She’d also kept all the standard-issue wooden furniture that I’d almost immediately replaced with thin wall-mounted shelves that didn’t provide loads of dark corners. She even had two half-empty bookcases: her room had just gone double-width in the last reshuffle, which I could tell because she had a bright cheerful mural painted over the wall alongside the bed and was still working on continuing it onto the new space. It wasn’t an ordinary painting, either; I could feel mana coming off it. She’d probably imbued the paint with protective spells in alchemy lab. Even so, I kept my back to the door and didn’t come far into the room. She was snuggled in doing some reading on one of three luxuriously plush beanbag chairs amid a pile of other cushions, and I didn’t trust a single one of them. My hands were itching to pull her up out of the heap before it suddenly swallowed her whole or something. “I’m just asking to borrow mana. I’m running out.”
“Really?” she said dubiously, like that was an extraordinary thing to imagine. “Are you feeling okay?”
“It’s not mana drain or a pipesucker,” I said shortly. “I’m using it. I’ve got three seminars, a double independent study, and once a week I’m stuck with eight freshmen in a room and things try to eat them.”
Chloe’s eyes were all but popping before I’d finished. “Oh my God, are you nuts? A double independent study? Are you making a last-ditch run for valedictorian? Why would you even do that to yourself?”
“The school’s doing it to me,” I said, which she didn’t want to believe was possible, so I spent the next ten minutes standing there with metaphorical cap in hand while she earnestly informed me that the fundamental intent of the Scholomance was the shelter and protection of wizard children, and the school couldn’t act contrary to that intent, as if it didn’t toss half of us to the wolves on a regular basis, and also that the school couldn’t violate its standard procedures, which it also did on a regular basis, and after she had laid out those lines of argument, she finally wound up triumphantly at, “And why on earth would it be out to get you?”
I really didn’t want to answer that question, and I was already sick of hearing her trot out the enclave party line. “Just forget I asked,” I said, and turned to go; she was going to turn me down anyway.
“What? No, El, wait, that’s not—” she said, and even scrambled up out of the heap to come after me. “Seriously, wait, I’m not saying no! I’m just—” and I gritted my teeth and turned round to tell her that if she wasn’t saying no, she could get on with saying yes, or else stop wasting my time, except instead what I did was grab her arm and yank her sideways onto the bed with me as the cushions did have a go at swallowing her whole, and me along with her. Her own beanbag chair had split open along one seam to let out a gigantic slick greyish tongue that swiped across the floor towards us. It moved horribly fast, like a slug on a mission, and after we got out of the way, it kept going and swiped over the doorway, leaving every inch of the metal coated and glistening with some kind of thick gelatinous slime that I was confident we didn’t want to touch.
I always keep my one decent knife on me; I already had it out and was slicing fast through all the canopy ties along the wall over the bed, so I could yank it down to envelop the slug-tongue. That bought us a moment, but not a very long one, since the fabric almost immediately started to hiss and smoke: yes, the slime was bad. I didn’t recognize this particular variety of mal, but it was the kind that’s smart enough to play a very long game, waiting until it can take a victim without sparking suspicion. The dangerous kind. A glistening tip was already wriggling out through the first dissolving hole in the canopy, but Chloe had got past her own instinctive shriek and was grabbing a pot of paint from the rack at the foot of the bed; she threw the paint over it. A gargling noise of angry protest came from under the disintegrating canopy, and it rose to a higher pitch when she threw on another pot: red and yellow streaming together over the silky fabric, staining through and running off in rivulets, coating the thrashing tongue.
The mal pulled the tongue back in through the hole and back under the canopy, making a lot of ugly squishing and gurgling noises underneath that unfortunately sounded less like death throes than a mild attack of indigestion. “Come on, quick,” Chloe said, grabbing another pot of paint and jerking her head towards the door, but halfway there, we ran out of time; there was a large gulping noise and the whole canopy, paint and all, was sucked into the slit of the beanbag chair with a slurp of tongue, and then the whole pile of beanbags and cushions heaved itself up together and came at us in a humping rush.