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This time, I was searching for three faces. Three faces I knew as well as my own by now, belonging to three men who had come to mean more to me than I’d ever expected.
I found them in the front row, and my stomach dropped.
As I looked down past the lip of the raised stage, I realized that there were ten seats bordering the front of the platform, lined up in front of me.
But only five bodies occupied them.
Trace, Merrick, and Lachlan sat in a row, their expressions unreadable as they watched me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Pay attention! This question will be on the test,” Professor Cantwell said, standing at the front of the class going over magical theory.
I blinked, trying to focus. I’d been back in classes for three days, and I needed to catch up on everything I’d missed.
The day after the ceremony, things had gone back to normal—or at least as normal as they could get for me.
Honestly, nothing felt the same. When I’d first come to Magic Blessed, I hadn’t been all that excited about being here. I hadn’t planned to make friends, and I certainly hadn’t expected three men to crack my sealed heart open and make me… feel.
“I still don’t know how you’re doing better in Practical Uses of Magic than I am,” Eden whispered to me, not listening to Professor Cantwell as he droned on.
I shrugged, dragging my pencil across the pages of my notebook without even paying attention to what I was writing.
“You have to realize, in the jungle, I had to use my magic every single day, and usually every single hour. What I didn’t already know, I had to teach myself, and I had to do it fast.”
Eden settled back into her seat, but her gaze kept darting in my direction, as if she could tell that something was fundamentally different about me. Class finally ended, and I closed my notebook, shoving it into my bag and hefting the backpack over my shoulder.
Walking out of class behind Eden, I caught sight of Lachlan coming down the hall from the opposite direction. Our gazes caught, and my mouth dropped open. But just like the last few times I’d seen him or any of the other three men in the halls, I couldn’t seem to force out a damn word.
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“What the hell is up with him? With all of them?” Eden murmured, turning to look over her shoulder at the burly Irishman passed by. “From the bits of footage I saw, I was sure you guys had gotten to be good friends.”
The footage of us in the cave had fortunately not been aired to all the students at Magic Blessed and the entire magical community. Like Eden had told me, only the “highlights” were broadcast.
I pulled the strap up on my backpack, a dull ache spreading in my chest until it felt like it would stop my heart.
“Yeah, well. Things are just kind of back to how they were before the competition. They’re not giving me shit anymore, but they’re pretty much ignoring me.” At Eden’s pitying look, I shook my head quickly, forcing my voice to remain even. “It’s for the best. We were just working together out of convenience. It’s not like we became soulmates or anything. It wasn’t like we were a real team. Now that we’re back, they don’t really want to talk to me.”
Eden gave me a skeptical look, then shrugged and took the lead as we maneuvered through the crowded hallway, dropping the subject for the moment.
Thank fuck.
Everything I’d just said had been a lie. The guys hadn’t been ignoring me. If anything, I’d been ignoring them—and once they’d realized that’s what I was doing, all of them had followed my lead and kept their distance.
In the immediate aftermath of the challenge, all I’d wanted was to be with them, to talk about the weirdness of being back and how strange and guilty I felt for having survived. To soak up their comforting presence and lend them my strength too.
But in the days that followed, I had gotten more and more stuck in my own head. I kept trying to process everything that’d happened in the Gods’ Challenge, but it was impossible to wrap my mind around all of it.
Something felt… wrong.
I’d stuffed the medal I had won in a drawer under a pile of clothes, unable to stand the sight of the gold glinting in the light. I’d been tempted to throw it out the window, but I was sure Dean Frost would somehow find out and be furious about it.
But I didn’t want the damn thing.
As I passed by the large Gods’ Challenge board, a sort of tribute that’d been erected a few days after we returned, I paused for a moment, staring at the faces of the four contestants who had died inside the realm.
Every time I saw their faces, my heart skipped a beat.
