Page 16 of Keeper of Death (Ouroboros Academy #1)
W ell, Sage knew my name now and knew I’d avenge her if someone wronged her. I wasn’t going to tell her about the dick in front of the healer because I didn’t know if she was a narc who didn’t care why I cut a dick off and got rid of a body. Context was important.
Maya warned me, but I wasn’t the kind of psychopath who would hurt her for doing her job. I didn’t even hurt people because they got my coffee order wrong and me and whole milk didn’t get along at all. I knew Maya’s job involved sometimes hurting people to make them better. Some of the arseholes in my family liked hurting people for no reason and that was one of the reasons I didn’t want anything to do with them. Sage didn’t even flinch when Maya set up the insulin pump.
Seems I wasn’t the only one who wanted to team up with Sage. The others came over to introduce themselves after she got the insulin pump put in. The Egyptian fellow who was supposed to be at Oxford would probably be an asset. He was a big lad for a scholar and his hands looked like he knew hard work.
The posh bloke was probably completely useless. He looked like he hated me, too, and I was fine with that. I didn’t need him to like me. If he wanted on the team, he’d better pull his weight and right now, I was getting vibes he was the kind of gobshite who thought he was allergic to work.
It looked like we weren’t the only people who requested to be on a team with someone because the cliques were already forming. Gross. That was my least favorite part of secondary school and if I couldn’t even bake edibles here, they’d probably frown on stabbing bullies.
I’d give it to Headmaster Mykene. She had this post kidnapping thing down pretty efficiently. Must be that wisdom god thing. By the time we’d eaten all this delicious food, she’d met with everyone and determined who would be paired.
She seemed to trust our gut. Like, I wanted to be paired with Sage because I could feel this pull to her and she seemed to think that was a clue. Hey, maybe I could use my gut as an excuse if I gutted the big braggart off to my left who didn’t even know which god he was yet, but already assumed he was the most important person at the school.
“So, we’ll be moving on to the ritual and then you’ll be stepping through the portal into different quadrants of the trial. You’ll be given rations as the trials typically take a week to do all four quadrants. We’ll also be giving you gear if you’re skilled enough to eat off the land. You’ll be getting your magic in tiny increments, but you won’t get all of it until you know who you are.
“Some of you might be able to figure out how to eat with magic. Some people blow through their rations, can’t figure out either, and their stomachs get the best of them. They drop out of the trials and lose their place at school. If the danger you’re in without your full power and training isn’t an incentive, each of you has a trust waiting with the combined wealth of all your reincarnations. It’s more than any of you could spend in your lifetime, even if you set out to be really irresponsible and blow it all.”
That was pretty grand. I stole more money than I could ever spend. I mostly just wanted to be bulletproof and shoot lasers out my eyes when the Irish mafia eventually caught up with me. I was pretty motivated. Sage wanted this, and I’d make it happen for her, too.
Khalid seemed interested in the entire thing from a historical perspective and Lucian looked like he might have had his entire world rocked, but was covering it up with some kind of pretentious rich person thing that he thought made him look cool, but everyone knew he was a plonker.
We had our teams, and I was guessing we went through a portal to get here when they drugged us, but I had a million questions about what kind of ritual they were doing to unlock our magic.
If it was one of those child-sacrifice things…I killed people for hurting kids.