Page 9 of A Deadly Education
“Given that you’re at least half responsible for this situation, I refuse to thank you,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment, and suddenly the five-minute warning bell was ringing for curfew. It hadn’t felt like that much time had gone by. I put my hands down and touched the patch gently, testing. Sitting up was not going to appeal for a long time. The blood had gone back into me, so I felt much better, but not even Mum’s top work could make a ragged gut wound disappear instantly. I reached out for the mana crystal and hung it back round my neck. I could forget about sleep tonight, and I was going to have to use some real power. Not only hadn’t I given in, Jack was dead, for a net loss of malice in the world. The maleficaria would probably go on a rampage.
Orion was still sitting on the edge of my bed as though he’d been there the whole time, and he didn’t make any move to get up. “What are you doing?” I said irritably.
“What?”
“Did you not hear the warning bell?”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said, as if that were obvious.
I eyed him. “Do you not understand the principle of balance at all?”
“It’s a theory, first of all, and even if it’s true, I’m not going to live by it!”
“You’re one of those,” I said, with heartfelt disgust.
“Yeah, sorry. Do youmindmy staying, or should I leave you alone with a gut wound to be attacked all night?” I’d evidently pushed him so far he’d found some sarcasm himself.
“Of course I don’t mind.” It wasn’t going to make things any worse for me, after all. There’s a practical limit on how many maleficaria can come into your room at once, and I was already on the menu as tonight’s special offer. Having Orion around could only help. It’s very roughly the same principle that makes being inside the school during puberty better than being on the outside.
Curfew rang on schedule a few minutes later. Whatever kept the maleficaria from attacking Orion usually, it couldn’t overcome the scent of blood in the water that I was obviously giving off, not to mention the temptation of two students doubled up in a cell. There was a squabble outside the door over Jack’s body to start off the festivities, a sound of things wrestling and gnawing horribly. Orion stood there in the middle of the room with his hands flexing restlessly, listening to them.
“Why are you wasting energy? Just lie down until they come in,” I muttered.
“I’m fine.”
The noises outside finally stopped. The first rattle of my door came shortly after. Then a glistening black ooze began to seep under the door, thick as tar. Orion let it come halfway through and then framed it with his hands held up, making a diamond-shaped opening between them. He chanted a one-line water-spout spell in French and then blew a whistling breath through his hands. A torrent of water gushed out the other side, firehose-strong, and dissolved the ooze into a thin slick that ran along the cracks between the floor tiles and slurped down the round drain in the middle of the cell floor.
“If you’d frozen it, you could have blocked the opening,” I said after a moment.
He threw an annoyed look at me, but before he could answer, there was a sudden hard vacuum-popping sensation in my ears: something big had come through the air vent. He jumped in front of my bed and threw a shielding spell over us just in time as an honest-to-goodness incarnated flame erupted at the dark end of the room, inches away from the void. It bashed my desk out of the way and started lashing blows at us with a huge thrashing whip-coil tentacle of fire that splashed gouts of flame over the surface of the shield.
I grabbed Orion’s arm as he swiped a streak of dust off the top of my headboard, about to use a dust-devil spell. He yelled at me, “I’m going to kill you myself at this rate!”
“Shut up, this is actually important! You can’t smother it, you have to burn it hotter to burn it out.”
“You’ve seen one of these before?”
“I’ve got a summoning spell that raises a dozen of them,” I said. “It was used to burn down the Library of Alexandria.”
“Why would you ask for a spell like that!”
“What I asked for was a spell to light my room, you twat, that’s what Igot.” To be fair, the incarnate flame was in fact doing a magnificent job of lighting the room. My room went double-height after the sophomore-year reshuffle—at term-end the school gets rid of any rooms that aren’t being used anymore—and I hadn’t seen the upper corners of the wall above my bed since. A whole bunch of agglo grubs up there were humping around in blind circles trying to get away from the light and getting vaporized in flaring-blue pops by the vermin stripe I’d tacked on the wall as high as I could previously see. “Do you want to keep arguing with me until it smashes through?”
He actually snarled wordlessly and then hit the incarnate with a magnificent incineration spell, barely four words long—all his spells seemed to be like that, ideal for combat—and it shrieked and went up into a towering pillar of flame that burnt out along with the spell. He sat back down on my bed breathing in hard gulps, but there was almost a static-electricity crackle coming off his skin: he was bursting with mana.
He didn’t break a sweat killing the next five things that made it in, including a disembodied wight that floated through the opening he hadn’t blocked under the door and a horde of little squeaking fleshy things like naked mole rats that appeared from under the bed apparently hoping to nibble us to death. He was almost glowing by the time he disposed of the last ones.
“If you have more mana than you can handle, you could put some in my crystals,” I said, as a way of fighting the urge to just claw his and my own faces off with envy.
He did actually pick up the half-empty crystal dangling from my bed, gave it a double-take, then stared at the one I was wearing. “Wait—I thought—what enclave are you from?”
“I’m not in any enclave.”
“Then how did you get your hands on Radiant Mind crystals? You’ve gottwo.”
I compressed my lips, regretting I’d got us on this conversational road. Mum will give her crystals to other wizards sometimes, if she gets a good feeling from them, and since Mum’s judgment on that sort of thing is fairly unerring, her crystals have developed a bit of a side reputation, out of proportion to the mana they can hold. “I’ve got fifty,” I said shortly. The crystals were what I packed instead of more clothes, supplies, tools; anything I could live without. “They’re my mum’s.”
He gaped at me. “Gwen Higgins is yourmother?”
