18
Not only did Professor Eldridge not skin me alive for being late to Weaponry and Combat, but she pulled me aside.
I stood there across from here in the weapons cage. On the shelf beside her hip, a crossbow pointed at me. “So,” she said, “the Unity Games are approaching. I hear you’re taking lessons from that Sisterhood lunatic.” She clamped my shoulder in her iron-grip. “If you need anything, let me know.”
I wanted to tell her I really needed her to let me go. And probably a visit to the infirmary now. Diana laughed at me rolling my shoulder. “Too bad you weren’t born an Amazon,” she said.
“Too bad about a lot of things.” We went to pick out weapons. “Do you think the boys will help me train?”
She was eyeing a mallet on the top shelf of the cage. Neither of us was tall enough to reach it though. “Help you train how?”
“Well, I was thinking I’ll ask Sasha to compel me so I can learn how to resist it.”
Diana dragged a wooden stool across the floor. She jumped on to it and used it to climb the cage. I could see the situation going south quickly. She looked like she might actually slip. I readied myself to catch her.
“I’m sure he would,” she said. She swiped her left hand on her cargo pants. Now was probably not the time to be engaging in a conversation. I breathed a sigh of relief when she pushed up with her legs and grabbed the handle of the mallet. She landed with a soft thud on the ground. I wasn’t so happy about it when we got back onto the floor and she started swinging the mallet at my head.
“Why don’t you use the stuff the nymphs have taught you?” Diana hissed at me. I had just ducked out of the way and marginally missed having my skull bashed in. If she wasn’t so skilled with brute force weapons, she wouldn’t have been able to compensate and pull her swing at the last second.
“I do!”
Though the dwarves weren’t built as elegantly, they possessed the same fire as the nymphs. Anger flared in Diana’s brown eyes, making them darken. “Bullshit! I know you can be faster than this. It’s like you’re purposefully being useless.”
We squared off against each other. More than one set of fighting partners had stopped to watch us. Dianna huffed. “Whatever,” she said. “I just hope you get over whatever this is before the games!”
She started swinging at me again before I could respond. By the time class was over, I was in a fair amount of pain again.
Sophie had zero sympathy for me. “She’s right, you know,” Sophie said. “You better start taking this seriously.”
“I am,” I said through my lock jaw.
She pressed her lips together but didn’t say much more. After lunch, Sophie and I made our way to our Undead Magic class.
Of the four Academies, Nightblood had the smallest student population. There were only a few hundred of them. But they made up for their numbers with morbid showmanship and creep factor. As displayed by the skull decorations on the Academy’s front door.
I put one foot inside and shivered. My breath condensed into a cloud of mist in front of my face. “Why is it so cold in here?” I complained.
Sophie’s complexion was already turning blue. “I suppose it’s to keep all of the ingredients fresh.”
“Just to be sure, by ingredients, you mean dead bodies, right?”
We both made a face and walked into the foyer together. The very second we stepped past the threshold, it was as though a veil had been lifted. The temperature of the air rose to a comfortable warmth. Sunlight streamed through an open skylight above. The grey stone turned into marble. A black creature resembling a cat but with three tails brushed up against my shin. Both Sophie and I squealed in surprise. The thing raced across the polished floor. It disappeared around the corner.
“First timers, I’m guessing,” a voice with a lilting European accent said. We turned to find a girl our age standing on the bottom step of the staircase. She was so pale I thought she was a ghost. It didn’t help that she had a long sweep of straight, black hair with heavy bangs. The vise around my chest only relaxed when she walked to a door on the other side of the room. She pushed it open instead of just walking through it. “Come on then.”
I glanced at Sophie. Her eyes were darting all over the place. Yeah, we were clearly thinking the same thing: exit strategy. The girl tapped her foot impatiently. “We don’t have all day.”
Steeling my spine, I stepped towards her. Sophie followed me. The girl took us down a long corridor and out through a small courtyard where a tree with the whitest bark I had ever seen reached up to the sky. Its leaves were of a scarlet so bright, I couldn’t look at it too long without straining my eyes.
We came to a stop in front of a set of double doors. The girl didn’t wait for us to go through. I gulped. When the door had opened to admit her, I heard the sound of low voices and something else that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Inside me, the wave of the darker magic was spasming out of control. It reacted to whatever was in the room. On Bloodline soil, I wasn’t allowed to use my bone-witch magic. Those restrictions didn’t apply here. If ever there was a time to run away, it was now. “Should we?” I asked Sophie.
“No chickening out,” she said. That’s where she was wrong. But I shoved the door open anyway. The scene we walked in on made me want to turn tail and run. There were only about a dozen students in the room. Instead
