Bloodrage - Helen Harper Page 0,85

an idiot, he’d have known what you’d be like and how the Dean would react.”

“What I’d be like?” Careful, Thomas, I thought irritably. I might kind of like him now but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still piss me off.

He rubbed his forehead. “You know. All angry at the world and stuff. By keeping you here the Arch-Mage gets to exert a little power because he knows you’ll piss off Michaels. It’s His Magnificence’s way of putting him in his place without anyone getting hurt. It’s pretty clever really.”

Just the tiniest flicker of bloodfire in the deepest pit of my gut answered Thomas’ words. “No-one gets hurt? Are you fucking kidding me? There’s a harmless elderly woman stuck in bloody Tir-na-Nog in a coma!”

Thomas put his drinks down and his hands up, palms facing towards me in a gesture of peace. “Yeah, and you’re not the kind of person to sit back and wait for five years, or however it long it takes to graduate, before she’s released from stasis. So if you were the Dean, what would you do?”

“What do you mean what would I do?”

He sighed. “Imagine that your first reaction to being threatened or put in your place isn’t to violently attack someone. Put yourself in the shoes of the Dean being made to look after a student who you don’t want and who you know is just there to remind you that you’ll never be the man at the top. What do you do?” There was a faintly desperate edge to Thomas’ voice.

I thought for a moment. Killing the student would probably be the easiest, I reckoned, but seeing as how that might not be an option… “You would do something to make the student flunk out. To prove that you were right all along that they should never have been there in the first place.”

“Yes,” said Thomas patiently. “And how would you do that?”

“Well, I guess I’d just sit back and watch them self-destruct. Or attack another mage. Or destroy a priceless painting. Or fail every single discipline.”

“And in case those things don’t work?”

“Then I might do something to help them along a little bit, I suppose. Something to make them look really bad. Like…,” I threw my hands up in the air. “I don’t know. Help me out a bit here, will you?”

“Where does every student have to go no matter what they are studying?”

“The cafeteria?” I asked, feeling rather stupid.

Thomas stayed silent.

A dawning realisation hit me. I was having an epiphany. And not the good kind. “The library,” I said slowly. “You’d plant a trap in the library. Like maybe having an area that’s off limits. That’d make that student think there were some dangerous spells there. The kind of spells that would help them get little old ladies out of trouble. And then that student would go looking for a spell book to help them out with that, and when they found it you’d appear out from behind a corner and accuse them of cheating or lying or being dishonorable or whatever.”

“Bingo.”

I felt slightly sick. “That fucking bastard,” I whispered.

“But you’ve not done it though, have you? You’ve shown that you’re a more honourable person than that.”

I wondered how much of that suggested honour was down to the fact that it just hadn’t occurred to my dim-witted brain that I could even find such a book until Solus had pointed it out. What if I hadn’t been quite so preoccupied or quite so thick? The little flicker of bloodfire was burgeoning and growing, licking its way along my veins with an ever increasing ferocity. Blood roared in my ears.

“Whoa, Mack, calm down.” I must have looked about ready to murder someone, because Thomas stood up off his stool and reached out for my arms. “Seriously, calm down. I’m telling you about this for a reason.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?” I snarled.

“Because I like you! I didn’t want to, but I do. So I don’t want you to do anything stupid and I do want you to get your little old lady out of the state that she’s in. So calm the fuck down,” he reiterated.

I stared at him, realising that I’d pushed my bar stool back and was now standing and facing him. Thomas’ hands were gripping my upper arms with surprising strength and I was dimly aware of the barman watching me steadily from behind the polished mahogany counter, wary in case I was about to kick off inside his