Semua Bab Blood Moon: Bab 1 - Bab 7

At seven in the morning, the Pacific was a bruised, churning slate grey, and the narrow strip of wet sand connecting the mainland to the academy’s island was slick with kelp and minor curses. To my left, my sister Celestia was having a stand-off with her third-year Transfiguration textbook. The textbook, which had developed a predatory set of leather teeth over the summer, snapped viciously at her knuckles every time she tried to open it."Just cast a minor binding hex on the spine," I muttered, adjusting the straps of my satchel."I tried!" Celestia snapped, her voice carrying over the roar of the surf. She pinched her fingers together, whispering a low incantation. The book lifted about three inches, flipped upside down, and dropped open, pages-side down—or rather, teeth-side down—into the wet sand. "See? I’m aggressively average, Layla. In a family of magical overachievers, I’m practically a statistical error.""You have magic, Cel. That automatically puts you above me in the food

Magical athletics are, as far as I can tell, just a highly institutionalized method of committing legal manslaughter under the guise of school spirit.By Friday afternoon, the entire academy quad had been converted into a volatile carnival of team rivalries for the upcoming Autumn Broom Polo Tournament. If you thought regular high school football fans were intense, you hadn't seen a faction of third-year fire-witches actively trying to enchant the stadium banners to project literal, roaring pyrotechnics every time their team scored."Move it, human!" a voice barked from above.I ducked instinctively as a shadow streaked past, missing my head by a matter of inches. It was Jessalyra, the undisputed star of the Obsidian Spire Broom Polo team. She was a fierce, sylph-blooded fourth-year who could pull off a flawless vertical spiral dive without losing a single hairpin. Right now, she was hovering upside down on a sleek, silver-trimmed racing broom, effortlessl

The confrontation in the courtyard was already drawing a crowd by the time Celestia and I tried to slip past."She didn't just walk out of the wards!" Dread was snarling at Mr. Harrison, the school's head of security, who was currently looking like he wished he’d chosen a career in taxidermy instead.Dread wasn't a werewolf himself, though you wouldn't know it by the company he kept. He was a puck—a shape-shifting fey of low, chaotic magic. In the grand, snobbish social hierarchy of our world, pucks were positioned barely a step above werewolves, who were as good as mud. Because Dread chose to lead and run with a pack made almost entirely of werewolves, the academy’s elite treated him with the exact same brand of cold, nose-wrinkling disgust they reserved for flea-bitten werebeasts.Right now, he was standing up for one of his own. "Clementine is a freshman," Dread barked, his shoulders tense. "She’s terrified of being alone, and she left her pack-scented

I told myself I was just returning a library book.It was a flimsy excuse even by my standards, but the freshman dormitory wing was technically on the way to the returns cart if you were willing to take the long way around the east cloister, past the potions greenhouse, and down a corridor I had absolutely no legitimate reason to be in. I took the long way around.Clementine Thorne's door was propped open with a rubber wedge, and the room beyond it looked exactly like what it was: a crime scene being quietly, efficiently converted back into an ordinary dorm room.Two staff witches I didn't recognize — mainland contractors, judging by their unfamiliar blue robes — were working in practiced silence. One was folding a stack of flannel shirts into a packing crate with the crisp, joyless efficiency of someone who did this often enough to have stopped thinking about what it meant. The other was levitating a shelf of hand-drawn star charts into a second box, the