Her cries slowly died, a piece of my heart seeming to break off and wither away with her.
I fell to my knees, the weight of devastation crushing me beneath a wave of desolation. The textbook didn’t talk aboutthis, only commented on the resolute loyalty of our familiars and how they will protect us to their dying breath.
Clove’s obsidian eyes met mine with a final blink, her grief at having failed me so palpable that I cried out in anguish. “Please,” I whispered, reaching for her and unable to do a damn thing because I didn’t know how to help her. How to stop this. How tokillthat sickly three-headedthingdestroying my beloved creation.
“You’re pitiful,” Zeph said, his voice cold and remorseless. “Just like your familiar.” His snake gave a victorious twist, and Clove’s body went limp, her eyes falling closed.
I covered my mouth to hold back a sob, the sight before me destroying my will to breathe.
What was the point in inspiring life just to have it taken away so coldly?
The monster refocused on me, those lethal eyes glowing with malicious intent.
“What will you do now?” Zeph asked. “Run away? Build a fortress of flowers to hide behind?”
I didn’t reply, my grief suffocating my ability to move.How could you?I wanted to ask him.Why did you do this to me? What lesson are you trying to teach me?
The snake slithered off my dead familiar, pinpoints of evil watching me with obvious intent.
I just held its gaze, waiting for the inevitable. Even if I knew a spell that could hurt the creature, I wouldn’t use it. “I don’t take lives. I create them,” I whispered to it, defeated and broken. “So do what you must.”
“That’s why you won’t survive in this world,” Zeph replied, his voice dark with some unspoken emotion. “There’s no one here who will protect you. Only yourself. And without the will to survive, you’ll merely perish.”
I swallowed thickly, his words battering my already destroyed heart. “Better to perish than to become a monster.” I met his gaze and found death staring back at me from his dark green depths. “A monster like you,” I added, finally seeing him for the first time.
Whatever demons he harbored, I wanted nothing to do with them.
If he wanted to break me with this exercise, he’d succeeded, but not in the way he probably intended.
“Killing and hurting others isn’t the only way to survive,” I told him, pushing to my feet and ignoring his bristling pet. If that thing wanted to attack me, so be it. I wouldn’t fight back, at least not in the way Zeph anticipated. Instead, I’d go about it my way—by undoing his spell. Maybe I’d tame a new pet in the process. Or maybe I’d die trying.
At this point, what did it matter?
I turned on my heel, leaving him behind.
He called my name. I ignored him.
He shouted after me. I stopped listening.
Several students watched me leave the courtyard. I didn’t acknowledge any of them.
I’m done,I thought.I just want to go home.
“What the fuck?”I demanded in a low voice, stepping into Zeph’s path to keep him from pursuing Aflora. After that little display of jackassery, the dick clearly needed a moment to breathe before he made the situation worse.
“Move,” he ordered me.
“No.”
His green orbs flashed with emerald fire, his shoulders tensed for a fight.
I arched a brow, daring him to hit me. Class or not, I’d happily duel him in front of the entire school. Even if it meant having my ass handed to me. Anything to protect Aflora from more of Zeph’s bad mood. “You could have at least told her that familiars can’t really die.” Well, unless the owner died, too. Then the familiar passed as well.
A muscle ticked in his jaw as he looked over my shoulder in the direction she’d gone. “She needs to learn.”
“Is that how you justify what you just did to her?” I wondered out loud. “Fascinating.”
“I taught her a lesson she needed to learn.”
