Page 6 of Spark of Sorcery

My gloves feel especially tight tonight, my skin itchy against the leather and damp with warm perspiration. I have the sudden urge to strip them right off my hands and live with the consequences. To let my shadows do their worst after all.

I have an urge to find her. To let my magic …

I close my eyes. A million voices shout and scream inside my skull and her bright green eyes burn back at me.

The sound of footsteps slapping on the wet cobblestones sucks me back into the present.

It’s her. Huddled in a pathetic winter coat, picking her way through the puddles.

What is she doing? Seeking out treatment? Coming to find us to be healed? Making her way to the clinic?

But she turns the wrong way, heads in the opposite direction.

I follow at a safe distance, hugging the darkness, watching as she pulls the coat more tightly around her tiny frame.

The thin leather of her boots does not protect her feet, instead they soak up the water, turning a dirty gray and damp marks the back of her coat.

She turns right, right again, left and then she’s at the tallest tower of the academy, the one reserved for teaching. Tonight its windows are dark, the classrooms empty, no one is learning today. Nonetheless, she pushes against the door with her shoulder, groaning as she does, and steps inside. What the hell is she doing?

I can’t follow after her. I’d have to get too close to her. She’d know I was there.

Instead, I remain out of sight, watching as the doorway swallows her inside.

And then I’m left standing and staring at the doorway as more rain cascades down on my head. Even to me, the walls and the door of this tower are impenetrable. I can’t hear what’s happening inside. I can’t see and I can’t feel either.

Instead, I’m left outside and alone as always, waiting, my bitter imagination my sole companion.

Chapter Three

Fox

I push uneaten steak around my plate, candle light flickering across the table and the hum of human voices loud in my ears, pressing against the inside of my skull.

I can’t tolerate all the inane chatter and excited conversation. Not when my mind is focused elsewhere. Not when I fear she’ll read exactly where it is focused.

I glance up from my plate and across the long table, meeting her steely gaze immediately. She glares at me and maybe if I had a heart, it would be leaping into my throat. Maybe I’d even be afraid. There’s a mania in her eyes tonight, even more wild and cruel than usual. She lost her hold on me long ago, but to think some other has it now, it would drive her to distraction. It would make her even more dangerous than she already is.

I push my chair away from the table, the legs scrapingalong the floor like fingernails down a black board. Nobody seems to notice but her. They are all tucking into their food, filling their bellies and knocking back the free-flowing wine.

She lowers her glass and watches me walk across the Great Hall, through the shadows and to the door. I know she is still watching me as I slip through the doorway.

The heavy clouds that have hung above the academy all day have finally split open and water pours from the sky, running down the towers and through the cobbled pathways. I pull the hood of my cloak over my head and stride through the rain, water splashing against my ankles and into my face, leaving the banquet behind me in the Great Hall.

Despite the cold and the wet, there are students out on the pathways, lounging in doorways, hanging from windows. They don’t see me and I pass through the shadows and down into the cellars, finding the sanctuary of my own room. Dark and cold. Empty and soulless. More like a prison cell than the room of a professor. But it suits me. I am cold and dark, empty and soulless, after all.

At least, I thought I was. The girl has stirred sensations inside me I thought were long dead. Like she’s knocked the smallest chink in the walls of this cell and the tiniest drop of light has slithered through.

I snap off my cloak, sling it across the back of a chair and sink low onto the single bed that occupies my room. I rest my hands on my head.

She’s safe. There were no casualties in today’s trials. I made sure of that. I took responsibility for hooking the kids that needed saving out of the maze myself, and she was not among them. Somehow that slip of a girl made it the full sixty minutes. The corner of my mouth tugs up into a smile. I jolt – it’s such an unusual sensation. I used to smile likethat – I used to smirk like an asshole – all the fucking time. Now those muscles feel tired and weak.

I toe off my boots and my socks, tug off the tie from around my neck and shrug off my shirt. Then I roll down onto the hard mattress and close my eyes. I won’t sleep – I never do – but I can think. I need to think. If Veronica knows, then Briony is not safe, and I need to find a way to protect her.

As if my very thoughts have dragged her to me, my peace is disturbed by the whisper of her scent in the air – so faint at first, I think I’m imagining it. But then there is the hammering of a fist on my door – insistent and urgent.

My eyelids flick open and I inhale, everything in my cold body tingling with life.

Her.