19. Asha
Asha
Istare up at the darkness where we fell through and decide I’m officially bored of gravity being a suggestion.
“Knock?” I ask Hale. “On the sky?”
He gives me a grin full of trouble. “I was thinking fire.”
“You think everything is fire.”
“It works.”
“It really doesn’t,” Leith says without looking at him.
Tobin lifts both hands. Silver magic gathers, faint at first, then steadier as he drags power from whatever reserves he hasn’t already abused today.
The light outlines the chamber in sharp strokes.
Bone arches. Jagged glass. Violet haze turning overhead with slow malice.
My real body rests in the basin behind us, watching with my eyes and wearing my face like a smug promise.
Tobin’s magic snaps tighter, and the chamber answers with a low vibration that crawls up my legs. The black surface above us ripples.
It widens into a circle, then splits down the centre.
“Well, that’s ominous,” I say. “Can you make it a door?”
“I can make it less opposed to the concept,” Tobin replies through grim focus.
Hale lifts one hand, fire gathering along his knuckles. “I can encourage it.”
“If you blast it before I stabilise the edges, the threshold may collapse,” Tobin says.
“May collapse?”
“Will collapse.”
Hale lowers his hand with visible irritation. “You could’ve led with that.”
Leith’s magic crawls higher up the wall, black threads cutting across bone and glass. The chamber shivers at his touch. My real body laughs softly behind us.
I turn on her. “Do you mind?”
“I mind being exiled, half murdered, my essence ripped out of me and left in a basin.”
“Join the club,” I mutter. “Except the basin part.”
Her smile is all mine and twice as annoying. “You’re taking too long.”
“I’m in a fragile witch body, down a nightmare hole, relying on three males with control issues to open a door in the ceiling. Forgive the delay.”
Hale glares at me. “Control issues?”
“You shifted in class.”
“Blackridge threw you into a wall.”
“And you made the point for him beautifully.”
“And I’d do it again.”
“I know you would,” I say, and get that warm, stupidly fuzzy feeling again.
Tobin makes a strained sound. “This would go faster if you stopped flirting during dimensional engineering.”
“I flirt under pressure.”
He ignores me as the black circle above us stretches wider. Silver lines form along its rim, thin and unstable. The edges tremble, trying to pull apart faster than Tobin can hold them.
Leith’s magic sinks into the wall with a sharp crack. A seam appears high above us, then another beneath our feet. The chamber doesn’t like that. Violet haze drops lower, thickening until it brushes my hair with static.
“Hale,” Tobin grits out. “Blast fire towards the gap.”
Hale doesn’t hesitate. Hellfire erupts from his palm and spears upwards.
The threshold convulses.
For one glorious second, it looks like it might actually work. Tobin’s silver rim hardens around the black opening, Leith’s death magic anchors the chamber wall, and Hale’s hellfire punches straight through the centre.
Then the sky screams back.
A blast of violet power slams down from the opening.
“Duck!” Tobin roars.
None of us needs telling twice. I launch myself to the side as violet power hammers the obsidian where I stood. The floor caves in with a sound that jabs through my skull.
Hale catches my jacket before I skid into the basin. He yanks me back hard enough to steal the air from my lungs.
Another blast hits. Leith steps into its path, his magic rising around him in a black wall. The violet power strikes it, eats through the first layer, then dies under the second. He grunts as the impact drives him back.
Tobin’s silver rim above us flickers.
“Losing it,” he says, far too calmly for my liking.
“Try harder,” I growl. “We need to get out of here and somewhere where there is information about a forthcoming Eclipse. I hope.”
“We need to get to the Astrology Tower,” Tobin says through clenched teeth. “It’s our best bet.”
“Why?” I ask, as if we have time. We don’t.
“If there is a sunshine anomaly, the academy will be tracking it because of all the vampires in this place. Imagine if Blackridge was caught with his pants down and then had a horde of angry vamp parents to deal with as they collect the ashes of their children.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s not good.”
“He wouldn’t be so stupid,” Hale says and slams his hand to Tobin’s shoulder. “End this.”
Tobin’s magic flares at the contact, feeding on Hale’s power without consuming it. The rim above us snaps into a hard circle.
“Leith,” Tobin says. “Cut the resistance on the left.”
Leith lifts one hand, and his magic shoots up the wall, slicing through a knot of violet power. The chamber shrieks.
“Now!” Tobin says, and together they blast a monumental amount of power upwards, while I just stand here helpless.
I hate that.
I grimace and pinch myself really hard. It hurts, but good. It should. This body is crap. I should be helping.
“Ana! Hold on,” Hale growls, holding out his other hand for me.
I grip it tightly, as the force of their magic drags us upwards in a nauseating rush that turns my stomach inside out.
The bone cathedral drops away beneath us. Darkness slams over my head, squeezes my ribs, and tries to tear Hale’s hand from mine. I grip him harder. His fire lashes around my wrist without burning me, a blazing tether in the black.
We explode from the ground, quite literally, and land hard at the base of the Bell Tower as it strikes the hour, covered in dirt and grass.
I spit out a mouthful of mud and glare at the tower.
“How cute. You’ve announced our arrival to the entire academy,” I inform it.
The bell keeps ringing overhead, deep and brutal enough to make my bones vibrate. Students stop in the courtyard, staring at us with the delicious horror of people who just watched four disasters erupt from the lawn.
Hale groans beside me, still gripping my hand. His fingers tighten once, confirming I’m alive. “That was a first and last.”
“Agreed.”
Tobin is on the ground on one knee several feet away, his silver magic snapping out around him before he pitches forward. Leith has already face-planted into the grass.
The ground under us slowly repairs itself. Black cracks run through the soil where we landed, and little purple sparks crawl along the broken edges before SilverGate swallows them.
I get to my feet with Hale’s help and immediately regret having knees.
“I need my body back,” I say for the six thousandth time.
“Change the fucking record, will you?” Tobin growls, getting to his feet.
“Oh, I’m sorry, prodigy? Am I boring you?”
“You’re annoying me.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” I state, arms folded, defiant and so, so annoying. I can’t seem to help it.
He glares at me, and I glare back, but then I drop my defensive stance. “Quickie before we go to the Astrology Tower?”
Tobin stares at me.
Hale makes a choking sound that might be laughter, or might be trying not to die.
Leith lifts his head from the grass, mud smeared across one cheek, and says, “Now?”
“What?” I say. “Morale is important.”
Tobin rises fully, swaying only a little. “We need urgent answers about a possible eclipse.”
“I didn’t hear no.”
“I’m saying you have terrible timing.”
Hale grins and brushes grass from his shoulders. “She’s got great timing.”
Students are still staring. One little cluster near the path has stopped pretending otherwise. A witch with green braids whispers something to her friend, and the friend looks at Hale, then me, then the crater healing under our feet.
I raise my hand and wiggle my fingers. “Hello. Can we help you with something?”
They scatter like rats on a sinking ship.
“Great,” Leith mutters, pushing himself to his feet with a calm that doesn’t match the dirt on his clothes. “We should move before Blackridge finds out we exited a secret underground chamber through the lawn.”
“We didn’t exit,” I say, brushing mud from my sleeve. “We made a dramatic entrance in reverse.”
Hale looks at the Bell Tower. “Blackridge already knows.”
The tower stops ringing.
Silence drops across the courtyard.
I glare at Hale. “You had to say it.”
Even from here, I feel the weight of Blackridge’s attention. It settles on the back of my neck with all the warmth of a blade.
“Run?” I ask.
Tobin gives me a disgusted look. “Walk quickly and quietly.”
“That sounds like running for people with reputations.”
Leith wipes mud from his cheek with the back of his hand. “Astrology Tower.”
We move.
The courtyard has gone from busy to frozen.
Students stand in clusters under the rain, watching us with the kind of fascination normally reserved for public executions.
I don’t blame them. Hale looks half-feral and furious.
Tobin looks like he fought a god and complained about the inconvenience.
Leith looks deadlier with mud on him, which is about right.
I probably look like I crawled out of a grave after losing a fight with a lawn.
Not far wrong.
SilverGate’s rain falls harder as we cross the courtyard.
“About that quickie?” Hale asks as we head towards the residence tower.
I stop and look up at him, this huge mountain of a creature. “We can have a quickie. As long as it’s quick.”
He grins. “The very definition of a quickie.”
“No clothes off,” I say, as I push open the door to the tower. “We fuck, we find out about the eclipse.”
“Done,” he says and grips my hand tightly, practically pulling me up the stairs as Leith and Tobin follow.
We hit my room like we’re being chased. Hale kicks the door shut behind us, and the lock snaps into place.
Hale has already turned me towards him. His hands land on my hips, firm enough to make my breath catch, and my body immediately melts towards all that heat.
He bends his head, crushing his lips to mine.
His kiss is rough, hungry, and impatient in a way that wipes out the Well, the eclipse, my body in a basin, Blackridge, SilverGate, Yseld, all of it.