Bloodrage - Helen Harper Page 0,95
There had been no evidence that I could do anything magical at all until Mrs. Alcoon’s so-called friend, Maggie May, had placed the heavy chain around my neck. What if it was only the necklace that gave me the power in the first place? I’d had no luck in taking it off myself but I pondered the very real possibility that the green fire and the weak inveniora that I’d recently been manifesting were nothing other than traces of the necklace’s power, not my own personal power. I thought about what else I could do. Hear an alpha’s Voice. Initiate my own Voice to Corrigan. And to nobody else, I reminded myself. What if that was some odd offshoot of growing up with shifters that had made that happen? As far as I was aware, there had been no other human in history that had spent their formative years with a pack, so I had no other evidence from which to draw on.
I suddenly smiled. It could just be that after everything, then maybe I actually was human. If I could prove it, then the mages would have to release me from my oath and they’d have to remove the stasis spell from Mrs. Alcoon. And I could forget the Otherworld had ever existed. Then I remembered the strange stuff my physical blood actually achieved and the smile disappeared. I’d broken through a faerie ring. I’d also used it to snap a spell around a mage’s cage to free myself from them. Even more recently, it had helped me open up the vampires’ stupid glass display cabinet. Fuck. No, I wasn’t human. My teeth worried at my bottom lip. What if I was, as Solus suggested, some kind of daemon?
The growing ire in the voices to my left snapped me out of my reverie. Glancing over, I was stunned to see a group of mages, most of them black-robed, clustered around, and virtually all of them with flickering blue flames sprouting from their hands. I scrambled to my feet; what the hell had them so pent up and ready to attack? As soon as I standing and tall enough to see, I realised.
Stood in front of the mages were three vampires, recognisable immediately from their pale skin and lean builds, along with the fact that one of them was clearly my old pal, Aubrey. He was holding something in his hands and arguing loudly.
“You did something to it. Put some kind of spell on it because you thought you’d play a joke on us. Well, the joke’s on you. Now it’s yours and you can deal with the wraith yourselves.” He threw the object at the feet of the crowd of mages who, almost as one, sprang backwards. With a note of pride, I saw that Alex and Thomas were virtually the only ones standing their ground.
“We did nothing to it. You brought this on your own heads by stealing it from the wraith in the first place. The Palladium is no longer our responsibility.” Alex’s voice was calm, but I could definitely detect an edge of stress underlying it.
The Dean pushed forward. “You can take your piece of wood, and yourselves and get the hell off our land.”
Aubrey licked his lips, red eyes flashing. “Oh, don’t worry. I will, as you say, get the hell off your pitiful little school’s grounds. But you can keep the piece of wood. We no longer want it.”
I felt hot ire flicker inside me. How dare he think that just because Tryyl was causing him a few problems, he could dump the bloody Palladium back here? There was no way I was going to let this one slide by. I walked up to the group.
“Aubrey, fair’s fair. You wanted the Palladium and you got it. It’s up to you to deal with the consequences.”
The Dean looked more than slightly irritated that I was sticking my nose in, but before he could say anything, the vampire cast me a disparaging glance and spoke. “Oh, look it’s the little were-hamster.” He took a step towards me. “Except you’re not a were-hamster, are you? I don’t know what you are.”
Well, master of the scary undead, that makes two of us. I drew myself up proudly. “I am a student at this school and you will not leave that thing,” I jerked my head at the fallen Palladium, “with us.”
The Dean stepped up beside me. “For once, I agree with Initiate Smith. You will leave and take