Page 8 of The First Trial
Finally,blessedly,my feet touched the ground, and I almost bowed down and kissed it. Scaling a multi-storey building wasn’t really too much of an effort for me, at least physically. I may have been sweating with the effort, my breath sawing in and out of my lungs as adrenaline worked its way back out of my shaking body, but it wasn’t from exertion. I worked out plenty to give me the strength and stamina to keep myself from falling to my death, so that wasn’t the issue. No, my problem was that I fuckinghatedheights. I could handle most things other people feared, like snakes and spiders and public speaking. But heights? They left me a quivering, hyperventilating mess.
Nope. Not for me.
After catching my breath and lowering my blood pressure, I jogged around the dorm building to where the crowd had gathered on the other side, my lungs seizing for an entirely different reason as soon as I saw the black mass taking up a significant portion of our already vast academy grounds. It was an imposing structure, the black of the rock so dark it would have been impossible to pick out the intricate, swirling designs that proved it wasn’t a natural formation but a hand-carved behemoth.
‘Junie!’ a shrill, feminine voice, one I knew well, called my name.
I turned to find my old roommate, Kendra, heading straight for me, hazel eyes wide and flashing with disbelief and uncertainty. Her wild red curls waved dramatically around her face and shoulders, almost like they were taking on a life of their own as the breeze blew thick strands in front of her face that she kept batting away with frustration. I wouldn’t have called us friends, exactly, though she was nice in a shallow way. Shejust wasn’t the most trustworthy person on the planet. Her big mouth got not only herself but countless others into trouble, whether she meant to or not. It was the largest reason I kept an emotional distance between us. I couldn’t let someone like her get too close because my secrets wouldn’t stay so secret for long under her care, but we had fun together on occasion.
Which was why I struggled to understand why she was storming in my direction like hellhounds were snapping at her heels, and she wanted to sic them on me instead. Her face was twisted into a thunderous scowl as she surged towards me, and it took me a moment to notice she wasn’t alone. Casey and Georgina were hot on her heels, eyes darting between me and Kendra like they had no clue what was going on. Neither did I. Kenny had never been angry at me before. I felt like I was missing something.
‘How insane is this?’ I pointed towards the mysterious structure in an attempt to draw the attention away from me and back onto something more important. When it didn’t work, trepidation had me taking a step back when she halted far too close and got right up in my face.
‘Don’t you give me that, missy. Wherewereyou?’ she snapped, and I felt like a little kid with my hand caught in the cookie jar. She couldn’t possibly have any clue… right?
‘What do you mean?’ I hedged, taking another step backwards as if physical distance would save me from her wrath. The action only seemed to incense her further, and her clueless shadows cast me twin looks of suspicion.
‘Don’t play dumb with me, Juniper. You were supposed to meet us for drinks last night, but you never showed, thenthishappens? What did you do?’ she accused, her voice whipping through the crowd and silencing the mutterings in a wave as they caught onto the potential of a fight. Or answers, though they were looking to the wrong person for those.
‘Okay, wait a minute,’ I started, hands up as if my palms could ward her off. ‘We didn’t have plans last night, because it was a Friday, and you know I never do anything on Fridays,’ I argued my case, internally wincing when I caught Oz’s eye in the mass of bodies. If anyone figured out I was spending my Friday nights with him, without being able to defend ourselves thanks to the magical gag order holding our tongues, we both knew people would assume we were sleeping together. Blech.
‘Right! You’re AWOL every Friday night, and you don’t come back until after lunch on Saturdays. It’s like some sort of weirdritualor something,’ she continued throwing the accusations, each one feeling like a nail hammering into my coffin. Not because she was right, but because there was no way for me to defend myself. My stomach churned when the mutterings started back up, egged on by Casey and Georgina, and I inwardly cringed at the attention being drawn my way.
‘And now this!’ she gestured vaguely behind her towards the big black… thing. ‘This isyourfault. I just know it.’
‘Now, hang on a minute,’ I began to protest, my own anger rising, but another voice cut me off.
‘Come on, Kendra. Don’t be ridiculous. How could she have had anything to do with this?’
A familiar handsome face appeared between us. My stomach twisted for an entirely different reason when Hawthorne Ramil stepped forward to block me from my ‘friend’s’ verbal attack. Brown hair slightly too long on the top flopped over his forehead and into his eyes, uncharacteristically unstyled like he’d just rolled out of bed. To be fair, that was the case for most of us, and a cursory glance around the green showed a wide variety of nightwear and bedheads.
Hawthorne was no different, and because I had zero willpower when it came to that man, my eyes dragged down his form, a slow heat building low in my stomach at what I saw.He wore a grey tank top that did nothing to hide the dips and valleys of his lean but muscular chest, and it highlighted the way his waist tapered into a point at his hips like a flashing neon sign. A pair of grey sweatpants hung off his slim but toned hips, the material clinging to a particular bulge that wasveryclearly outlined. Damn…
I bit my lip, face burning, and hoped he hadn’t caught me checking him out, because I’d been secretly crushing on him for years, but I couldn’t act on it now matter how much I wished I could, because he was Oz’s best friend.
I wrinkled my nose in disdain when Kendra’s demeanour immediately softened into something more flirtatious and less combative as soon as he appeared, and it was so fake I had to force myself not to rear back in shock. She had never once shown an interest in him, but when her eyes flickered to mine, a challenge sparking in them as she twirled a strand of her hair around her finger, my opinion of her lowered further than I ever thought it could go. In all the years that I’d known her, I had never considered her negative or malicious, but I was seeing a whole new side to her that had come out of nowhere, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.
Plus, she needed to stop ogling Hawthorne. That was my thing.
‘Thorne,’ she simpered, moving closer so that they were almost touching, batting her lashes at him. She flapped them so fast it was like she was trying to take flight. ‘You don’t understand. She’s always disappearing, and she never tells me where she’s going, what she’s doing, and thenthishappens? It’s the only explanation. She has to be responsible somehow.’
‘Has anything happened before when she ‘disappeared’?’ he retorted, lips pursed in annoyance, but she wasn’t cowed.
‘She must have been planning. Can’t you see it? She’s been cavorting with the devil this whole time!’
Snorts of disbelief sounded throughout the gathered crowd, even from me, and a few people lost interest in the altercation. When someone started spouting bullshit about devil worshipers as a legitimate source of a mystery, people were bound to write them off.
I imagined Hawthorne’s unimpressed expression was a mirror of my own. His square jaw clenched, and the muscles ticked as he ground his teeth.
‘I highly doubt that, Kendra,’ he deadpanned. Many humans believed that witchcraft or sorcery, or whatever they wanted to call it, had a direct link to Hell, that magic was Demonic in nature, and anyone who participated in it was evil. Those who believed in the supernatural, anyway. Most just dismissed it all as a bunch of hocus pocus, which was exactly how we in the magical community viewed the Devil. We had our religion, the proof of which was a tangible thing running through our veins and clear to see after we performed anactualritual.
Devil worshipping… Absolutely ridiculous.
I pushed passed Hawthorne, eager to take back the reins and put this bitch in her place. Did I shiver in pleasure as our bare arms brushed? Of course. I was hopeless, but I could own it.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re getting out of this, throwing around accusations like that, but you sound like an idiot.’ I levelled her with my most disappointed look, attempting to emulate the one my mother had perfected while raising me. ‘We may not be the best of friends, but I never would have expected you to try and trash me like this. Whatever is going on here, pointing fingers and stirring the pot isn’t helping.’
She looked around as if to gather back-up from the bystanders, but when she realised she’d lost her audience, her entire demeanour switched up yet again, and she turned a sneer on me that I had only ever seen her throw at people she’d deemed beneath her. Until now, I had never made that list. Orperhaps I had, and I’d just never noticed her going behind my back.
