Trial By Fire (Schooled in Magic Book 7) Read Online Free PDF Page B

of cheap wine lay everywhere...
    ... She’d gathered them up, when she’d been much younger, and taken them back to the shop for a handful of coins...
    The memory was so strong it shocked her. No one had raised an eyebrow at a nine-year-old girl handing back empty booze bottles. No one had really given a damn, yet...
    Her stepfather slapped her, again. “Get to cleaning up the mess, you worthless bitch,” he ordered. The force of the blow sent her staggering back to the floor, tasting blood in her mouth. “I want this room clean by the time I get back from the bar...”
    He knew about my dreams , Emily thought. How did he know?
    She looked down at her hands. They weren’t childish any longer. Her chest was growing - her stepfather leered, but she ignored him - and she felt older. How had he known? She wasn’t in the habit of sharing anything with him, certainly not her innermost fantasies. He couldn’t have thrown the suggestion that she had magic in her face unless he’d known she had dreams of magic...
    “You’re not real,” she said, as she stood. She looked down at herself again and saw the shirt and trousers she’d worn in the Nameless World. No, the shirt and trousers that she was still wearing in the Nameless World. Her memory clicked and she put two and two together. “You’re just a Nightmare Hex.”
    Her stepfather snarled at her, his eyes moving over her chest and leaving trails of slime over her breasts, then lunged forward. Emily snapped into a fighting crouch automatically, silently thanking Sergeant Harkin for his lessons, then caught his arm as he took a swing at her. He seemed smaller, somehow, as she pushed him aside before she knifed her hand into his eye, where he was vulnerable. She felt something squish under her finger; her stepfather jumped backwards, screaming in pain and rubbing his eyes desperately. Emily watched blood spilling from his eye, too much blood to be real, and she knew , beyond all doubt, that it was an illusion.
    “You’re definitely a Nightmare Hex,” she said. She’d seen one before, in Blackhall, and it had almost killed her. “You’re not real.”
    “Bitch,” her stepfather swore at her. “I am real.”
    Emily smiled. “Then why are you shrinking?”
    She forced herself forward as he glared at her. “You’re a monster,” she said, as coldly and precisely as she could. “You dominated my life ever since you married my mother. You overshadowed my life, you made me scared of everything, you destroyed my hope. You...”
    Her stepfather, now the size of a small dog, stumbled backwards. “I’m not scared of you any longer,” Emily said. She’d met Shadye, and Mother Holly, and Aurelius’s namesake; her stepfather was nothing but a petty bully. Her later enemies had been threats to the entire world. “And I will not allow you to dominate my life any longer.”
    She lunged forward...and her stepfather vanished in a flash of light. Emily blinked - the light had been bright enough to hurt - and looked around. She was standing in the chamber, looking at the dead crystal; the Grandmaster was standing beside her, his face worried. A twitch from below told her that Aurelius was waiting for her. She bent down and picked up the snake, wrapping it around her wrist. It hadn’t been real.
    “I wouldn’t have expected a Nightmare Hex to last so long without constant renewal,” the Grandmaster said. “They’re fantastically complex pieces of work.”
    Emily nodded, then blinked as she realized the Grandmaster had to have seen his greatest fear, too. How else would he have known what she’d encountered?
    She looked at him. “What did you see?”
    “Whitehall coming apart around me,” the Grandmaster said, shortly. There was something in his voice, an edge, that warned her not to ask any more questions. “What did you see?”
    Emily shuddered. “My stepfather.”
    The Grandmaster gave her a long look, then turned to lead the way into the next chamber. “I