Zodiac Academy Fated Throne - Caroline Peckham Page 0,153

know that everyone I care about is going to be okay. That everyone in the kingdom will be okay. What he’s doing to people, to the Tiberian Rats…” I shook my head as emotion welled in me, threatening to rip me open.

He moved to sit in the chair opposite me, running his palm over his face as he sat back in it.

“I know,” he said heavily. “It’s fucking awful.”

“I just feel so helpless to it,” I breathed, balling my hands into fists. “And dwelling on it only makes it worse.”

“Well…maybe we should talk about something else,” Orion suggested and I nodded, needing that. “How’s school?”

I frowned. “It’s okay.”

“Liar,” he murmured and I sighed.

“Fine, it sucks. Everyone’s miserable, the Orders are forced to be apart, I can’t grasp the next level of illusion spells because Highspell won’t demonstrate anything and just throws me in detention if I try to question her. She basically won’t pay attention to any of the ‘lesser’ Orders at the back of the class and, not surprisingly, all of us back there are starting to fail.”

“Why the fuck are you at the back of the class?” he snarled.

“Because I refused to go along with Lionel’s Orderist bullshit,” I said heatedly and a smirk tugged at his lips.

“Well fuck Honey Highspell, beautiful, I’ll help you with whatever it is,” he said and my throat thickened at what he’d called me. He hurried on like he was trying to ignore that little slip while I held my breath. “I mean, if you want me to.” He shrugged and I tugged my lower lip between my teeth as I nodded.

Anything was better than sitting here and dying of awkwardness. His dark eyes stilled on my mouth for a second and the world seemed to fade into a blurry grey haze around me.

I cleared my throat. “I can picture just how I want the illusion to look, but whenever I do the cast it comes out wrong,” I explained.

“Show me,” he encouraged and I swiped his book from the arm of my chair, realising it was an old tome about dark concealment spells. I laid it in my lap and focused on the leather cover, flexing my fingers over it as I pictured a different cover until King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table appeared over it. Only it wasn’t quite right, the faces were off and the colours didn’t fit. It was clear to see it wasn’t a decent illusion if anyone looked close enough.

“Why did you pick that book?” he asked in surprise and I shrugged.

“It was the first one that came into my head,” I said and he frowned, pushing out of his seat as he moved across the room to a bookshelf and plucked another book off of it.

He shot back over to me and knelt down at my feet, placing the book on my knee beside the one I’d disguised.

“There’s a step you’re missing in illusion. Honey was never any good at it in her training.” He sniggered and my mouth pulled up at the corner.

“But surely she’s hiding behind fifty beauty illusions, the woman shines like the damn moon,” I said.

He grinned darkly, shaking his head. “It’s paid for. She holds the spells of others in that ugly necklace she wears.”

I released a laugh. “Please tell me she looks like the ass end of a rhino normally.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen her without that necklace, but I reckon she’s at least got warts and a hunchback,” he said.

“Maybe she has rotten teeth and a beak for a nose too.”

His hand slipped to the edge of the book, his fingers grazing my thigh as he chuckled. The sound made my toes scrunch up in my shoes and I quickly flattened my smile and looked back at the books. Nope.

“So what am I missing?” I asked.

“You need to practise memory imprinting,” he said. “The more recently you saw something, the better your memory of it is to create an illusion. But that’s very limiting. Unless the memory is particularly clear, you’ll never be able to create a perfect image without memory imprinting.”

“How does it work?” I asked, my heart thumping a little harder as he met my gaze and I felt myself leaning closer to him without really deciding to. I mentally yanked myself back by the hair because hell no.

“You tried to conjure the image in your mind of this book from some old memory, but to become really proficient at this, you