Page 23 of Venomous Lies (Greywood Conservatory for the Arcane #2)

Bricriu

MONDAY

C eremonial Magick was going to be the death of me. Attempting to read these rituals, written out in sprawling script, was giving me a fucking headache.

Hell, at this point, it felt like my eyes were throbbing. I sat in my home, trying to reset in the peace and quiet of my own space.

Being in the woods reminded me of Isla.

The smell of damp earth, dirt, and the plants themselves—it was her.

After the incident in the dining hall, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The rush of power that I’d felt when she lost control and the tugging feeling in the pit of my stomach as she used my magick to strike the other witch.

Someone having access to my powers should make me feel violated, but with Isla, it just felt… odd. How she drew it to her and used it was so different from how I controlled it.

Fae are taught that illusion magick is a subtle art, so each stroke of the imagination should be slow and methodical. Your imagination and control were what made the illusion magick into something great.

But subtlety wasn’t something Isla cared about.

It felt as if she had dipped her hand into the well then hurled it at Allison. She didn’t care about finesse; she used rage as her conduit for the magick, and it showed.

Allison’s mouth was gone.

And despite my conversation with her and Wells, it was my opinion that there was no way Allison would be able to magickally recover from it.

Could she survive with the help of human advances? Yes.

But witches were often odd when it came to things like that.

“Bricriu, you’re being lax with your awareness today,” a familiar voice crooned. The hint of sweet smokiness heralded Ambrose’s presence. “How reckless of you.”

I opened my eyes, and my smartass retort died on my tongue once I realized how close the fae was.

Ambrose’s coat brushed my fingers as he knelt in front of me, leaning closer so I could see his face, something he had never bothered doing before.

“What are you—?” I started to ask as I leaned back.

“Can you sense Isla, Bricriu?”

The question was so unexpected I just blinked at him in shock before his question fully hit me.

“Why—?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Yes,” I replied slowly, thinking about it. He just stared at me with a predator’s glint in his gaze. “I can sense the presence of her magick all the time, but particularly when her magick or emotions spike. Why are you asking me this? ”

“Isla was attacked today in her dorm room,” he replied evenly, orange and red fiery eyes watching my every move. “I found her stumbling out of the dorm building covered in bruises and blood. Did you not feel it?”

Cold detachment poured through my veins as I pushed myself to standing. My senses were on high alert, and even the wildlife around us slowly fell silent.

“Who did it?”

“Did you sense it?” Ambrose repeated his question.

“No,” I growled, offended and angry he would even ask that. “If I had, I would have gone to her.”

“Can you feel her now?” he pushed, refusing to drop the subject. I swallowed hard, knowing that even though every part of me wanted to go to Isla, his questions were important.

I searched within me, looking for the bond that had been established between the witch and I, but found nothing but a dull ache. It was there, but faded somehow.

“I can feel it, but it’s… Something is wrong,” I rasped, my voice rough with pain and confusion. “Why can’t I?—?”

“We will have to ask the others,” Ambrose commented after a moment of tense silence. “A troubling development indeed.”

Forcing myself to focus on what I could control, I looked at the fae beside me and studied his red-orange eyes. “You didn’t say who attacked her.”

“We don’t know. I got her to Julian and a healer then came to get you. She’s getting the help she needs,” Ambrose explained as he stood up. He lit a cigarette, maintaining a calm stare. “We need answers.”

“What about her friends?”

“They weren’t there,” he answered after a long drag. “ But then again, there seems to be more going on than it appears since no one else in the dorm said anything.”

Every instinct I had urged me to hunt down her attacker. I would rip them apart at every joint until I fashioned Isla her own personal marionette. She would be the type of person to savor each scream whenever she played with it.

But then I recalled her friends being cautiously nice.

Wells had easily talked with me, letting off no stench of fear as we worked together in the greenhouse.

Taking every ounce of self-control, I inhaled deeply and rolled my neck, cracking it in multiple places.

“We’ll find our answers. The people we need to start with are her friends. Then we go hunting.”

ECHO

“Z, can we just talk about this?” Aizel asked Zhara. Wells and I shared an uncertain look, the two of us choosing to stay back once they started having it out. The four of us were heading out of the dining hall.

I had tried to talk to my brother earlier today but to no avail. He didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say, and I couldn’t blame him. The irony of me trying to calm him down was just too much for both of us.

“Talk about what?” Z shot him a dirty look. “The fact that you went off to fuck a bunch of people with your brother, multiple times, might I add? How about the fact that you lied about it on top of everything?”

“I’m an incubus?—”

“Tell me, did you fuck me after you fucked one of those bitches?” With a growl, Zhara stopped and spun around to face my brother. “Did you touch me while covered in the scent of them?”

“No,” Aizel replied, shaking his head. “I would never do that. I was just feeding, Zhara!”

“You couldn’t feed off of me?” she argued.

“I didn’t think?—”

“No, you didn’t.” She growled again as her blue eyes began to glow. “You didn’t think because you didn’t even fucking ask me! Good enough to randomly fuck but not actually do anything else with.”

“It’s not like that?—”

“Then what could it possibly be like?!” Zhara yelled loudly enough to draw the attention of everyone around us.

“Zhara…” Wells stepped up, his hands held out in a calming gesture. “What if we moved this to the dorm?”

Ever the peacemaker, that witch.

“Why?” She rounded on him, her teeth lengthening as her wolf started to climb to the surface.

Aizel paled, but Wells remained calm and steady in the face of her rage.

“Less witnesses for one thing,” Wells told her. “Plenty of things to throw in his direction, including his own things.”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Aizel began to protest, but Zhara started to calm down.

Wells stood there, calm in the face of her predatory stillness as she considered the witch’s idea.

“You have sisters.”

Wells nodded. “Quite a few siblings.”

“Fine,” Zhara huffed after staring the other man down for a few minutes. “I’m starting in his room, and whatever you do, Aizel, don’t you dare touch me. ”

She ran off toward the dorm without looking back.

“Thanks a lot,” Aizel muttered.

“She’s going to listen as she messes up your stuff,” Wells answered with a shrug. “It’s more than you’ve had up to this point.”

Aizel took off with Wells, and I wasn’t far behind him. But our attempt to play middlemen was interrupted when we were met with an unwelcome sight.

Zhara wasn’t inside the dorm at all. Instead, she was standing near the building alongside Professor Ambrose and Bricriu.

“What’s going on?” Wells asked as we slowed down and came to a stop by the fae.

“Isla was attacked,” Bricriu answered. Somehow, his voice was both bland and chilling at the same time, and rage radiated from his still form. “We need to see her room.”

“She came stumbling out of the dorm building, so it’s obvious the attack must have happened here,” Ambrose supplied.

Zhara’s attention snapped to the entrance of the building, and she took a long inhale.

“There’s blood on the door.”

“Don’t touch it,” Ambrose ordered sternly. “Take us to her room. We need to take a look at it before we go to her.”

“We’re going with you,” all four of us said at the same time.

“That’s another reason Bricriu insisted we come here and wait for you all. At least you were already on the way,” Ambrose said absently before he opened the door to the dorm and headed inside. “Keep up!”

“Have you seen her?” Wells asked the bone fae.

Bricriu ducked down to enter the building then slowly straightened up, his back cracking with the motion. “Not yet. But from what Ambrose said… It's not good. Let’s go.”

As he slowly made his way up the stairs, I swore I heard a hint of hollow clanking with his every step. I wanted to ask him for details, but I couldn’t find it in me to question him.

Instead, my focus was on the smears of blood on the stairs and railing. The closer we drew to our suite, the greater they grew in size. Somehow, that didn’t prepare me for the state of her room. The shared suite was in disarray, but her room was destroyed .

Furniture shattered into countless pieces.

Glass blown out.

Everything was thrown around everywhere.

Isla had been viciously attacked, but she had put up one hell of a fight.

“Oh my god,” Zhara whispered, her voice and eyes back to normal as she took in the state of the room.

Ambrose ambled into the bathroom and came out with an empty expression.

“The shower door is broken, and even part of the sink is missing. If I had to guess, I’d say she used shards of the mirror as a weapon at some point. Could account for some of this blood.”

A hint of something out of place drew my attention. I squatted down and reached out, nudging it out from beneath a torn shred of bedding.

“There are syringes,” I said, carefully grabbing them and holding them up. “Two of them. I think I can confidently say these aren’t Isla’s.”

“Syringes?” Ambrose asked sharply, his long fingers grabbing them faster than I thought possible. “ Shit.”

“What does that mean?” Zhara asked, but Ambrose was already out of the room.

“Let’s go. Now!”

I looked at the others, and even Bricriu appeared surprised by Ambrose’s quick exit. A moment later, we all rushed off to follow him.

The dorm was quiet, too quiet, something that hadn’t fully registered on my way upstairs.

My curiosity got the best of me, so I slowed down on the second floor, unable to help myself. I left the stairs and headed toward a room with the door slightly ajar.

“Echo?”

Ignoring Wells, I pushed open the door only for the ice I had embraced for so long to come rushing back full force. My humanity shut down as I studied the room, feeling like I was having some out-of-body experience.

“Echo, what are you…? Oh my gods,” Aizel muttered, stumbling against the wall.

“It just occurred to me that it was too quiet in the dorms,” I started to speculate. Walking further into the room, I crouched down to look over what was left of the students that had lived here. “How will the conservatory hide these bodies, I wonder.”

“Especially if all the rooms are filled with them,” Wells added on.

“They are.” Bricriu’s calm voice echoed in the space, power filling every word. “That would also explain why no one reacted to Isla being attacked.”

“Ambrose knows something.”

“Then let’s go find out what.”