Page 48 of Faerie Marked

“I got top 25. It’s nothing to turn your nose up at,” I replied. And knew immediately. I shouldn’t have given in to her power games. She’d made the remark on purpose, of course, and I fell into her trap.

Something about Persephone’s voice just rubbed me the wrong way and made me want to fight back.

“You might have gotten through with your grades,” she began, brushing her hair until the strands gleamed, “but nothing is going to help you with your hairdo. I mean, look at you, Tavi. Do you always take suchpridein looking like you crawled out of a gutter? Your hair is like a rat’s nest. Come on, look at yourself. Maybe you’ll see why we all laugh at you.”

She flashed the mirror in my direction. I glanced over, eyes locking on the glass because I hadn’t been thinking.

I felt my spell shatter.

The same cold washed over me like taking a dunk in a river in winter, my skin rippling and my stomach bending over backwards to make me sick. Oh,no!

Persephone was giggling. “What’s the matter, Tavi? You can’t stand seeing your own reflection? Do you think it’s going to turn you to stone? Maybe we should start calling you Medusa!”

I heard her as through a wall of cement, clawing for the box of potions before anyone noticed something was really wrong with me. My skin itched, squirming, shifting as the spell dissipated to reveal my wolf.

A swell of anger ripped through me and the she-wolf part of me snapped her teeth from inside my head, my dual nature reacting to Persephone’s aggravating cackle.We could rip out her throat, if we want.She’d be nothing but a snack between our teeth.The wolf had been suppressed for too long and would love a chance to attack.

The lid flipped. Ugh, no. I’d only just drank my latest dose the night before. It was too soon, too soon. No choice.

My fingers scrambled over the empty spots, those empty spots for the vials I’d already drank and disposed of.

I chugged the potion with a cough.

I was down to the last of my bottles, all because I’d been careless.

17

Ifound myself struggling to catch up to the rest of the class, scrambling to stand on the ice because I knew if I slipped, I wasout. Just when I thought I had the hang of things, the class load shifted entirely for the first half of the new semester.

Labs started as soon as fall break ended. Each class I had now dealt with a different type of magic, with hands-on work being the emphasis of this portion of the semester. Quite a difference from the study I’d grown accustomed to.

Thank God. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could have dealt with the book work. My eyes were practically bleeding.

That was probably the way the staff wanted things to work. Their watchful gazes were everywhere, constantly, waiting for us to mess up, waiting for an excuse to take our points away.

I tried to look at things a little differently after my last talk with Melia, shifting focus to remind myself about how the professors didn’t want us to succeed. They wanted us to be strong. They wanted the best people to move on to the next level, and the next level, with a spot in Faerie being the ultimate goal.

Paranoid, I peeled an orange for breakfast, not trusting anything else the chef made, the garlic demon. I’d never used magic before. I knewnothingabout magic. Could I even do this?

Barbara had told me I’d broken through her wards, something I didn’t remember doing. Was it magic?

Melia sat down next to me, her plate filled and a grin on her face. “Are you excited to start your practical studies?” she asked me.

I tried to nod and nearly choked on my orange. “Sure,” I said with a groan. “Hey Meli, does magic come naturally to everyone? What I mean to say is, I’ve never had much of a chance to practice it. Does every half-breed have a kind of natural proficiency when it comes to magic?”

“Well…” Melia trailed off, her gaze distant. “For some people I suppose it comes more naturally than to others. I’m not sure about the same level for every half-breed. I think sometimes it depends on your own talents, and for others it takes hard work. I’ve never seen anyone completely fail at this portion of their curriculum.” She paused, then gestured with her fork. “I take it back. My second year, I saw a first-year boy completely fail to produce any kind of magic. They got rid of him really quickly. But I think he was half-Fae, half-troll or something. Maybe his two parentages canceled each other out.”

“I wonder how it will work for me,” I muttered, popping another orange segment into my mouth.

“You’ve never used magic?”

“Not once.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much. You’ll get your chance to practice. And practice and practice and practice. You’ll end up using so much magic you’ll dream about it at night,” she told me.

In the afternoon I sat down at a long table for my first Divination class.

Things didn’t feel right at the academy today. Maybe it was my imagination but the air was filled with pressure despite the empty halls, so many students given the boot and sent home after the first culling. I’d gotten used to the low-lying energy of all those Fae singing in my veins as I navigated the strange world of academia, but I couldn’t shake the sense that there were things going on here I still didn’t understand.

---