’d go for the eyes, or belly, aim and shoot the sparks. I’ll then follow it up with an actual spell.”

“The eyes are much too small and far away for a target,” I said, my brain whirling, shedding off the panic of fighting a huge predator that had terrorized prehistoric earth. “The belly is covered in that thick skin. Are your spells more potent than foot-long teeth?”

Ethan blinked and looked down at his wand. He hadn’t thought of that.

“Who the hell is training you that you don’t already have a strategy?” I berated. “And what important branch of the government is he or she making a mockery of?”

“It was my weapons instructor,” he replied.

“Ever heard the saying, those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach?” I shook my head and crawled toward the mouth of the cave on hands and knees until the roof allowed me to stand, hunched over. I eyed the T-Rex, looking around the empty space, waiting for us to bring the fight to it.

Whiskers, my pissed off bull, had nothing on this situation.

“So, it’s either bring down the beast or get eaten?” I asked.

“Or let time run out.” He braced a scratched hand against a rock, leaning heavily and squinting. I looked at my watch to see a timer ticking down. We had less than thirty minutes left to deal with the T-Rex. Ethan’s head was probably throbbing to the same beat as mine. “But I got the impression that time running out would be worse than losing to the beast. Something about lava…”

My jaw dropped, and I spluttered before I managed to actually speak words. “Oh my God, what is wrong with magical people?”

He took a deep breath. “Are you ready?”

“No. You?”

He released a shaky laugh. “Nope.”

“But what choice do we have, right? We need to impress your daddy, right? We need to finish this and hope that Orin, Wally, and Pete are okay.”

He sobered. “Yes,” he said softly. His pink tongue left a wet trail across his bottom lip. “Look,” he said, not looking over at me. “Between us, I’m glad it worked out this way. I’m glad we ended up in a crew. You’re insane, but you have a way about you. You make all this…bearable.”

“Same,” I said, and it wasn’t a complete lie. Sometimes he was actually pretty okay.

His grin said he heard everything I didn’t say in my voice. “We can’t all be team players, Wild. What fun is there in that? Some of us have been groomed to be separate, whether we like it or not.”

And with those words, he pushed out of the cave and ran right. I surged after him a moment later, really wishing he’d given me a heads up.

As expected, the T-Rex’s head swung around, tracking our movements. It roared as it stepped forward, on the chase once more. Ethan pivoted and headed back toward it at an angle.

“Go,” he said, yelling at me. “Go, go!”

“Go where?” The T-Rex gained speed, each step cutting the distance between us by a quarter.

“I hate this,” I muttered, letting intuition kick in and changing my angle. “This is terrible. Why did I decide to come?” Not that I could have let Billy come instead, but I found myself wishing we’d cut and run like my dad had suggested.

The T-Rex either didn’t catch my change in direction or wanted Ethan more, because it kept moving straight for him.

“Levitate!” I heard, imagining him using a lovely little wand flick while standing stationary, like that woman in the last challenge.

“It’s too heavy,” I said, changing my direction again and running back at him. He couldn’t get eaten yet. If he did, I’d have no chance. The T-Rex didn’t have a wand I could steal, and it wouldn’t care about my punches. “Use an attack spell!”