Page 7 of Bonds of Magic
And now he was going to be giving me private lessons? On being an incubus?
My head was full of too many swirling thoughts, all jostling for attention, my heart too heavy with grief, to have really registeredhow awkward those lessons were going to be. But I knew I wasn’t looking forward to them.
I wasn’t going to look forward to anything ever again. Erika was dead.Dead. And it was all because of me. Professor Romero had been shot in the stomach because of me. And I couldn’t stop shaking.
The empty words Noah and Dean Mansur had used didn’t matter. I knew it was my fault.
It would have been better if I’d been the one who was killed. Would have been more fair. I’d never been any use to anyone. And if I’d died, Erika would still be here.
Instead, the universe had played another sick joke at my expense, and decided to keep me around. I wished I were back out there, lying in the snow. Dying might have been peaceful. I wasn’t sure, but it could hardly be worse than how I felt right now.
Maybe I should try to grab one of Cinda’s scalpels when she wasn’t looking and take it to my wrists. It was what I deserved.
“Well, don’t fret,” Cinda said as she turned back to me. “We’ll get you cleaned up in no time.”
And she did. The outside of me, anyway. The blood was gone, the bruises were fading, and my nose was back in one piece, reasonably straight. But my insides would ever feel clean again.
She instructed me to go straight to bed, saying that she’d come by to check on me in the morning. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. Not with my chest swollen with grief. I started crying again as soon as I was alone in my room, the pain clawing its way out of me in long sobs. But I must have been more tired thanI realized, because sleep overtook me faster than I could have imagined.
It was bone-deep and dreamless.
I surfaced sometime the next morning to see Cinda hovering over my bed with a worried expression. It cleared a little when she saw that I was awake, but not completely. There was something sad in her face, despite her smile.
“I am tending to you with worrying regularity,” she said.
I frowned, wondering where I was. I looked from side to side. It was my room at Vesperwood. The motion exacerbated the ache in my head, and as soon as I became aware of that, I realized that the rest of me hurt too.
But why? What was Cinda doing here? Why was I—
And then the events of last night surfaced, and I remembered exactly why I hurt. The clearing. The man in the overcoat. The gun.
Erika.
Tears sprang to my eyes. I closed them, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep the tears back. That man had come to Vesperwood looking for me. If I’d stopped Erika sooner, if I’d never gone hunting for the spring—if I’d never come to Vesperwood, she would still be alive.
“Pain?” Cinda’s voice filtered through my thoughts, and I opened my eyes in confusion. She looked concerned again. “I was hoping you’d be feeling better this morning. How bad is it?”
Terrible, I thought. But I knew she meant my physical injuries. Not my heart.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, everything hurts. But I’ll live. I think.”
“You’d better, after the effort I put in.” She looked a little annoyed. “You really do have a distressing tendency to hurt yourself.”
My memories of my meeting with Dean Mansur and Noah last night were fuzzy. I knew they’d talked about people who might be after me. Something about faculty involvement.
The names had slipped out of my mind, along with most of what had been said. But the dean had made it quite clear that I wasn’t supposed to talk about what had happened. That much, I remembered. I didn’t know what the official story was yet, and I didn’t know if Cinda knew the truth or not. I decided to be vague.
“Maybe I’m just unlucky?”
She shook her head. “You have no idea what bad luck is.”
I knew it better than she could imagine, but there was no reason to press the point.
“Is there anyone you want me or the dean to reach out to? Someone at home? Family?”
I shook my head again, wincing. “No. I don’t have any family.”
Her sad smile came back. “Maybe you do understand bad luck.”
