Adrian looked laconic as usual, but I could see some anxiety under that lazy smile. He didn’t want to be in this situation, and, like Eddie, he wasn’t even sure how it had happened.
“Honestly,” said Adrian in a weary voice, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Can we please just go sit down and discuss this reasonably?”
“Sure. Of course you’d want that. You’re afraid I might do this.” Christian held up his hand, and a ball of flame danced over his palm. Even under the fluorescent lights, it glowed bright orange with a deep blue core. There were gasps from the crowd. I’d long since gotten used to the idea of Moroi fighting with magic—Christian in particular—but for most, it was still a taboo thing. Christian smirked. “What have you got to fight back with? Plants?”
“If you’re going to go start fights for no reason, you should at least do it the old-fashioned way and throw a punch,” said Adrian. His voice was light, but he was still uneasy. My guess was that he figured he could do better with hand-to-hand than spirit-to-fire.
“No,” interrupted Eddie. “No one’s going to set anyone on fire. No one’s going to punch anybody. There’s been some huge mistake.”
“What is it?” I demanded. “What happened?”
“Your friend there thinks I’m planning to marry Lissa and carry her off into the sunset,” said Adrian. He spoke to me, but his eyes never left Christian.
“Don’t act like it’s not true,” growled Christian. “I know it is. It’s been part of your plan—yours and the queen’s. She’s been backing you the whole time. Coming back here . . . the whole studying thing . . . it was a scam to get Lissa away from me and tied to your family instead.”
“Do you have any idea how paranoid you sound?” asked Adrian. “My great-aunt has to manage the entire Moroi government! Do you think she really cares about who’s dating who in high school—especially with the state of affairs lately? Look, I’m sorry about all the time I’ve spent with her . . . we’ll find her and figure this out. I really wasn’t trying to get between you. There’s no conspiracy going on here.”
“Yes, there is,” said Christian. He glanced over at me with a scowl “Isn’t there? Rose knows. Rose has known for a while about this. She even talked to the queen about it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Adrian, surprised enough that he too shot me a quick glance. “Right?”
“Well . . .” I began, realizing this was getting very ugly very quickly. “Yes and no.”
“See?” asked Christian triumphantly.
The fire flew from his hand, but Eddie and I jumped into motion at the same time. People screamed. Eddie grabbed Christian, forcing the fire to fly high. Meanwhile, I grabbed Adrian and slammed him to the floor. It was a lucky division of labor. I didn’t want to think what would have happened if Eddie and I had gone for the same person.
“Glad you care,” muttered Adrian, wincing as he lifted his head from the floor.
“Compel him,” I murmured as I helped him up. “We need to sort this out without someone spontaneously combusting.”
Eddie was trying to restrain Christian from leaping forward. I grabbed a hold of one arm to help. Adrian didn’t look thrilled about coming any closer, but he obeyed me nonetheless. Christian tried to jerk free but couldn’t fight both Eddie and me. Uneasily, probably afraid of his hair catching on fire, Adrian leaned over Christian and made eye contact.
“Christian, stop this. Let’s talk.”
Christian struggled a little against his restraints, but slowly, his face went slack and his eyes started to glaze over.
“Let’s talk about this,” repeated Adrian.
“Okay,” said Christian.
There was a collective sigh of disappointment from the crowd. Adrian had used his compulsion smoothly enough that no one suspected. It had looked as though Christian had simply seen reason. As the crowd dispersed, Eddie and I released Christian enough to a lead him over to far corner where we could talk in private. As soon as Adrian broke the gaze, Christian’s face filled with fury, and he tried to leap at Adrian. Eddie and I were already holding on. He didn’t move.
“What did you just do?” exclaimed Christian. Several people down the hall glanced back, no doubt hoping there’d be a fight after all. I shushed loudly in his ear. He flinched. “Ow.”
“Be quiet. Something’s wrong here, and we need to figure it out before you do something stupid.”
“What’s wrong,” Christian said, glaring at Adrian, “is that they’re trying to break up Lissa and me, and
you
knew about it, Rose.”
Adrian glanced at me. “Did you really?”
“Yeah, long story.” I turned back to Christian. “Look, Adrian didn’t have anything to do with this. Not intentionally. It was Tatiana’s idea—and she hasn’t even actually done anything yet. It’s just her long-term plan—hers alone, not his.”
“Then how did you know about it?” demanded Christian.
“Because she told me—she was afraid that
I
was moving in on Adrian.”
“Really? Did you defend our love?” Adrian asked.
“Be quiet,” I said. “What I want to know, Christian, is who told you?”
“Ralf,” he said, looking uncertain for the first time.
“You should have known better than to listen to him,” remarked Eddie, face darkening at the name.
“Except, for once, Ralf was actually telling the truth—aside from Adrian being in on it. Ralf’s related to the queen’s best friend,” I explained.
“Wonderful,” said Christian. He seemed calm enough, so Eddie and I released him. “We’ve all been played.”
I looked around, suddenly taken aback by something. “Where’s Lissa? Why didn’t she stop all of this?”
Adrian raised an eyebrow at me. “You tell us. Where is she? She didn’t come to dinner.”
“I can’t. . . .” I frowned. I’d gotten so good at shielding myself when I needed to that long periods of time would go by without me feeling anything from her. This time, I sensed nothing because there was nothing coming from her. “I can’t feel her.”
Three sets of eyes stared at me.
“Is she asleep?” asked Eddie.
“I can tell when she’s asleep. . . . This is something different. . . .” Slowly, slowly, I gained a sense of where she was. She’d been blocking me out on purpose, trying to hide from me, but I’d found her as I always did. “There she is. She was—oh God!”
My scream rang down the hall, echoing Lissa’s own screams as, far away, pain shot through her.
TWENTY-THREE
O
THERS IN THE HALL stopped and stared. I felt like I had just been hit in the face. Only it hadn’t been my face. It had been Lissa’s. I shifted into her mind and became instantly aware of her surroundings and everything happening to her—like the next time rocks flew up from the ground and slammed into her cheeks. They were guided by a freshman I didn’t know anything about, save that he was a Drozdov. The rocks hurt both of us, but I withheld my screaming this time and gritted my teeth as I shifted back to the hallway with my friends.
“Northwest side of campus, between that weird-shaped pond and the fence,” I told them.
With that, I broke away from them and headed out the door, running as hard as I could toward the part of campus where they were holding Lissa. I couldn’t see all of the people gathered there through her eyes, but I recognized a few. Jesse and Ralf were there. Brandon. Brett. The Drozdov guy. Some others. The rocks were still hitting her, still cutting into her face. She didn’t scream or cry, though—she just kept telling them over and over to stop while two other guys held her between them.
Jesse, meanwhile, kept telling her to
make
them stop. I only half-listened to him through her mind. The reasons didn’t matter, and I’d already figured it out. They were going to torture her until she agreed to join their group. They must have forced Brandon and the others in the same way.
A suffocating feeling suddenly overwhelmed me, and I stumbled, unable to breathe as water smothered my face. Fighting hard, I separated myself from Lissa. That was happening to her, not me. Someone was torturing her with water now, using it to cut off her air. Whoever it was took their time, alternately filling her face with water, then pulling it back, then repeating. She gasped and sputtered, still asking them to stop when she could.
Jesse continued watching with calculating eyes. “Don’t ask them. Make them.”
I tried running harder, but I could only go so much faster. They were at one of the farthest points of campus’s boundaries. It was a lot of distance to cover, and with every agonizing step, I felt more of Lissa’s pain and grew angrier and angrier. What kind of a guardian could I ever be to her if I couldn’t even keep her safe here on campus?
An air user went next, and suddenly, it was like she was being tortured by Victor’s henchman all over again. Air was alternately taken from her, leaving her gasping, and then slammed back into her, crushing her face. It was agony, and it brought back all the memories of her capture, all the terror and horror she’d been trying to forget. The air user stopped, but it was too late. Something snapped inside of her.
When Ralf stepped up next to use fire, I was so close that I actually saw it flare up in his hand. But he didn’t see me.
None of them had been paying attention to their surroundings, and there’d been too much noise from their own spectacle to hear me. I slammed into Ralf before the fire could leave his hand, pulling him to the ground and punching his face in one skilled maneuver. A few of the others—including Jesse—ran to help him and tried to pry me away. At least, they tried until they realized who it was.
Those who saw my face immediately backed off. Those who didn’t quickly learned the hard way when I went after them. I’d taken out three fully trained guardians earlier today. A group of spoiled royal Moroi took hardly any effort. It was ironic, too—and a sign of how unwilling some Moroi were to lift a hand in their defense—that while this group had been so eager to use magic to torture Lissa, none of them had actually thought to use it against me.
Most of them scattered before I could even lay a hand on them, and I didn’t care enough to go after them. I just wanted them away from Lissa. Admittedly, I gave Ralf a few extra punches even after he’d gone down, since I held him responsible for this whole mess. I finally left him alone, lying on the ground and groaning, as I straightened up and looked for Jesse—the other culprit here. I quickly found him. He was the only one left.
I ran over to him and then skidded to a halt, confused. He was just standing there, staring into space, mouth hanging open. I looked at him, looked at where he was staring, and then looked back at him.
“Spiders,” Lissa said. Her voice made me jump. She stood off to the side with wet hair, bruised and cut, but otherwise okay. In the moonlight, her pale features made her look almost as ghostly as Mason. Her eyes never left Jesse as he spoke. “He thinks he’s seeing spiders. And that they’re crawling on him. What do you think? Should I have gone with snakes?”
I looked back at Jesse. The expression on his face sent chills down my spine. It was like he was locked in his own private nightmare. Scarier still was what I felt through the bond. Usually when Lissa used magic, it felt golden and warm and wonderful. This time, it was different. It was black and slimy and thick.
“I think you should stop,” I said. In the distance, I heard people running toward us. “It’s all over.”
“It was an initiation ritual,” she said. “Well, kind of. They asked me to join a couple of days ago, and I refused. But they bugged me again today and kept saying they knew something important about Christian and Adrian. It started to get to me, so . . . I finally told them I’d come to one of their sessions but that I didn’t know anything about compulsion. It was an act. I just wanted to know what they knew.” She tilted her head barely at all, but something must have happened to Jesse. His eyes widened further as he continued to silently scream. “Even though I hadn’t technically agreed yet, they put me through their initiation ritual. They wanted to know how much I could really do. It’s a way to test how strong people are in compulsion. Torture them until they can’t stand it, and then, in the heat of it all, people lash out and try to compel the attackers to stop. If the victim manages any sort of compulsion at all, that person’s in the group.” She regarded Jesse carefully. He seemed to be in his own world, and it was a very, very bad one. “I guess this makes me their president, huh?”
“Stop it,” I said. The feel of this twisted magic was making me nauseous. She and Adrian had mentioned something like this before, this idea of making people see things that weren’t there. They’d jokingly called it super compulsion—and it was horrible. “This isn’t how spirit is supposed to be used. This isn’t you. It’s wrong.”
She was breathing heavily, sweat breaking out along her brow. “I can’t let go of it,” she said.
“You can,” I said. I touched her arm. “Give it to me.”
She briefly turned from Jesse and looked at me, astonished, before fixing her gaze back on him.
“What? You can’t use magic.”
I focused hard on the bond, on her mind. I couldn’t take the magic exactly, but I could take the darkness it brought on. It was what I’d been doing for a while now, I realized. Every time I’d worried and wished she’d calm down and fight dark feelings, she had—because I was taking it all from her. I was absorbing it, just as Anna had done for St. Vladimir. It was what Adrian had seen when the darkness jumped from her aura to mine. And this—this abuse of spirit, using it to maliciously harm another and
not
for self-defense, was bringing the worst side effects of all in her. It was corrupting and wrong, and I couldn’t let her have it. All thoughts of my own madness or rage were completely irrelevant at this moment.
“No,” I agreed. “I can’t. But you can use me to let it go. Focus on me. Release it all. It’s wrong. You don’t want it.”
She stared at me again, eyes wide and desperate. Even without direct eye contact, she was still able to torture Jesse. I both saw and felt the fight she waged. He’d hurt her so much—she wanted him to pay. He had to. And yet, at the same time, she knew I was right. But it was hard. So hard for her to let go . . .