We stayed that way until I felt his heartbeat slow to a normal pace. “What was that?” he finally asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Professor Mortimer said the demons called to you.” I actually thought it might have been the other way around. It felt like my magic fed them strength. It was why they were so desperate to get to me.
“I think my presence agitated them,” I said. “They went insane.”
“That’s the understatement of the year. A demon doesn’t give up its human host easily. These ones were willing to kill their hosts to get to you.”
I blinked slowly. “Did any of the humans survive?”
“Seven out of the twelve.”
I released the breath I’d been holding. Five people had died because of me. My body tried to curl involuntarily but Kai held me in place.
“Shhh,” he said. “Without you, they would have all died eventually. The Dominion couldn’t find a way to exorcise the demons and it was becoming dire.”
I knew that in those circumstances, the humans were sacrificed. But the logic of it was lost on me right now.
“Can I sleep?” I asked.
He kissed my temple. “Relax. I’ve got you.”
It was dark outside when I woke again. Somebody was making a racket. Kai was still wrapped around me, but he’d dozed off. His exhaustion was evident because he didn’t wake when I crawled out from underneath him. As silently as I could, I opened the door and stepped out into the main floor of the infirmary.
There were more students in here than I had ever seen. Most of them were Bloodline kids but some of them were refugees from the other Academies. A pixie was sitting on a bed screeching at the top of her lungs.
“I don’t care how qualified he is,” she said. “I’m not letting that thing touch me.”
My hackles rose. One of the dwarf nurses grunted at her. “You’ll be seen by Doctor Thorne or you can drag your sorry behind out of here.”
The pixie’s ruby lips opened into a perfect O. “How dare you threaten me? Do you have any idea who I am?”
“You’ll be out on your ass soon if you don’t stop that caterwauling.”
The nurse turned on her heels, saw me, and rolled her eyes. “These ridiculous pampered princesses are going to be the death of me,” she said.
“Why does she have a problem with Doctor Thorne?” I asked.
She made a derisive sound. “Because she’s an empty-headed moron. All these idiots hang on to a dimensional hierarchy that is long gone. None of these kids even knew the home dimensions but they act like they’re still part of a war that ended long before they were even conceived.”
“Why doesn’t she go to her own infirmary then?”
She showed me her teeth. “The other Academies don’t have infirmaries. Bloodline is the only one that has ever had human students. The other Academies just make their students tough it out.”
Now that I thought about it, that made a lot of sense. With their healing abilities, they didn’t really require the kind of healing us humans did. They had spells that helped their own regenerative powers accelerate. But sometimes healing had little to do with physical injuries.
“But the elite guards have medics in their ranks,” I pushed.
“The elite guards don’t cry over a sprained wrist.”
Point taken.
Doctor Thorne appeared from one of the other private rooms. He tried to approach the pixie girl only to be lambasted. He was so gracious about it, taking their abuse with stony calm. How long had this being going on? I remembered Griff’s terse words about how the para-humans needed me.
“Alright, that’s it.” I marched over there, grabbed the girl by the arm that wasn’t injured, and hauled her towards the door. She hissed and tried to throw a hex at me, but I was already protected by a circle. It bounced off me and blasted a hole in the wall. I knew the scale of her attack and what I’d done in Dominion weren’t even on the same level, but I hadn’t meant what I did. She wanted to hurt me and was preparing to do so again. I pushed open the door and tossed her out. “Anybody else that has a problem with the medical staff can leave right now,” I said.
Jacqueline made her reappearance then. The pixie girl threw me a withering glare and stomped off. “Perhaps we should have a chat before you frighten the daylights out of any more students,” Jacqueline said.
I expected her to take me back to her office, but we lingered in the courtyards outside of the infirmary. I was glad. The last thing I needed was for Kai to wake up without me around and kill something. We sat on a bench beneath an arch of clematis vines.
“Let me guess,” I said, “neither Council is happy with me at the moment?”
“It’s not just the Councils. It’s the parents, the board, the other students, and pretty much half of the supernatural community,” Jacqueline said. Ouch.
“Way to put a positive spin on it,” I said.
To my utter surprise, she smiled at me. “I said half the supernatural community. There is still the other half. And now there’s the Human League. Thanks to this stunt, they’ve agreed not to reveal us to the humans for the time being.”
I blinked stupidly. “Why?”
“Nora drilled it through their heads that if more humans found out about demons, they would give up their humanity for power. And then we’d have a situation where the demons would rule the earth. The difficulty of that exorcism was made blatant. Without you, there would be twelve deaths on our hands.”
She leaned back on the bench. “Having said that, I’m finding it particularly difficult to keep you enrolled in Bloodline at the moment.”
I laced my fingers in
