Page 5 of Spells of Shadow and Blood

“While I agree, I’m afraid it’s too much of a risk to the other students,” the instructor replied.

“Too much of a risk to the other students,” Zion murmured. “What about Donika? She is just going to be cast aside? Didn’t it occur to youthatis the very reason this happened in the first place?”

The instructors stirred uncomfortably.

“Theybullyher. She has stopped telling me about it, but I know it happens still. I believe this is a sort of…retaliation. I’m not sure her actions were vindictive in nature.”

“I have to disagree,” the instructor replied. “She didn’t show a fragment of remorse for Gregor. In fact, when she turned backinto her human form, the first thing she stated was that she wasstill hungry.”

Zion pushed the table away, and it screeched across the floor. “You didn’t protect her. That boy has been torturing her for the last three years and you have donenothingto prevent it. Just yesterday they pulled her down from that tree by her hair!” His voice was on the edge of shouting.

“We can’t have eyes everywhere…”

“Bullshit.” Zion stood, his chair screeching away from him against the tiled floor. “This is just as much your fault as it is hers. You didn’t protect her. She should have been in the Nightshade advanced class from the very beginning, despite her not having shown a lick of magic yet. You know how powerful I am, and how powerful her mother is. You knew she wasn’t a Stormshade, and there was no possibility of her being merely a Shade. You didn’t protect her from the relentless torture those children put her through, and now you want to blame herfor finally standing up for herself.”

The instructor cleared his throat to speak, but Zion stopped him.

“I would take her from this school, regardless. You have done a poor job educating her, and this isnother fault.”

“You can’t always protect her—” the instructor began.

“She is my daughter. I will doexactlythat.” Zion replied through clenched teeth.

He tore from the room in a visage of fury and scooped me into his arms, though at this point I was far too tall to still be carried.

We left the school that day and didn’t look back.

That is…until the time with my tutor came to an untimely conclusion. Zion did his best to home school me at first, but he didn’t have the time or the energy for it. He needed to hire a full-time instructor for me.

That was when I went to Cirilla’s house for the first time.

EIGHT YEARS OLD

Zion had contacted Cirilla in hopes that she would be available to teach me, and she had agreed. Cirilla was a friend of Annelise’s, and a powerful Shade. Zion thought I could learn to hone my magic beneath her tutelage.

She lived in Siraleth, right down the street from our cottage. Zion had brought me to the stone house—quite sizable compared to our own—and knocked on the door.

Cirilla answered, they exchanged a few words, and he had left me there to study with her that very day.

When she had first opened the door, I had noticed her purple eyes were markedly darker than I remembered. More of an aubergine compared to the bright amethyst from my earlier childhood.

At the time, I didn’t think anything of it.

Looking back, I should have realized right away that she had been dabbling in dark magic. It wasn’t long before she began teaching me, too. She had said that I was unique in a way she had never seen before, and that my magic might need an extra…advantage.

She hadn’t wanted to at first, especially after hearing about what had happened at the school with Gregor. One day I was rifling through the books in her attic and found one that particularly intrigued me. Cirilla often let me go through her books, so this day was unlike any other.

Until I opened the binding.

Most of her books were leather-bound pieces that were handwritten, but she had quite a few that were commercially made, too. I tended to gravitate toward searching through the leather-bound tomes, hoping that I would find her family’s grimoire. She had told me that it was hidden away, though I was desperate to hold one in my own hands for the first time.

I had only seen the Kotova grimoireonce, and hoped desperately that it would choose me as its ward one day. It had snapped closed as soon as my eyes had laid upon it. My mother had taken it with her when she had left to go to Akra, and I had not seen it since. At the time, I had been too young to recognize what it was.

But now that my magic had awakened, I craved the spells hidden within its pages.

The book I found that day in Cirilla’s attic was a grimoire of sorts. It was filled with all types of clandestine spells I had never seen before and hadn’t expected to find the grimoire of an upstanding family hidden away in the attic. How to create a potion to make someone fall in love with you—something that was taught to be strictly forbidden. Spells shouldn’t alter free will. How to change into a form that was not your own mother given form. I could turn myself into a lion with this spell insteadof a wolf. How to cast a curse that would give you complete control over someone. How to incur physical pain with merely a thought.

How to siphon magic.

---