Witches Burn at Dawn ✔

17. Yaroslava

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For the first time in my life, I feel welcome in St. Daktalion city. I feel like I belong to something bigger than my little world of doubts. It's a strange thing though, dangerously fragile.

Nilam and I spend the rest of the night at the apartment, but Mir doesn't come home. A part of me worries that I've gone too far, forcing him to feel things for me that he'd once felt for Polina, but then another part of me remembers what he made me feel, and my anger kindles back aflame.

At least I didn't use magic.

A comfortable sort of silence surrounds Nilam and me as we drink tea and watch  TV. We don't talk much, at least until Laverna returns from the club, a trail of smeared lipstick on her neck and a tipsy smile across her lips. As I see Nilam guide Lav to the couch and pour her a cup of tea, nodding to her inarticulate babbling I can barely make sense of, I wonder what kind of past these two share. They talk like they know each other, know each other's fears and dreams.

When Laverna dozes off on the couch and Nilam snoozes in front of the TV at dawn, one question keeps bothering me. I don't want to sleep. I don't sleep. I can't sleep.

I haven't closed my eyes, not for a minute, since I woke up in the graveyard, and I don't feel the need. Is it something that happens when you're only half alive? Your bones sleep for you? Or is it because my soul is still somewhere in the dark, and I have nothing inside this body to travel across the dreams? Because I'm a meager reflection of myself, of my memories, not even whole and complete? Can it even be fixed?

Maybe it's a gift not a curse, for what kinds of horrors my subconsciousness would have invented otherwise.

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At lunchtime, Adélard and Kadri arrive. I don't know how, but Ady has found hook-nosed Euklas who Nilam saw in Jasna's visions.

"You're not coming?" I grimace at my discouraged voice when Nilam turns in the opposite direction as we all walk into the street. Laverna has sneaked out of the apartment an hour ago, too.

"Naw, I won't go near the university." Nilam shakes his head. He looks sleepy, his blue hair disheveled, and yet the flash in his eyes suggests he has a busy plan for the day. "I haven't been there for any of my last exams and...Well, I have plenty to do in my club." He gives me a lazy smile. "You'll be fine."

I hope he's right because the ice-melting glares Kadri cuts me from under her blond bangs all the way to the university make me queasy, stripping me of all my confidence.

The University of St. Daktalion stands on the outskirts, on the rise from where the old part of the city looks like a painting of wide streets and stone buildings. Two angelic statues guard the campus entrance: one of them is white, its wings spread and its head held high gazing upon the sky; another is black, its wings folded, its head dipped low as if staring into the underworld beneath their feet.

According to legends, the university ground is where those first four mages lived, from where they vanished forever one night. And the angels were put around the city to protect the lands from the bygone evil.

The city mayor, Corneille Lishan, and the most respectable members of the society whose children study here invest great money to make the university look polished and regal, but behind the green lawns and shiny traceried windows, the walls are still doleful and radiating ancient mysteries. I shiver at the thought of demons those mysteries might conceal.

"Yara, will you recognize Euklas if you meet him?" Ady asks as we walk along a narrow path, avoiding the main lanes. The campus is crowded like a market square.