The Culling Trials (Shadowspell Academy #2)(8)

Anger burned in my gut—not at the troll, but at Ethan—strong enough to shatter whatever remaining hold the troll had on me. Well, minus the hand around my neck.

He squeezed my neck as he grinned. “Imma pop you like a daisy.”

I lifted my hand, still holding my knife, and laid the razor-sharp blade against the back of his remaining knuckles. I breathed out—or should say I tried to—and let all the anger swell in me, let it bleed into my eyes until there was nothing there but the urge to finish the troll off. I’d fight like a rabid wolf if he forced my hand. Maybe I’d die, but I’d take him with me.

For a split second, his magic rose around us, dark green and misty, and I…breathed it in? Was that right? No, maybe I absorbed it somehow. It soaked through my skin, and I owned it. I held it tightly for a beat before it flowed out through my eyes.

The world around us flickered and changed, but this time it wasn’t a misty image or a disorienting overlay on our world. It seemed entirely real.

The troll was drawn and quartered, tied under the bridge by his feet like a cow carcass hung to tenderize, the pink blood dripping slowly into the water below, dead eyes glazed with a white film. All ten fingers missing.

“No.” The troll let me go, turned and touched his own image. The flesh moved and he howled, and bolted away from me at top speed. I went to my knees as the troll raced away down river, his body jiggling like a bowl of jelly. But I couldn’t laugh. I could barely breathe and I’ll admit a large part of that was straight up fear catching me.

That troll meant to kill me, and I didn’t see any teacher showing up to stop him, no supervisor of the Culling Trials making sure I didn’t indeed have my head popped off like a daisy.

“Let me go!” Gregory yelled, and then the little goblin was running down the stairs that Ethan had cut into the side of the ditch. He looked at me on my knees in the water and then at the retreating figure of the troll. He said nothing but hurried to my side and helped me to my feet.

“You okay, Wild?”

I swallowed hard, coughed a few times, and finally nodded. “Thanks for the advice. Helped.”

“You…handled him well.” We slowly made our way up the stairs. At the top, Pete was still in honey badger form, being held by Wally as though he were a fat house cat and not a snarling twisting maniac of a badger.

Ethan raised his eyebrows.

“Boots,” Orin said, thrusting my boots at me. I bent and yanked them back on, lacing them up quickly. Behind us was the next group of kids. I could just hear their voices, and I knew we had to get going. Being passed was bad. Even if my heart was still racing, even if I wasn’t entirely sure just what had happened here.

Because part of my brain said I’d somehow sucked in the troll’s magic and spat it back at him, using his own gift against him.

I swallowed hard. “So, we’re done now, right?”

Wally shook her head slowly. “Three challenges for each house. We have two more. The final one will be where the gold is, assuming we chose the paths correctly.”

I rubbed my head. That couldn’t be the full story. There was something missing. There was no way that a place like this used the exact pattern for each trial. The trial for the House of Shade had been all about strength, speed, and predicting your enemy’s moves. Made sense if they were badass assassins. But the House of Unmentionables was not the House of Shade.

If my childhood fairy tales had taught me anything, trolls and goblins hoarded things.

Ethan was already partway down the path, eyeing up his piece of paper. Out of earshot. Still, I bent and spoke quietly into the goblin’s ear.

“Gregory, do trolls have any sort of talisman?”

His eyebrows rose and he slowly nodded. “Usually they bury something close to where they haunt. A trinket they love.”

I ran down the stairs into the ditch and did a slow circle through the muddy water, ignoring the sloshing inside my boots. “Would it be precious metal or something else?” I couldn’t explain what was driving me other than this challenge’s lack of complexity. Getting past a troll had been physically hard for me, not having done it before, but for Ethan, it would’ve been a cakewalk. There had to be something more.

Gregory hurried down the stairs and took a big snort of air, his eyelids fluttering. “A ruby. There’s a ruby buried in the creek.”

With Gregory helping as a magical treasure detector, we pinpointed a slight depression in the ground in under a minute. I started clearing away the wet rocks and mud.

“Stop messing around and get out of there!” Ethan snapped from the top of the stairs, then disappeared again. Thankfully, he wasn’t the suspicious type, just impatient.

My fingers slid over a smooth surface, different in look and texture than the rocks around it. In fact, it was a perfect square, strange to exist out in nature. I pulled it out and rinsed it in the water. Vivid red. I’d found a gemstone. A ruby.

I handed it to Gregory. “Hang on to it.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know, just hang on to it. And keep it from Wonder Bread.”

He snorted. “No problem.”

We ran up the stairs and reached the top just as voices filtered to us from the opposite bank.

I looked over my shoulder at the approaching kids. “We’d better move. That troll isn’t coming back anytime soon to slow down the next group.”