Chapter 45 — The First Heat

Chapter 45: Chapter 45 — The First Heat

~ Raven ~

"Run."

Half of them didn’t.

Twelve students stood behind the painted line.

Six of them still had not moved. They remained where the wardens had placed them, waiting for someone to laugh and admit that the whole thing was a joke.

Until every warden along the walls released their aura at once.

The court folded.

Raven felt the pressure from outside the line, and she was not even caught beneath the worst of it. Inside the heat, it came down like a roof collapsing. Students buckled. Hands shot out for shoulders and arms, strangers holding on to one another because their own legs had stopped listening.

A boy near the end forced himself forward, managed one step and drove his knee into the painted floor.

Another broke into a blind sprint before he seemed to understand what his body was doing. He made it three strides before his foot caught beneath him and he went down face-first.

Tessa staggered sideways into Thalia.

"Fuck you, you black-clad asshole," she ground out.

She tore one foot off the floor and planted it ahead of the other.

"Fuck this court. Fuck that painted line. And fuck whichever dead lunatic invented the First Howl."

"Tessa," Thalia gasped.

"Not now. I’m using anger to walk."

But she kept going.

The curses came under her breath in one long, furious stream—aimed at the wardens, the academy, the freezing floor and every ancestor of whoever had decided that dragging students out of bed counted as education.

She was not performing. She had not looked around to see who might hear her. She was simply hauling her legs forward one at a time and saying exactly what she thought of the experience.

Raven had lived with that girl for two days.

Two days of sorry, do you mind, and passing the bread with both hands.

Fear did not silence Tessa.

It took the lid off.

Then the throwers raised the balls, and the court stopped being funny.

The first one left a warden’s hand low and fast, yellow light spilling from the runes as it crossed the court.

It struck a boy squarely in the shoulder.

He did not fall.

He spun completely around—away from the platform, away from the markers, away from everything he had been running toward—and bolted for the side wall as though something enormous had opened its jaws behind him.

He crossed the boundary at full speed before the terror had even cleared from his eyes.

Two wardens caught him on the other side without hurrying.

"Out," the leader said.

Farther up the court, red light took a girl in the ribs.

She stopped dead. Her head came round toward the nearest thrower and Raven watched her forget the platform existed. She went at him with her hands already curling into claws, and she was fast, and she was three strides from the boundary when a blue ball caught her across the shins.

The floor took her hard. She tried to get up and went down again in a different direction entirely.

"One," the leader said. "Two."

So that was the trick of it.

Raven watched the rest of the first years struggle forward and finally understood what the wardens had built. The aura did not stop them outright. It made every step something they had to wrestle from their own bodies.

The balls struck and seized whatever instinct they carried—run, fight, kneel, fall—until crossing a flat stretch of court in a straight line became almost impossible.

Tessa’s answer to all of it was to get angrier.

She pushed into the pressure with her shoulders down and cursed every ball that missed her, loudly, with details.

Which was, Raven thought, an excellent way to get noticed.

Black light caught her in the thigh.

Tessa’s leg gave out beneath her.

Her knee struck the stone hard enough for the crack to carry across the court, and she stayed there, one hand catching her weight while the aura drove down across her shoulders. Her whole body shook as she fought against it. Muscles stood out along her arms. Her teeth bared with the effort.

She forced herself halfway upright.

The blue ball slammed into her ribs.

The impact folded her sideways, but whatever was bound into the runes hit deeper than the blow. The court lurched violently beneath her. Floor and walls traded places, and Tessa went staggering toward the boundary with both arms thrown wide, her feet crossing over each other as she fought for balance she no longer possessed.

Her heel skidded across the stone.

She stopped with the front of her foot hanging over the painted line.

For one awful second, she swayed there, blood running from her split knee and one arm wrapped tightly around her side.

Then she dropped both palms to the floor before her body could tip any farther, dragged herself away from the boundary and shoved herself upright again.

When she finally found the thrower who had hit her, her face twisted.

"You aim like a blind bastard with a personal grudge," she spat. "Try that again and I’ll shove the ball so far up your ass the runes will glow through your teeth."

And his mother.

And, as far as Raven could follow, four generations of his bloodline, without pausing for breath.

Across the court, Thalia was doing the opposite of all of it.

Thalia had let the faster students pull ahead, and she was not looking at the platform at all.

She was watching the throwers.

Every time one of their shoulders drew back, she moved—a step left, a step right, never more than she needed. The balls kept tearing through the spaces she had occupied a heartbeat earlier.

It was working.

She was gaining ground.

But she was slowing too. Raven saw it in the way her knees dipped with each step and took longer to straighten. Cleverness could keep the balls off her. It could not lift the aura pressing down on her body.

A yellow ball passed close enough to Thalia’s face to whip her head backward.

It missed her and struck the boy beside her instead.

His eyes went wide.

Then he bolted straight through her path.

His shoulder caught her across the chest and knocked her sideways. Thalia hit the floor on both hands, barely stopping herself from rolling over the boundary.

By the time she forced herself upright again, the opening she had spent so long creating was gone.

Tessa was nearly at the platform.

A ball came at her legs and she turned into it and took it across the forearm instead, which put her a step out but kept her upright, and then she was staggering up onto the raised silver, catching the edge, dragging herself over it on her stomach.

Her hand closed around a marker.

The howl tore out of her before she got her feet under her.

It was loud, and it was furious, and it was shaking — not with fear, with everything else — and it went up into the lattice and came back down over a hundred silent first-years. When it stopped, Tessa shut her mouth so hard Raven could swear she heard her teeth.

She stood on the platform with the marker in her fist and glared at it like it had insulted her family.

Behind her, another contestant made the edge and grabbed a marker and howled.

His didn’t stop.

It ran on and on past where it should have ended, climbing, the boy’s face going from triumph to confusion to something close to panic while his wolf refused to let go of ground it had just won. Two masked wolves stepped up onto the platform and stood there until it finally guttered out.

Raven turned back to the court and found Thalia alone.