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As far as the Good Council knew, I was only a Wild Whisperer. If anyone besides Emelle or Lander found out about the brand on the back of my neck that gave me the ability to Mind Manipulate an arthropod…
My control crumbled, and the centipede exploded with movement again.
Not forward toward Emelle, Lander, and the other student, thank God, but around, coiling its body until it was bearing down on me once again. Its jaw snapped, two clusters of eyes glittering with hunger.
“You,” it hissed at me in a high, rattling voice. “You just tried to kill me.”
“No!” I raised up my palms. “I was just trying to get you to stop for a second. We can get you back to normal if you tell us who did this to you.”
“I don’t want to go back to normal,” the centipede rattled out. “I want to be like this forever. To reach new dark places. To taste the flesh of monsters who have terrorized me. To bask in power like—”
“Move out of the way!” an instructor called, raising two hands to throw whatever magic they possessed in the centipede’s direction.
But it wasn’t an instructor who made it freeze again.
Right before my eyes, spiders surged from every crack and crevice of the buildings around us in tremendous waves of black and brown and gray—thousands and thousands of them, scuttling up the centipede’s body, winding silky strands around it just like some of them had once coiled around me.
No, not thousands. Millions. So many that the centipede drowned in the many-legged hairy bodies until it was just a swell of writhing black.
I turned, expecting to see Ms. Pincette somewhere behind me, but a cough from above caught my attention instead. I snapped my head toward a garden wall bordering the walkway to find a familiar young man with tousled blonde hair grinning down at me.
“Hey, darling. Looked like you needed a hand.” He hopped off the wall and rose to a stand on the cobblestone beside me.
“Rodhi,” I breathed, nearly melting with relief. “Thank you.” Although he was one of the few people who knew about all my secrets alongside Emelle and Lander, he’d been absent for a large portion of this past dry season, working with Ms. Pincette on…
Well, he had his secrets, too.
“Nice to see you not impaled and convulsing with neurotoxins,” he replied casually.
I gave a shaky laugh, my hands still shaking as all the instructors rushed forward to finish the job. Hopefully they’d find whatever Shape Shifter had done this and get him to reverse the enlargement, or else they’d have to kill the creature.
Rodhi slung his arm around my shoulder and gave a reassuring squeeze.
“I might not have a big enough army to help you save the world yet, Rayna, but you can bet your ass my babies can handle a centipede or two.”
At dinner that night, the Wild Whispering dining hall buzzed with overlapping voices, everyone discussing the debacle like it was nothing more than another piece of juicy gossip to toss around.
“And then,” Cilia told her own friends at the next table over, “we looked up, and this thing was just streaking past at the literal speed of lightning. I swear it had about two thousand legs on each side.”
At my own table, Wren’s thin, dark eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She leaned toward Emelle, Rodhi, and me with a lowered voice.
“Who do you think did it?”
“I don’t know.” Emelle winced with her fork halfway to her mouth. “But Lander’s whole house is probably getting a stern reprimand right about now.”
I winced, too, remembering what Kimber Leake had told us upon our first day at the Esholian Institute two years ago: Anyone older than you here at the Institute is your superior. We have a better grasp on our magic, and we won’t hesitate to use it to put you in your place.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the current prince and princess of the Shape Shifter houses were punishing their students as we spoke, trying to find the culprit.
“Nuisance says Mrs. Smetlar’s integrating the centipedes, too,” Gileon piped up, his rhinoceros beetle fluttering over his shoulder as per usual.
“You mean interrogating,” Wren said, patting him on the arm.
“Yeah.” Gileon frowned. “That.”
“Well,” Wren said, stabbing a piece of mushroom casserole with her fork, “the first-years flew in right after it all happened, so the Good Council won’t be far behind. They’ll probably interrogate everyone when they arrive.”
The thought of the Good Council made my pulse jump. I clenched my hands under the table, palms still stinging from the scrapes of my fall earlier.
