Page 6 of Bonds of Magic (Vesperwood Academy: Incubus #3)

I hadn’t keeled over from exhaustion yet, but Dean Mansur’s warning from my first night at Vesperwood hung heavy in my mind as we made our way to the refectory. I hoped I could make it through the day. That tug would be clawing at my vertebrae by this evening.

Everyone at the lunch table was somber. Keelan’s easy-going manner was subdued. Min spent more time stabbing at her food than eating it. And Felix was always quiet, but his silence today was weighted with sadness.

Out of nowhere, Ash exclaimed, “I just don’t see why they’re turning it into this big secret.”

“What?” Keelan looked up as though surfacing from a dream.

“What happened to Erika,” Ash continued. My stomach tightened. He wasn’t looking at me, but that didn’t mean I felt any better about the return of this topic. “We all know something bad happened out there. Saying it was an accident, keeping it a secret, makes people more curious, not less.”

“Ash,” Felix said, his tone a warning, but Ash plowed on.

“I mean, we saw Adenike and Meredith. Right there at the edge of the woods. They said Noah looked ready to murder someone when they ran into him, that he’d told them to find a professor no matter what.

But they didn’t mention seeing Erika. So how could Noah know something was wrong if he hadn’t even found her yet? ”

“Ash,” Felix tried again, but Ash had the bit between his teeth now.

“It’s so like them,” he complained. “Everything’s fine, nothing to see here. I’m sure the dean will come up with more restrictions for us now, but will he actually tell us anything useful? No, he’ll lie to us over and over until—”

“Ash!” Felix snapped. It’s the angriest I’d ever heard him. We all turned to look. “How. Is. This. Helping?”

Felix bit the words out, giving Ash a restrained but baleful look. Ash glared back at him for a moment, but wilted quickly under Felix’s gaze. Eventually, he looked down at his plate and pierced a macaroni noodle with his knife.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

It was the first time I’d heard him apologize to someone in earnest.

“I miss her,” Min said, throwing her fork down suddenly. “Our room feels so empty now. I couldn’t sleep at all last night, even before we found out. I knew something was wrong.”

As she spoke, I noticed she had dark circles under her eyes. I’d been so focused on my own pain, I hadn’t paid attention to anyone else’s.

“It’s going to be weird without her in class,” Keelan said. “Always raising her hand with the answer.”

“Yeah,” Min said bitterly. “Now we’ll just have Rekha doing it all the time.” She looked across the table at Felix. “Well, you always know the answer too. But you usually keep it to yourself.”

Felix sighed. “I’ll miss studying with her. She was a good library buddy.”

“Yeah,” Ash said sadly. “She was a good friend.”

“Is everyone staying?” Keelan asked after another long period of quiet.

“With the dean’s announcement and all? My mom’s going to want me to come home, once the news gets out.

But I don’t want to leave. I’m pretty sure it was an accident,” he said with a hard look at Ash.

“But even if it wasn’t, I still don’t want to go. ”

“My parents know better than to try to pull me home,” Min said.

“I chose to be here,” Felix said. “That hasn’t changed.”

Ash shrugged. “Where else would I go?”

I gave him a quizzical look. “But you’re always complaining about it here.”

“Well, yeah. But half of that is because I like complaining. And the other half…”

He trailed off, and we lapsed into silence again.

After a moment, Min said, “What about you, Cory?”

My stomach twisted some more. I’d been thinking about it all day, and I’d become more and more convinced that the right thing to do was for me to leave. But I couldn’t say that out loud, or Ash would turn it into a big argument.

“I don’t have much to go back to,” I said instead. That was true, regardless of what I ended up doing.

“Oh, shit,” Min said.

I followed her gaze across the room. A tall, muscular girl with curly brown hair had appeared with a tray of food, flanked by an even taller guy with blond hair and a shorter girl with straight black hair. A hush fell over the entire refectory as the threesome crossed the room.

“Who’s that?” I asked Ash quietly.

“Valeria Martinez,” Ash said. “Erika’s sister. A Hunter. The other two are Talmadge Hastings and Evelyn Lee. Both of them are in Hex.”

He said their names like he was afraid to draw their attention. That was unlike him.

Conversation didn’t start up again until the three students sat at an empty table in the far corner of the room. They weren’t huddled, exactly, but something about the way they sat made it clear no one else was welcome.

Valeria’s eyes were red. I’d seen it when she passed by. From crying, probably. But there was a fire inside them, too.

“Must be awful,” Keelan said. “Having everyone staring at you, wondering how you’re doing.”

“Plus, you know, losing a sister,” Felix put in. Keelan nodded absently.

“I’m surprised she’s even here,” Ash said.

“You don’t think she’d leave, do you?” Keelan asked. “After this?”

“No, but you saw her. She looks like she wants to tear someone in half with her bare hands.”

Min shook her head. “Val’s smart. She’s a Hunter, but she knows better than to go off half-cocked. She’ll be planning, though. Gathering information. And when she has enough, she’ll be out for blood.”

I swallowed, thinking about Valeria’s pain. One more thing that was my fault.

I was in no shape to participate in combat that afternoon, especially not as Cinda’s potion was wearing off.

Noah barked my name at the beginning of class and told me to make myself useful cleaning a bunch of mats in the corner.

He barely looked at me as he said it. No acknowledgement at all of what had happened last night.

Not that I really wanted that. But Noah always found a way to cut me to the bone, no matter what he did. It was uncanny, really.

Towards the end of class, he walked over to my corner to dump another mat on the pile I’d finished wiping down.

“I’ll meet you at your room tonight at 7:45.”

I blinked. “What? Why?”

He looked at me like I was dumber than he thought, which was saying something.

“Your lesson ,” he said, in a voice that dripped disdain.

“No, I know that,” I said, shaking my head. “I just—why my room? With Professor Romero, we used his.”

“And we’ll use mine too. But I don’t live in the manor, and you can’t be walking around the woods alone.”

He lets the sentence hang there, freighted with guilt and disgust.

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Of course.”

He gave me a withering look. “Just finish cleaning the mats, okay? And be ready.”

Be ready? For a lesson with him? Was such a thing even possible?

I sighed, my shoulders falling. It had been a long day—and it was far from over.