Blood Pledged (Arcane Arts Academy #3) - Elena Lawson Page 0,58

it was clear he was trying to project his voice enough so I could hear it clearly as I passed. I clenched my fists and my jaw, resisting the urge to set my magic loose on him. On anyone who thought they had a say in what happened to my familiars.

I didn’t like that they were out in the tool shed without me. I tried to send them a message down through the bond, to leave, go for a long long run, but I couldn’t concentrate hard enough to do it.

“We should all go home,” another girl said as she spoke to her friend in the stairwell leading up to the female dorms. “It isn’t safe here with them—” Their conversation came to a grating halt the moment they saw me.

I rushed past, shaking from the effort of containing my rage. A problem I hadn’t even thought of seemed to be Granger’s, and my, biggest hurdle now.

The parents.

It didn’t matter what the authorities discovered, or that they had no proof. If the parents of the students at the academy believed my familiars were a danger to their children, they’d pull them from the school.

And that was just one thing. If Granger didn’t agree to do as they demanded, they could start a petition to have her removed from her position. And if she was removed, who knew what vile person the council would instill in her place?

Someone who would act first and ask questions later. The parents were out for blood—the blood of my familiars—and I was terrified that it was only a matter of time before they laid this beast hunt to rest at the expense of Cal and Adrian. All it would take was one angry parent too blinded by grief or rage to see reason. They’d know the spell to do it. Everyone knew that one. It was illegal. Lethal. But would the parent of a dead child care about the consequences?

I wasn’t a mother, but I knew that if someone took away someone I cared that much about, I’d cast first and think about the repercussions later.

I wanted to think I was smarter than that, but I didn’t think that was true. In that one terrifying second when I thought Cal and Adrian were dead, one of my first thoughts was that I could crush the person responsible.

Right now, for those parents, the people responsible were Cal and Adrian, with or without proof. I’d known it would be bad the moment I realized how it would look to find her there, but I never dreamed it would be this bad. If I had, I’d… well, I wasn’t sure what I would’ve done. Hide the body, maybe? Move it? Something. I would have done something.

I ripped the door to my room open, ready to have a good scream into my pillow, but Bianca was standing there when the door opened instead.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and all the frustration mounted, coming to a head. Was I okay? No. No, I wasn’t okay. Sensing as much, Bianca wrapped her arms around me, brushing her hand over my hair, trying to soothe the ache. I could barely hear her over the sound of my sobs. “They didn’t do it. I know it and the authorities know it. This will all blow over, you’ll see.”

I wished I believed her. The alternative was too grim to bear. There was only one thing now that could lay this whole thing to rest, and that was finding the beast who was responsible for these grisly deaths and bringing them to justice.

It was the only way to save them.

And I would find a way to do just that… right after I had a good ugly cry.

I didn’t leave my room again that day. Bianca spent half the day with me, studying quietly on her bed, before Marcus came to the door to ask her if she wanted to study in the library with him. She’d blushed when he’d asked and tried to say no, glancing back at me as though to say, she needs me right now. But I urged her to go. She deserved a break from the shit storm that was Harper Hawkins.

That, and I felt horrible that I’d forgotten all about Marcus and how they’d been spending some time together. She never mentioned it and I, terrible friend that I was, never asked.

The sweet guy even brought me a dinner plate, figuring Bianca’s roommate who hadn’t come down for dinner must