Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dafni
“Don’t you look all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. You have a certain glow about you…”
Brooke was sitting on the bed when I scurried in, using both of my hands to keep Gideon’s shirt pulled down over my thighs. The door closed behind me, and I let out a sigh of relief. I hadn’t run into anyone on the way up here.
Brooke stood and walked around me, examining me from head to toe. “Are you wearing one of his shirts?”
I looked down at my body. Yes. Yes, I was. I vaguely remembered putting on one of his shirts to sleep in last night after he’d helped me strip out of my uniform. I’d been too tired to care what Gideon saw of me.
“Did you two…?”
“No!” My face heated as I turned away from Brooke’s critical eye. “We didn’t do…whatever you think we did.”
“Then what did you do?” Brooke asked.
“We didn’t do anything—”
“Liar.”
“Fine!” I let myself fall back onto the mattress, covering my eyes with the crook of my elbow.
“Yes! Spill, Dafni.” I felt Brooke’s weight settle into the mattress next to me.
“He touched me.”
“Where?”
I pulled my arm off my eyes, giving her the best glare I could muster. “Where do you think?”
Brooke’s eyes bounced down between my legs before returning to my eyes. “Oh. Oh, my.”
“Yeah, and it felt good.” I tried to gauge her reaction, tried to read her face with my eyes. She kept her features neutral, her eyes trained on me. “And I let him know it felt good.”
Brooke giggled. “That doesn’t seem all that bad.”
“Not until I have to see him again, see his face, knowing what we did yesterday.”
She fell back, lying next to me on the mattress. “Maybe he’ll want to do it again.”
“Not anytime soon. I’ve got to get to class today, and then the air task is tonight.”
“Promise we’ll sit next to each other?” Brooke asked.
“Of course,” I said. “We need to watch our dear roommate compete.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Petunia will do whatever she can to win. She hasn’t been back in our room since she attacked you. She must be spending all her time preparing.”
We both cringed.
I pulled my extra uniform from the closet and went to the bathroom to change.
I felt the loss of Gideon’s scent as I removed his shirt and pulled on my uniform.
The water elements’ evaluation would be in a couple days.
I needed to prepare as much as I could, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in front of the entire Academy.
Without the distraction of Gideon’s hands.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I called out to Brooke as I left our room in search of a cauldron.
Witches squished Brooke and me between them on the bleachers, our boots stacked on top of each other.
“There she is!” I whispered, nodding toward where Petunia walked in with the rest of the air elemental witches.
Her ringlets were tight, and she held her nose high in the air.
She scanned the crowd, narrowing in on where Brooke and I were sitting.
The way she stared at us turned my stomach.
She looked at us with such intensity, like she was challenging us—and we weren’t even competing.
Some of the surrounding witches looked nervous, their eyes bouncing around the cavern. Other, more experienced witches stood tall, facing forward with their arms at their sides.
The cavern looked different from the last task. Instead of dirt, the ground was covered with several feet of sand. The witches walked gingerly through it, their heeled boots sinking.
“There he is…” Brooke bumped my shoulder before tilting her head toward the stage. Toward where Gideon was sitting.
He was sitting in the same wing-backed chair he’d been in during the last task—though this time he didn’t look relaxed or bored.
There were lines in his face from the way he flexed his jaw.
He had his forearms resting on the armrests of the chair, his hands gripping the ends so tightly that his knuckles were white.
The knuckles that had been between my legs.
My cheeks instantly heated. And his eyes.
They were staring at me. I looked away as quickly as I could.
His gaze was hungry, and I didn’t need to feel the way his eyes consumed me.
Robinson took the stage, his voice booming throughout the cavern as he gave his welcome speech, explaining the rules and what was at stake.
I let the sound of his voice wane, and instead of paying attention to him, I looked around the cavern, at the faces of the witches in the audience as well as the witches on the floor.
They all had different colored hair and skin, were different heights and builds, but they all had the same expressions on their faces as he spoke.
They pulled their brows down, focused their eyes as they glared at the stage, and closed, tucked, and tightened their lips.
I brought my hand to my own face, feeling the downward tilt of my eyebrows, the wrinkles between my brows. The way my neck tensed involuntarily every time Robinson’s voice fluctuated.
Rage. I was feeling rage, and so was everyone else.
Everyone hated Robinson.
He had a definite ick about him—the way he stared at us, the way he saw the female witches as vessels instead of people. Robinson wasn’t unlike my mother in that way—wanting the best and discarding anyone who was less than perfect.
From high up on the bleachers, Robinson looked small. He was a crumb surrounded by a colony of ants. It would only take one of us—one witch to nibble, and the rest would follow. We could swarm him.
“Look.” Brooke tapped my leg before pointing over at Petunia. She was pushing the other witches aside, running to the side of the cavern.
“I missed it. What are they supposed to be doing?” I asked.
Brooke stood as everyone around us did, trying to get a better view. “They have to make it to the top.” She pointed to the ceiling of the cavern. “First one to touch the top wins.”
The witches on the sandy floor looked around, locking eyes with each other, as if they were daring each other to go first. Witches began pointing their fingers at the ground, gusts of air traveling down their fingers and into the sand.
This created a plume of sand and only propelled the witch a of couple feet in the air before she fell back down.
“The sand—it’s too soft to push off of,” Brooke whispered.
Petunia, finding purchase on a large rock that hovered just above the sand, regained our attention. I could see the white teeth of her smile from across the cavern.
She was the only one smiling.
We watched as she kneeled on the rock, leaning over the side, sticking both of her hands into the sand.
She stuck her tongue out between her teeth in concentration as she stared at her hidden hands.
Only when we heard the screams of the witches on the floor did she look up, the smile back on her face.
The witches on the floor were sinking, being drawn beneath the sand by some invisible force. Sand blew up around them from where they tried to use their air magic, trying to raise themselves up to escape the pull of the sand.
“They’re all sinking!” I yelled, looking around for a way off the bleachers. Maybe I could help them, make the sand wet so their air magic would have a more solid place to land.
Brooke grabbed hold of my arm, steadying me.
Once again, this task wasn’t fair. The witches couldn’t use their air magic in the sand and Petunia was up to something.
I just knew it. I wanted to do something, anything besides just standing here.
There was nowhere to go. I was trapped in the middle of the bleachers, surrounded by witches.
My fingernails pushed through the skin on my palms. I’d have to push and climb over them to get to the floor.
“Look at the wall!” Brooke pointed at the wall of the cavern she had tried to make her way through several days ago.
Sand bubbled up, breaking the surface. It looked like boiling water.
“She’s made an air current beneath the surface.
The sand is moving so quickly below, it’s created something like quicksand… ”
We could do nothing but watch as the witches on the floor fought and clawed against the current, trying to keep their bodies from sinking.
The instant Petunia pulled her hands from the sand, the witches stopped sinking.
Her steps were quick as she bounded across the now still sand, dodging the heads and shoulders of the witches trapped.
She stopped at a group of ten witches who’d been clumped together, pushed next to one another by the quicksand, their hair and faces brushing against each other’s on the surface.
Petunia looked back at the stage, checking to see if Robinson and Gideon were watching before she placed a foot on a witch’s head, then, like balancing on lily pads, she stepped on the next head and the next until she was in the middle of the group.
The witches winced, and their faces scrunched with the pain of holding her weight and the heel of her boot.
Pointing her index and middle fingers at the tops of the witches’ heads, she blew a gust of wind down at them, the ten of them a solid surface to propel her upward.
They cried out from the wind that whipped their hair and pushed them further into the sand.
She floated up steadily, touching the ceiling before lowering herself back down onto the ground.
Robinson was standing on the stage, clapping, his mustache curved up, following the smile on his lips. “We have a winner!”
Petunia made her way to the stage, walking around the sunken witches, sand kicking up from the back of her boots. She didn’t look at the crowd who were politely clapping or at Robinson, who was beaming at her through his beady eyes. Her gaze pointed directly at Gideon.