“Here goes nothing.”
I stabbed the heart. I swear I could feel it beating right up to the palm of my hands. “Shamayin!” I said. White light exploded out from the hole. It struck us both and threw us across the grass. I drew a circle around Cassie and me before either of us hit the ground. A little late, in hindsight.
My vision slipped into the Ley dimension. There was a moment when my blue light flared so brightly it blanketed all the other stars. What the hell? Every time I performed some kind of magic, it busted up my vision in the Ley dimension. I heard Cassie groaning. Feeling slightly winded, I coughed and pushed myself up. The world became dull again.
“Cassie?”
She scrambled to her feet. “I’m okay. Should it be smoking like that?” She was referring to the hole in the ground. I covered my nose because now the air was permeated with the stench of something rotten. A cat’s heart well past its prime.
Seeing that nothing had gone too wrong, I kicked Morning Star out of the way and filled the hole with dirt. I compacted it with my foot and blew out a breath. It didn’t seem right to just leave the thing bald on the ground like that. So I placed my hands over the patch of dirt and directed some of my hedge magic into it. The grass from the surrounding area extended their runners out. Slowly, the mound stitched together into an unbroken field of green.
“There,” I said.
Now that I’d flouted all the rules, I decided to have dinner on the junior campus with Cassie and the boys. Charles kept eying me throughout the meal. “Shouldn’t you be training right now?” he asked.
“I’m giving myself a break.”
“You’re going to give yourself an early grave if you don’t train.”
“When did you become such a buzzkill?”
“Since I have all of my pocket money on you winning the games.”
My fork stopped mid-way to my mouth. “You bet on me?” I asked, completely shocked.
Charles banged his head on the table. “Duh!” he said. “You think we’d bet against you? Luther has even more money on it.”
I turned towards the fire mage. Of the three of them, he had the most even temperament. He shrugged. “It’s only half the money I have,” Luther said. “But when you win, I’ll more than triple my stash.”
It wasn’t until they were walking me back that something else hit me. “Wait,” I said, “you bet for me to win, not just for me to beat Chanelle?”
Charles grinned at me. “After the way you cracked it last semester, we don’t even think Kai has a chance against you.”
They dropped me off at the edge of the kitchen garden. I was still grinning until I walked into my room. “There you are!” Sophie said. “I’ve been worried sick. Giselle is spitting chips that you didn’t show up to training.”
I waved it away and told her what happened. She was so stunned her comb got stuck in her hair. She dropped her arms. The comb stayed tangled in her tight curls. “He didn’t!” she said.
“Afraid so.”
“I could kill him!”
“Tell me about it.”
She came over and hugged me. “I don’t think Giselle will care,” she observed.
I laughed. “Me either.”
I slipped into bed and was out like a light. It would have been a night when I slept like the dead, except I was torn awake by the sound of the ground shaking.
20
Sophie stomped out of bed and flung our door open. I was a bit slower on the uptake. The Evil Three and some of the Fae were already out on the landing when I caught up with her.
“No,” she said. “I am not having another sleepless night. Whatever is making that noise better stop.”
“It’s Kai,” Max said. He emerged from the top of the boy’s wing landing wearing only pyjama bottoms. Sophie stopped hopping down the staircase. Even in the dim light of the dorms, I could see her face going still. I had a feeling she was only just now realising she was in her pyjamas too.
I took in what I thought was a calming breath. It felt like it heated through a boiler in my chest and came out steaming. “I’ll deal with it,” I said.
I knew where that sound was coming from. I had committed some of the new layout to memory. When I reached the illusion training room, there was already a crowd lingering out the front of it. Most of them were Bloodline kids, but I could see some from the other Academies coming from their directions.
“Scram!” I snapped at them.
I expected to walk in on another deranged training session. My muscles stretched taut in anticipation of demons springing at me from either side. Instead, the ground became a rock face jutting out against the sheer cliff of a mountain. Kai sat on the very edge with his legs dangling over the side. His shoulders were hunched in a way I’d never seen before.
In the distance, smoke wafted from the fires and clogged the air in dark plumes. The towers of Seraphina rose up into the sky. They too appeared grim and foreboding. In the air, Nephilim in soot-covered armour clashed with demons whose wings were membranous with clawed tips. Some of flying demons were humanoid. Others were horrific amalgams of para-human creatures. A demon with blood-red scales swooped down on the city below. It blew smoke out of its nostril that lit up the spires of the city. When the fire turned blue, the spires shattered. The ground rumbled. That was the sound I’d heard earlier.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the battle in the sky. But I had been conditioned by the prophecy to look up. To look out for Kai and watch him die. In this twisted memory, his sight was riveted below. My ears weren’t sharp enough, but I thought I heard the distinct sounds of screaming. My heart palpated. I knew
