Page 7 of Spark of Sorcery

Definitely her.

I wait to see if she’ll leave, but the hammering becomes more urgent still, and I stride across my room, through my classroom and fling back the door.

She’s soaked through, her eyelashes stuck together in clumps, her wet hair plastered to her head. She’s shaking from the cold, her arms buried under her thin winter jacket. Cuts slice across her face and bruises mark her cheek, her brow, her chin.

She opens her mouth, takes a step forward, and then her eyes alight on my half-dressed state. She halts.

All that glorious blood rushes right the way up into her cheeks, making that bruise all the darker and she averts her eyes to my face.

“I need to talk to you,” she says, pushing her way inside the classroom.

“Miss Storm,” I say, keeping my fist coiled tight around the door handle, anchoring myself where I am, “I think wemay have misunderstood each other. While I insist you attend each and every one of my lessons and you attend them on time every time, I do not wish to see you outside of lessons.”

“I just told you,” she says, wiping the water away from her face with her sleeve, “I need to talk to you.”

“And this couldn’t wait until?—”

“No,” she says, her gaze flicking momentarily down to my chest before returning to my face. She swallows.

Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to send her away. The sensible and the safe thing. But my damn curiosity – or is it the way the damn girl looks, water sliding down her face, like a far more appetizing dish than the one served up in the Great Hall tonight – won’t let me.

I close the door carefully and walk past her into my room, and poke with my magic at the ancient fireplace, one that hasn’t seen a fire lick its hearth in years and years.

“Take your jacket off and go dry by the fire,” I tell her as I stride towards my wardrobe and pluck out a clean shirt. She hesitates by the entranceway to my room, then does as I say, and I watch as she turns her back to me and carefully removes her jacket, keeping it clutched to her stomach in front of her. Underneath, she’s still wearing the gray tracksuit uniform of the academy except it’s now shredded to pieces.

I frown.

“What happened?” I say, leaving my shirt hanging open across my chest and stepping back towards her.

“You said …” She pauses. The warmth from the fire lifts the water from her skin in visible puffs of air and the firelight plays across her flesh. “You said Madame Bardin couldn’t be trusted. That she was dangerous. Why did you say that?”

“Did something happen?” I ask her, thinking of the madame’s eyes across the Great Hall this evening. Full of malice.

“You know,” she says, peering into the flames and not at me, “you always answer every single one of my questions with one of your own.”

“Do I?”

She snorts and glances over her shoulder at me. The fire illuminates her face, bathing it in mellow light, catching in the strands of her hair and turning them into gold. She looks otherworldly. Her eyes are like emeralds in the darkness.

I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. About how I came to be here, why, what it all means. How I feel about her, how I’m losing my mind over her, how obsessive and out-of-control I’m falling.

But I can’t. I can’t let her see me for what I really am. She would despise me, fear me, loathe me. There would be no more moments like this – no matter how fleeting and desperate they are. Because I am that addicted. Unable to resist even the most meagre of encounters.

She reads the silence on my face.

“She attacked me. In the maze, she attacked me.”

I frown. “What?”

“Madame Bardin attacked me in the maze.”

“That isn’t possible,” I say.

I was watching, keeping my eye on all students straying close to danger, and hooking them out when that danger came too near. Briony never came close to being in danger. Not once.

And yet as I look at her, past the rain and the fire, and really look at her, I see I’m wrong. All those scrapes and bruises, all those injuries. They didn’t come from nothing. She must have been in danger.

Then why the hell did I not feel it?