Page 136 of Obsidian and Frost
I wasn’t going to allow anything to ruin this unexpected pleasant experience.
I’d had so few of them that I knew their worth more than most.
I responded appropriatelyas several students waved to me on their way out of class.
I’d assigned two sections for them to read in order to prepare for the next lecture.
We’d move into specific tasks and assignments once more of a base had been established with which to draw from.
I looked up as I overwrote the magic of the levitating texts in preparation for the next professor, as a shadow fell over me.
Lazriel Thaine.
“This is your way of finally doing what I asked, huh?” he spoke, eyeing me curiously.
“What youaskedof me? Is that really how you wish to phrase it?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean.”
I leaned against the desk and folded my arms across my chest. “I will no longer be enforcing a distance between myself and Velra. Does that satisfy you?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered, honestly.
I frowned. “Why is that?”
“She doesn’t like surprises. You must know that. And you showing up here unceremoniously like this is gonna qualify as even beyond that—more like an earth-shattering sort of shock.”
Was it? Was this not what he’d communicated she needed?
Was it not whatVelrahad wanted, what she’d grieved when I’d cut off contact between us?
Before I could answer, Sylas stormed down the gangway. “You’ve got some nerve.”
“Sylas,” Lazriel urged, going to him, and somehow posing as the voice of calm reasoning.
“I understand why you are vexed and—”
A spark of his magic pulled me up short, and then he was sweeping the two of us up in teleportation.
I jolted as we rematerialized in a secluded area formed by heavy foliage at the edge of campus.
“You petty motherfucker!” Sylas shouted at me, fisting his hands in my tee.
I shoved him back with enough strength to send him stumbling several feet away before he managed to catch his balance.
“It wasn’t out of pettiness that I revealed your situation. But you shouldn’t have sent him my way in that manner.”
“He needed it. And you fucking needed it. The fact you took it as a slight and a threat says a fuck of a lot about just how demented and ill-equipped you are.”
I flinched as his words managed to slice far too deep. “Check yourself.”
“The fuck I will. Dropping that bomb on him like that… you deserve every bit of my wrath. Telling him I’m fuckingdying!”
“You are.”
“I’m treating it. It’s stable.”
That was something he told himself to make believe his situation wasn’t as dire as it truly was. And, as it appeared now,something he might actually have convinced himself as being the truth.
