His laughter was cold and hard. “I am not useless after fighting a single demon.”
She was bound to this? This monster? Her thoughts snapped and her hatred of him pulsed heat into her flesh.
“You watched me. You stood there and watched me? You complete bastard.” Felix surged forward, forgetting how her body ached, how she could hardly breathe. Everything in her wanted to smash against the man who had stood by as she almost died. “You—”
Mael caught her wrists, his preternatural strength holding her as he pushed her against the cold plaster wall still stained with demon dust. “Foolish girl,” he growled. “You waste your energy.”
“What does it matter to you?” She strained against his hold, trying to wrest her pinned arms free, but that only added to her pain. Fuck, she’d never wanted to be within five feet of the bastard. Now his long body pressed against every inch of hers. She glared up at him. Only moments before, a Bringer had held her just so. Now another monster trapped her. “Why are you here?”
His lip curled and anger snapped in his amber gaze. “You ran from the Conclave. Ignored its edict. I’ve been charged with bringing you back.” He sneered. “That I would have a ‘vested interest’ in your return. Alive. Unharmed.”
“So you waited to see if the Bringer ate me first? You—”
“Call my birth into question again, girl, and you will regret it.”
The ice to his words, the low anger in his dark voice stilled her tongue. Her sense—belatedly—kicked in. This was Zacharias Mael. The most powerful magus yet born. Her gaze darted over the slashing scars marring his face and the twisting, ghostly shadow of horns at his temples. He was the only one of them to survive a full devouring. A Bringer’s wings had held him tight… Horror and guilt—quickly crushed—cut through her.
The Bringer had raked its mark in more than scars. Mael was no longer truly a magus. He now walked in both worlds.
“How did you find me?”
His mouth thinned. “And your other mentors credit you with some intelligence.”
“You could simply answer.”
He huffed, his lip curling into his familiar sneer. “You could couch your questions in a less abrupt manner. I am your Provost.”
Felix stopped herself from grinding her teeth. He would do that. Use sixteen words when one was good enough. But then he liked to belittle. Her, especially. She fixed her gaze on the underside of his sharp jaw—fuck the man was tall—and forced herself to think… She almost groaned. “Our bond.”
“Give the girl a medal.”
“I am twenty-one. I am not a girl.”
“You scraped through your Third Year. Barely proficient in your written and practical assessments and abysmal in the field. I have taught more skilled rocks—”
“I just destroyed a Dagon—”
Mael leaned in, black hair, loosened from its tie, brushing against her face. Felix swallowed, her nerves stretched tight. He was touching her. Mael never touched her. And she hadn’t been this close to him in a long, long time.
“You were lucky.” He stressed each word, almost biting them out. “It was distracted, by its brethren, by me.”
Felix lifted her chin. Was he trying to take credit? “It is still dead.”
“And if another broke through that door? What then? What would you fight it with? A pan? A broken chair? Feeding yourself to it is not skill, it is not technique.”
“Is this lecture over?” Her head fell back against the wall and her body sagged. Every bone ached and the only thing holding her upright was him; his hands at her wrists and the solid press of his body.
Felix willed down the trembling, the nerves still coursing through her, deepening her breaths, but dragging the lingering scents of death into her lungs. The acrid stink mixed with something else. She frowned. Not Bringer. Something…rich, delicious. She almost groaned. Was her sense of smell finally working? Her brain still wasn’t on straight. Mael. It was Mael’s…scent that had her heart skipping that little bit faster.
“It would serve you well to listen once in a while.”
And yet another tone he took with her. The Provost. Head of the Institute. “I know I’m a disappointment to you.”
His hands snapped free of her wrists and he stood back from her. “You are not destined to work in the Upper-World. You are practically…” He pinched the bridge of his nose. He was going to call her an ‘empty’. The harsh term for those magi born with too little magic in their flesh. Useless in their fight against the Bringers. He drew in a long breath. “I—and your mentors—are trying to keep you alive. Every magus must master the basics. Yet you seem to revel in ignoring this necessity, Felicienne.”
She winced. Felicienne. Her over-exaggerated magus name. Her father had a long line of magi behind him, her mother was the first in her family to find the magus magic in her flesh. She’d known the Upper-World…but still saddled her only child with that name. And frowned when Felix insisted on shortening it.
Felix couldn’t make that demand of Mael to use it. As if he would listen.
Sudden darkness swept over the kitchen. The shadow of a Bringer stretched across the long window. Felix’s hands jerked into fists and she fought not to react further. Not in front of Mael. The glow of blood-red wards traced a fiery line over the arc of its wings and the ram-like spiral of its horns. Another Dagon. At least one of the quad was still out there. Not much of a comfort.
Felix let out a slow breath, wanting the wild thud of her heart to ease and fixed her gaze on the creature splayed across the glass.
The ward would hold. Glass or stone, it didn’t matter. The bloodstone focused a magus’s magic, brought it strength and resilience. It was one of her first lessons learned as an apprentice. She had to trust it to be true. “We should get out of here. With the wards still strong and the Bringer gone, the brethren will soon lose interest.”
“So you’re now denying the evidence of your own eyes?” Mael huffed a soft and bitter laugh. “And still you’re not thinking. What am I?”
Fuck. Perhaps she deserved his disappointment. “You’re not simply magus.”
His smile was dark, a sneering lift of the corner of his mouth. “I draw the brethren just as a true demon would.” He glanced behind him to the smoky wreck of the formally immaculate kitchen. “Why did you come here, Felicienne?”
She ignored his use—again—of her hated name. “I was on the road outside. A rush of magic hit me, just before the screams did. I reacted.”
Mael swept his hands behind his back, his shoulders braced. He glared down at her in the familiar pose of her Provost. Afternoon light touched his skin. The shadow of his curving horns, the upsweep of his ghostly wings and the tail that flicked against his hip pushed a chill beneath her skin. She fought not to scramble back, away, to hide in the pantry again.
“You ran towards the house. Why was that your greatest mistake?”
“I’m still an apprentice and I was alone.” She knew what she’d done wrong. It was obvious. He opened his mouth but Felix had to add more. He had to understand. “I couldn’t ignore them. They were still alive.”
“No, they were screaming. They were already dead.”