10

Star Theory is fast becoming my favourite class.

That isn’t reflected in my grades, of course. I do best in Conservation Theory, Mathematics, Geology and Geometry. But those classes don’t have Eric in black teacher robes.

He wears them as he always does.

Unfastened.

The buttons, the strings, they are all undone to reveal the starched white shirt beneath, the sleek black of his slacks, the golden gleam of his leather belt—all new, I decide. Not a frayed thread in sight.

But tonight, he doesn’t lead the lesson.

Master Milton has us directed to the chalkboard he scribbles incoherently on, and we copy down the notes.

My gaze finds itself dragging to Eric every so often.

Sat at the teacher’s desk, he works through a pile of assignments that he grades, and since it’s more often the red pen in his hand, I think he’s sort of merciless.

Maybe he’ll be nicer to me.

It’s not a silly, empty hope. I decide he might be more lenient with my assignment marking, since each time I look at him, he seems to feel my gaze on him, and his lifts to mine, or I find he’s looking at me already.

Always, there’s the ghost of a smile on his pretty mouth.

I look away, quick.

The rest of the lesson goes like that until we are dismissed. The rumble in my belly fights to take control of my fast-moving legs, to lead me into the mess hall. But my steps force me out of the academy, and into the mushy drizzle of the gardens out back of the West Quarter.

About half of the other seniors from Star Theory move with me, a wave of black and white uniforms, the ruffles of puffer jackets being pulled on, the annoyed “ fucksake ” that murmurs occasionally when fingers won’t cooperate and fit into the gloves that we wrestle on.

Brews and Theory has been relocated to the cauldron aisles in the gardens. Draught of the Undead was wrapped up last week. Thanks to Dray being my potion partner, I passed with top marks. I hate him but I’m not delusional, I know it was all him who scored our potion a perfect grade.

So maybe I’m only sort of moody that we are still partners for the next brew.

Serum of Forgetfulness.

Causes amnesia. Not full-scale amnesia, of course, but—with the right witch, powerful enough—this brew can be used to muddle one or two memories in a person’s mind without wiping the whole slate clean.

It’s a delicate enough concoction that without Dray, I wouldn’t pass. Not on my own. I would have better chances with Courtney, but Master Welham sticks to the theme of boy-girl for our senior year, because the brews need that.

Like tonight, the brew needs the hair of a woman and the hair of a man.

I tug mine out from the underside of my hairline, then place it on the dish of tools and newt hearts and pickled pixies.

Dray follows suit, taking one of his own hairs, then setting it down to be used when the time comes.

But he says nothing to me.

Dray has to pretend I am not here. Basically that I do not exist. The dare keeps him to that.

So I don’t expect any interaction this night.

I wander around the gardens, sticking close to our cauldron, in case I am needed, but he seems to take care of the work himself. Doesn’t trust that I won’t fuck it up somehow.

I wade through the gardens, the soil wet with icy sludge, the snow season approaching too fast. The plant pots are shielded by nets, but I peer through them to the peonies, the coral bells, the moonbeams.

I rush back to the cauldron as Master Welham approaches. He walks the line of potions brewing, pausing to inspect progress and make quiet notes on his clipboard.

I drop onto the hard wood stool with a grunt.

With his back to me, Dray drops in the two hair stands.

Doesn’t acknowledge me at all.

I hug my arms around myself and wait as Master Welham pauses at our cauldron. His gaze cuts over the green foamy surface that looks like snotty vomit, and after a beat, he gives an approving hum.

The scratch of his pen on the parchment clipboard tugs a small smile onto my mouth. An undeniable tick !

Another top grade coming my way, and all I had to do was pluck a hair from my head. If only all grades were that easy to score.

Maybe if Dray wasn’t such an evil fucker, and we were actually friends, I would stick to him in every class we shared.

I sit on the stool until midnight shudders through the gardens, a whisper that ripples the surface of the brews, and the plants murmur.

A violent shudder runs through me.

I always hated that. Midnight in the gardens.

Got most of my experience with that creepy whisper, the murmurs and the high-pitched whistle of the daffodils, in fifth year herbalism.

Nearly dropped the class, it freaked me out so much.

Now, it sets me on edge and grits my teeth, but it is something of a slight relief. Because now, the brew is in the moon’s hands, her glow, and we are done here.

Dray snatches his books from the other stool and, no look spared on me, heads out of the gardens in swift strikes.

He has kept true to his word, his promise to the dare.

Funny that, without his focus on me, the others seem to forget I exist as well. Landon barrels into me down the gardens as the stream of seniors try to be the first out of here, but he just shoots me a look, as though he means to apologise for running into me. But he says nothing before he turns his back on me, snatches Serena by the wrist, then pushes his way through the slow-moving line of seniors.

None of the Snakes spare me much attention at all, and that’s a good thing, undeniably.

Well, except Mildred, of course, but since she’s only poured cola over my head in the corridor, then tripped me over as I carried my tray through the mess hall, I count this past week as a solid win.

The mess hall doors are shut, firm, and locked for good measure. The grumble of annoyance ripples over the crowd spilling into the atrium.

Landon tries the handles, but the doors don’t budge, don’t even rattle in their frames. Then he punches his fist down on the wood with a curse—and that’s it.

No dinner for the late-night students.

Thankfully, I have a drawer filled with snacks.

Not dinner snacks, but crisps and chocolates and sweets. Won’t hit the spot, but it’ll have to do.

I make my way back to the dorm room in a hurry. It’s practiced in me, an instinct, to be quick back to my room. And even then, sometimes that is not quick enough.

Tonight, I make it in one piece.

Courtney isn’t far behind me.

I don’t need to look up at the door as she comes in.

I recognise that it’s her by the uneven weight in her steps, the thick clock of her cheap boots, and the paper rustle of her yellow marshmallow puffer jacket.

Crouched at the bottom drawer of my dresser, I rustle through plastic and paper wrappings. “I’ve got a croissant,” I start, but there is doubt in my tone because this croissant has been flattened sometime in the one and a half months since senior year began, “a plait au chocolat,” I add, then riffle through the packaging at the back of the drawer, “and these tins of quinoa and tuna.”

“Salt and vinegar crisps,” she sighs with a frosty breath.

I look over my shoulder as she tugs off her gloves, those ghastly things with the smiley faces. “You don’t want something more filling than that?”

She shakes her head, mousy strands falling into her pinkish face. Whatever bothers her tonight, she won’t speak about it. She never does.

I toss a packet and it lands on the foot of her bed.

I pick out a different dinner for myself. A can of quinoa and rice, sugared almonds, handful of pistachios, and a bag of popcorn.

Before I can even lay out my haul on the comforter draped over my bed, Courtney has disappeared into hers and closed the curtains.

My mouth puckers as I eye up the pulled-over drapes.

It might be midnight, but it’s also Friday night, and it’s the moments like these I miss having friends. True friends. The ones who laugh and play and gossip and—

I rub the ache that blooms in my chest.

With a sigh, I start on my makeshift dinner.

Doesn’t hit the spot, but I didn’t expect it to.

And when I’ve worked my way through the rice and the nuts, I pick at the popcorn, the bag rustling with the occasional invasion of my hand, and I read through the latest edition of Italian Vogue that Mother mailed to me.

Sleep isn’t ready for me yet.

So the red sting of my eyes isn’t fatigue.

I rub the balls of my palms against my eyes and swallow down the thickness of my throat. Sometimes, as much as I loathe it, I do allow myself to indulge—and feel a bit sorry for myself.

Falling back on the pillows, I cross my arms over my face and let my lashes shut on dampness.

I ache for them.

The way it once was.

The pain of that first day they turned on me, it carries with me, it sticks to the inside of my gut like hot toffee, it’s a thick honey slicking down my twisting heart.

I don’t let myself dwell on it often. It only upsets me. But this year already, it’s been forcing its way into my mind more and more.

But nights like these, the memory crawls back into my mind. It snares around my brain like foreign fingers and talons scraping over me.

I hate my fucking life.

I hate it so much, because it would have been perfect if my magic hadn’t failed me. And I never saw it coming.

I should have.

Even as a child, the clues were there. Not only that I was a deadblood, but that the others would turn on me once it was confirmed.

It was confirmed on my birthday.

Shared with Oliver, our party was held in the gardens of Elcott Abbey.

I received gifts, like normal. Gifts from the Sinclairs. But on the thirteenth birthday, I received gifts specifically from my friends. Moving into our elevated traditions. The fostering of alliances and what friendships matter.

Serena gave me a flimsy silver bracelet. Slight and underwhelming in hindsight.

Dray’s present was a black cockatoo. Extravagant.

But he didn’t approach me.

Not once during that whole party did he come to me. That was a change, since if I wasn’t glued to Serena, then I was with him.

So I went to him.

I found Dray by the aviary. Before he walked off, like I mattered little more than a servant, he spared me a dark look, and it rings in my mind with too sharp edges, like it’s real, happening now, and it sets my teeth on edge.

It’s a look that I had seen a handful of times before, on the times I hurt his feelings or did something he thought wrong, like the time that Landon and I kissed in spin the bottle, or when I took Oliver’s hand instead of Dray’s offered one, or when Serena and I blocked him from coming into the den we built from blankets and pillows because we wanted ‘girl time’ and there were ‘no boys allowed’ in the fort.

He always hated things like that. Exclusion . That cut him deepest of all. He also didn’t fuck with other people touching what he understood as his. And I was his. His intended. So sharing that kiss with Landon in a silly game, just two months after Dray kissed me in the gardens, well that fast spiralled into a fist fight between the two.

But the first time Dray had ever hurt me was the day we first ever came to Bluestone.

I followed Oliver up the path that runs alongside the village. We made to join the queue, to find the others further up, cut in line, and join our friends.

I only just reached them when Dray turned to me—and told me exactly where to go. He shoved me, hard enough that I fell onto the ground with a shooting pain up my spine.

I didn’t cry out.

I just looked up at him.

I don’t know what froze me. The shock of it, or the confusion . The heartache came moments later, when I dusted myself off and stood up, and it all seemed to sink in.

Still, I waited for the moment Dray laughed and declared it all a joke. He didn’t. No one did. They looked at me—then turned their backs on me.

Oliver, too.

That was the day I was first shunned by the Snakes.

That was the moment that changed my life.

A day at Bluestone was filled by many things, and not much changed over the years I’d been attending.

I went to class—those of the lessons I could take without magic to back me up, like Brews and Theory, Herbalism, Astrology, Society History, World History, Mathematics, and then of course the Basic Sciences and Star Theory. Between lessons, someone would corner me, push me over, put newts in my hair, tie my shoelaces, dunk green-staining brews over me. None of those petty attacks bothered me much, not when they paled in comparison to what Dray would do.

In Brews and Theory, he knocked over a phial of warts that clung to my leg. It took three days for the warts to come off, and they left tiny nick scars in their wake. Years of balms finally removed the traces. But Dray’s torment was relentless.

In the corridor, between P.E. and Astrology, he called me a ‘waif’ and shoved me into the wall. Mostly, he just snarled barbed insults my way, sometimes poured honey in my bag, cut off a chunk of my hair in class, tripped me over in the mess hall so my breakfast would slop all over me, and on and on and on it went.

After all those years, I should have gotten used it. Still, every time I saw that gleam of hatred and disgust in his eyes, my heart ached because of what we once were.

What I once was to all of them.

I don’t even have my brother anymore.

The sniffle that shudders through me is wet. My mouth wobbles into a twist and, arms still folded over my wet face, I bite down on the trembling cries—

The thud of the door jerks me.

With a sharp breath, I drop my arms to my sides and jolt upright.

Serena stalks across the dorm room, her gaze sliding to me—and her brow arches.

I must look like the truth—that I have been caught crying.

Busted.

I swallow down, thick, then run the sleeve of my cardigan over my face. Whether it wipes away tears or snot, I don’t know. I just know that this cardigan must be burned in the fireplace.

Serena turns around the side of her bed, her lashes lowered over the gaze she aims right at me. “What has he done now?”

I peel off the cardigan, then let it slap to the floor. “What?”

“Dray.” She drops onto the edge of the bed and starts undressing from her uniform. “Why else are you crying yourself to sleep?”

“I’m not.” My face crumples. “He can’t.”

She drops her shoes to the floor. They land with a thud, then a clatter. Without looking over her shoulder at me, she just says, “Oh?”

I pick at the bundled thread on the blanket. Pilled already and I’m not even halfway through the year. I’ve got to stop rolling around this bed in my jeans and sweaters. It’s rubbing the fabric of the comforter all wrong.

Serena steps into a pair of black breeches, fitted tight. “He’s done nothing at all to you?”

I use a tissue to wipe my face clean, then blow my nose. “You know he hasn’t. Two weeks, that was the dare. It’s been one.”

Her smile is tight over her slender shoulder. “I supposed he was sicking up tar for hours the other day because he went back on the dare.”

My lips part slightly.

Then a frown furrows my brows.

“That is what Landon told me, at least.” A one-shouldered shrug on Serena is a movement of tigers in silk. “ Hours ,” she echoes, a dark knowing look aimed my way. “In the boys’ bathroom. Landon tried to take him to the infirmary, but you know Dray—pride and all that nonsense. It runs too deep in him.”

Still, silence keeps me.

I watch her fussy with the pearl buttons of her silk blouse, a sort of style that’s oversized but cuts off around the mid-drift.

“To pretend you aren’t here ,” she says with a sly smile, then fastens the clasp of her belt. The breeches cut off below her bellybutton, the tan of her latest tropical trip still deeply hued in her complexion. “To break that dare, he must have done something, right? Interacted with you in some way,” she adds, then flicks her hair over her shoulder. It whips down her back.

“He didn’t do anything.”

For the first time in ten years, those words about Dray are true. He’s always done something.

But this past week, not even a glance.

The boots she slips her feet into are black snake leather, and I think it a little ironic. She folds over herself to tug up the zips.

“To break the dare, and make himself sick for hours? He must have stopped pretending you’re not here,” she says, as though she thinks aloud, but the blasé look she gives me has my suspicions prickled, that she’s already given it thought and reached her conclusion, long before this chat of ours.

“But if he didn’t do anything…” With a wink, she starts across the dorm room, “…then he must have just forgotten to pretend. Maybe staring at your ass a little too long in class?”

She slips through the door, and it slams shut behind her.

I frown a while at the door.

Serena barely speaks to me at all. Not at the aristos events, the balls, the shared holidays, not in the corridors or classes or even in the dorm, unless she’s asking to borrow a pencil or to snap at me for all the clothes I kick off the bed instead of putting them away.

Now she’s chatting to me about Dray throwing up in the boys’ bathroom? Asking about the torment she turns a blind eye to? Suggesting that he’s checking me out on the regular?

I scoff, and it jolts my shoulders.

Serena is a black viper.

I trust her as far as I could throw her. And since she can kick some ass, I don’t estimate I could throw her very far at all.

But she’s not wholly malicious.

Serena is an opportunist. Where the current goes, she floats along.

She’s not a wave ahead of me, she’s an entire ocean ahead of me. So whatever she’s actually getting at, I don’t know.

But it’s something.

I run the tip of my tongue over my bottom lip before I finally tug my stare from the door. I roll onto my side and, leaving the curtains open, kick off the empty bag of popcorn. It rustles to the floor.

And I let sleep come.