I quickly brush my teeth, and then hurry back into the room before anyone gets up in the middle of the night and sees me. Maxon is in bed when I get back into the room. He’s wearing a light gray T-shirt and is half tucked under the covers.
“Maxon?” I ask softly, pulling the blankets up to my chin. “Why do demons want souls?”
“Power.”
His words send another chill through me.
“The more souls they consume, the more powerful they become.” He blows out the candle on his nightstand, leaving just the one on the middle of the table as our light source. “You should get some sleep, Addy. We can talk more in the morning.”
“Okay. Goodnight. Thanks again for helping me out tonight.” I turn my head, studying his handsome face in the dark. A few moments of silence pass by.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Are you still up?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“I’m…I’m sorry that demon spotted you. If it hadn’t…maybe you wouldn’t have had to come here. I should have killed it sooner. Then I might have saved you.”
I flick my eyes to the ceiling. “Maybe you did.”
6
“What the hell is this?” A high-pitched female voice reverberates through the room, waking me with a start. My eyes fly open and I jerk up, blinking so my eyes adjust to the bright light. A young woman with long, silver-blonde hair is standing in the threshold of the room.
She’s wearing a white button-up shirt tucked into a yellow and gray plaid skirt, knee-high black boots, and a long black cloak.
“Maaaax!” she whines and stamps her foot. “What’s going on here?” She sweeps her hand out at me and all I can do is stare. Max, who was still sleeping, throws the blankets back and sits up.
At some point in the night, he must have gotten hot. Because he’s only wearing the dark pants and no shirt and holy hell, he’s a fine-looking man. Tall, tan, with more abs than I can count. He has a half sleeve of tattoos on his left arm that goes up his bicep and over his pec.
“Celeste,” he grumbles, bleary eyed. “What are you doing?”
“I should ask you the same. What is this?” Her cheeks are pink with anger. “Are you cheating on me?”
“Seriously?” He stands up, stretching to his full height. There’s something dangerous about the look in his eyes as he towers over her.
“You’re going to go there?”
“Well, what do you expect?” Celeste is fuming, apparently oblivious to the murderous look in his eyes, and I push myself up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. A few others are gathered in the hall, peering into the room.
Great first impression, Addy.
I reach up, feeling the rat’s nest of hair on my head.
“Hi,” I say, holding my hand up in a little wave. “I’m Addy, and this is not what you—”
“She’s wearing your cloak?” Celeste pushes past Maxon, her eyes full of fire as she stalks toward me. “You little cheating whore!”
“Celeste!” Maxon yells as she raises a perfectly manicured hand, summoning a white ball of energy. He moves to stop her, but it’s too late, and she whips the energy ball at me. Reacting on instinct, I bring my hands up, shielding my face as I turn away.
The painful shock never comes, but I can feel the prickle of electricity just inches from my face. It reminds me of when I was a kid and used to think it was funny to rub a balloon on my hair and hold it up, using the static electricity to make my hair stand on end.
Leaning back, I slowly open my eyes to see the ball of energy hovering in the air. My mouth falls open as I watch tendrils of raw energy crackle and pop, fizzling into the air.
“How did you do that?” Celeste demands, and brings her hand up, probably to summon another energy ball that I won’t be able to stop this time. “No one deflects my energy balls. No one!”
“Well, it looks like someone did.” Maxon dodges in front of her and holds out his hand, muttering an incantation that causes the ball to dissipate into the room. He whirls around, putting himself between Celeste and myself.
“You are way out of line,” he sneers. “What the fuck were you thinking, attacking a student like that? I should report you to Professor Dal.”
“You wouldn’t do that, now would you?” Celeste snaps her attention away from me and puts one hand on Maxon’s chest, splaying her fingers. “You wouldn’t want me to get in trouble now. Unless you want to punish me.”
“Excuse us,” Maxon says, and takes Celeste by the hand, pulling her out of the room, closing the door behind him. I stare at the spot where they just stood, blinking. I have no idea what time it is, but if others were up and dressed, I should probably get up too.
I take off Maxon’s cloak and carefully fold it, laying it on the foot of his bed. Then I grab my uniform and quickly change.
“I see you met Celeste.” I whip around just in time to see Cass materialize through the door. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“She seems psychotic.”
Cass laughs and glides to the dresser, perching on the top.
“I didn’t know he had a girlfriend,” I whisper. “Not that it matters. Nothing happened and I’ll be moving into the girls’ dorm today.”
“She’s his fiancée,” Cass whispers.
“Really? Wow. No wonder she was mad. It’ll be fun rooming with her.” I sit on my bed and start brushing out my tangled hair.
“You won’t. She’s a magus and isn’t supposed to be up here, but she sneaks up to see Maxon anyway. Her skirt is yellow, did you notice? Proeliators wear red, Magi yellow, and Arbiters blue. That hottie with a body you should have been shacking up with last night had on a red tie.”
“How do you know all this?”
She shrugs. “I’ve been bored without you. I lurk.”
I laugh. “You lurk anyway.” I try to sound reproachful, but I can’t help thinking that having Cass lurk about the academy could very much come in handy, especially since this place is still a mystery to me.
“I have to say, Addy, death becomes you.”
“You think?”
“Have you seen yourself?”
Uh oh. “Now I’m worried.” I rake the last tangle from my hair and get up again, putting my hairbrush away and taking out a little handheld mirror.
I’ve fought with my skin for years, never able to get the right combination. It’s either too dry, too oily, or an annoying mixture of both, dotted with acne that just wouldn’t go away no matter what I tried.
But now…now my skin is clear. Flawless. Smooth. Practically glowing, in fact.
“I should have died years ago.”
“Stop.” Cass goes to nudge me with her foot, and it passes right through my arm. I don’t get as bad of a chill this time. Trading the mirror for my toothbrush, I go back to my bed and put on the boots.
I can hear people talking and laughing in the hall, giving me flashbacks to my freshman year at Columbia College when I tried to stay in a dorm. To make a long story short, it didn’t work out. I quickly became known as the weird girl who you should be nice to because there’s a chance she’s crazy after I mistook a ghost for a real person and got into a heated argument with him about women’s rights.