cult or something. I glared at him. “Not all of us can pull from maleficaria.”
“But—why don’t you pull from—the air, or the furniture—everyone’s got holes in their bedposts—”
He wasn’t wrong. Cheating is a lot harder in here because there’re no small living things to pull from, no ants or cockroaches or mice unless you bring them in with you, which is awkward since the only stuff you can bring is what’s physically on you at the moment of induction. But most people can pull small amounts of mana from the inanimate stuff around instead: leach heat from the air or disintegrate a bit of wood. It’s a lot easier to do that than to pull mana from a living human being, much less another sorcerer. For most people.
“If I pull, it won’t come from there,” I said.
Orion was eyeing me with a growing frown. “Er, Galadriel,” he said, a bit gently, as if he was starting to think I was a lunatic, one of the ones who’d just gone crazy inside. I’d had a wildly horrible day anyway, thanks to him, and that was the final straw. I reached out and grabbed at him. Not with my hands—I grabbed at his mana, at his life force, and gave it a hard deliberate yank.
Most wizards have to work at it to steal power from a living thing. There are rituals, exercises of will, voodoo dolls, blood sacrifices. Lots of blood sacrifices. I barely have to try. Orion’s life force came away from his spirit as easily as a fish on a line, being tugged out of the water. All I needed to do was keep pulling and it would end up in my hands, all that juicy power he’d built up. In fact, I could probably have followed his power-sharing lines to pull mana from all his enclave friends. I could have drained them all.
Even as Orion’s face went wide with appalled shock, I let go again, so the mana went snapping back into him like a rubber band. He staggered back a full pace, his hands coming up defensively like he was ready for a fight. But I ignored him and sat down with a hard thump on my bed, trying not to cry. Whenever I let my temper get away from me like that, I always feel rotten afterwards. It’s rubbing my own face in how easy everything would be if I just gave in.
He went on standing there, hands raised, looking a bit silly when I didn’t do anything. “You’re a maleficer!” he said after a moment, like he thought he was prodding me into doing something.
“I know this is going to be a challenge for you,” I said through my teeth, still fighting back the sniffles, “but try not being an idiot for five minutes. If I was a maleficer, I’d have sucked you dry downstairs and told everyone you died in the workshop. It’s not like anyone would’ve been suspicious.” He didn’t look like he’d found that particularly comforting. I rubbed the back of my sooty hand across my face. “Anyway,” I added desolately, “if I was a maleficer, I’d just suck all of you dry and have the whole school to myself.”
“Who’d want it?” Orion said after a moment.
I snorted a laugh up into my nose; all right, he had a point. “A maleficer!”
“Not even a maleficer,” he said positively. He did lower his hands then, still warily, only to take another step back again when I stood up. I rolled my eyes and made a little jump at him with my hands raised like claws and squeaked, “Boo!”
He glared at me. I went over to where he’d put the rest of the supplies on the floor. The rest of the scrap pieces got shoved under my mattress where they couldn’t be replaced by something unpleasant during the night without my noticing. The drill and pliers got strapped securely down to the lid of my storage chest next to my two knives and my one precious small screwdriver. If you keep things strapped to the underside of the lid, then if they’ve come loose, you can see the straps dangling when you crack it a bit. I’m really systematic about checking, so I haven’t had a tool go bad for a long time: the Scholomance doesn’t waste its time.
I went to the basin and rinsed off my hands and face again as well as I could: I was down to just a tiny