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“It’s because they’re all trying to figure out how to get us home. Plus, they’ve been running circles around themselves trying to keep the wards up and fully functional.” She did a little full-body shake, like a wet dog trying to dry itself, probably trying to banish the dismal thoughts I could practically see filtering past her eyes. Then she refocused on me. “How do you feel about today? Do you want to review anything before your test? I know I was repeating facts to myself up until the bell rang, plus I was doing flash cards all through breakfast. I don’t know if it helped or not, but it made me feel better.”
I shook my head. “If I don’t know it now I’m not going to learn it in the next two hours. A shower and breakfast will do me more good than studying.”
She blinked at me. “I would kill for a modicum of your chill, you know that?”
I huffed a laugh. “The unknown scares me. If we were still on earth and were taking the final, I’d probably be praying for somebody else to attack the school so I wouldn’t have to do this. The idea of getting sent to the underworld used to terrify me. But now that we’re here, I know what I’ll be dealing with if I fail. It can’t scare me now that I can see it.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. I just smiled at her and went about my business. What she knew but maybe didn’t quite understand w
as that I’d been through hell before. When my mom died, and I was too old for anyone to really worry about me but too young to sign contracts, that was hell. The wasteland of the underworld couldn’t hold a candle to the wasteland of being totally alone at seventeen.
I met the guys downstairs at breakfast and gave them all a quick mental once-over, reaching out through the connection between us. Jayce had already been meditating for hours; I could tell by the serenity wafting off of him. God, I would kill for a modicum of his chill. Kai was annoyed, but not stressed. He was good at tests. Xero’s lips moved as he read over the notes he’d been keeping all year. Kingston seemed more nervous than everybody else, and kept turning away to look into his pocket.
“Pretty sure cheating counts as failure,” I told him as I sat down.
“What? Oh. I’m not.”
“Then what’s in your pocket?”
A flash of anger crossed his face, but he pushed it away with an over-the-top leer. “Come here and I’ll show you.” He wiggled his eyebrows and licked his lips.
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t have to be a dick about it.”
“A dick! You guessed it! Well, that’s no fun. Now all of these fine people will have to find a way to enjoy their breakfasts without a show. What a shame.”
“Oh, shut up, Kingston. God, you’re—” I groped around for the right word.
“Attractive? Enticing? Superb?” He grinned as he filled in the blanks.
“Obnoxious,” Jayce said.
“Insufferable,” Xero added absently.
“Yeah, what they said.”
Kingston smirked and went back to his meal. He didn’t look in his pocket again after that, and I wondered if he’d just been messing with me to begin with.
I chalked it up to nerves. We were all dealing with them, but Kingston didn’t exactly deal with emotions well. He preferred to pretend he didn’t have any, but he couldn’t hide the truth from me. I could feel an echo of what my bonded foursome were feeling all the time, and right now we were one giant mass of walking nerves.
It was all wasted energy, as it turned out. When we were settled into our seats in the magic lab and had the tests in front of us, everything suddenly made sense. They weren’t testing us on our ability to memorize facts—which was good, because I would very likely have flunked—but on our ability to use that knowledge in ways that were not psychotic.
For example, one of the early questions was about the Salem witch trials. It asked what I would have done if I’d been accused of being a witch and had a mob chasing me, threatening to burn me at the stake. The answers ranged from Eat them to Beg for mercy. I chose Diplomatically diffuse the situation, which I assumed was code for Cast persuasion.
As the test went on, the questions got more complex, but as far as I was concerned the answers were always clear. Find the balance between doing the best thing for myself and causing the least amount of harm to others. There were a few trick questions, and a few morally ambiguous situations, but for the most part it was all very straightforward. A person would have to be completely evil or completely stupid to screw it up. Probably both, honestly.
It made me wonder about the students who didn’t pass.
We finished by dinner time, and as we all headed to the cafeteria, it felt like the giant bubble of stress had popped, leaving my whole group feeling looser and happier. I smiled at my guys as I linked arms with Xero and Jayce.
“Think you all passed?”
“Of course,” Xero said with his slow grin.
“That test was so simple I was almost offended.” Kingston rolled his eyes.
“I know. It was basically just ‘don’t be a dick’, right? Or… did I miss something?” Jayce suddenly looked worried.
“No, that’s what I got out of it.” I leaned forward to peer around him as we walked, my gaze landing on the fifth member of our group. “Kai?”
