By the time I got down to the lab, Orion was hallucinating so hard he thought I was a pythagoran myself and tried to throw an immobilizing spell at me. If it had landed, I suppose we’d have died hallucinating together; how romantic. I caught it and hurled it right back at his head, and he promptly toppled over with a crash, taking out three stools on the way down. At least that got him out of my way so I could get on with vaporizing his cauldron of increasingly toxic dye, along with a substantial chunk of his lab table. Overkill, but I was vexed. I didn’t get any less vexed after dragging his lockjaw-rigid body out into the corridor. I vented my spleen by haranguing him for the next five minutes while he still couldn’t move, but he was still high as a kite and only kept staring at me glassily until I finished and then he said in a soupy way, “El? Is that you?” Then the immobilization spell wore off and he sat up and vomited purple all over my feet.
So he had no business getting himself into avoidable trouble with his classwork, and he knew it, and he could just stuff his large frosted beach ball into the nearest bin. He squirmed away from my glare and looked an appeal over at Chloe, who’d been trained up to be nice to him all her life. “Well, I think it’s probably dead, but you could try a scrying on the internals,” she said cooperatively.
“Yes, you could, if only you weren’t six weeks behind on your schoolwork,” I said through clenched teeth.
“I’m not!” Orion said. “I’m only four weeks—” He stopped himself too late and glared at me while everyone at the table, including even Chloe, made the appropriate squawks of horror at him. I smirked back over folded arms. That evening he got told off by Magnus and Jermaine, by which I mean they cornered him in the boys’ bathroom and earnestly talked to him about the need to catch up properly and how silly he was being to let his work get away from him for no reason when it could be so easily managed. I wasn’t there to hear it, but I didn’t need to be; they were enclavers.
I did see them going in after him, so I hurried to brush my own teeth and then waited in the corridor until Orion sloped out again, properly chastened; I fell in with him and said, “So, Lake, going to let your enclave pals shove your schoolwork off onto some poor sod desperate to get in with them?”
He threw me a look of outrage: having got him into trouble in the first place, couldn’t I at least have the decency to let him just look away while Magnus made his work conveniently disappear? But as I clearly couldn’t, he sighed and muttered, “No,” reluctantly.
I nodded and asked very sweetly, “Going to keep shoving the consequences off onto me?”
The right answer to that question wasn’t very hard to find, either, although he did scowl at me before handing it over. “No.”
“Good,” I said, with satisfaction, and stopped by his bedroom door and pointedly waited for him to go and shut himself in with his overdue homework.
He looked at the door and then back at me. “El—if the cleansing runs down in the graduation hall again—”
“At New Year’s, you mean?” I said. The end-of-semester cleansing isn’t nearly as thorough as the graduation day cleansing. School maintenance had to be cut back a great deal in quantity and ambition once they had students doing it instead of teams of grown professional wizards coming in through the graduation hall. One of the places where they decided to cut back was the mid-year cleansing. Only about a quarter of the walls of mortal flame go, in order to save on wear and tear. That leaves plenty of survivable escape routes available, so the cleansing really only winnows back the more mindless mals.
Of course, where a lot of the smarter ones retreat to is the graduation hall. If the machinery did run down there, then we’d very likely end up with all the mals cut down back to the nonexistent levels from the start of the year.
“Yeah,” Orion said, glumly. Poor him: the greatest hero in generations and no evil monsters for him to fight. Precious made a dismissive squeak from her cup, but lucky for him, he wasn’t in range for biting. At least he wasn’t trying to complain of it to anyone but me, the one other person who had a decent reason to dislike the idea. If the mals did get cut back that far, the school would probably be able to funnel all of the attacks right back at me again.
But I wasn’t going to commiserate with him out loud. I was in range, and I’d been bitten twice that week already. “Much difference it’ll make if you get yourself turned into goo beforehand because you couldn’t be arsed to do a few worksheets,” I said. “It’s thirteen seconds more to New Year’s, and then you won’t need to do any more classwork ever, unless you completely flunk everything. Do you need another helping?”