Page 28 of Every Shade of Shadow

I want him to hold the knife.

"So much darkness," he says softly, "waiting to be awakened." His nostrils flare. “You’re open, ready.”

He reaches up, thumb gliding over my cheek. His touch ignites my skin, magic and desire intertwining until they become one and the same.

I want him to press me against the wall again, take me with his fingers, his cock…anything to drive off this desire.

“But first, restraint,” he smiles.

He pulls back and the moment is lost, the shadow spirit evaporating and the stone wall opening once more. He gestures back towards the classroom. “Until tomorrow.”

Disappointment unfurls in my chest. I had hoped for more. More attention. More praise. More magic, literal or physical.

But no. I make my way out of the classroom, the door closing more firmly than it should behind me, into the hallway empty, which seems kind of appropriate.

Until tomorrow—what a fucking joke.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Post-dinner I was sitting with Lily in her room, a room that is far more…embellished than my own. There are family pictures, ticket stubs, a Palm Springs poster, which strikes me as kind of funny given we are in the complete antithesis of tropical paradise. The castle seems to be under a permanent veil of cloud, the temperature somewhere between tepid and ‘freeze your tits off.’

There is a decided lack of windows here at the Academy, and when you do stumble upon one, you almost never find sunshine outside. The whole place seems consumed outside by a perpetual, bathetic gloom.

I’m on Lily’s concrete-mattress bed (she was right), my back against the wall, Lily playing Solitaire on her laptop.

“So,” I begin, looking to get a better fix on exactly what is and isn’t kosher around here, “Shadowcraft is taught here, like it’s okay?”

A delicate laugh follows, Lily spinning around to face me. “Taught, yes. Practiced no, and I mean no. Not that it stops anyone. You’ll see students around with cutting marks, pain increasing the power, blah, blah, blah.”

“Cutting?”

She makes like she’s cutting her arm with a razor. “Real Thirteen Reasons shit.”

“Oh.”

“You can waltz into the library and grab a book on it, if you want.”

This strikes me as particularly curious. I intensify my stare. “You’re telling me there are books about Shadowcraft in the library, just out in the open?”

“A whole section of them.”

“And they’re not in a restricted area or guarded by a troll or protected by countless enchantments?”

“Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p.’

She turns completely, hands on her lap like she’s about to deliver the birds and the bees. “Look, things are pretty, how should I say it…loose, here at Lumina. People try Shadowcraft, usually in a sexual way because hey, that’s kind of where the power comes from. So you mix the pain and the pleasure, and woo-hoo, it’s magical heroin, but no one really dabbles in the truly dark stuff. You’d have to go to Darkwood for that, and even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to teach it. That stuff will ruin you.”

I think of the spirit I summoned, that shadowy darkness still swimming in my veins as I take in her words.

“Got it,” I smile, my thoughts shifting once more to the Professor.

*

Later, I decide to explore a little. I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of this place yet. Who knows what’s hiding in the bowels of this place, what’s yet to be revealed.

Kinky shit, by the sounds of it.

I pass a group of boys huddled around a laptop in someone’s room, a brief glimpse of a nudity on the screen. Others eye me warily as I pass. I’ve done my best to dress as innocuously as I can—jeans, waffle-knit shirt in boring-as-fuck gray, but still I see the suspicion in their eyes. It’s like I’ve got a big fat sign planted on my head that reads ‘Not Society! Without means! About to be evicted!’

---