the spell wouldn’t have been able to bring her true. She might have been even less happy about it than I was, though. Now she knew exactly where she was going to end up if she went back to using malia, and she’d have to do it again anyway, or completely change her entire strategy.
Orion didn’t stop hovering. He walked me back to my room after dinner and obviously wanted to come inside. He’d probably have stayed with me through the night again, the wanker. “And again, I’m fine,” I said. “Aren’t you worried there’s someone in need of a hero somewhere? You could always prowl the senior res hall if you’re that bored.”
That won me a glare, at least. “You’re welcome,” Orion said. “Really, no big deal, I’m up to seven times now—”
“Six,” I said through my teeth.
“This morning?” he said pointedly.
You didn’t save me from anything today, I almost said, but I wasn’t completely sure that was true, and anyway I still didn’t want to talk about it, so I just turned coolly on my heel and went into my room and shut the door on him.
Then, since I was in fact fine and now no longer in a nice comfortable dissociating haze, it was time to inventory the damage, which was pretty appalling. The crystal I’d used to channel to the rest of my store was also cracked. A full nineteen crystals had been completely drained. I had only eight filled ones left. And I was alive, after taking on a maw-mouth, which did put things into a different perspective. I sat down on the bed with the cracked crystals in my hands, staring at them. It’s one thing to have the strong sense that I could cast any number of insanely powerful murder spells. It’s another to have proven it quite that dramatically, even if the only person I’d proved it to was me.
Which was just as well, obviously. I’ve long entertained detailed fantasies of dramatic public rescues—several of them lately featuring a grateful and admiring Orion, to be honest—and the reaction of my fellow students, bowled over and regretful they’d never seen the real me before. But the real me had just single-handedly killed a maw-mouth, with liberal use of one of the most powerful and unstoppable killing spells on the books, so if my fellow students saw the real me, they wouldn’t decide that after all I was a lovely person they should have been nice to all these years. No, they’d start thinking I was a violently dangerous person they should have been nice to all these years. They’d be scared of me. Of course they’d be scared of me. I could see that now with perfect clarity, despite the pathetic dreams that I’d hung on to all these years, because I was scared of me, too.
I got up and got my sophomore-year Maleficaria Studies textbook down from the upper shelf—I checked the undersides of that shelf and the one above, and ran the back of my hand across all the books before I took it down—and found the pages on maw-mouths. There was a reference for the journal article. I found it and looked up from my desk into the pitch black and said, “I want a clean, readable, English-language copy of issue seven hundred sixteen of the Journal of Maleficaria Studies.”
I could get specific because that’s the opposite of hard to get. Journal of Maleficaria Studies might sound academic and dusty, but it’s only pretending. There’s a very passionate audience for new information on the things that want to eat us. Every enclave in the world supports the research, in exchange for a boxful of copies each month, and any independent wizard who can afford it will get a subscription; most who can’t will find others and club together to get a shared copy.
This issue was quite a recent one, not twenty years old. Orion’s mum was already on the board of editors: OPHELIA RHYS-LAKE, NEW YORK, eight names from the top of the masthead. She’s higher up now. The article on maw-mouths took up half the contents, and the historical section went into detail on the one reputable modern account of taking one down.
A double handful of wizards in the Shanghai enclave in China were scooped up and sent away by the authorities during the Cultural Revolution—not for being wizards, they just looked suspiciously rich—and the wards on the place went downhill quite fast after the sudden