Nobody said anything at first. We just sat there, four assholes hanging on by a thread.
“Anyone else…” Eris started, then trailed off, staring at the ceiling. “Never mind.”
Aiden flicked his cigarette into the sink. “Yeah.”
Draco’s lip curled in a sneer. “She’s not even trying to block us now. She wants us to know.”
“That wasn’t an accident,” I said. “She wanted us to feel it.” I tried to sound disgusted, but I wasn’t. I was desperate for any scrap of her, even if it was just the echo of her pleasure from someone else’s hands.
The silence went on until Draco stood up so quickly his chair scraped the floor. “I’m going to the training arena. Anyone coming?”
Eris shot up off the couch like he’d been poked with a cattle prod. “Fucking right.”
Aiden just grabbed the pack of cigarettes and followed, not bothering with shoes. I threw on a hoodie and went last, locking the door behind us. Nobody said another word as we stalked down the hall. We passed some first-years in the corridor, and they shrank away, giving us a wide berth. Good. I didn’t want to see anyone else. I didn’t want to see anything that wasn’t the inside of a combat ring.
The next three hours were a blur. We fought with each other. We fought training dummies. We fought anyone who looked at us wrong. I took a punch to the jaw from Aiden that made my ears ring and knocked a molar loose, and I barely noticed. Draco broke Eris’s nose and set it himself with a savage twist. None of us cared. The pain was a welcome reminder that we could still feel something. Afterwards, we sat on the arena steps, sweating, bleeding, and breathing hard.
“You know what’s worse?” Eris finally said, voice muffled by the blood-soaked towel he held to his face. “It was how fucking happy she sounded.”
“She wants us to hurt,” Aiden said, and he was right. But we deserved to hurt. “Sheshouldbe happy. Iwanther to be happy.”
Nobody argued. It was the first time in months we all agreed on something. So we walked back to the dorms, showered, and went our separate ways for the day. I had a lit survey at noon. I sat in the back and didn’t listen to a single word, spending the whole time rolling a joint under the table and thinking about what it would be like to see her again.
I skipped lunch. I skipped everything. I smoked, I drank, I messed up an elemental magic quiz so bad the TA asked if I’d had a traumatic brain injury. My father must have called me at least twenty times in the last week, asking if I’d managed to convince our axis to get a grip and come back to Dominion. He didn’t get it. He’d never understand just how badly I’d fucked things up.
I was about to head back to the room and drink until I blacked out, when the lights flickered and the air around me in the dark, empty corridor grew charged. Something was wrong. A rolling sensation shot through my stomach, and a stinging pain lanced through my head as I staggered.
Then, in the center of the empty corridor, a jagged seam opened up, crackling with silver light until it made a perfect circle. Jupiter Black stumbled out of it.
She looked like hell. Her hair was out of its braid, her face pale. She was gripping the straps of her school bag so tight her knuckles were white. As soon as her feet hit the ground, the seam snapped shut behind her, leaving only the faintest shimmer in the air.
Our eyes locked, and for a second neither of us moved. I couldn’t even breathe.
17
Jupiter
I stoodin the space between two ancient yews on the edge of the grove, my hands outstretched, searching for the seam between shadow and light. The trick, according to the threadbare copy of ‘A Study in Ophis Phenomena,’ was not to force it. The dark didn’t respond to violence. It yielded, if you were patient. If you asked the right way. I wasn’t patient. I wasneverpatient. My first two attempts at darkrending had ended with scorched leaves and a headache that made my ears ring.
“Let’s try again,” I said, to myself, to Noodle, to the gathering dusk.
Noodle slid his head out from under my sleeve and flicked his tongue in the air.‘Hypothesis…’
He wasn’t wrong. Most Ophis lore was written by people who’d never met one, let alone practiced the magic. We were like unicorns or yetis to the Assembly.
I let myself sink into the shadows at my feet, feeling their coolness brush against my ankles. I thought of the time three nights ago when Jamie had shown me how to drift into thedreamscape, how effortless it had felt to slide sideways from reality the moment I fell asleep. It only worked if he was there to pull me in from the other side, of course.
This was less graceful, more like climbing inside a trash bag and hoping the bottom wouldn’t rip. I reached. Iasked. The darkness responded like a living thing, flowing over my skin, up my legs, tangling around my hips and chest. I felt my own magic meet the dark, and for a split second, we were the same thing.
The world melted around me, the trees blurring into streaks of ink, the temperature dropping ten degrees. My skin prickled with static, my hair lifting from my scalp. There was asnap, and I found myself ten feet to the left, behind a mossy boulder.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, my heart slamming in my chest.
‘Again,’said Noodle.
“Yeah, again.”
I did it three more times, each slip easier. By the last try, the air was thick with something that smelled like fresh tar. The book said that darkrending was a rare ability. The ability to use shadows as a form of transportation by folding them around oneself and slipping right through. Not quite portaling, but similar enough. I had to admit it was a fucking thrill when it worked. Was it practical? No. Not really. In fact, I was exhausted.
