Chapter 8
Eight
Elodie
For my last class of the day, Professor Perez leads us outside to a grassy courtyard between the two senior buildings. The scorch marks mottling the grass and singed leaves fluttering on the three saplings serve as a reminder of past exercises that didn’t go entirely to plan.
Perez’s glim—the ability to summon water out of the environment and direct it—has clearly come in handy more than once, just as it often did in my reality.
While the professor pulls today’s training apparatus out of a canvas duffel, Stella considers our surroundings with a skeptical air.
She tucks her silk-gloved hands around her elbows.
“Well, at least it’s sunny. I can’t believe last time he made us come out here, we had to keep going even when it started spitting rain. ”
I can remember plenty of outdoor sessions in outright deluges across my years at the academy, but that was my reality’s academy.
Some things might have been a little different on that front here, so I hum in vague agreement.
The warmth of the sun streaking over us is pleasant, whatever’s in store for us next.
Stella smooths her hair back toward her casual bun and glances at me sideways.
“Are you going to the Blossom get-together tonight? The idea of planning how to pretty up the school halls makes me want to claw my eyes out, but my parents are always pushing me to stay as involved as possible.” She gives a soft huff of a sigh.
Of course Other Elodie would have joined Blossom. The staff advisors of Luminary’s most esteemed club for female students probably expected her to take over as president next year.
Too bad, so sad.
I’d rather get beat up at the next meeting of the Cutting Flame, the invite-only combat club. Hell, I’d rather hang out with the radiators in their Holy Radiance worship room in the Apollo Building’s basement.
No doubt my double would have felt pressure from her grandparents—and maybe Dad?
I haven’t gotten to spend enough time with him to know—to prance around the academy in benevolent superiority.
But Other Elodie is dead, and I won’t be sticking around long enough to be affected by their possible disappointment.
“We’re twenty,” I point out, hoping that’s actually true in Stella’s case.
I don’t know when her birthday is, but everyone in Year 15 should be turning 20 by the summer solstice that’s only a couple of months away.
“We’re supposed to be taking control of our lives and carving our own path, right?
If they hassle you, ask them if they want to raise a leader or a limp rag. ”
Stella catches a snort and shakes her head at me. “All right, I take it you’re skipping, then.” A slight furrow forms in her elegant brow. “More violin practice, or something else? You’ve seemed like… like you’ve got a lot on your mind.”
A mind that immediately trips back to Divination class, to Cole’s searing glower and the shriveling of my internal organs in response. My innards still feel tender, as if our caustic exchange scraped me raw from the inside out.
It doesn’t matter. He’s not my Cole. He’s just a professor to me here—an asshole professor who has no right to be such a snuffer when he got what he wanted out of life.
It seems Stella is more observant than I gave Other Elodie’s friends credit for, though. I probably haven’t quite lived up to my double’s usual aggressively vapid self.
I summon an airy laugh. “Oh, my grandparents were badgering me a bit over the weekend, and I guess that was kind of annoying. But it’s no big deal, really.”
It seems like a reasonable excuse, but Stella shakes her head again. Her expression has turned more thoughtful. “It’s not just this week. The past month, really.”
She pauses, her stance tensing as if she’s grappling with herself, and then offers me a small but soft smile. “You know you can talk to me about whatever, right? Isn’t that what friends are for?”
Sure, but are Stella Kingsley and I actually best buds, or does she simply hang out with me because we’re equals in social status? Daphne’s comments about the sniping between the top families prickles up through my head.
My supposed friend might be offering a genuine ear… or she might be looking for a weakness to exploit. That’s how the whole lucent upper crust operates, isn’t it?
“There’s honestly not anything to talk about,” I say, which is true, because I don’t have a clue what Other Elodie got herself into in the weeks before her murder. It’s very unfortunate that her friends seem to be equally clueless.
Professor Perez clears his throat, and the couple dozen of us clustered around fall silent.
Our Bloom Practicum professor has a mild-mannered vibe that you’d expect would get him eaten by the sharks around here, but he balances it with enough assured expertise that even the biggest jerks can’t help respecting him.
Well, most of the biggest jerks.
A presence leans over behind me, with a tingle of ephemera and a tug of my heart that tells me it’s Salvatore before he speaks.
He takes a cocky but languid tone, quiet enough that no one else will hear. “Think we’ll get to face off again, patatina? Maybe you want to bring out that new fire after class? I could teach you a lot. Just one piece of this could blow your mind.”
His tone makes what should be only vaguely suggestive phrasing outright filthy. A twisted heat crawls down through my abdomen, objecting and yet turned on.
He isn’t my match, but Durga damn me if he doesn’t look—sound—feel—just like the man who’d spill out strings of adoring words I couldn’t understand while he took my body to the stars and back.
I lift my hand to direct a middle finger his way without glancing back. Salvatore merely chuckles as if the gesture is foreplay rather than a fuck-off.
Thankfully, Professor Perez starts talking in his steady, measured voice.
“There’s only a little more than a year left before you’ll finish your initial schooling, attend the graduation ball, and fate willing, spark with your matches and activate your glims. Which makes it all the more important that you’re ready for the initial surge of your innate power.
As probable bloom talents, you may be blasting out a lot of power when your glim first awakens. ”
A chill washes away the flickers of heat Salvatore provoked. I don’t really belong here.
Lucent talents are divided into two primary types. Everyone wants to find out their glim is the bloom sort: casting some kind of productive energy out into the world, boosting or creating.
But no one knows for sure what their inherent power will be until their glim activates with the sparking of their matches. While the academy decides which practicum we take based on family history and aptitudes with the basic magical skills, they’re wrong plenty of the time.
They guessed wrong about me back home, and they’re wrong about Other Elodie too. I have to assume she had the same glim as me, considering we came from the exact same family lines with all the same energies coursing through them.
I’m not bloom but blight: the talents of binding and destruction.
The professors pretend both are of equal value, but I’ve heard the way people talk about children of the top families who reveal a blight glim. I’ve seen kids break down sobbing when they find out they’ve been assigned to the blight practicum during the sorting at age ten.
I doubt any of them ended up with a glim as horrifying as mine.
I don’t have to worry about that in this reality, though, because there’s no way in Helheim I’ll still be here in a year. What’s a little more playing along?
Perez gives us a wry smile. “You’ll all hope you’ve got a refined glim, which does make it a little easier from the start.
But even those can pack quite a punch when they first emerge, and some of you will have a raw talent.
Either way, you all need to learn as much control as you can before that day. ”
Would the horrific evening in the parking lot have gone differently if I’d gotten four more years of training before my glim woke up?
Even after three years of working with my unsettling power—of digging up every shred of supernatural information and trying every technique I stumble on, no matter how much a longshot, to suppress it—I’ve never been able to stop the main effect from kicking in automatically when triggered.
The best I can do is guide the initial direction.
Chances are someone was always going to die.
Our professor is motioning to a row of metal pinwheels he’s set out on the grass in front of us.
“You’ve done a lot of exercises on your own.
It takes even more control to work in collaboration with your peers.
I’ll be pairing you off, keeping skill levels in mind.
Between the two of you, you need to set the blades spinning, light them up by whatever method works best for you, and float them up to that ledge by the roof. ” He points to the opposing building.
“Just that?” Salvatore calls out with a teasing lilt from still way too close behind me.
Professor Perez lifts his eyebrows. “If you want a decent grade, you’ll do it without any crashes or setting anything other than the pinwheel on fire.”
In any other class, the teacher might encourage us to try to sabotage each other. The one relief of the practicums is that they’re focused on reducing harm above all else.
I enjoy that relief for the three seconds before Perez tips his head to me. “Miss Devine and Mr. Worth, you can get started over there.”
Fuck a firedrake. I can’t claim a talent for precognition, but I already know this pairing is going to end badly.
Dragging in a breath, I walk to the first trinket in the row without glancing over at Byron. Perez did say he was pairing us up based on skill, and we’re the top two students in our year. Other Elodie must have had to work with him a lot.