Page 86 of Mortal Shift
“Burning pain.”
Jax went paler still as Nyra nodded.
“Yes. And like all pain runes, it can be dialed up to various extremes, from mild discomfort to cases in which the recipient has begged for death.”
Jax’s outstretched arm trembled and he squared his jaw and stilled it. I narrowed my eyes. Nyra’s punishment wasn’t just about the rune. It was about the anticipation of the rune, and the pain to come.
“Everyone take out a sheet of paper, and we shall see who gets to determine which of them Jax will bear. Draw your suggestion on your sheet, fold it, and pass it forward. You may use textbooks. And someone try for some originality, please. We can’t all choose burning and crushing pain runes.”
Jax looked like hereallyhoped they wouldn’t all be burning and crushing pain runes. He started to lower his arm, and Instructor Nyra snapped her icy glare onto him. He quickly moved it back into place. Apparently, he was going to be waiting like that until a decision had been made.
I grabbed my textbook and flicked through to the chapter on punishment runes, wincing at some of the more horrific ones. I mean, Jax was a jackass, but some of these were barbaric. And sure, the fae weren’t exactly known for being a kindly race, but these were extreme. Hypothermia, blindness, paralysis.
And then my gaze snagged on one at the bottom of the page. There was a little smudge next to the rune and the word,‘mutism’.Well, I was pretty sure Jax losing the ability to run his mouth for a while would work in everyone’s favor. Plus it’d piss him off…without leaving him screaming on the floor. I copied the symbol as carefully as I could, folded my sheet, and passed it forward.
Jax, to his credit, loathe though I was to acknowledge it, handled the wait with a stoicism I probably wouldn’t have managed in his place. Me, I’d have been craning my neck to see what was on each sheet of paper, and trying to find some way out of having a symbol imbedded into my skin that would make me feel like my hand was being burned, or crushed. Or, hopefully, that’d make me go mute for an hour. Jax was statue still, his shoulders unmoving, his hand steady.
Nyra gathered up all the slips and unfolded them on her desk, one at a time, in Jax’s clear view. I heard him audibly swallow at one, and Nyra’s lips curved a fraction at the edges. She set that slip to one side.
In the end, she had three slips set aside. She looked out at us.
“Well, I’m not surprised that most of you have proved to be utter disappointments. If one of these three runes does not belong to you, you’ll be writing an essay on punishment runes before our next lesson.”
And with that, she turned and drew three runes on the board. I watched, barely drawing breath, torn between the urge to keep watching and see if mine came up, and the temptation to scan the textbook and identify them. In the end, I kept watching. The first two runes meant nothing to me—I really needed to study more—but as the third one started to take shape, a small gasp slipped from my lips. That wasmyrune. Guess Nyra secretly harbored a desire to shut her students up, in common with every other teacher I’d ever met.
It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t the only one who’d gasped, and a few quiet whispers raced round the room. Well, that was weird. But whatever.
“The three of you who chose these runes, stand up.”
The girl from the front row got to her feet, and Kallan followed. No surprise thee that he’d thought up a brutal punishment for one of Cole’s pack members. Reluctantly, I pushed my chair back and got to my feet, too. The whispers intensified, but Nyra silenced them with a swift glare.
“First rune. Leilani.”
She nodded.
“Yes, I thought as much. Constricting trachea. Somewhat original, I’ll grant you. Second rune, whose was this?”
“Mine, Instructor Nyra,” Kallan said. His face stayed carefully neutral, but I could practically feel the gleeful animosity rolling off him.
“The quintuple sensory deprivation rune. Both unusual, and one that Jax wouldn’t quickly forget. Not bad. Sit down, both of you.”
I suppressed a shudder. Completely shut off from all your senses, and totally isolated in the pitch dark silence? Yeah, that was something I could believe of Kallan. He and Leilani both sat, leaving me the only one still standing.
“Cali,” she said. “I’ll admit I’m surprised, but perhaps pack bonds aren’t so strong in humans as they are in shifters. You have chosen the anti-transmutism rune.”
The what? I shook my head. “No, I—”
My words were drowned out by a resurgence of the whispers, but they weren’t whispers anymore.
“How can she do that to a member of her mate’s pack?”
“I’d rather be killed.”
“That’s barbaric…”
My head swam, and I glanced down at my textbook. The smudge! Oh, fuck. It wasn’t just a random fingermark, it was half the rune name that had been smudged out. The important part. I frowned. Mis-read or not, this seemed like an over-reaction.
“I don’t get why it’s such a big deal,” I murmured from the side of my mouth to Cole, who looked somewhere between shocked and horrified.
