Page 185 of A University of Betrayal

Inside me, the first big stone had flown against the glass, striking me with a brutal blow in the pit of my stomach.

When everyone had left for lectures, I had stayed there and thrown up. Three times.

I hadn’t been able to stop, and the side effect was that I had clearly felt my emotions again.

This morning, I had emptied the last vial, with the devastating realization that I was at the mercy of the sheer range of my emotions. And as long as I didn’t possess an elemental stone to help me get a grip on my powers, that meant only one thing:I was a walking danger to everything and everyone around me.

Physically, I was alive. But something was dying inside me, very slowly.

And until that minute, I had suppressed the fact that something was growing there in that pile of shards. Something that was supposed to live. It was only a matter of time before it cut itself. Because of what I was, it could die. Maybe it was too weak, weaker than me. It wasn’t even pureblood like me, though I still couldn’t believe that I was the child of two Quatura, as fragile as I was.

Here, this place I lived in, had weakened me. Whatever it was that I would face if I kept this child, I wasn’t ready for it. I could feel how it would break me, without any doubt.

The last thing I wanted was to bring a child into this cruel world.

The feeling that, no matter what I did, I would end up doing something wrong, crawled painfully up my throat.

You would kill it anyway, I kept telling myself, stifling a sob that quietly fought its way out and echoed off the sand-colored walls of the hallway, as if even the building had realized there was no place for it in this world.

I listened to the sound until it faded away.

Then I was alone again.

With every step I took through the half-open colonnades, I felt the cold around me. There was no doubt that it emanated from me, because I didn’t feel it the way you did when you were standing in the middle of a snow-covered landscape, freezing.

The cold was a part of me, always had been. Only it had taken years for my body to let it out, and now it was threatening to destroy everything.

I walked on through the stone corridors, past one of the courtyards, where a flock of ravens landed at that very moment, as if they were following me, past all the ancient columns that were literally being devoured by ivy.

The university had been built long before our time. Everything about this place seemed like something out of a dark fairy tale, and the stories from the diary Bayla had found had made me curious. We weren’t the only ones… Alice had been here, maybe even right here, where I was walking.

I stopped.

My gaze slid over the stone walls to the ground. The cobblestones, wet from the rain, shimmered slightly, even though the sun was no longer shining because the sky had been completely closed for a few days.

Irritated by my trance-like state, I started moving again.

I wasn’t a bit shocked that I had an aunt I’d never heard of. She had been older than Margot but younger than Amara.

Amara seemed to have been a completely different person back then. Maybe she had just been young and insecure, like me. But no one could be as miserable asmeand become likeher.

And this Alice? She seemed to have disappeared, just likehim.This woman had known my father, my aunt, even Bayla’s mother and the director of Vanderwood, our English professor. It was more than strange that she – obviously a Quatura – had spent time with one ofthemwithout permission, with a Senseque. Alice had described the feeling:Forbidden.

I knew exactly what she meant. For a brief moment, it had felt like we had something in common. And I felt bad.

Why? Was I different from her? Was she even bad?

She had spent time with Alaister, more often, apparently. She and my supposed father had been friends. And they were both gone now.

The diary had awakened an irrepressible desire in me.

Who was this woman? What did she have to do with my father?

I deliberately hadn’t done any research on him to protect myself from disappointment. No one had talked about him, there were no pictures, nothing... As if he had never existed.

Alaister Westcode was like a shadow hanging over me now, as if he was haunting me. I had tried, again and again, to put the thought of a father out of my head.I didn’t want one.And above all,I didn’t need one. He hadn’t been there.

Whatever had existed between him and Margot... it hadn’t been strong enough to survive this town.