Page 11 of Bonds of Magic
“Ash,” Felix tried again, but Ash had the bit between his teeth now.
“It’s so like them,” he complained. “Everything’s fine, nothing to see here. I’m sure the dean will come up with more restrictions for us now, but will he actually tell us anything useful? No, he’ll lie to us over and over until—”
“Ash!” Felix snapped. It’s the angriest I’d ever heard him. We all turned to look. “How. Is. This. Helping?”
Felix bit the words out, giving Ash a restrained but baleful look. Ash glared back at him for a moment, but wilted quickly under Felix’s gaze. Eventually, he looked down at his plate and pierced a macaroni noodle with his knife.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
It was the first time I’d heard him apologize to someone in earnest.
“I miss her,” Min said, throwing her fork down suddenly. “Our room feels so empty now. I couldn’t sleep at all last night, even before we found out. I knew something was wrong.”
As she spoke, I noticed she had dark circles under her eyes. I’d been so focused on my own pain, I hadn’t paid attention to anyone else’s.
“It’s going to be weird without her in class,” Keelan said. “Always raising her hand with the answer.”
“Yeah,” Min said bitterly. “Now we’ll just have Rekha doing it all the time.” She looked across the table at Felix. “Well, you always know the answer too. But you usually keep it to yourself.”
Felix sighed. “I’ll miss studying with her. She was a good library buddy.”
“Yeah,” Ash said sadly. “She was a good friend.”
“Is everyone staying?” Keelan asked after another long period of quiet. “With the dean’s announcement and all? My mom’s going to want me to come home, once the news gets out. But I don’t want to leave. I’m pretty sure itwasan accident,” he said with a hard look at Ash. “But even if it wasn’t, I still don’t want to go.”
“My parents know better than to try to pull me home,” Min said.
“I chose to be here,” Felix said. “That hasn’t changed.”
Ash shrugged. “Where else would I go?”
I gave him a quizzical look. “But you’re always complaining about it here.”
“Well, yeah. But half of that is because I like complaining. And the other half…”
He trailed off, and we lapsed into silence again.
After a moment, Min said, “What about you, Cory?”
My stomach twisted some more. I’d been thinking about it all day, and I’d become more and more convinced that the right thing to do was for me to leave. But I couldn’t say that out loud, or Ash would turn it into a big argument.
“I don’t have much to go back to,” I said instead. That was true, regardless of what I ended up doing.
“Oh, shit,” Min said.
I followed her gaze across the room. A tall, muscular girl with curly brown hair had appeared with a tray of food, flanked by an even taller guy with blond hair and a shorter girl with straight black hair. A hush fell over the entire refectory as the threesome crossed the room.
“Who’s that?” I asked Ash quietly.
“Valeria Martinez,” Ash said. “Erika’s sister. A Hunter. The other two are Talmadge Hastings and Evelyn Lee. Both of them are in Hex.”
He said their names like he was afraid to draw their attention. That was unlike him.
Conversation didn’t start up again until the three students sat at an empty table in the far corner of the room. They weren’t huddled, exactly, but something about the way they sat made it clear no one else was welcome.
Valeria’s eyes were red. I’d seen it when she passed by. From crying, probably. But there was a fire inside them, too.
“Must be awful,” Keelan said. “Having everyone staring at you, wondering how you’re doing.”
