Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,1

Maybe, one day, I would scrape up to second-last. “So, who’s up?” Marcel asked.

Genie bounded into the center of the floor before I’d even vacated it. “I reckon I can take you, McCarthy.” (She wasn’t being rude—he’d asked us to leave out the honorifics of ‘Scholar McCarthy’ or ‘Sir,’ to bring a bit of equality to our training sessions. Marcel or McCarthy were fine by him.)

Marcel laughed with the entirety of his barrel chest. “Aye, the wee firecracker. I was wondering when you’d muster the plums after you botched that somersault on Wednesday. I thought you’d be in the Infirmary, seeing stars for a week.” He grinned mischievously. “Though I’ve got to say, you’d have had me if you’d not conked your bonce six ways to Sunday.”

“No clue what you just said,” Genie retorted. There was laughter from the rest of the ten-strong class. Since finding the Door to Nowhere and rescuing our fellow hunters, we’d earned our classmates’ respect, and they ours: Teddy Isherwood, Suranne Redmond and Gem Phillips (formerly the Ponytails), Colette Requin, Ayperi Khoury, Adrian Gunn, Pia Sund, and Dauda Jalloh.

It had been a lengthy road to reach this level of friendliness, especially for Genie. She hadn’t forgotten the way things had started, and she hadn’t let them forget their initial behavior, either. But she’d taken it upon herself to educate them instead of ignoring them, and she’d given them plenty of food for thought. Like when she earned the top ranking during our Arena sessions and they used to quip, “Well, you only won because you’ve got all that Atlantean juice in your veins.” They didn’t necessarily think they were saying anything wrong, but she’d called them out on the comment and explained the way it made her feel—as though she had no right to win, or that she’d somehow cheated because of what she was—and forced them to unpick the nuances in what they’d said and understand why it was more of a slur than they realized. Or when older students or graduates made a sly comment about her, or Atlantis, and our classmates stayed silent. She asked them, outright, why they hadn’t spoken up, and made them see that silence was almost as bad as hurling an insult. Slowly but surely, they’d realized the error of their ways and had begun to unlearn the judgments that had been instilled in them since birth. After apologies, the reading of Genie’s suggested texts, and vows to be better (plus, proving that they meant it by creating a no-tolerance policy of any anti-Atlantean sentiments), a truce had finally been struck. It was a good start.

“Aye, well, you should count your lucky stars—all them ones that were swimming round your noggin last time we met in combat—that I didnae come from Glasgow, else you’d still be figuring out what I was saying after I’d already wiped the floor with you.” He maneuvered into position, stepping behind a line of white duct tape at the far side of the room while Genie emulated him on the nearside, closest to where the class was watching from a safe distance.

It had been three months since our martial-arts training began, but six months had somehow raced by since the Door to Nowhere incident. Our classes changed up with every season, and as spring had turned into summer, we’d had two new classes piled on top of the old ones. Our schedules were now fit to burst. Five days a week, from eight in the morning until eight at night, we sprinted from one two-hour lesson to the next. We had half-hour breaks in the mornings and afternoons for studying, and a half-hour for lunch—or a trip to the Infirmary, depending on how the day had gone. And once the day was over, we usually had a stack of homework to plough through: essays, notes-studying, preparing for the next day’s sessions, that sort of thing. Most people tried to get some of that done in our study breaks, but not me.

For my part, I used my private study periods to visit Victoria at least once a day. She’d become my mentor, researching ways that I could better use my ability and guiding me through what she’d found. As it was a new ability, it came with a learning curve for both of us. At the moment, we were looking into the possibility that I might be able to Purge at will, to reduce the chance of a Purge sneaking up on me. The