10. Asha
Asha
Eska’s hand closes around my upper arm hard enough to bruise, and that alone is enough to decide the matter.
I drive my knee up between his legs.
He grunts and jerks back, more offended than injured, which tells me everything I need to know about how this is going to go. He has cornered a weak little witch in the courtyard, and he is about to enjoy himself at my expense.
And I’m going to have to let him because I can’t do fuck all about it.
Not now. Not like this in this weak body with flickering magic.
We’re in the open stretch of courtyard between the tower and the dining hall, and students are already milling around us, circling as they place bets on Eska to win in under sixty seconds.
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
Hot tears prick my eyes again, and I growl as I struggle to get out of his grip.
I twist, stamp on his foot, and rake my nails down his wrist. It does nothing except make him smile.
“Cute,” he says.
“I will gut you with your own ribs.”
A few of the watching bastards laugh.
Eska yanks me in close enough that I can see the thick scar cutting through his eyebrow. “You talk a lot for something that breaks.”
My face gets hotter, and I want to die on principle. I slam my free hand into his throat. He barely rocks back. He catches my wrist and holds me in place, hard enough to break the fragile bone.
Pain bites through me. “Let. Me. Go.”
“Make me.”
Blue light spits uselessly over my skin, trapped and angry. It crackles around my fingers and vanishes before it can do anything useful. The crowd makes a disappointed noise.
“Pathetic,” a girl with an icy voice mutters.
I memorise the voice for later.
Eska bends his head towards my ear. “Thought so.”
Rage goes white and pure inside me, and then a flash of familiar silver that burns my eyeballs wrenches Eska away from me. I rub my wrists, hating that I need a fucking man to save me, but there was no way I was getting out of that myself.
The humiliation is complete. “Hope you’re happy, you fucking twat,” I mutter, unable to say his name or even think it in this godforsaken realm.
“I will be in a minute,” Tobin says, striding into view, thinking I was talking to him.
“Fuck you,” I spit out, and then stumble backwards as a creature the size of a fucking small building pounces into view.
Three heads with snapping jaws, black fur, red eyes, and enough aggression to level a small city out of will alone.
I raise an eyebrow as I stumble backwards from the heat rolling off him. “What the hell?”
“You rang,” the cold one from Combat class says with a smirk that does things to my insides I will never unpack in a million years.
The creature growls, and all three heads fix on Eska with the kind of intent I deeply respect.
The cold one steps up beside me, black hair untouched, blue eyes flat as winter. “You remember Hale,” he says it like a fact.
Hale.
Eska shoves against Tobin’s silver magic and snarls at him.
The three-headed beast—Hale— prowls forward one heavy step, claws scraping black stone. Students stumble back, muttering, breaking the neat little ring they made for my public humiliation.
It doesn’t last long. The bets start rolling in again, and this time their money is on Hale.
Hale pounces, his massive front paws hitting Eska’s shoulders, so he goes down hard with Hale looming over him.
Eska changes into another creature underneath him, forcing Hale back a step.
I’m intrigued by this. “Can everyone in this realm do that?” I ask, forgetting for a second that I’m meant to be keeping my mouth shut.
“Not everyone,” the cold one says, his voice quiet enough that I feel it more than hear it.
I note it and file it.
Eska’s body surges and tears into something larger, with a grey hide, muscle and teeth, wolfish but wrong in the way everything here is wrong.
Hale slams into him before I can get a proper look, and the sound of it cracks across the courtyard.
Claws rake stone. Students shout and gamble, their bloodlust roaring across the courtyard.
A memory of my arena at home flashes through my mind, the crowds calling for the kill.
This is not unlike that. The mindset is violence, and it’s something that makes my small heart flutter.
Tobin steps in front of me without asking, silver light still laced around his hands. “Stay back.”
I bristle but know my limits. I’m not dying today because I got eaten by a fucking creature from the gods only know where.
Hale tries to remove Eska’s throat, and it’s difficult to focus on anything else when a three-headed monster I fucked in his human form is pinning a giant wolf-creature to the ground in the middle of the courtyard.
One of Hale’s heads locks on Eska’s shoulder. Another goes for his neck. The third head drives into Eska’s thigh with a sickening, yet delightful crunch.
Blood spills across the black stone.
The crowd loses its mind.
For one glorious second, I forget my own humiliation and just enjoy. Hale is magnificent. Brutal. Massive. Built for ruin. His black fur gleams under the dead light, and every movement is pure violence. He doesn’t posture or play. He means to end this.
A hot rush floods my veins, coming outward from the depths of my chest. It’s possessive, it’s delighted with Hale, it’s a bunch of other things I have no name for.
Eska twists under him and snaps at the nearest throat. Hale rips free before the jaws connect and comes back in with enough force to send both of them skidding across the courtyard. Stone shatters under their weight.
The cold one’s hand closes around my elbow, not gentle, just precise, and pulls me another step back as Eska lashes out. I let him move me anyway because one of Eska’s claws has just torn a groove through the stone too close to where we’d been standing.
Tobin’s silver magic whips out again, bright and controlled, trying to box the fight in. It wraps around the space in sharp lines, a boundary more than a binding.
The bell in the tower off to the left clangs loudly, making me wince. The crowd settles immediately, and Hale stands down. Eska follows a second later. They stay in their animal forms, circling each other, snarling and drooling.
“The bell,” I murmur.
“It means the fight is over. I’m Leith, by the way.”
“Asha,” I mutter automatically.
“Head down,” Leith whispers. “This is about to get worse.”
“Worse?” He doesn’t need to reply. I get the message loud and clear when Blackridge strolls onto the courtyard, hands behind his back, eyeing up the two animals with a blank expression that I would like to be able to master. My face—my real face—is too expressive for its own damn good.
Blackridge stops in the middle of the two creatures and surveys the blood, the gouges, the ring of suddenly silent students, with a boredom that should not be possible in the middle of this mess.
“Shift,” he says.
No shout. No strain. Just one word.
Power snaps across the courtyard. It slams into my skin hard enough to make me suck in a breath.
Hale and Eska jerk like the command hooks into bone and drags.
Fur recedes. Limbs crack and reform. Teeth shorten.
In less than a heartbeat, two fully dressed males stand in the middle of the courtyard, both bloody, both furious.
“A little warning next time,” Hale grits out, rolling his shoulders.
“My presence here should’ve alerted you to the fact that I wasn’t going to tolerate your shifted alter egos for more than half a second, Mr Hale.”
“Blackridge did that?” I mutter.
“Blackridge does a lot of things,” Leith mutters back.
Blackridge’s eyes land on me. “Miss Asha.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I blurt out, causing a snicker around the students.
“Did I accuse you of doing something?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.
“No,” I say, because that feels safer than whatever trap he is laying. “I’m just trying to stay ahead of the accusations.”
A few idiots around us laugh again.
Blackridge turns his head, and the laughter dies so fast it’s almost beautiful.
His attention returns to me. “Then you may explain why Mr Eska had hold of you in my courtyard.”
Every eye in the place swings back to me.
I straighten, even though my wrist still throbs where that wolfish prick nearly crushed it. “Because he lacks restraint, basic manners, and a survival instinct.”
Eska gives a rough laugh that ends badly when blood slips from the corner of his mouth. Hale takes one step towards him as Tobin’s silver magic snaps out and catches Hale across the chest, stopping him.
“Don’t,” Tobin says.
Blackridge looks at the marks on my arm, then at the blood on the stone, then at Hale. “And you decided to intervene.”
Hale wipes blood from his jaw with the back of his hand. “I did,” he says, unbothered to admit to ripping another student open in front of half the academy. “He had his hands on what’s mine.”
Silence drops.
A dangerous one.
My entire body goes hot with outrage, but I know better than to comment. Blackridge is in a foul mood despite his outward calm.
Hale turns his head and looks at me, blood drying on his mouth, green-gold eyes bright with that same possessive madness he had in my room.
A few students make interested little noises, which means I’m now the centre of some fresh horror. Perfect.
Blackridge’s expression doesn’t move, but something in the air changes anyway. “Mr Hale.”
Hale’s jaw tightens. “What?”
“You will refrain from making territorial declarations in my courtyard.”
Blackridge looks at Eska next. “Mr Eska, explain your conduct.”
Eska spits blood onto the stone and shrugs one shoulder. “She humiliated me in Combat Training.”
“You humiliated yourself,” Tobin pipes up.
“Was this an unprovoked attack?” Blackridge asks me.
“Yes. I was minding my own business,” I lie, not prepared to blurt out I was searching for a ward to break. “And he comes along and grabs me, threatening me in my face.”
Eska’s face hardens. “I wasn’t trying to break her.”
“Mr Eska,” he says, “you will report to the lower cells for detention until tomorrow evening.”
Eska goes still. “For grabbing a witch?”
“For assaulting a student under my protection after previous misconduct in Professor Vey’s class.” Blackridge’s voice stays calm. “Questions?”
Eska simmers for about half a second. “No, sir.”
“Off you go then.”
Eska trudges off, and Blackridge turns his attention to Hale. “You. My office. Now.”
Hale gives him a grim nod but says nothing. He follows Blackridge as he sweeps out of the courtyard, leaving me with Leith and Tobin as the rest of the students scatter fast.
Tobin looks at my wrist. “Show me.”
“No.”
His silver eyes lift to mine, cool and steady. “Your wrist, Asha.”
“I heard you the first time. The answer is still no.”
Tobin takes one step closer. “If it’s broken, I’m fixing it.”
“It isn’t broken.”
“Then prove it.”
I glare at him and hold my arm up. My wrist is already swelling. It hurts enough that I want to bite something.
Tobin’s expression shifts into something flatter. More dangerous. “He should’ve lost a hand.”
“He nearly lost more than that,” I mutter before I can stop myself.
Leith’s blue eyes settle on me. “You enjoyed that.”
I don’t reply. I’m more concerned that this body doesn’t appear to heal on its own.
That is a problem, and I’m going to have to be more careful.
The break in Vey’s class was a shock, but he healed it before I had a chance to notice that this body didn’t.
This is clearly nowhere near as bad as that, and yet it is still throbbing and turning an ugly colour.
I’ve already been saved once—okay, twice— by these fools; I might as well use them for whatever benefits me.
With a lofty gaze, I hold out my arm to Tobin.
“Well, prodigy?” I ask as he takes it gently. “What’s the verdict?”
Tobin turns my hand carefully, his fingers cool and precise against the heat in my skin.
Silver light gathers over his palm, thin and controlled, catching in the swelling at my wrist. His magic sinks into my wrist. Relief spreads almost at once, the sharp pulse of pain easing into pressure, then into nothing.
He releases me when the last of the swelling goes down. “Done.”
I turn my wrist, flexing my fingers. No pain. No weakness. “Adequate.”
“That was almost gratitude.”
“Don’t push it.”
His mouth shifts, just enough to annoy me. “You’re welcome.”
I give him a flat look. “Are you always this big of an arse?”
“Yes,” Leith replies for him, and I find myself liking ice-boy the most out of all of them.