Chapter 16
The entire next day, Dray haunts me.
I don’t speak a word to him at breakfast—which is at the Snake table now, because when I try to sit with Courtney, she leaves.
Dray only considers me in that hollow, distant way that he does.
It’s not so much him today who haunts me. It’s Dray yesterday.
It’s the portraits, the screams, the casual way he brought them to life just to burn them into obscurity, to make them suffer or at least give us the illusion of it—and even if it’s just an illusion, and the portraits are perfectly fine down there in the hall, he chose to make it harrowing, to make them scream, their faces twist in anguish.
I have been afraid of Dray before.
A lot.
But this…
This is ice in my chest, it’s a gutted sensation in my stomach, it’s nausea when I chew my food.
I don’t think I speak a word through breakfast, and not for the rest of the day in the second round of practice exams.
I sit bundled up on the pew, arms wrapped around my woollen sweater, and watch the prints reveal on the podium.
Teddy’s is rituals.
I often thought of Teddy as too similar looking to Dray for my appreciation. He’s hot, no doubt about it, with dirty blond hair and ocean eyes, a brilliant smile and dimples—but I never let myself lust over him, because he shares an echo of Dray.
It lurks behind his bright eyes and wide smile, a little hint of viciousness, like he breaks hearts for fun, pits crushes against each other and sits back and watches.
He’s often behind the blackout pranks.
Things can get dark in the blackout, fast.
My strategy is always to get back to the dorm room as quick as I possibly can.
I watch Teddy on the podium and know that I was right about him.
Rituals are a dark print, and he’s too practiced at slicing open that poor chicken’s throat, too unaffected as he rips off the head and lets blood fall onto the painted pentacle on the floor, and his grin is too wide as he successfully summons a fucking poltergeist, and all hell breaks loose in the hall.
Poltergeists can only physically affect those who scream—but that doesn’t stop the shrieks from ripping through the hall.
Teddy laughs.
He laughs as seniors are clawed and thrown into walls—and the master of rituals has to step in to end it.
The poltergeist vanishes, but it reminds me of the poltergeist that was loitering in the corridors just last semester.
Maybe Teddy was the one who let it loose.
Unease worms in my gut all day.
Even as the day goes on, and Eric reads old star charts to determine the day and events of history, I have that sick, empty feeling inside of me.
Haunting me.
No one else seems affected by it.
The practice round goes past dinner time, but as we all file into the atrium, we find that the mess hall stayed open for the seniors.
The atmosphere is mixed, a jarred divide between those who haven’t done as well as they hoped, those who sulk and slump over their trays and pick at their meals, and the ones who did well, those who grin and laugh and throw things across tables.
Like Teddy.
My eyes narrow on him, two tables down, flicking popcorn pieces into Piper’s open mouth.
“There was no numerus this year.” Oliver drapes his arm over the back of Serena’s chair. “I thought Delia Dimas had the print.”
Asta drizzles white sauce over her plated vegetables, lingering longest over the pile of cauliflower. “Her’s is the sight.”
Landon throws him a furrowed look. “Weren’t you watching?”
“He was asleep for most of it,” I say.
Oliver shoots me a smarmy look. “Some of us are more exhausted than others.”
I make a face back.
Asta interjects, not to divert, but to pretend I’m not here and didn’t speak at all, “You’re thinking of Fiona Abernathy. She’s numerus—but the year below us.”
Serena picks at her green beans. “Fiona is rituals. Her younger sister is runes. I don’t remember her name.”
“Kirsty,” I say—and puzzled looks land on me. “Their family traces back all the way to the Picts and druids.”
The puzzled, doubtful looks stick to my face for a long moment.
I huff. “What? I pay attention in class.”
Dray’s tray slips onto the table, opposite me. He kicks back his chair before sinking into it, and Asta scoots over an inch to give him more room.
He asks, dull, “Since when?”
I correct myself, “I pay attention in History of the Videralli.”
It’s true.
It’s one of my highest performing classes, but mostly because a lot of the history is drilled into the aristos elites from youth, and so I already know a lot of what I’m taught in class.
But no one cares about my offer of the Abernathy sisters’ ancestry, or that I know all the history and ancestry of every elite bloodline in this school, and probably beyond.
Dray’s gaze is the only one to linger on me as he reaches for his knife and fork.
Landon cuts into his roast beef, dividing the strips into smaller bite-sized pieces. “Those were practically the auditions for what jobs will be offered, and you slept through it?”
Oliver lifts a dark look to him over the steam of his coffee mug. “I watched the ones worth my attention. That made one, James, was first-rate.”
I slide a look between him and Landon, back and forth, from one face carved from stone, and the other disinterested.
I don’t think Oliver knows.
He sincerely holds James’s skills in high regard—but Landon isn’t happy about that.
Asta mirrors me for a beat before she cuts between them, leaning over the table for the pitcher of orange juice, then pours herself about two inches worth.
“Mine was a colossal disappointment. And I know what my father’s going to say about it.” She drops back down onto her seat with a thud, and as she does, her face contorts. Her voice deepens as she mimics her father, “Siv managed to manipulate the master into clucking like a chicken.”
I feel my eyes alight with the surge of interest.
Siv, Asta’s elder sister, is apparently not all that close with Asta. At least there is competitiveness there, between them.
It makes me feel a tad better about my own home life and lack of love between me and Oliver.
Asta lets her guard down at the table with her friends—and me, her enemy in plain sight.
Sisters often fight, squabble, compete. At least, that’s what I’ve observed. But there’s genuine hatred in her sharp, beautiful.
“Illusion is way more complex than manipulation,” she adds with a scoff that sounds like a sword being drawn. “But does my father ever acknowledge that? No, because his print is manipulation, and so it’s absolutely the most important, and how dare anyone ever say otherwise.”
The tension in my cheeks stiffens the more I fight back my smile.
I do enjoy watching her unravel.
But I enjoy most of all that she reveals how she is definitely not the favourite in her home, and that her sister is the golden child.
I like when others suffer my pain.
Dray notices—he reads me.
From beneath his lashes, the hollow pallor of his stare is hooked onto me as he brings his fork closer to his face. His teeth bite around the small strip of chicken.
The chicken breast at the buffet is seasoned tonight with herbs and oil, but I find it to still be such a plain meat.
I went with the messiest food on offer—the spaghetti bolognaise.
It makes for slow eating when I’m surrounded by the eyes of vipers.
I twirl the spaghetti around the spoon, carefully, delicately, and I keep my gaze on this task so I don’t catch Dray’s stare again.
“Teddy’s ritual is going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” Serena complains, and sinks into her seat. “I’ll certainly have nightmares tonight.”
“Come sleep in my bed,” Oliver suggests with a wink. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Serena’s gaze is withering, and she doesn’t even turn it on him, like she can’t be bothered to look at him.
But I snag on the offer—the one to sleep in his bed. We can’t go into the other dorms. Girls are barred from the boys’ dorms, and the same goes the other way around.
The enchantments are airtight.
So he’s really just trying to rile her up a little.
He must be getting stagnant again, a bit bored, and eager to piss her off just so he can feed off the drama, the toxicity.
It’s a fight to not roll my eyes at him.
Landon stretches his arms over his head. “I have to admit, I have a strong stomach, but Teddy is fucked in the head.”
A smile twists around my choked laugh.
I fight it—because I don’t want to laugh with them, I don’t want to find joy in anything they say.
But it’s too late, because Landon heard my strangled chuckle, and his dark eyes swerve to me. “I have a theory that the witches who do rituals are poisoned by them each time. The more they do, the more they,” he clicks his tongue, “lose it.”
“Shame they are integral,” Dray adds, and his tray is clear of the chicken strips he cut up and the green beans. “Ritualists are our literal gateways to the gods—mad or not.”
“Can they ritual up a toffee pudding?” Landon speaks through a yawn stretching through him, and he swallows it down. “I’ll settle for butterscotch if I have to.”
The only desserts I saw down at the buffet were those horrible plastic cups of jelly and fruit.
Landon kicks back from the table. “I’m going to the kitchens for a raid.”
Oliver grunts as he struggles to lift himself from his own chair.
Serena is fast to chide him, the same thoughts that crumple my face, “Do you think you should be going anywhere but bed right now?”
His migraine must not be done with him.
But Oliver is done with us—and her.
He doesn’t even acknowledge that she spoke before he starts out of the mess hall, Landon at his side, and they go off in search of dessert.
Serena thins her lips for a beat, then forces a smile. “I heard Teddy has been buying up all the blackout powder.”
She tells the table in general, not anyone in particular. But it’s Asta who latches onto it—
And as she does, Dray takes his tray back to the buffet for seconds.
All that use of their prints have them hungry.
But it’s the out I’ve been waiting for.