the wall with a hard thud.
My vision wavered as Olivia battled with an overturned chair before rushing to me. “Lily! Are you okay?”
I doubled over laughing. “That was hysterical! Let’s do it again!”
My best friend rolled her eyes, completely exasperated with me, but this was the best I’d felt in ages.
“Well, clearly my ‘feel-good’ spell needs some work.” She gripped my arm and gave me a light shake. “Do you feel up to going to class? We really can’t miss this one, even if I did just overdose you with dopamine.”
“Class? That sounds awesome!” I exclaimed as I jumped to my feet. Tingling sensations ran over my head and I steadied myself against Olivia, then smiled as it passed. “Last one there’s a rotten deviled egg!” I shouted before I burst into a run.
Olivia yelled after me, totally trying to ruin my good time, but I decided I was definitely not going to be a rotten deviled egg and I ran all the way to Monster Studies with a giant smile plastered on my face.
Monster Studies—or any of my classes—were way better when high on whatever spell Olivia had overdosed me with.
For once, my mind wasn’t racing with all of my responsibilities, worrying about what my Virtues were up to, if we’d all die in the next second when Calamity decided to drop the other foot, if the Dean found me out or remembered who I was, or the other thousand-and-one things that could go wrong that resulted in death, destruction, and absolutely suckiness.
Now nothing mattered and I just felt… good.
Apparently feeling good left no filter on my mouth, so Olivia had to tell me when I was going off the deep-end, which was easy to do when I didn’t care about anything. The latest monster didn’t help, either. The warlock-vampire was a smokin’ hottie and apparently I was a little too vocal about my opinion on that front. Plus it was just too plain cool to learn that his magic revolved around time. I planned on studying him because even if he wasn’t the vampire from Olivia’s vision, he had power over freaking time. It made me wonder why he didn’t just zap back to when he was captured. Our guess was either some timelines couldn’t be changed, or he needed sufficient blood to have the strength to work his magic.
I didn’t really care about his reasons. If he could really manipulate time, maybe I could use him to go back and stop Hendrik from getting Cole locked up in the first place.
And, yeah, if I got an eye-full of sexy male vampire while I was at it, then no harm, no foul.
For once, I didn’t feel like shit for appreciating a guy with good looks. That’s just the kind of girl I was, being one-third succubus and all, and maybe it was time to accept that.
Humming a tune to a song I couldn’t quite remember, I filled in the lyrics with meaningless babble as I worked my way around another empty classroom. I wandered in a small circle as I dropped tiny red orbs Olivia had given me. While I thought that the new monster was hot as Hellfire, I wasn’t stupid. He could still rip my throat out and I so did not want my black blood to get on my new uniform.
How to contain a sexy vampire who had access to witchy-gifts? Use his warlock powers against him, of course.
All of the classrooms needed to be bugged with magic-containment traps and Olivia had put me in charge of setting up new rune nets just in case he ever got out. I wasn’t too concerned, because I’d locked him up myself. The Dean had already starved him to keep him malleable, but Olivia wasn’t going to take any chances.
She was such a worrywart.
I didn’t mind the task of keeping him grounded, though. If he got trapped in one of these bad boys, it would keep him locked in place and right where I could keep an eye on him.
I hadn’t forgotten my purpose. I was going to find Cole and convince him how awesome I was and remind him that he needed to stop working against me. Step one of that plan was to find him, and to find him I needed the Dean to let me into the Monster Arena in the first place. One of these monsters held the key to making that happen, even if I didn’t know how or when, if Olivia’s visions