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I tipped the chair, throwing it off.
“Sun god, huh? I’m the moon. Come back in the morning. It’s my turn now.”
Sam had the audacity to look flabbergasted.
“What? Are you going to complain to Reaper? Report back all my activities? Tell him I need to study! And vanish through the portal, with witnesses, while you’re at it. I need more points.”
The crow blinked, then pecked me with a sharp beak.
“Ow!”
I rubbed the peck as it cackled and flew away.
The next time, Sam was actually minding her business and sat above my usual seat. But I hated being stared at, or even monitored, while I worked until the late hours of the night. I directed my hand to the window. “Out.”
It squinted at the window, eyeballed me, then flipped a page of its book.
“Don’t make me feud with you. Is there no more valuable use of your time right now? Don’t you have any powers to wield?”
She straightened out, glowing faintly red-gold, as the temperature escalated several levels. Rays beamed from her like she was the rising sun.
“Good, you’re a heater. Begone now.”
Her wings snapped in with a crack. The heat abruptly vanished.
“Now you’ve done it,”Gaksi warned.“She’s vicious when she’s angry.”
“But not as vicious as me,” I retorted. I stood up on my tiptoes so I was level with the crow engrossed in a copy ofTwilight: Breaking Dawn. “I’m prettier than you,” I whispered.
“Caw?” She slammed the book closed with her wings. “That’s why Reaper sends you to stalk me and not the other way around.”
A deep chuckle sounded behind me, igniting my mood in the otherwise somber stacks. “Speak of the devil,” I muttered.
“Don’t bully my bird,” his raspy voice chided. “She once held a favorable opinion of you.”
“The girls are fighting!” Gaksi announced from the bookend. The crow knocked it off the table with the viciousness of a cat and a table salt on a countertop.
Reaper approached, and his face in the dark night was… absolutely flawless.
My heart thrummed. Every part of my body heated, warmed with the possibility of getting closer, flushed with anticipation of what we could do alone in the library…
His lips turned up, catching me daydreaming. Reaper’s long, thin hands flipped a blade between them, juggling it without effort.
“This is a strange place,” Reaper mused.
He was one to talk. “How so?”
“The way administrators here hoard magic and make children compete for it… is rather sadistic.”
Sadistic. That was exactly how I’d describe the clock tower to any other student, but I felt defensive right now, with my University under attack by an onlooker.
“It’s orderly. Everyone gets an equal chance to be whoever they want to be.”
Reaper’s voice was laced with condescension. “Do they? Or do they get forced into the same House their parents were in?”
Legacies were preferred in every House’s process, but that was beside the point.
“Being… gently pushed into something is a lot better than born something you never wanted to be. Than having rogue fairytale creatures and humans intermingling.”
