If the seraphim were subject to mundane human gestures, I imagined Azrael would have shrugged at this point. There are many reasons. I swear I saw an image of myself during that first trial against the manticore. I saw how I would have looked to the Nephilim Council. I was a human who had so much power it was leaking out of me without any control.
Even though I had contorted myself into a human pretzel to assure them I wasn’t going to kill them, they just wouldn’t get it through their thick heads.
And now they were going to make humans suffer for it.
“I won’t have to do anything but sit there and watch, right?”
Declan smiled. “Right.”
“Fine. I’ll go and try not to look broken.”
That was all well and good, but I felt pretty broken that evening as I sat by the fire with Basil. I was still obsessed with trying to find a way to contain Lucifer if we could kill him. The citizens of Ravenhall were not scholarly. In fact, I had walked into what I had thought was a bookshop in the main stretch in town and was promptly assaulted with all manner of smut.
It wasn’t even good smut. Just some crazy guy’s very poor drawings of demons in odd poses. The art was terrible. Basil almost had a seizure when he found me in there pointing out how they could improve their drawings.
The library at Ravenhall was not well-stocked. When I asked Eugenia about it, she scrunched up her nose. “We do magic in here.” She pointed to her heart. “Not in here.” She pointed to her head. I imagined Jacqueline would have a word or two to say about that.
I groaned as I read to another dead end.
“I give up,” I said. Casting the stupid book aside, I went to grab the next one in the pile. Basil shoved a Western romance in my face.
“If you’re going to try and distract yourself, you may as well do it with something worthwhile.”
“I’m not trying to distract myself.”
“Right.”
I eyed the cover of his book. Hmmm. Insane ramblings of an unqualified scholar or sexy alpha cowboy? There wasn’t really all that much competition. But after I took the book from Basil, I set it aside. I’d tried to read a bit since coming to Ravenhall but anything with even the smallest dab of romance had my mood nosediving.
Instead, I grabbed my sketchbook and began the millionth drawing of a circle. “Lex,” Basil said after a while. “You’re not going to forget how to do it.”
I was just circling it on the page over and over again. It was a wonder I hadn’t worn the damn thing out. I threw the pen at the sketchbook. “I hate this!”
Nanna came in with a cup of tea. I wanted to scream that if I saw one more cup of calming tea, I was going to strip naked and run blindly into the fens. Instead, I sat with my back to the fire and did my meditation.
“You lived seventeen years without magic,” Nanna reminded me.
I dropped my head into my hands. “I know,” I said. “But I can feel it in there. I just can’t reach it. The worst part is that it doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s all aqua and warped and argh....”
“Aqua?” Basil asked.
I scrunched my hair in my hands. Then I scrubbed my face. “I think I should probably go and blow off some steam.”
That equated to hours of standing in the backyard going over drills that Giselle had taught me. The repetitive motions reminded me of all the times I had trained inside the Grove. Thinking about the Academy had all the pent-up emotion in me draining. I sank to the ground and bowed my head. There was so much I missed about the school. I spoke to everybody over the MirrorNet, but it wasn’t the same.
Tomorrow I would see them all for the first time in over a month. How much would their lives have changed while I was exiled in this place?
“Hey,” Basil said. He sat down beside me with his legs crossed. I couldn’t help grinning at how ridiculous he looked. It was like all those years as a doll had imprinted on him. The thought hit me like a freight train. My great-grandmother had taken away his powers and sealed him in the body of a doll. He’d endured years of this kind of torture without complaining. And here I was whining yet again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. He petted my cheek.
“I knew what I was getting into. You’ve had this forced on you.”
“Still. That doesn’t make it okay.” I drew a circle in the dirt with my hand. There was no corresponding spark of blue. Something inside me shrivelled.
“You know your blood magic still works, don’t you?” he said.
I nodded. I’d read about it since we got here. A seal had no effect on blood magic because it was everywhere inside me. The problem was that as soon as it left my body, that’s when the connection eroded. Without the strength of my bone and hedge magic, the blood kind of just fizzled. Fat lot of good that did.
“It’s easier to control if it’s inside a body,” Basil offered.
“Right,” I said. “Next time I fight a demon, I’ll make it drink my blood first.”
He grimaced at me. We spent the rest of the night sitting outside like we’d done my first semester at Bloodline when I couldn’t sleep.
42
Even though I hardly slept, I’d gotten used to being sleep-deprived. It didn’t help my nerves when Eugenia gathered us up at the portal beside the Great Hall. Giselle and Matilda were both present.
Nanna elected to stay home. “Strangely enough,” she said, “I’m not that interested in watching supernatural creatures beat each other to a pulp.” I had to agree with her at this point. Basil, the gossip,
