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“You brought Ophelia back. Set off a chain of events you don’t understand.” I lift my hand, feeling my fury gathering into a hard ball in my gut. “You screwed up.”
“Oh no… Are you going to throw sparks at me again?” She blows a bubble with her gum. Pops it. “I’m so scared.”
My head throbs. My hand feels hot, then cold. And then… drops of water start to drip from my fingertips to the ground with gentle plops.
“I… can’t believe it,” Zoey says and for once we agree. “That’s all you can do? Girls, look. She’s dripping. Dripping wet!”
“Fitting for a slut,” one of them says and they dissolve into laughter.
My neck starts to burn with humiliation. My magic starts to shrivel and curl back into me, for all the good it did me. Wiping my wet hand on my jeans, I turn around and march away. What good is my magic when this is all it can do?
It’s not so much the humiliation as the helplessness, the crippling sense of failure, the whisper in my mind saying that… if I can’t even do this, if I can’t even gather enough magic to shove Zoey and her bitches away, then what chance do I stand against my powerful cousin?
Zoey’s words gave me an idea, though. The boys bought me those clothes. Ergo, it’s the sort of clothes that excite them on a girl. Each one gave me a particular set, and so far, I’ve never worn it for the particular boy who gifted it to me. It’s as if they each gave me a key to their desires. Would it be enough if I appeared at their door dressed like that for them to let me in, get distracted enough to be free of the enchantment for a while?
Worth a try.
And then skin-to-skin contact would help things along, maybe enough to drag them off to Miss Worthy or the Headmaster and get an account of what is happening out of them before Ophelia realizes.
I wince. It’s a thin hope but I’ll try everything at my disposal. For now, it’s the library.
“Books on symbols,” I tell the librarian, a tall, willowy woman with a faint aura of magic that hints at fire and smoke, like Emrys’. Who thought putting a fire element near thousands of books was a good idea?
Then again, both her demonblood and elemental magic are so faint as to be practically nonexistent. She directs me to two rows of shelves and disappears back behind her desk, probably to go back to reading. I think people become librarians because they hope to spend their lives reading all the books in the libraries—and when they discover how much work the job involves, they simply develop a strict and forbidding personality so they can scare readers away and go back to reading.
With Ophelia’s diary in my backpack and Jason’s note in my pocket, I made my way through the maze of shelves. A magical building in a magical academy, the library seems to extend much deeper than its actual size, occupying a different space. I walk and walk and could swear I’m lost when I locate the numbers she gave me and relieved, enter the first row.
Only to find Vanessa in front of me.
She shoots me a hostile look. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for books. This was a library, last I checked.”
She sniffs. “Well, this row isn’t for you. It’s for actual witches. With actual magic.”
“Believe it or not, I don’t need your permission to be here,” I say and pretend to ignore her while I peruse the book spines.
“What are you really doing here?”
“Why should I tell you?” I mutter. “You’re a friend of Ophelia’s.”
“And she’s your cousin. So what?”
“It’s not the same, is it?”
“Isn’t it?” She watches me as I select a book—a random book on ancient augurs as I’m not going to give my hand away—and open it. “Researching omens now?”
“Going to run back to Ophelia and report it? Get yourself a gold star and a pat on the back? That’s all she’ll give you, you know. While she takes over the world.”
“Still with that silly idea about the conquest of the world. You must be so jealous of her.”
I still, because there is some truth in that. “I used to be jealous of her,” I admit softly. “Back when she had her freedom and I didn’t. When she knew what she was but not me. Now I’m not jealous. Only worried.”
“Is that another word for furious?”
“You will be, too,” I promise her, “when you find out how she duped you.”
“She wouldn’t.”
