“Yeah,” Aadhya agreed. “The school wants you to go maleficer. What could you do if you decided to start using malia?”
If you had me make a list of the top ten questions I go to great lengths to avoid asking myself, that one would have comprehensively covered items one through nine, and the only reason it wasn’t doing for item ten as well was that So how do you feel about Orion Lake had quietly crept onto the bottom of it. But it’s a long way down from the rest. “You don’t want to know,” I said, by which I meant I don’t want to know.
Aadhya didn’t even slow down. “Well, you’d have to get the malia somehow—” she was saying thoughtfully.
“That wouldn’t be a problem,” I said through my teeth. She wasn’t wrong to raise the question, since that’s the top roadblock facing most would-be maleficers, and the solutions generally involve spending a lot of time on intimate encounters with entrails and screaming. But my own main concern is how to avoid accidentally sucking the life force out of everyone around me if I ever get taken by surprise and instinctively fire off something really gargantuan. For instance, I’ve got this great spell for razing an entire city to the ground, which will certainly come in handy if I ever turn into one of those people who write furious letters to the editor about the architecture of Cardiff, and I suppose it would do to wipe out any mals on the same floor as me. Along with all the other people on the same floor as me, but they’d probably be dead by then, since I’d have drained their mana to cast the spell.
That did finally stop her; she and Liu both eyed me a little dubiously. “Well, that wasn’t creepy and ominous at all,” Aadhya said after a moment. “Okay, I vote for you not turning maleficer.”
Liu put up an emphatic hand to agree. I let a choked snort of laughter come out and put up my hand. “I vote no, too!”
“I’m even going to go out on a limb here and say that pretty much everyone else in the school will be right there with us,” Aadhya said. “We could ask people to chip in for you.”
I stared at her. “Hey, everybody, it turns out El is some kind of mana-sucking vampire queen, we should all give her some mana so she doesn’t drain us dry.”
Aadhya scrunched up her mouth. “Hmm.”
“We don’t need to ask everyone to chip in for you,” Liu said slowly. “We could just ask one person—if it’s Chloe.”
I hunched my shoulders forward and didn’t say anything. That wasn’t a terrible idea. It might even work. That was why I didn’t like it. It had been almost a month since we’d gone down to the graduation hall, and I still remembered what it had been like with a New York power-sharer on my wrist, all that mana right in front of me like getting to plunge my head into a bottomless well and drink cold water in careless gulps. I didn’t trust how much I’d liked it. How easy it had been to get used to it.
“You think she’ll say no?” Liu said, and I looked up: she was studying me.
“That’s not…” I trailed off and then blew out a sigh. “She offered me a spot.”
“In an alliance?” Aadhya said.
“In New York,” I said, which only means one thing in here: an enclave spot, a guaranteed enclave spot. For most people, if you’re lucky enough to get picked by an enclaver to join their alliance, it means their enclave will look at you, maybe give you a job. Usually four hundred kids graduate each year. Maybe forty enclave spots open up worldwide, and more than half of them will go to top adult wizards who’ve earned them with decades of work. A guarantee of one of those spots, fresh out of school, is a prize even if you weren’t talking about the single most powerful enclave in the world. Aadhya and Liu were both gawking at me. “They’re freaked out over Orion.”
“After you’ve only been dating two months?” Liu said.
“We’re not dating!”
Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards. “After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but totally looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.”
“Thanks ever so,” I said, dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.”
“To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said.
I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.”