“What?” I moaned.
“If they kick you out of here, you don’t get to go back to the village. I don’t know what happens to those dwellers, but trust me, it isn’t anything great.”
And there it was.
I was suddenly up, on my feet, and out the door, Emmy right behind me.
I had no idea what happened to those dwellers either, but I wasn’t planning on participating in crushing practise with Rome, while Coen tried to pin me up against the main gate with a few crossbow bolts. Not getting kicked out was looking like my best option, even though it wasn’t such a great option all on its own.
I only had to clean and serve one table at breakfast, while Emmy took the table next to mine. Both tables had been—thankfully—filled with perfectly normal, sacred, spoiled, and slightly sadistic sols. Not the special demon-sols whose rooms I had cleaned. It felt like the five of them—who were all the way across the other side of the room—spent a lot of the morning locking their bright gem-like eyes on me, but I could have been wrong. I hoped I was wrong, because the only reason they were all paying attention to me, was because Rome had told them that I was their new dorm bitch. I’d be the first female they’d have had to deal with, and probably they were thinking up new tortures to suit me. Specialised torture.
“Where are you going now?” Emmy murmured to me as she dashed into the kitchen with an armful of plates. I was on my way out, heading toward the classroom.
“Classroom 346. We need to stand in attendance in case any of the sols need us to blow their noses or wipe their butts.”
I was almost out the door when I said that, which meant my voice carried further than I intended. As I turned toward the dining hall, I froze. Every single sol within hearing distance was looking at me—no, glaring at me. Holy baby gods.
This was it. The moment I was kicked out of Blesswood to be churned into bullsen feed. As I slowly started backing up, toward the kitchen doors, one of the Abcurse brothers got to his feet. It took me a few beats to recognise which one, because terror had my eyes functioning at about half-sight.
Yael.
Maybe he was about to persuade me to take my clothes off and parade around as punishment.
He was the first to stand, but his brothers soon followed. One by one they stood, and somehow all the eyes in the room shifted to them. I was just about to make a run for it, since this was a golden opportunity, when Yael spoke.
“Nothing happened … nothing to see here …” His voice was low, hypnotic. It rolled out of his mouth and avalanched across the room and I found my mind fuzzing over as I tried to follow his words. “You have not heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, go back to your food.”
Just like that, the room resumed its previous level of activity. A group of female sols to my right were squealing over their hair or something. Oh no wait, one of them just had a spider on her head. Those weren’t squeals of excitement. A group of males to my left resumed bicep-curling one of the recruits.
Blinking rapidly, trying to clear my mind, I tentatively stepped into the room. I waited for the jeers. For the teachers to pounce on me. But no one noticed me. No one was paying attention at all.
I swivelled back to face the Abcurse table. It was the centre of everything, the entire hall, the entire academy populous. And it was empty. Empty?
Why had Yael used his persuasion to help me? Had they saved me just so that they could take me down themselves? I wasn’t sure what was worse: knowing that I owed them one now, or that things were about to escalate like that one time I told a little lie to explain why I hadn’t done the home-reading Teacher Harris had given me, only to accidently put the entire village into a state of lock-down. Turns out, ‘my mother caught a plague’ has a few holes in it, as far as excuses go. I stumbled out of the dining hall toward the classrooms and just as I crossed into the first hall, I could have sworn there was a whisper on the wind.
We’re not done with you yet.
So now I was hallucinating. Like actually hallucinating. Hearing voices and crap. Hearing the voices from hell. Maybe they were calling me because the Abcurse brothers were about to end me. It was a given that I was going to go to hell—all dwellers did. The sols got to go to heaven, unless they were chosen to become a god, in which case, they went to Topia. They got more than a second-chance at life. They got a first chance at immortality, at a living heaven. Or actually … still a dead heaven, but a dead heaven that was still connected to the living world, somehow.
And here I was philosophising about a whole bunch of realms that had nothing to do with me. Because I was crazy now. I heard voices and everything.