Page 28 of Wicked Bonds
Fifteen
Rose
The next week goes by in a blur. I show up to class. I keep my head down. I don’t choke anyone, which is a win. The mark on my arm still throbs, like a perpetual shock collar reminding me to be a good girl and not to run away.
Classes are strange. Magical Theory is endless lectures about ‘ethical applications’ while the real lesson is figuring out who’s got enough power to make the rules in the first place. Elemental Magic is a repeat of humiliation, now with a new flammability contract, signed by me and witnessed by the department chair. Alchemy is better, but there’s still a running bet on how many weeks it’ll take before I poison myself.
Then there’s Shielding. We file into a windowless room that smells like a musty dungeon. Of course, Soren is the instructor. Because who better to teach you how to keep your head from being invaded than a demon whose entire existence is about breaking into minds at night?
He starts class by leaning against the whiteboard, spinning a piece of chalk between his fingers. His shirt is half-unbuttoned, and I can see that he has tattoos all over his chest, symbols of some kind. I wonder what they mean and decide that they probably just sayassholein Enochian.
He doesn’t call roll. He doesn’t even introduce himself. Instead, he looks over the room slowly, lets his eyes linger on a few nervous-looking kids in the back row, then finally lands on me.
He smirks. I give him the finger.
Let the farce of this being an appropriately professional professor-student interaction begin.
“Shielding,” he says, “is about as useful as a condom with holes in it, if you don’t know what you’re doing.” He pauses, letting that land. A couple of students snicker.
“So let’s not insult either of us. I’ll be teaching you how to keep the monsters out of your mind.” He raps his knuckles against his skull. “And it starts by knowing what you’re dealing with.”
“The trick,” he says, “is not brute force. Brute force is boring. Anyone with enough energy can break down a wall. The real skill is in infiltration. Seduction. You make them want you inside their head.”
He looks right at me as he says it. I keep my eyes on my desk and twirl my pen.
By the end of class, we’re told to partner up and probe each other’s shields.
There are not enough years of therapy available to me, for the amount of shit that happens at this academy, but I guess we’re doing this.
My partner is a guy named Dima. I’ve seen him in Magical Theory, where he usually sits at the back chewing gum and ignoring the teacher. He’s rumored to be part djinn, which apparently means he’s good with fire, bad with authority, and has a wicked temper.
“Wanna go first?” he asks, not making eye contact. His accent is soft, barely there.
“Sure,” I say, instead ofabsolutely fucking not. I close my eyes, try to remember the three steps Soren outlined, which are to focus, then set your boundaries, then reinforce.
I picture a wall. I picture a bank vault. I picture the world’s biggest panic room. I don’t feel any different but I keep at it. Then I wait for the attack.
Dima’s approach is clumsy, a battering ram. I can almost feel the heat as he shoves his way into my thoughts. I push back, and there’s a resistance, like when you put two magnets together the wrong way. For a second, I think I’m winning, but then my wall crumbles, and suddenly my brain is just full of static and fire.
I gasp. My arm jerks on its own, the mark burning so bright I see red behind my eyelids. Dima pulls back fast, looking freaked out.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It’s fine,” I say, but he looks so weirded out right now that I want to know what the hell he saw in my head. I tried to make my mind blank, but that never works.
Soren is across the room in half a second. “Problem, Miss Smith?”
“No.” I don’t look up.
He kneels next to me, his eyes boring into mine. “Your shields are ineffective. But there’s something else. Feedback?” He tilts his head. “We can work on that.”
Dima slinks away. I’m left sitting there with Soren’s promise of extra help hanging over my head like a guillotine.
That night, I sit on my bed, textbooks open and useless, trying to follow the instructions for building a psychic shield. The steps are stupidly simple: focus, define boundaries, reinforce. But when I try to do it, the thoughts in my head start chasing themselves in circles, and the mark on my arm burns and itches worse than ever.
I try again, setting the timer on my phone for five minutes. “All you have to do is visualize it,” I mutter, already feeling ridiculous. I picture the wall, bricks on bricks, topped with barbed wire. For a second, it holds. Then I feel a pressure, like someone leaning against the other side.
The lights in the room dim, and the air gets warmer, then the wall in my mind shatters. A rush of memories and emotions flood in. My mother’s face, the smell of gin, eight-year-old me packing my little suitcase quickly and crying when I realized I left my favorite stuffie back in the motel room. All of it blurs together, a swirl of painful moments.
