Page 33 of Friend
I shook my head. I couldn’t describe it. Despite having passed three other hallways without pause, there was something different about this one.
It’d been only recently that I’d embraced my precognition abilities, my onmyoji skills mostly centered on combat. But… I couldn’t ignore this.
She was somewhere down here.
I was pulled forward, searching along the obviously empty space. My feeling was rewarded as when I moved past one of the classrooms, the door swung open.
Bianca stumbled out, crashing into me.
“Bianca!” I grabbed her shoulders as she jerked back, almost falling to the floor. She relaxed slightly at the sound of my voice, and her gaze flickered up briefly to meet mine.
“Finn…” Her voice was suspiciously strangled, out of breath, and she was hunched over slightly, holding her stomach.
Cramps? But I didn’t think it was that time of the month again.
Regardless, what was she doinghere?
My wariness grew and my discomfort settled in my chest as I looked at her. Now that I was focused and my heartbeat had returned to normal, it was obvious to see that she was upset. Not to mention, she appeared to be out of breath. Her hair had been in a neat braid this morning, but now, there were loose strands falling around her face.
“What happened?” I asked, noting her sick pallor.
“N-n-nothing!” she stuttered, no longer meeting my eyes. But even so, she was unable to hide her darkening, cloudy gaze.
My heart sank—this was what she looked like when we first met.
“We were just t-talking,” Bianca said.
I didn’t have a chance to ask who ‘we’ was, although I suspected.
“Abernathy!” Adrian Collins leaned against the door frame, arms crossed and a self-satisfied smirk on his face. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Bianca tensed at the sound of his voice and her attention moved to the floor.
My attention flickered between the two of them, and a white-hot hatred began to burn under my skin.
“What did you do?” I asked him.
Why had I spent all day chasing after Cory? It was Adrian who was the bigger problem.
I never regretted anything more.
“Nothing. Like the Dunce said, we were only talking,” Adrian replied—and for someone who’d been a mindless follower for the entire time I’d known him, he was full of arrogance now. “Mostly about how, if she knows what’s good for her, she’ll stay away from Cory.”
There was no mistaking the meaning behind his words.
My vision flashed red, and before I could stop myself, I’d already closed the distance between us. Adrian barely had time to breathe before I’d grabbed him by the front of his shirt. I pulled him from the door, dragging him into the hallway. I threw him against the wall, following him, and his back crashed loudly onto the surface. I stepped forward, pressing my forearm against his neck, and his breath ended in a strangled gasp.
“You willnotthreaten her.” I was unable to keep the scathing out of my voice. My temper had been a problem for so long, and I’d worked to control it, but at moments like this—during intense stress or worry—it was so hard. “If you have a problem, you come to me.”
“But—” He gagged, and I relieved the pressure, but only slightly. “We… we were just talking,” he protested with a strangled voice.
“Well, stoptalking,” I warned him, allowing the heat to pull from the ground, to wash over me. I’d rarely called on my abilities during a confrontation, but this time, I’d make an exception. He could feel it too—his eyes widened as fear touched him, and his pallor tinged green.
This was his first, and last, warning.
“We’re in the same class!” Still, Adrian unwisely chose to argue. “We have to talk sometimes.”
“You don’t get to talk to her at all,” I growled. The pungent stench of burning flesh filled the air, and Adrian hissed in pain. He’d been up to no good and had been torturing Bianca for at least the length of the school year. “You don’t even get to look at her. Leave her alone.”
