6. Asha #2
“Do try to surprise me.”
A nasty smile pulls at my mouth. If she wants to watch me fail in public, I can at least make it memorable.
I close my eyes for half a second and reach inward.
The problem isn’t finding the power. It’s always there.
Vast. Pressed up behind bone and skin and nerves that were never built for it.
Storm-dark, blood-deep, old enough to remember what fear looked like before creatures gave it a name.
The second I touch it, this pathetic little body starts protesting.
Pain needles down my arms, my ribs tighten, the room goes too sharp.
“Steady,” Sable says.
I pull, and that annoying blue light flickers over my fingers.
The power surges harder, trying to come all at once. I shove it back down with brute force because finesse isn’t exactly an option when your magic wants to rip through your chest and redecorate the walls with your organs.
The stone under me hums. The silver lines carved into the floor answer, lighting up one by one.
Sable’s voice cuts through the pressure. “What do you feel?”
“Annoyed.”
“Beyond your attitude.”
I open my eyes and glare at her. “Pain.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.” I gasp. “Make it stop.”
“Miss Asha—”
“Make it stop,” I grit out and convulse.
Instantly, Sable pulls back, and I feel it retreating. She stares down at me, curiosity in her eyes. But there is another thing lurking under there. It looks suspiciously like understanding. She blinks, and it’s gone. She steps back, and a mean smile pulls at her lips.
“Are you sure you’re in the right class, Miss Asha?”
The lecture hall erupts into laughter. It’s not the muffled snickers from earlier but a full-blown, humiliating laugh.
It hits my insides, and my eyes feel hot and wet. I sit up and slide off the table, running for the hallway and hopefully a way out of this horrible place.
My throat burns. That fucking laugh keeps hitting the inside of my skull, over and over, each burst of it a fresh little knife. I shove through the double doors at the end of the hall and find a narrow landing wrapped around the outside of the tower, open to the dead, dark sky.
The cold hits me.
I plant both hands on the black stone rail and breathe like I’ve forgotten how to do it properly. My eyes sting. I blink hard, furious at them for even trying.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I whisper.
A tear spills anyway.
I scrub it off my cheek so viciously I nearly take skin with it.
I have been ripped out of my realm, shoved into this tiny breakable cage, mocked by students, assessed by strangers, and made into a spectacle in front of a room full of idiots who couldn’t survive five minutes where I come from. And this body’s response is to cry?
Pathetic.
I slam my palm against the stone.
Blue light flickers between my fingers and skates across the balustrade in a crackling line. The wards in the tower answer at once with a low, warning pulse not to try that again.
I don’t turn. “Go away,” I state, my voice as cold as the surrounding air.
“You forgot your things,” Tobin says and drops my bag at my feet.
“Well, thanks for being a hero. Now fuck off.”
“You are definitely an anomaly,” he says, resting one elbow on the stone rail as he faces me.
“Look, I don’t want conversation. So please just fuck off.”
“No. There is something dreadful about you, and I don’t mean your poor magic.”
“Dreadful,” I repeat.
“As in full of dread.”
“You have no idea,” I mutter, closing my eyes for one brief moment and remembering who I used to be.
The scene flashes through my mind’s eye in an instant, even though the event itself took hours.
Blood. Obedience. The noise as I walked through my realm, the screams as I brought every creature to their knees in worship, whether they wanted to or not.
My fingers curl against the rail until the stone bites into my palms.
For one foul second, I nearly tell him.
Instead, my eyes snap open, and I laugh once, thin and vicious.
I turn then, because if I keep staring out into that dead sky, I’m going to either cry again or throw myself off the tower to see if the ground has the decency to kill me. “Do you collect wounded girls on landings often, or am I getting special treatment?”
His silver eyes flick over my face, over the damp at my lashes that I know he’s seen, and to his credit, he doesn’t mention it.
“First years cry, second years learn to control it better. By third, they are starting to realise strength is the only way forward, and by the fourth, they are hardened to the way of the realm. You are amongst the wrong crowd. Why did Blackridge put you in Upper Class?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“How old are you?”
“That’s rude. How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Twenty-one. I can’t even remember being twenty-one. I am sure I was… once.
“Well?”
“I guess I’m twenty-one then.”
“You guess?”
“I am.”
He nods slowly. “So you are in the correct year for your age, but you are out of your depth magic-wise.”
“I guess that’s why they call me an anomaly.”
“Speaking of which…” he steps back as Blackridge swishes onto the landing with his robes billowing.
“Miss Asha. My office.” He doesn’t give me a chance to refuse.
With a wave of his hand, I’m standing in a room that is clearly his office.
Black wood panelling runs the length of every wall, interrupted only by books that seem to have arranged themselves there out of personal conviction, their spines pressed between silver wards etched so densely into the surfaces that the room feels warded against doubt.
At one end, a fire burns low in a hearth that gives the impression of having already decided what it thinks of you, while at the centre, a wide desk holds neat stacks of paper and, less neatly, a black bowl filled with what looks disturbingly like a heart.
I stare at the bowl.
“Decorative?” I ask.
“Consequential,” Blackridge says. He moves behind the desk and sits. It should make him look more ordinary. It doesn’t. He still gives the impression that the room belongs to him because the realm asked nicely.
I stay where I am. If he wants me seated, he can say so.
He does not.
Instead, he studies me in that quiet way of his that makes my skin itch. “Professor Sable tells me your power response was extreme.”
“Your professor made me a public exhibit.”
“She made you an instructive one.”
“I’m going to assume this academy runs on humiliation and threats because if not, your staff are getting very creative.”
His mouth does not move. “Sit down, Miss Asha.”
There is one chair opposite him. I take it because standing on principle while I’m one insult away from either crying again or murdering someone feels like poor timing.
He folds his hands on the desk. “You didn’t leave angry. You left ashamed.”
I sit very still. The fire shifts in the grate. The heart in the bowl does not. That somehow feels ruder.
“I don’t do shame,” I say.
“No.” His gaze drops once, to my clenched hands, then returns to my face. “You do fury over vulnerability. It’s a common substitution.”
“Are all your little chats this insufferable, or have you decided I’m special?”
“I decided that when you fell into my courtyard from nowhere.”
That shuts me up for half a second.
He sees it. Of course he does.
“I didn’t fall from nowhere,” I say carefully. “I fell from somewhere else.”
Blackridge says nothing.
I feel the trap opening under my own words and smile without warmth. “What. No dramatic gasp? No demand for an explanation?”
“I find creatures reveal more all on their own.”
“Ah, the simmering silence. I’m familiar.”
“Really? You come across as liking the sound of your own voice.”
“Rude,” I mutter. “But accurate. I have a lot of witty things to say.”
“Witty to whom?”
Wow. Okay. Noted.
“To me,” I say at once. “Obviously.”
Blackridge steeples his fingers. “That confidence may yet keep you alive.”
“Comforting. I was worried I’d have to rely on the curriculum.”
His eyes rest on me for a beat too long. “You’re deflecting.”
“I’m surviving.”
“By refusing to look directly at the problem.”
“I looked directly at the problem. She put me on a table in front of half the tower.”
“Sable did what I told her to do.”
“So this was planned.”
“Assessed,” he corrects. “You arrived with power that does not behave according to the laws of this realm. I needed to know whether it was merely damaged, or dangerous.”
“And?”
“You are both. What are you?”
I shrug. “Don’t remember,” I lie.
“You don’t act like a creature with amnesia.”
“It’s selective.”
He snorts, but I can tell from the way he tries to stifle it into a cough that he didn’t want to. “I see. Dismissed.”
“What?” I frown. “That’s it?”
He doesn’t answer. He simply waves his elegant hand at me, and I arrive back in my bedroom, bookbag slipping off my shoulder as I stare at the fireplace.