“Fuck you, Great-Grandmother,” I whispered, so angry I could have cried, and got ready to shove myself up onto the knife so I could reach the mana crystal. And then I heard the knock on the door. A knock on a school night, with everyone else sane in their own cells and study groups by then—

Talking was difficult. I pointed a finger at the door and thought, Open sesame. A stupid kid spell, but it was my own door, and I hadn’t locked it for the night yet, so it shot open, and Orion was standing in the doorway. Jack whirled round, his hands wet and red with my blood. He’d even smeared some on his mouth to make the finishing gruesome touch.

I laid my head back down and let the mighty hero get on with it.

THE AWKWARDLY APPEALING SMELL of roasted flesh was filling the room when Orion dropped to his knees beside me. “Are you—” he started, and stopped at the obvious negative.

“Tool chest,” I said. “Down the left side. Packet.”

He dug into my tool chest—didn’t even spare a glance to check the innards after he opened it—and got out the white envelope. He ripped it open and pulled out the thin linen patch. Mum had made it for me, beginning to end: she tilled the field, planted the flax, harvested it by hand, spun and wove it herself, and she chanted healing spells into it and over it the whole time. “Wipe up my blood with one side,” I whispered. His face was tight with alarm, but he looked at the floor, doubtfully. “Okay if it gets dirty. Take out the knife, put the other side on the wound.”

Thankfully, I sort of blacked out when he pulled the knife, the next ten minutes gone to confusion, and when I surfaced, the patch was on. Jack’s knife hadn’t been long enough to go all the way through me, so there was only the entry wound, and it wasn’t too wide. The healing patch was glowing faintly white, hurting my eyes, but I could feel it working on my abused innards. In ten minutes more, I was ready to let Orion help me move onto the bed.

After Orion settled me there, he heaved Jack’s charred corpse out into the corridor. Then he went to my basin and washed the blood off. When he sat back down on the bed, his hands were shaking. He was staring down at them. “Who—who was that?” He looked more shocky than I felt.

“You haven’t bothered to learn anyone’s names, have you,” I said. “That was Jack Westing. And he’s the one who ate Luisa, if it makes you feel better. You can look in his room and you’ll probably find something left behind if you don’t believe me.”

That brought his head up. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was leery of getting shivved by a sociopathic maleficer, as I would think might be obvious under the circumstances,” I said. “Thanks for going round loudly asking questions about Luisa, by the way, that didn’t at all set him off.”

“You know, it’s almost impressive,” he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. “You’re nearly dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met. You’re welcome again, by the way.”

“Given that you’re at least half responsible for this situation, I refuse to thank you,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment, and suddenly the five-minute warning bell was ringing for curfew. It hadn’t felt like that much time had gone by. I put my hands down and touched the patch gently, testing. Sitting up was not going to appeal for a long time. The blood had gone back into me, so I felt much better, but not even Mum’s top work could make a ragged gut wound disappear instantly. I reached out for the mana crystal and hung it back round my neck. I could forget about sleep tonight, and I was going to have to use some real power. Not only hadn’t I given in, Jack was dead, for a net loss of malice in the world. The maleficaria would probably go on a rampage.

Orion was still sitting on the edge of my bed as though he’d been there the whole time, and he didn’t make any move to get up. “What are you doing?” I said irritably.

“What?”

“Did you not hear the warning bell?”

“I’m not leaving you,” he said, as if that were obvious.

I eyed him. “Do you not understand the principle of balance at all?”

“It’s a theory, first of all, and even if it’s true, I’m not going to live by it!”

“You’re one of those,” I said, with heartfelt disgust.

“Yeah, sorry. Do you mind my staying, or should I leave you alone with a gut wound to be attacked all night?” I’d evidently pushed him so far he’d found some sarcasm himself.

“Of course I don’t mind.” It wasn’t going to make things any worse for me, after all. There’s a practical limit on how many maleficaria can come into your room at once, and I was already on the menu as tonight’s special offer. Having Orion around could only help. It’s very roughly the same principle that makes being inside the school during puberty better than being on the outside.

Curfew rang on schedule a few minutes later. Whatever kept the maleficaria from attacking Orion usually, it couldn’t overcome the scent of blood in the water that I was obviously giving off, not to mention the temptation of two students doubled up in a cell. There was a squabble outside the door over Jack’s body to start off the festivities, a sound of things wrestling and gnawing horribly. Orion stood there in the middle of the room with his hands flexing restlessly, listening to them.

“Why are you wasting energy? Just lie down until they come in,” I muttered.

“I’m fine.”

The noises outside finally stopped. The first rattle of my door came shortly after. Then a glistening black ooze began to seep under the door, thick as tar. Orion let it come halfway through and then framed it with his hands held up, making a diamond-shaped opening between them. He chanted a one-line water-spout spell in French and then blew a whistling breath through his hands. A torrent of water gushed out the other side, firehose-strong, and dissolved the ooze into a thin slick that ran along the cracks between the floor tiles and slurped down the round drain in the middle of the cell floor.

“If you’d frozen it, you could have blocked the opening,” I said after a moment.

He threw an annoyed look at me, but before he could answer, there was a sudden hard vacuum-popping sensation in my ears: something big had come through the air vent. He jumped in front of my bed and threw a shielding spell over us just in time as an honest-to-goodness incarnated flame erupted at the dark end of the room, inches away from the void. It bashed my desk out of the way and started lashing blows at us with a huge thrashing whip-coil tentacle of fire that splashed gouts of flame over the surface of the shield.

I grabbed Orion’s arm as he swiped a streak of dust off the top of my headboard, about to use a dust-devil spell. He yelled at me, “I’m going to kill you myself at this rate!”