Chapter 68 — Never Again

Chapter 68: Chapter 68 — Never Again

~ Raven ~

She was not running.

She was simply walking fast enough to put the east reading hall several corridors behind her before anyone could reasonably call it fleeing, and if somebody wanted to argue the distinction, they were welcome to try.

Nobody did.

The only person she passed was a clerk pushing a trolley of returned books. He glanced at her once, seemed to reconsider whatever greeting had been forming, and suddenly became very interested in arranging the bottom shelf.

Raven made it around two corners before her brain finally caught up with the rest of her.

Then it hit her.

She had put her throat in Cassian Blade’s hands.

Raven slowed.

No, worse. Cassian had only lifted his hands in frustration, fingers spread like a man who had exhausted every other way of expressing how thoroughly she was getting on his nerves.

And she had stepped forward.

Actually stepped forward.

Go on.

Raven stopped and planted one palm against the corridor wall.

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

She dragged both hands down her face and started walking again, slower this time.

Two days.

She had been at Valerius for two fucking days.

In that time, she had been assessed by one Cardinal heir, fought for by another in front of half the academy, dragged out of bed by masked upper-years, battered across the Grand Drill Court, turned into Bellringer entertainment, marched into the cafeteria under a legal petition she had not even known existed, and then, because apparently none of that had been enough, gone to the library to calm down and deliberately provoked Cassian Blade until his control slipped in front of forty students.

Raven exhaled slowly.

Nascent.

That was what Valerius had officially classified her as.

Nascent.

And she had spent most of her first two days antagonizing people who could probably remove her ribs without needing a second attempt.

The worst part was not the recklessness.

The worst part was that she had walked into every single one of those rooms without knowing the rules.

She hadn’t known what Redress was until Rowan filed one against her. She hadn’t known Seats could be stripped for refusal until she was standing on a table refusing. She hadn’t known what a First Howl was until men in wolf masks came through a locked door. She had found out about the Founders’ Hunt because four Cardinal heirs argued over her head about a notice board.

Three years of gazettes out of Blackthorn’s waste bins, and she had learned the names of everyone important in this academy and none of the things that could be done to her by them.

Raven started walking again.

Fine.

Rules first. Whatever a Court challenge actually permitted. What Merit was, properly, and who could take it. What being Twentieth Seat obliged her to attend, agree to, or bleed for. What a House could legally do to a student with no House.

And then the simple part.

Stay away from Cardinal Alphas.

Her mind produced Cassian, gold-eyed, hands open.

Especially him.

Never again.

The quiet route back to Nikolai’s Wing ran through the old stone passages behind the lecture halls, where the windows were narrow and the floor still had grooves worn into it from whatever the academy had been before it was this.

Raven turned the corner and stopped.

Rowan was coming the other way.

He stopped too.

For a second neither of them did anything at all. He had already been wearing an expression that suggested his morning had continued badly after the Headmaster’s office, and Raven watched it get worse in stages — his stride ending, his jaw setting, his eyes going cold.

She stared at the corridor.

No Headmaster. No instructor. No Nikolai, no Dante, no four hundred students with their slates up.

Just stone, two narrow windows, and a Cardinal heir who had filed a formal petition against her that morning and been publicly stripped of it before lunch.

Oh, fuck me.

"Rivers."

Raven said nothing. Her hands had gone cold.

Rowan took one step toward her, his eyes moving over her face.

"Interesting."

She frowned despite herself.

"You didn’t look nearly this nervous in the cafeteria."

There was no satisfaction in the words. If anything, that made them worse. He sounded like he had discovered something useful.

Raven forced her fingers to loosen at her sides. "Maybe I preferred you with witnesses."

His mouth tightened.

"Look at me."

She did, and hated how quickly her body obeyed.

Gold bled into the air around him a breath later.

The pressure rolled down the empty passage and hit her all at once. It was nothing like the cafeteria. There, Rowan’s aura had spilled across a vast room crowded with hundreds of bodies, its force spreading through the space before it reached her.

Here, there was nowhere else for it to go.

The weight settled over Raven’s shoulders and kept building.

Her knees felt it first. Then her lungs.

Her next breath came shorter than the last.

Her pulse kicked harder.

The pressure kept building until her fingers started to feel numb at her sides. Her breaths were coming too shallow now, and she hated that Rowan could probably hear every one of them.

For one ugly second, the empty corridor seemed much narrower than it had before.

Her gaze almost dropped.

Raven caught herself and forced her chin back up, though her heartbeat was already hammering hard enough to make the effort feel ridiculous.

Rowan noticed.

"Still stubborn," he said quietly. His gaze dropped briefly to the tension in her shoulders before returning to her face. "Just not quite as comfortable without the crowd."

Raven wanted to tell him to go fuck himself.

For once, survival instinct arrived before her mouth.

Then an arm dropped across her shoulders.

Raven nearly came out of her skin.

The arm across her shoulders startled a breath out of her.

Then something in her body loosened.

Her lungs opened first. The tightness around her chest eased enough for her to draw a full breath, and the frantic pounding of her pulse began to settle almost as quickly as it had started. Raven frowned, confused by the sudden change.

Rowan’s aura was still pressing down the corridor.

So why did she suddenly feel safer?

"Rowan."

Raven turned her head.

Nikolai stood beside her, one arm resting over her shoulders as though finding her trapped alone with an angry Cardinal heir was nothing particularly interesting.

"Are you finished with my Wing member, or should I come back?"

Rowan’s eyes dropped to Nikolai’s arm.

His expression hardened.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

Then the gold surrounding him began to recede, drawing back toward his body until the pressure finally lifted from Raven’s chest.

Rowan looked at her once more, visibly displeased, before stepping past them without another word.

Raven waited until she was sure he was gone.

Then she let out a breath that turned into most of a laugh on the way out, and put her back against the wall.

"There she is," Nikolai said. "Where did the other one go?"

"What other one."

"The one from this morning. The one who climbed onto a table and told Rowan House, House Blackthorn and every Cardinal heir in this academy to go and fuck themselves."

He tipped his head. "I liked her. She was memorable."

"She had an audience."

"She had four hundred witnesses and three Cardinals in the room, yes."

"That’s not the same thing as this." Raven pushed off the wall. "That was a performance. This was a corridor. Those are different subjects entirely."

"So fear found you."

"Fear has always had my address," Raven said. "It’s the timing we argue about."

Nikolai laughed, and it was easy, and Raven found she didn’t mind it.

They started walking.

Raven made it three steps before looking back in the direction Rowan had gone.

"What Power Class is he?"

"Dominant."

She turned to Nikolai. "And the rest of you?"

"Dominant."

"All four?"

"All four."

Raven was quiet for a moment.

That sounded considerably worse now that she knew there was an actual word for it.

"And I’m Nascent."

Nikolai glanced at her. "You really don’t know how the Classes work?"

There was no insult in the question. That somehow made it worse.

Raven kept walking.

She could have told him that while children in Houses were learning about essence, wolves and whatever else apparently counted as basic education, she had been learning how long grease needed to soak before it came off Blackthorn silverware. Most of what she knew about Valerius had come from old gazettes pulled from rubbish after the nobles were finished with them.

She had no intention of explaining any of that.

Instead, she smiled.

"Are you going to teach me, or keep looking at me like I’ve admitted I don’t know what water is?"

Nikolai watched her for another second, then let it go.

"There are seven Classes. Nascent, Awakened, Tempered, Ascendant, Dominant, Exalted and Sovereign."

Raven counted them silently.

Her mouth tightened.

"So Rowan is four Classes above me."

"Yes."

"And I told him to go fuck himself."

"Yes."

"In public."

Nikolai’s mouth twitched. "Very publicly."

Raven stared ahead.

"That feels considerably stupider now."

"I thought it was impressive."

"You weren’t the one standing alone with him two minutes ago."

That got a laugh out of him.

Raven adjusted the strap of her bag. "So what does the Class actually measure?"

"How much supernatural power your body can hold, use and control." Nikolai shrugged. "Higher is stronger, generally. It doesn’t mean somebody automatically wins every fight."

That was simple enough.

Raven nodded once. "And people move up how?"

"Metamorphosis."

She waited.

Nikolai kept walking.

Raven looked at him. "That’s it?"

"That’s the answer."

"What the fuck is Metamorphosis?"

"You’ll learn that in class."

Raven stared at the side of his face.

"You are unbelievably irritating."

"I just saved you from Rowan."

"That doesn’t make you less irritating. It makes you an irritating person I currently owe a thank-you."

"I’ll take it."

Before Raven could answer, Nikolai reached over and ruffled her hair.

She stopped.

He made it another step before noticing and turning back.

Raven looked at him.

"Stop doing that."

His hand dropped.

For a second, the amusement left his face. Not enough to make the moment uncomfortable, but enough that Raven wondered if she had been sharper than necessary.

Then Nikolai lifted both hands.

"All right."

That was it.

No argument. No attempt to do it again while pretending it was a joke.

They started walking.

Raven felt mildly guilty almost immediately.

He had just stepped between her and Rowan, calmed her down somehow and answered questions she probably should have known the answers to years ago.

Still, she didn’t like him touching her hair that way.

She had asked him to stop.

He had stopped.

There did not need to be anything more complicated about it.

The corridor widened ahead, and the normal academy noise reached them before the crowd did.

Students filled the crossing between buildings. Several were gathered around a notice board, others sat along the low stone wall, and somebody near the stairs was loudly arguing about Merit.

Raven almost relaxed.

Then a boy by the wall looked up.

His sentence died halfway through.

The girl beside him followed his stare.

Then another student turned.

And another.

The noise around the crossing began thinning so quickly Raven noticed it before she understood why.

Within seconds, dozens of faces were pointed in her direction.

Raven slowed.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

She knew this part.

Except the students weren’t only staring at her.

Their attention kept shifting between Raven and Nikolai.

Between the quiet corridor behind them and the fact that the two of them had just emerged from it side by side, still talking as though they had been doing so for some time.

A whisper moved through the nearest group.

Then another.

Someone raised a Linkslate.

A second student did the same.

Raven looked at Nikolai.

He had noticed too.

Naturally, the bastard looked entertained.

Raven closed her eyes for one very brief moment.

She had left the library with perhaps the first sensible decision she had made since entering Valerius.

Stay away from Cardinal Alphas.

She had managed it for approximately one corridor.

"Fuck."