Page 120 of Fractured Fates

“No, your ignorance is.”

She doesn’t like that answer. Probably because it hits the mark. We’re always going to know more than this weedy little girl. That’s what a proper education at prestigious schools with the best teachers in the land will give you.

Her mouth clamps shut but I can see in her eyes how desperate she is to know, to understand.

I’m prepared to leave her wallowing in her own pool of ignorance but Tristan has other ideas.

“Only deeply scarlet magic can do that to someone so much bigger than you.”

Her jaw twitches but she refuses to ask us the next questions clearly spinning in her mind: what’s scarlet magic?

“Look it up,” I snap before Tristan can indulge her again.

“Where did you learn that,” Tristan says, “because it’s not something they teach just anyone here at the academy?”

“Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, maybe they did teach me.”

“Like I said, you can’t even tie your own shoelaces, they’re not about to teach you highly complex and potentially lethal magic like this.”

She shrugs, although I can tell how interesting this information is to her.

“Who taught you it?” I growl in irritation.

“No one,” she says.

I stalk towards her. “You know what happens to you if I tell them what you did.”

“Yes,” she says. “I get expelled, another thing we went over already, Spencer.”

Tristan shakes his head. “If Spencer, here, shows them that bruise, Pig Girl, they’re going to do more than expel you.”

Her eyes travel over his face, then mine, determining whether we’re bluffing.

“So,” I say, towering above her, “if you don’t want me to go show Principal York, I suggest you start talking.”

“Who taught you that magic?” Tristan adds.

“I told you already, no one.”

“You think I’m messing about here, Pig Girl–”

“I just told you what you want to know. No one taught me anything. I … I didn’t know what I was doing … it wasn’t deliberate … it just …”

“It just what?” Tristan says, and the tone of his voice, eager, yet strained, excited, yet cautious, has the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.

“It just happened.”

* * *

“Do you buy it?”I ask Tristan as we walk along the darkened pathway on our way back to our rooms.

“No,” he says, “no, I don’t. You don’t just conjure magic like that from thin air. You don’t just ‘feel’ it. It’s bullshit. She’s hiding something.”

I chew on that for a moment, adjusting the gym bag on my shoulder. “I don’t know, man. I think she was telling the truth.”

“Spencer, it isn’t possible.”

“What do you know about her?”