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Chapter Twenty-Eight

B riony

“I need to head back to my room for a bit before I grab some lunch,” I tell Fly as we walk away from Madame Bardin’s classroom.

“I’ll come with you. I need to fetch something from my room too,” Fly says.

“You don’t have to,” I say, probably a little too quickly, because he eyes me with suspicion.

“You’re acting really weirdly today,” he says, “well, you’re always weird, you’re just being even more weird.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“It’s a compliment, Cupcake.” He shrugs. “I like weird. It makes things more interesting. I was just making an observation and pondering what could have caused this additional weirdness. ”

“Probably just tiredness,” I half lie. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

When we reach the top of our tower, we find Thorne waiting outside my room.

“Didn’t sleep well, huh?” Fly mutters with a raised eyebrow.

I wait for him to disappear inside his room, muttering something about enjoying our lunch break. Then I turn to Thorne.

“I came to see how the little one is doing,” he says.

I press my finger urgently to my lips and peer towards Fly’s door. The outer walls in this tower may be formed from thick stone, but the inner ones are paper thin.

I signal to him to move to one side and open my door. As soon as I do something comes streaking towards me. I shriek and duck as it skims over my head, and soars up towards the ceiling.

“What the hell was that?” I mutter, peering up towards the rafters and the thatched roof.

“Shit,” Thorne says behind me as the door clicks shut.

“What?” I say, dragging my gaze from the shape up above and down to my room. “Oh!”

My room is once again trashed. The cage Thorne created is smashed. My bedding is all messed up. And most disturbing, the entrails of something that was once alive are strewn across the floor.

“Blaze!” I cry, rushing forward.

Did someone find out about him? Did someone–

“Briony!” Thorne barks, pointing upwards.

I lift my gaze to find something hurtling towards me from above. I screech again, lifting my hands to cover my head.

“Briony!” Thorne repeats. “It’s the dragon! ”

I peek through my fingers to find Blaze hovering in the air in front of me, his little baby wings flapping like crazy. He gives me a toothless grin and zooms straight into my chest.

“ Oofff ,” I grunt, catching him in my arms. He snuggles up against me and licks at my neck. I stare up at Thorne in disbelief. “He could barely crawl first thing this morning,” I point out.

“Dragons must develop quickly.” He goes to inspect the damage to the cage. “It looks like he burned right through the wooden bars.” He turns to look at the dead thing on the floor, nudging it with the toe of his boot. “Rat.”

“Did you catch a rat, Blaze?” I ask the little dragon, who growls when he sees Thorne inspecting his kill and flutters that way, grabbing a piece of intestine with his mouth and shaking it about.

Something I did not need to see right before my lunch.

“Blaze?” Thorne asks.

“Yes, I named him.”

“But where did he catch a rat from?” Thorne asks.

“The roof’s infested with them,” I say, which makes Thorne frown. “But at least, I won’t have to worry about what to feed him.”

Thorne doesn’t smile at my joke, instead he twitches his fingers and his shadow magic rushes around the room, tidying up and repairing the damage.

Blaze growls at the shadows too and spurts a tiny flame at one that rushes close by.

The flames merrily flicker through the shadows, doing nothing to stop them.

They are mesmerizing to watch, shimmering as they swirl and swim and slide in front of me.

I’m so tempted to reach out and touch them, even if Thorne says they are dangerous.

But I don’t have permission and I can’t help thinking it would be a violation.

Just like with Thorne himself, I’ll have to be resigned to looking and not touching.

“Thank you,” I say, when the room is back to normal and his shadows are retreating. He nods. “I’d better hurry to the canteen before all the good food goes.”

“You could …” He looks at a point over my right shoulder, not meeting my gaze. “Come to the Shadow Weaver Dining Hall. Thralls are welcome.”

“Other thralls, probably not me,” I point out.

“What does that mean?” he asks, his dark eyes now flicking to mine.

“Oh, nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” he says, as Blaze somersaults in circles above our heads.

“Be careful,” I warn the dragon. Then sigh, and address Thorne again. “I think you three, and possibly my friends, are the only people in the academy who believe I should be your thrall.”

“That’s not true.”

“Erm, it is.”

“Does it matter?”

“No, but I’d rather have lunch with my friends than a roomful of people who resent and hate me.”

“They don’t know you.”

“You don’t know me,” I tell him, smiling. “We barely know each other.”

“I know you, Briony Storm,” he says.

“So Thorne Cadieux too, huh?” Fly says with a big grin, when I join him and Clare at the lunch table later.

“It’s not like that,” I say .

“He still doesn’t like you?” Clare asks sympathetically.

“Oh he likes her,” Fly says, “you should have seen the way he was looking at her out there on the landing. I bet her clothes were off within a microsecond of the bedroom door closing.”

“Well, you suppose wrong,” I snap, slicing a potato in two so aggressively one half skids across the table.

“Woah, okay,” Fly says, raising his hands in surrender. “Why so touchy about it?”

“I’m not touchy,” I say, chomping down hard on the same potato.

“Is it because you want to sleep with him but he doesn’t want to sleep with you?” Clare says frankly, adjusting her glass.

“I don’t want to …” I begin, then trail off because who am I kidding?

I do want to. Fly is right, the way that man looks at me is like fire.

All this time I’ve been mistaking it for hatred.

Now I see it for what it is – want, an unfulfilled want, a want he thinks can never be fulfilled.

No wonder he’s so freaking angry about it.

I feel pretty angry about it myself. “It’s complicated. ”

I poke at the remainder of my potato with a lot less force.

“It’s always complicated with you and those Princes,” Fly says. “If you ever turn around and tell me it’s easy and simple, I’ll drop dead of shock.”

“Some of it is easy and simple,” I muse. Fly snorts. “It is!” I insist. “I don’t know, I’ve spent time with Thorne now and I kind of like him.”

“But he doesn’t feel the same,” Clare says, nodding her head as if she’s worked out a tricky puzzle.

“Erm, actually no.” I drop my fork and slump back in my chair, twisting a loose piece of hair back into my usual bun. “I think he does like me.”

“So what’s the problem, Cupcake?” Fly says. “You haven’t exactly proved shy when it comes to these men so far.” He leans in close. “You know there are rumors swirling about you and Dray at the ball.”

“Tsk,” Clare dismisses, “there are rumors swirling about everyone. Including you Fly.”

Our usually overly confident friend shuts his mouth and peers around the canteen as if to check whether people are talking about him right now.

“Like I said,” I sigh, staring down at my unfinished lunch, “it’s complicated.”

Clare removes her glasses and wipes the lenses with her sleeve. “A problem shared, is a problem halved.”

I chew on my cheek. “He can’t touch me,” I whisper quietly. They both lean in closer.

“Does he have OCD?” Clare asks. “Or an aversion to sex or something?”

“It’s his powers. He says if he touched me, he’d hurt me.” I shake my head in frustration. “I don’t really understand it.”

“Ahhh,” Fly says, “that explains the gloves. I thought that was a strange fashion choice.”

“But he controls his powers. I don’t see why it would be a problem,” Clare muses.

“According to him it is.”

“There must be more to it,” Clare says.

“If there were, though,” Fly says, “wouldn’t he have told you?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Thorne Cadieux isn’t exactly the talkative type.