AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I think Anya put something in her food,” Esmae says in a low voice. “I’m going to bring her back to her room.”
“Aww, and deprive us of the possible entertainment?” Benedikt teases, but his tone goes just slightly serious when he adds, “I’ve heard she’s staying in Stavros’s quarters.”
The bastard’s bastard is playing the same joker as always but conveying the important information at the same time. Julita picked pretty well with him too.
I try to say so, but all I manage to do is giggle uncontrollably. I wobble along with Esmae out into the hall and over to the stairwell.
“Never had food that fancy,” I remark, and burst into more laughter.
Esmae shakes her head. “You’ll have to be careful. Who knows what she’ll try next time.”
She pauses, gripping my elbow as I maneuver my unsteady feet up the stairs. “Julita’s been gone an awfully long time now. Anya obviously had it in for her too. You haven’t heard from her at all?”
Does she think Anya offed her? For some reason, that idea makes me laugh too.
Anya in a dirty Slaughterwell alley knifing someone. I could more easily picture her flying to the moon.
“Don’t know,” I mumble. “She’s been quiet.”
She’s being very quiet right now. Maybe she can’t speak through the haze in my head?
“I hope no one here hurt her. Even a drug like this at the wrong time… Did she say anything at all about what trouble she might have gotten into or what she was up to?”
I’m not supposed to talk about that, but it’s hard to remember what’s true and what’s acceptable conversation. I stick to simplicity. “No. No. No idea.”
Esmae drags in a breath and helps me around the landing. The railing feels slick under my sweating palm, but I think my balance is getting a little better?
It’s a good thing I was talking to my friend here while I was eating, or I’d have ingested even more of the drug before I realized something was wrong.
A giddy smile curves my lips. I’m about to tell Esmae how wonderful she is when a shriek rings out from above us.
Esmae’s eyes widen. She freezes, looking torn between fleeing and seeing what’s going on, so I make the decision for her.
If there’s trouble here at the college, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
I propel myself forward, clambering with an occasional hand braced against the steps up to the next floor. Esmae catches up with me just as I shove into the hallway.
I stop in my tracks, shocked into something close to sobriety.
Several students are flattened against the walls or their doors, staring at the wreckage on the floor. And it is a wreckage—several marble busts of prominent former professors that were set on display pillars along the hall have been hurled to the floor and smashed to smithereens.
A couple of the students are bleeding, one guy clutching a scratch on his cheek and another a cut on his forearm.
“Gods above,” Esmae says. “What happened?”
“It must have been a daimon,” the guy gripping his arm says. “Something just blasted down the hall, flinging the statues around.”
A woman swings her head, peering through the hall. “Is it gone? Is it finished?”
Another student shudders where she’s crouched by her door. “They just keep getting worse. Why aren’t the staff doing something to stop them?”
Because they don’t know why it’s happening. Because there’s terrible magic.
Some of it’s in me.
If the gods do look down, if the gods see—
We have to fix this.
