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I decided I had to let Orion die after the second time I saved his life.
“You could have helped, you know,” I said, cutting off his obvious struggle between thanking me and telling me off for smearing soul-eater all over the floor of his room.
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. “I—did you want help?”
“No,” I snapped. “But that’s no excuse for standing there gawking like an empty letter box while a hungry mal throws itself at your head.”
His face was turning pink. It wasn’t a very good face, all told: nose too beaky, hair too long and sticking up like he’d tried to brush it with a cattle prod. (Not that you’d be able to get enough juice for a cattle prod anywhere in the Scholomance, unless you were willing to trade a graduation alliance for it.) It looked even worse when it was coming all over magenta with indignation.
I was probably treating him all wrong. If I were a member of the New York enclave, saving Orion from a mal like they did every other day on average, I’m sure I would have had a handkerchief and a hot toddy waiting to soothe his troubled mind. Maybe some hangers-on to clean his room so he wouldn’t have to get his nails dirty. Or, heaven forbid, have to figure out a cleaning spell himself.
“Sorry,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
“No, that’s all right,” I said, the mana burst from the soul-eater making me acerbic. Most people say being flush with power gives them a brighter outlook on the world; then again, most people don’t get their mana from killing mals. “Nothing to it. Happy to spend my time and mana saving you from mals that otherwise would have required you to do something terrible like, I don’t know, perform actual magic for yourself. No, I know how awful that would have been for you. No need to thank me.”
He’d had his mouth open, but he snapped it shut now. Good: I hated it when they thanked me. Especially the ones who tried to suck up while they did it. It only made it worse when half an hour later they were edging their chairs away from me in the alchemy lab, back to that safe fifteen-foot radius where they could trust me to vaporize any mal that showed up but would have plenty of warning if I decided to vaporize them, instead. Or whatever it was they were afraid I would do to them that day when I was done with the mals. I could never stay on top of the rumors.
That was the thing my mum hadn’t told me about, when she’d told me the other students would need me at the Scholomance: that they wouldn’t want to need me. That a six-foot-tall girl who can take down a maw-mouth in her second week of school inspires more fear than admiration, actually.
Well. That was fine; the only reason you needed other people inside the Scholomance was to stay alive, and that had never been a problem for me. I didn’t need them, and I definitely didn’t need Orion, inexplicable darling of the New York enclave, who as far as I could tell had never done a spell for himself in his life.
Orion, who was currently gawking at me like he couldn’t believe I’d just had the nerve to imply that he didn’t deserve the constant adulation and self-sacrifice of everyone around him. Well, the soul-eater was gone; he could let that little shard of truth pick up where it had left off. Or he could forget about it, more likely. Either way, I was late for dinner.
“I’m not supposed to, actually,” he said, as I turned on my heel.
I turned back, already building up another head of anger. “Not supposed to what? Appreciate your saviors?”
“Do magic.” He was scrubbing at the soul-eater slime on his chest. The scent was already thick enough in the air to abrade my sinuses. “I’m not supposed to.”
I goggled at him. That was like someone saying they weren’t supposed to chew their own food, that they needed someone else to do it for them. Or worse: like saying they weren’t supposed to breathe their own air. Pre-processed oxygen only, please. “Is that what they told you, back in your cushy New York enclave? That you’re too good for actual work, that you shouldn’t get your hands dirty like us commoners?”
“No!” he said. “It’s—”
“Or are they afraid you wouldn’t be any good at it? You’re Orion Lake, can’t risk you doing magic and not being a superstar. Then everyone might see there isn’t anything special about you after all.”
His face was very red now, in blotches. “It’s not that. It’s—not safe.”
“Ohhhh,” I said, drawing the word out, mad enough to spit. “Oh, of course, magic is risky business. Can’t have the valued son of New York mixing himself up in that. He might sprain a finger. No, definitely better that he sit back and let everyone else take all the—”
“Look!” he said, eyes flashing, and stepped forward and put his hand on my chest.
I would have slapped him down for just that under other circumstances. The obvious aside, his hand was covered in melted soul-eater, and not all of us had been given the weight allowance to bring more than one change of clothes to school. But I was a little distracted by the fact that he was trying to pull my entire life force out of my body.
It was a feeling like doing a spell, only more so. All of us—those who aren’t connected to enclave power-sharers, anyway—spend our days rationing power, constantly calculating how much mana we have built up and how much we can let slip into one spell or another. That feeling of letting mana flow out of me was a lot like this, except it wasn’t a choice, and it wasn’t just the mana I’d built up from killing the soul-eater; it was all of me, every bit of life force in my body, every last drop. The kind of power a straight-up maleficer might manage to get out of one victim in his whole lifetime, after careful spells and conditions met and some kind of trick to get the victim to at least think they were giving permission.
Orion hadn’t done any of that. He hadn’t done any spells that I could hear, and he hadn’t won my trust at all. He’d done it on a whim, it seemed like. And he was succeeding.
He let go, and everything snapped back into me. My own life force, my soul, whatever you want to call it, and all the new sizzling power from the soul-eater. I staggered back, gasping.
“That’s why,” he said, when I was trying to get my breath back. “When I try to do magic, I—do that.”
I stared at him. It was unfathomable. Not the malia itself—people talk a big game about that, but we all do it at least a little: use power we didn’t earn, pulled out of the air or the woodwork or the bugs on the ground. Everything in the world has power, and it doesn’t hurt you to use a little bit of it every now and then. My mum is dead against it, and I don’t need to in here, with all the mals around—but I still can. I know how to kill a blade of grass to mend a tear in my jeans, and my mum might look disapproving if I did, but it wouldn’t be a big deal.
What Orion had just done, though. Almost done. Pulling all of the power out of a human being. That was a big deal. The kind of big deal that gets you banned from every enclave in the world. Unless you happen to be the son of the domina of New York, and she decides that instead, she’s going to draw up the walls around you and get every kid of the enclave to guard you constantly for four years and do your magic for you so you can survive school without killing anyone and get home and never do magic again in your life, basically.
No surprise the New York kids stuck so close to him. They knew what would happen if they didn’t—in the short term, and when they went back to the outside world and had to tell their families what happened. “So where are they now?” I asked. “Your protectors.”
He was picking at the slime on his shirt. “I sent them on ahead.”
Was he just an idiot, then? “Why?”
He shrugged. “They shouldn’t always have to look out for me.”
Definitely an idiot. I had seen enough kids get attacked on the way to dinner to know that that going alone was only two notches short of actually throwing yourself into the void, and that was for normal students. It was the only reason everyone else put up with me at all, really: me, the girl who scared everyone, but who scared monsters more. If the danger had been a little less dire, if walking to dinner were only a little risky and not potentially fatal, they might have decided I was too much trouble to have around and done something drastic.
Dinner had started ten minutes ago. There wouldn’t be anyone in the halls now. No one for Orion to tag along with, even if he weren’t the kind of monumental idiot who slunk away from the people who were trying to save his useless life. He would almost definitely be attacked, and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it: even if he did want to drain the life of a random student to save himself, he probably hadn’t learned any spells to use it with.
Not my problem. I had already saved his life—twice, if you counted the incident with the chimaera last year when I’d saved the whole language lab. If he wasn’t going to make an effort to protect himself, it wasn’t up to me to do it.
He must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said, “You can go ahead. I’ll just get this stuff clean and come after you.”
He scrubbed ineffectually at the sleeve of his shirt. I could have told him that wasn’t going to work: I’ve done more than my fair share of getting mal remnants out of my clothing, and soul-eater is one of the ones where you absolutely need magic. Even if Orion had somehow managed to smuggle in some heavy-duty cleaning supplies—which I doubted, considering he’d probably never had to do a chore in his life—he wasn’t going to get anywhere without several hours and a sandblaster.
I sighed and muttered a cleaning spell. It was in Old English, and annoyingly mana-intensive, but it was fast, and I had plenty of mana built up from the soul-eater I’d just killed. Besides, I was hungry.
The black sludge leapt from the floor and from Orion’s clothes and vanished. “Come on,” I said, stalking to the door. “If you’re coming to dinner with me, I don’t need you stinking up the halls on the way there.”