I nodded, trying to wriggle out of his hold. “So?”
“Was it spelled?”
I snapped my mouth shut. This wasn’t my first rodeo with him. He was Deputy Head of the Academy and therefore in charge of the junior campus. I knew better than to say anything even slightly incriminating without proper witnesses. His black eyes narrowed. When he spoke to the guards, his bottom lip snagged on the sharpened points of his incisors.
“Take her to the infirmary.” One of the Nephilim placed a hand on Kate’s shoulder. He closed his eyes and they winked out of existence. No matter how many times I watched a teleportation, the whole concept still fascinated me. I’d only ever been teleported once and that was part of the evacuation drills I’d learned when I first joined the Academy.
The deputy head’s palm contracted against my shoulder.
“I don’t think physically containing Miss Mwansa is going to make much of a difference, Dmitri,” Professor McKenna’s voice interjected. She was a tan-skinned sorceress with an impressive jet-black bob. What interested me were the two thick strands of magenta that framed her face. In her early thirties, Professor McKenna was the youngest teacher in the Academy. She taught Potions and Alchemy on both campuses.
“I caught her red-handed.”
Professor McKenna looked me up and down with sharp grey eyes. Her focus landed on my hands. My left one was jittery from where the deputy head’s finger was pinching my nerve. “Let’s presume she’s innocent until she’s proven guilty, shall we?”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?”
Instead of being intimidated, the professor bit the inside of her cheek to refrain from rolling her eyes. She shook her wrist and approached the perimeter of the chest. “I’m assuming the protection circle is disabled, Sophie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Pointed nails scraped my skin. I bit my lip. He was slicing holes into my favourite blouse. I tried fruitlessly to twist free. I might as well be a tick bird on the hide of a rhino. My pecking did nothing to dissuade him.
Far from it, he took a compact mirror out of his pocket and did the unforgiveable. He called my parents. I used to think the MirrorNet, the supernatural communication channel, was really cool. Now I cringed when I passed a reflective surface. They used mirrors for ease but I knew behind it was a complex network of intricate portals. A portal was how my parents managed to get shipped from Zambia so quickly.
Half an hour later, I was sitting on the wooden bench outside the headmistress’s office. Dad on my left and Mama on my right. Both of them were quiet. I could tell Mama was spitting fire on the inside by the way she sarcastically smiled at the kids who came past to rubberneck at us.
“You’re scaring the children, Nora,” Dad mumbled.
“Be thankful it’s just a smile and nothing else, Emmanuel,” she shot back between clenched teeth.
“Will you two please stop?” I tried to draw an invisibility circle around us but Mama waved it away.
“We are not going to hide.”
“Well, we can’t let Soph go on like this, either,” Dad said.
I squeezed his wrist. Maybe now they would reconsider this ridiculous notion of sending me to Bloodline Academy when there was a perfectly good school inside the compound. Everyone I knew went to it. When I was ten, we’d gotten a mirror bulletin inviting me to the prestigious Bloodline Academy. Grammy had argued against it. I wish she’d won that fight. I had a feeling the board were just trying to make this place seem more low-magic friendly. They weren’t succeeding.
As evidenced by the skin stripping glare that Kate’s mother gave mine when her parents marched out of the headmistress’s office. I didn’t realise that lynxes could get bees up their butt.
Mama returned the glare with a steely face. She’d been just a little girl when the shifters had forced her coven into the compound. They had done it after great-grandfather was discovered. It was a way of keeping tabs of his descendants. Back then, the hostility would have been unbearable. So if Mrs Barnaby thought a little dominance showdown was going to make my mama cower, she had another thing coming.
Headmistress Pendragon, or Jacqueline as she liked to be called, appeared in the doorway. Her stiletto heels clicked on the linoleum.
“Jacqueline,” Mama greeted.
“Nora. Mani. It’s good to see you. I really wish it was under different circumstances.”
This happened so often my parents were on a first-name basis with the headmistress. At the end of last semester they were here because one of the Fae was convinced that I had put a curse on her. Me. A curse. Never mind that her high magic was far stronger than my low magic. Sheesh.
I watched Jacqueline march through the room. Yep, march. She might be in her navy pants suit today, but Amazons could march in anything. Her straight back and assured gait relieved the ball of tension in my chest.
She tucked a strand of her blonde bob behind her ear as she sat down behind her desk. “Well,” Jacqueline said. She gestured for us to take seats. “That’s certainly a puzzling ailment.”
I placed my hands on my lap, trying to appear as innocent as possible. “She was like that when I got there.”
She held up a hand to stop me. She smiled like she knew what I was thinking. Maybe she did. There were rumours that Amazons had the ability to tell when someone was lying. Maybe she could actually read my thoughts. I eyed the rose-gold bangles on her wrist. They looked like nothing more than pieces of jewellery, but I wasn’t fooled. In Magical History in eighth grade, I’d seen pictures of Amazons during the Dimension Wars. That bangle was a part of their armour. I swallowed.
“I know you didn’t do it,
