Chapter 30
Thirty
The corridors are quiet with only a few scones lit as I walk back towards my office. There were no casualties and only a few minor injuries. Everyone had been seen during the duration of yesterday after the attack and I hadn’t seen anyone out and about during my rounds around the school.
Edmond and Aslan thought it would be best for us to patrol just in case. The rebels on the field had started to retreat not long after the rest of us got on the battle scene. But it was a distraction tactic because multiple beings came around the back to sneak into the school.
That was when we felt a wave of power indescribable. The magnitude. . . it was colossal. Far greater than Kolasi and even the leader of the rebels.
I make my way down the hall to my office.
Castiel had turned in for the night directly after his patrol – right before mine.
Despite only being about two to three hundred bodies from the rebels and not even too powerful of races, it had taken a toll.
We were all in sync with each other, but we’re all out of practice with actual battle.
I’ll have to up the training next week. Not only Castiel and I, but Thorne, Callahan, Darian, and the rest of the trainee’s. The rebels are becoming more bold. An attack on Syngenia could be an act of actual war. The rebels have the numbers for it.
I enter my office and shut my door directly behind me. The second I do I grab the wrist that was lifted and aimed with a knife towards me and slam it into the wall.
He uses his other hand to punch my side, but his force is relaxed as I grab his neck and slam the rest of his body to the wall.
A breathy chuckles puffs in my face as I tighten my hold on him.
Irritation flickering throughout my body.
I already had to deal with one problematic bloodsucker yesterday, I did not intend to deal with another one tonight.
“I could drag you to Aslan and have them behead you right here right now,” I grit. My jaw aching with the force of clenching it.
He takes his free hand and pulls his hood back to reveal his face. Golden tanned skin that looks darker in the low lighting and twin red eyes encased in gold. “How much you want to bet you won’t though. . . twin brother.”
I shove off him and step back to properly look at him. “I bet the Mage Board would let me leave this damn school if I turned you in. A hundred fucking years as a professor because of your bastard ass.”
The left corner of his mouth curls up in a grin revealing his lone dimple. It’s the only difference in our appearance, otherwise we are identically identical.
“How much you want to bet you’d never leave now?”
A knowing in his eyes has me glaring harder at him. Technically, he is older by four minutes, but I have always acted like the eldest. Percius – or as everyone alive calls him, Kolasi the Death Devil – never fully matured. Even to this day.
“Stop acting like a drama-seeking child. It’s unbecoming.”
“So is denial.” I scoff at him but he uses his shoulders to push off the wall and becomes serious. “Speaking of – “
I wave my hand to silence him as I turn around and head towards my desk. I can feel him following and his own glare burning a hole straight through the back of my head.
“You can be in denial about that,” he roughs, “but not the rest. She is not a vampire, Varian.”
I shake my head and rest my hands on my desk to not think. “She burns in the sun and needs blood to survive.”
“She used a fractured blood art,” he says as he comes up behind me.
Lowering his body so his head becomes level with where mine is bent down.
“Her blood didn’t dissipate after using.
A blood art user isn’t able to reuse their blood once it’s been spent.
They shouldn’t be able to expand it to the extent that she did. ”
My chest rumbles with unreleased frustration. “I can’t, Percius.”
He snarls at me. “She dominated you. She got you to sub – ”
“NO!”
My face becomes before his with my aura pulsing in the room. Despite us being twins and his true form resting on his surface obediently, my aura is still more powerful than his. I am more dominant than he. I became more dominant than our father right before Percius ripped his heart out.
But he does not submit before me. Just as he never has. A lack of self-preservation instead of because his instincts are telling him to challenge me.
“Why haven’t you learned anything?”
He tilts his head up a fraction but steps back first when I don’t immediately answer.
Blowing out a breath while rolling his eyes.
He’s also never cared about primitive hierarchies and never had that possessive and dominate nature to be on top.
He simply exists, which is probably why he has the control over his true form that no other devil or angel does.
They are aligned, going against every base instinct we have, and simply exist.
“I said I would stay out of her business.” Frustration scalding within.
Percius’s eyes flicker with understanding as he turns away and hums. The bloodsucker had been correct in her presumption that devils are known for their promise and word keeping.
Not that we always follow it, but in the situation I was in with Mavyn outside of my office, it would grate on my conscious if I didn’t keep my word.
Even though it’s currently grating on my conscious right now not knowing her business and secrets.
“A clever one,” he chuckles. Even though there is nothing funny about this situation. “And Thorne said she was Callahan’s fated?” He blows out a breath and shakes his head. Looking up to me there’s amusement in his eyes. “Is she Darian, Thorne, and Castiel’s as well?”
I narrow my eyes at his smirk and shake my head.
“I don’t think so. Definitely not Castiel’s.
She had bit and drank from him several weeks ago and while her mark stayed for longer than normal, he said there was no tie or knot or bond between them.
He thinks he only craves her because there’s blue belladon in her blood. ”
I look off to the side to think about the other two.
“I doubt there will be anything between her and Thorne either. He would have realized in the same moment as Callahan did a couple days ago. Darian hasn’t had enough contact with her so I can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely they’ll be fated.”
Percius hums and bores his eyes into me. “But you are. You and her.”
His words hang in the air between us as I look back at my twin. The reason I was punished and have been forced to teach the same four classes for the same nearly hundred years since he killed our father and joined the rebellion.
A fucking idiot.
“Have you seen her soul, yet?” he asks on a breath.
His body stills as I answer. Even his true devil within freezes and shrinks back.
“She doesn’t have one.”
Which is impossible. All living things have souls. Only some primordials and select monsters are without souls. And she has aura so she has to have a soul, but when I was truth-pulling I looked into her eyes, past her eyes, and had seen nothing.
“Or if she does,” I continue, “it’s pitch black. Because all I saw was an abyss. Nothingness behind her eyes.”
His exhale of breath shutters as he looks down and away. A flicker of remembrance and fear in his eyes as he replays a memory. Then he nods and clenches and un-clenches his hands.
“I’ll have to profusely thank Thorne,” he whispers. “If he didn’t halt her blood and given you a chance to create your shield Rovan and I would be dead. I could feel it. Even my death element was resigned because it knew. We were supposed to die. And there should have been nothing that stopped it.”
I release a breath through my nose and hang my head. I’ll have to thank Thorne as well. I have never felt the type of terror as I did when I realized my twin, my brother, was going to die. About to die. Because he’s standing right here in front of me. Safe – for the moment – and alive.
He sighs and shakes off the negative energy as he always does. He is a terrifying force nearly everyone runs from in battle but in truth he has a similar personality to Castiel with their charming, nonchalant, party-boy energy.
It reminds me of when the three of us were in school. Back before all the bullshit.
“Well,” he shrugs, “good luck with your fated and all. I hope the next time we see each other, brother, it’s not on a battlefield.”
He turns towards the door and I return my glare to his back. “What is Alexandros’s next move? He hasn’t attacked the school in a century and he was supposed to keep his war away from it.”
I only catch the edges of his smirk as Percius turns only his head back. His fucking dimple appearing before he faces the door and cracks it open.
“Don’t die out there, brother.”
Then he slips through and is gone.
I let out a groan as I rub my face with a hand. Frustration now coursing because of both problematic bloodsuckers in my life. Why couldn’t they be like Thorne, or even Callahan, without any secrets and major problems.
Turning to my desk, I go and basically fall into my chair. It groans as I lean back in it and shut my eyes. It doesn’t help though as I see two circles of pale pink. Her eyes bordered with long, dark lashes and narrowed into an almost glare.
They flicker to a red so deep it looks like the blood that had been staining her hands. As dark as the blood moon that appears on the last day of the year. A final ending to the year before the first day of spring and a symbol of beginning and life.
She had so much control over her magic. It appearing with a crash like the crest of a tsunami before disappearing like a switch being flipped. So much power shouldn’t be able to be contained that quickly. And then when she had actually felt like nothing.
She had looked more like a thing than an actual being. If I didn’t know better I would have said a true form replaced her conscious in that moment.
Pulling both of my hands over my face, I check in with Callahan. He’s been ignoring and blocking me out since I had truth-pulled. But he lets me in this time, though it’s only to bare invisible teeth at me.
What do you want?
I don’t think he knows. . . neither of them could know. An unsealed bond between fated is finicky. She probably thinks the tugging pulling within her is only for Callahan.
I wanted to make sure you are alright.
Fine.
Exhaustion is starting to weigh. I haven’t slept in this last week.
Is Mavyn alright?
His growl vibrates in my mind. She’s exhausted.
Not only did she not get any sleep after the ceremony, but she was starved and then forced to perform your truth-pulling and then threatened to be expelled if she didn’t go to class so while she was hanging on by a thread she attended your fucking class because my father and fucking uncle will kill her if she fails.
And then, he seethes, she faced your fucking true formed twin brother.
His fury claws in my mind and I let it. She hasn’t been given a single break. And I don’t count the Mage Board letting her enroll into the university instead of killing her a break.
And then you, his voice is barely understandable, confronted her with power stronger than your unhinged brother and demanded she tell you how it was possible for her, who you called nothing, to do it.
A pain deeper than just my body, my mind, my emotions stings. I had still been terrified for my brother when I said that to her. Terrified that I hadn’t made it and she really did kill them. I wasn’t thinking, and it was made worse when she challenged me.
The succubus, he murmurs in a dark tone, is Elaycia Sorenli of Havebeth.
You’re fucking kidding me.
And the bone witch is Esmirra of Ebony.
No.
I can feel his sneer. Thorne confirmed that was the blood she threatened him with during the party.
And it aligns with her always saying she grew up in a brothel because Elaycia has a strip club in New York races of all kinds frequent.
Darian ended up confirming all the information and with someone going over there to connect with the succubus herself.
I rub at my face again.
I’m having them both be welcomed so Mavyn’s family can be with her tomorrow.
Are you kidding me?
I blow out a breath as I try to process one of the most powerful bone witches of our era coming back to this school when she hasn’t been back to Syngenia since she first saw the university open.
And Elaycia. . . she’s royalty from an entirely different world and universe unaffected by the powers of the Mage Board.
A royal expat that has full immunity from anything.
Mavyn misses them, he rumbles. And they’re alumni. The Dean can’t say no.
True, but hissy-fits will be thrown. A witch hasn’t stepped foot on Syngenia grounds in over a thousand years.
I’m going to sleep now, he grouches and then kicks me out of his mind.
I blow out a breath as I try not to think about all that is about to happen tomorrow. So many beings and races and dominating aura’s in one place? It’s bound to be a bloodbath. Like it usually is every year.
I sigh for what feels like a millionth time. How did one little girl get wrapped up with so many powerful beings? What kind of fate was twisted to draw her into all of our lives?