The Scholomance (63 page)

“Please, get me
out of here,” he whispered, dragging a knuckled hand against his eyes. “I’m
begging you. I’ve been a fuckup all my life and I know I’ll only slow you down,
but I can’t stay here. They’ll eat me when you’re gone.”

He believed it. More
importantly, so did Mara. Whether she’d wanted him there or not, Devlin had
been too obvious a fixture at her side. When she left, her enemies would become
his.

And to be
honest, if she’d wanted him gone, really wanted it, she could have done it that
first day. She hadn’t. She’d kept him, tossing him the scraps of her company
like he was any starved and hand-shy dog in an alley, knowing he would never
make as good a pet as the one she’d lost, but he would serve to fill the void
for now. Easy for the largest part of her to say, ‘So what?’ and act like it
didn’t matter, but there was still a piece of her heart that recognized her
responsibilities, a piece which had once had the chance to go her entire
lifetime without killing anyone and had lost it in a single moment of blind
rage.

“All right,” said
Mara.

He looked at her
without confidence, without faith.

“Yes, I mean it,”
she said with a sigh. “I’ll get you out if I can. But don’t get all crazy with
it. I’m warning you now, if it comes down to her or you—”

“I know,” he
said. “It’s her.”

He was okay with
it, too. There was no more ego left in him, no more ambition. Eleven years of
demonic tests, dodging lions as he scampered from one impossible art to
another, had wrung all hope out of him. He did not see himself as worth saving.
He didn’t see a life out there for him if he was. All he had left was the fear
of death right now, and all the bad ways there were for it to find him.

Mara fell asleep
listening to those doom-filled thoughts. From the Panic Room, she watched
Devlin tuck her in, one limb at a time, just as she remembered her many au
pairs doing in her childhood before they went down the hall to do the sexthing
with her father. When he was done, he crawled onto the bed beside her, careful
not to touch her as he eased a corner of one robe out to use as a blanket. He
watched her eyes move as she dreamed (that was actually kind of creepy, seeing
her own face alone in the Mindstorm), believing now was the only safe time to
think, now while she slept.

He was afraid of
her. She’d made him nervous for some time, but now there was fear predominant
over all. She had become a Master to him, all-powerful, unaccountable to any
will but her own. He was afraid of her and with fear came the helpless
awe-filled love of any primitive for his unpredictable and pitiless totem-god. He
curled on his side at the foot of her bed and wanted nothing in the world, not
even escape, more than he wanted to please her, his volcano, his comet, his
moon.

His Master.

Well, thought
Mara, watching him from the Panic Room. There were worse things to be.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

M
ara awoke to first-bell with a slight headache
throbbing behind her eyes, and a strong erection pressing at her from behind. She
gave Devlin a jab with her elbow and he scooted away, mumbling sleepy excuses. She
didn’t take it personally. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man and
this was morning.

How did she
feel? Her monitors in the Panic Room told her she was fine, if a little worn
out. Being in the body gave her a much clearer picture of the little aches,
pains, and disorientation that persisted, but she knew she was much improved
even from yesterday.

“Are you hungry?
You want to go get some food?” Devlin asked, scratching at his armpit, mostly
as a means of hitching at the lie of his robe. He was hoping she’d go to the garderobe
or something, give him a little privacy to take care of himself…and then he
remembered she was psychic.

“Plus, it’s my
room, asshole!” Mara snapped, making him jump. “If you have to do that, do it
somewhere else.”

Breakfast. She
wasn’t sure she had it in her to fight the crowd at the table, but the lure of
solid food was strong. “And yes, go get me some food,” she commanded, shoving him
off the bed with her foot. “And then go to class. I don’t know whether it’s you
or me, but one of us is making the other one nervous.”

“I’ll go,”
Devlin said hurriedly, and ran from the cell holding his robe up and out from
his body like a comic housefrau running from a rat. She listened to the slap of
his sandals until the stone passage swallowed it up, then rolled onto her side
and closed her eyes again. Tired, she was so tired.

Maybe she really
should have stayed with Kazuul. His bed was softer and, suspect broth aside, she
had to admit he’d taken good care of her.

Mara didn’t need
taking care of. And besides, part of his bedside manner apparently included
letting his friends feel her up. The same friend he’d impaled on a spike for
taking liberties with her just a few days before. No, she would not be going
back to Kazuul to convalesce.

But she would go
back once she’d recovered. She still needed him, and anyway…and anyway…

It felt good,
being with him. As angry as he could make her, and vice versa, when they came
together, it was…well, it was magic. She didn’t always like him and there were
plenty of times when she hated him, but when he put his arms around her, she
was ready. Even now, half-asleep and too weak to walk to breakfast, she could
think of his mouth on hers and feel herself wanting him.

Mara dozed, not
in the Panic Room where she could keep watch, but here in her own flesh,
feeling warm and oddly contented in spite of her vulnerability. The next thing
she felt was Devlin’s hand shaking her awake. He’d brought her two loaves of
brown bread and three hard, wrinkled apples, and he insisted on sitting there
and watching while she attempted to eat it.

Her stomach,
which had for days taken only small sips of nourishment from Kazuul’s lips,
cramped warningly after only a few swallows, but she still felt better,
stronger, just for having chewed. She told him he could have the rest, but he
put it all on the bookshelf, “For later,” as he said.

“Now go to
class,” Mara mumbled, tugging her neophyte’s robe up around her shoulders and
thinking of blankets, all Kazuul’s blankets.

“I’m not sure I
should. You look awful.”

“Best thing for
me is sleep and I’ll sleep better if you’re not staring at me. Go away.”

“What if someone
comes and I’m not here?” he argued.

“What if someone
comes and you are?” Mara said with a snort. “What the hell could you do about
it?”

He hunched in on
himself unhappily. “I’d never let anyone hurt you.”

“Not if you
could help it,” she agreed. “And we both know how unlikely that is. So go to
class, Devlin.”

“Later, okay? I’ve
been worried about you. I just…” He shook his head, staring fixedly at his
feet, knowing it was no use trying to explain. The truth could only sound more
and more pathetic. “I just need to make sure you’re all right for a while.”

“I’m fine,” said
Mara, but she was falling asleep even as she said it. In another minute, she
was in the Panic Room, watching on monitors as Devlin rearranged her on her bed
of sand. Again it struck her how gentle he was, and how strange a quality that
was to find in someone here. She wondered for the first time where he’d learned
to tuck a person in, if he had little brothers waiting for him somewhere in the
world…heck, if he had kids. She was right on the edge of waking up to ask, but
let the urge drift away. She’d known him too long to start getting personal
now, and once she’d gotten him out of here, she was never going to see him
again. No doubt that would come as something of a shock to him once he found
out, but that was his problem. Even in the Outside, he was going to have to
learn to handle his own problems.

But he was right
there in the Mindstorm every time she looked up, his concern blown out to three
dimensions, surrounding her. He was there to cover her up every time she kicked
a robe off, and to feed her bites of bread and hold her cup during her little
snatches of wakefulness. He even ran and got her a chamberpot so she wouldn’t
have to walk to the garderobe, and he emptied it without complaint. He did
everything a devoted nursemaid should do, in fact, except go away, and at the
end of the night he was still right there, crawling up onto the foot of her bed
like a collie to sleep.

“You can’t live
here,” Mara muttered. “You’re going back to your cell tomorrow.”

“Or the next
day,” Devlin agreed.

“You’re an idiot
and I want you out of here.”

“Goodnight,
Mara.”

She sighed. “Goodnight.”

*
         
*
         
*

He stayed with
her the next day too, but by the third, she was strong enough to drop a psychic
seed in his head and make him go to class. It wasn’t quite as comfortable for
her without him, but it was quieter and she was beginning to need the quiet.

She was still
exhausted, not so much in her body, which had responded amazingly well to the
two enormous meals Devlin provided each day (she ate everything but the meat, the
origins of which were still questionable), but in her mind, where she had never
been weak before. She actually needed to lie there and recover from a simple
suggestion, something she’d been doing fairly regularly since she’d been ten. It
was embarrassing, but other than that, she did feel better.

She rested for
what might have been an hour after Devlin finally left her, and then left her
cell, testing her strength with a walk to the ephebeum. It was busy, but not
crowded. The first meal had ended and enough time passed to let the students
clean themselves up if they wanted to. Now, the steadiest traffic was that
which flowed up the wide stair to the Nave, but it came to an uneven stop so
that they could all stare at Mara.

Facing into all
those eyes, she checked the Mindstorm, but felt no menace, or at least, nothing
pressing. There were plenty of people who hated her, but hatred was fine as
long as it came alloyed by fear, and most of the people looking back at her had
seen her kill. Students killed each other, of course, they killed each other
all the time, but not the way Mara had, not one after another after another,
slashing her way through screaming people like a scythe through wheat, without
any effort, without any remorse. They said she was here to find someone, and
most of them had, at one point, wished bitterly that it might have been their
own self, but not anymore. No one could possibly be safe who had fallen under
those terrible white eyes.

Mara’s tapping
mind touched someone then, someone she had never expected to touch again. She
homed in on it, frowning into a knot of white-robed neophytes, and at her first
step towards them, they all drew apart, mercilessly exposing the very one she
needed to see.

Loki looked at
her, his hands half-raised, and a terrible rictus of a grin stretched over his
strained features. He didn’t look the same at all—she didn’t need a
point-by-point comparison in the Panic Room to see that someone had given him a
whole new face—but it was him, and the longer she stared at him, the more his
nerves tightened until they burst out of him as one of those unmistakable
donkey-like brays of laughter.

She hadn’t killed
him after all. Mara had only to turn her eyes in the Panic Room and see it all
again in the memory monitor: her hand smearing eyes and nose and mouth together
and leaving him to choke. But somehow he’d survived.

Mara tapped at
him again as he stood there, frozen in her stare, and saw him staggering over
the blubbery mass of boneless Proteus in her absence, seizing the spike that
had been made to kill her, and plunging the pointed tip into the center of his
face where his new skull was thinnest, opening a hole for one life-giving gasp,
and then he ran.

It hadn’t been
easy to find someone who would repair him, not with La Danse dead, not when
everyone knew that he had been with the ones who had tried to take Mara down. Oh,
but they’d been falling all over each other trying to be the one to fix up Mara’s
friend, and what were a few pinpricks when Loki was trying to breathe through
what he was pretty sure had been an eye socket? He’d managed to buy someone
eventually, and for the full contents of La Danse’s cell, he had even gotten
his face changed, so why was she staring at him like she knew who he was? Even
his name was different now!

Mara looked
away. She gazed across the open arena of the students’ wing, but the floor was
smooth and unstained. She’d given Suti’ok and his hounds a lot of work, but
they’d done it well. There was no sign at all of her rage. Nowhere, except in
the survivors.

Loki, terrified,
laughed again, covering the telltale sound as best he could with both shaking
hands. Mara heard, but felt nothing. Let him live. She’d killed five people who
hadn’t deserved it; she could let one live who had.

Mara left the
ephebeum. She wasn’t alone when she first entered the bath, but she was by the
time she’d worked her robe off. They all bowed before they left her, and left
whispering.

She supposed she
should have expected it, and further supposed it didn’t bother her. She had
killed nine people, nine, when only five had attacked her. She owned that now,
and she wanted to be sorrier than she was, but she wasn’t. All she could feel
was a grim sort of confidence that now there wouldn’t be any more problems,
tainted by the very faintest tinge of regret, not so much for the lives she had
taken as for how it had changed her. No matter how powerful she was, or how
she’d been provoked in her previous life, she had never killed anyone and she’d
never intended to. She was not a good person and she knew it, in spite of
Connie’s insistence to the contrary, but she was not a killer.