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I grimaced, gesturing for her to sit beside me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I was fucking starving this morning. But I’m glad you’re here. I—”
Before I could finish the thought, a hand slammed down on our table, making my spoon rattle in the bowl. I stared at the short stubby fingers and followed the arm up to the face I knew way better than I wanted to. My lips twitched, and anger began to rise inside of me again. The same anger that’d been bubbling in my chest all summer.
“Oh, hey, Wesley,” I said with forced casualness. “Great to see you. Although I’m honestly a little surprised to see you here.”
His pinched face shifted into a scowl at the monotone of my voice. “Why’s that?”
I turned back to my bowl of cereal, letting a half-smile curve my lips. “I don’t know, I just thought after taking a punch to the face like I gave you last semester, you might still be knocked out.”
The hands on the table curled into fists. Wesley leaned closer, making Eden pull back in distaste as he dipped his head to stare at me.
“Trust me,” he murmured. “I’ll get my revenge on you. Don’t underestimate me.”
The spoon paused in front of my mouth, hovering there for a second. Then I continued to eat, keeping my face schooled into a bland expression. Wesley stayed where he was for a long moment, obviously waiting for my facade of boredom to break. When it didn’t, he finally grunted angrily under his breath, turned on his heel, and walked away.
Eden watched our asshole classmate go, her nose wrinkled in distaste. Then she turned to me and chuckled. “It’s good to see you’re making friends again. You’ve always been so sociable.”
My stomach twisted a little, making the cereal churn in my gut. I wanted to laugh at her joke, but I felt like I was a fraud. It was true; I didn’t make friends easily. But Eden was one of the few people who had actually wormed her way into my life. Into my heart.
And I was being a pretty fucking shitty friend by keeping everything I knew secret.
In a way, maybe keeping her in the dark would protect her. But I’d started to realize that not knowing was just as dangerous—maybe more so.
Trusting the wrong people could get you killed. Especially if those people were gods.
“Hey, uh, I need to talk to you,” I said. “Can we go somewhere else?”
Her brows pulled together, but she nodded. “Sure. Just let me grab a muffin or something.”
I grabbed one too and demolished it in three bites as we made our way out of the cafeteria and down the hall. Most of the classrooms were taken up by teachers getting ready for the start of the semester, but I found an empty supply closet and pulled her inside.
She watched me as I held my ear to the door for a moment, making sure no footsteps headed our way. Then I did a spell I’d learned from Trace, sending out a layer of magic to create a seal around the door, blocking our voices from outside listeners. When I turned back to Eden, her eyes were wide, and she had a bite of muffin tucked away in her cheek like a chipmunk.
She might not know what I was about to tell her, but the way I was acting had obviously tipped her off to the fact that it was bad.
I crossed over to lean against a shelving unit beside her, shoving my hands in my pockets as I met her gaze. “I have to tell you something. But you have to swear you won’t tell anyone else right now. You could be in danger if you do.”
Her face went serious. She swallowed her bite of muffin and she nodded. “Promise.”
Okay. Here goes.
Keeping my voice hushed and flat, I quickly told her everything.
About how the gods were working with the school admins to make sure that a high percentage of students didn’t survive the Gods’ Challenges, and even worse, about why they wanted us to die.
Because we hadn
’t been gifted magic by the gods as we had been taught since the day we’d arrived here. Instead, every student at Magic Blessed was a person who had developed magic spontaneously. What the god Omari had called “wild magic.” And our time at this academy was a chance for the gods to weed out some of the strongest of us by making sure we died in the competition. It allowed them to cull our numbers without alerting the general magical population to the fact that they were killing off magic users.
“The strongest of us…?” Eden looked like she might cry. I could see shock on her face, but the emotion that really ripped my heart apart was disappointment.
Because she wasn’t as bitter and jaded as me, she had expected better from this place. Even I had been surprised by the level of evil and duplicity. Eden looked rocked by it.
“Yeah.” I nodded. It wasn’t really possible to soften a blow like this.
“Wait. Does that mean Wesley is one of the strongest of us?”
She looked horrified at the thought, and I laughed, even though I was sure she wasn’t joking.
