“Me neither.” I glanced at my twin. “You’re right. We don’t have a choice.”
“Should I be worried?” Raven asked.
“About?” I asked.
“Whatever the fuck you two have been talking about with your secret twin magic,” she said, dropping her hands to her side in frustration. The jacket opened, revealing her breasts and her soot covered skin. She quickly pulled it closed.
“You could tell we were communicating?” Zach asked.
“Yeah, it was obvious you were doing something. Plus, hello, this is magic school,” she said.
“Right,” Zach said.
The bell rang and the hum of conversation and footsteps of dozens of students moving to their next class filled the hall.
“Come on, we need to get out of here,” I said, grabbing Raven’s upper arm.
She tugged it away. “I’ve got another class after this.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you excused,” Zach said.
“You can do that?” I asked.
“For the money our parents are sending to this school, they should let us do whatever we damn well please,” I said.
She licked her lips and looked down at the ground. I could tell she was nervous about something but now wasn’t the time. We needed to get out of the hallway and somewhere quiet so we could try the magic meld.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll go to our room.”
She hesitated, and for a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to follow. Then, she nodded and started moving.
We cut through the students and down the hall to the winding staircase that led up the tower. It was a wide column heading up ten levels above the rest of the building with platforms leading to rooms on each level. Each floor had 4 bedrooms with the exception of the seventh floor, which had only one massive set of rooms that wrapped all the way around the winding interior staircase. That was our stop.
Since our family started this whole place a hundred years ago and still made hefty donations every year, we were given what we affectionally called the sacred suite. In past generations, the massive suite had been used by one child at a time as our family had a strict one-kid policy. They had some weird belief about spreading the magic too thin and believed that having more kids could result in children with no magic, which were seen as lower than shifters to people like my parents. The whole lot of them were a bunch of assholes.
“Here we are,” Zach said, sliding his keycard into the slot. “Home sweet home.”
I gestured for Raven to enter the room and she stepped in, then froze in the foyer. “This is your room?”
“Rooms,” I said. “It’s a suite.”
“Wow,” she said.
I glanced around, taking in the space I rarely stopped to admire. To an outsider, it was probably over the top. The floors were made of gray marble streaked through with white. The walls were covered in black and white damask, textured wallpaper. As you looked into the space, you could see the rich wood floors of the living area and the high end, modern furniture.
Everything in here screamed wealth. Which was exactly what my family was going for when they remodeled it a few years ago.
“Doesn’t exactly screamcollege dorm,” Raven said. “But then again, the canopy bed in my room doesn’t either. They really went all out when they decorated this place, didn’t they?”
“Well, it’s sort of our…” Zach began until I elbowed him in the side.
“They threw us in one room, twins, you know,” I said.
“Right.” She walked into the living area then stopped near an eighteenth-century globe shaped liquor cabinet. Her brow furrowed and she dragged her fingertips along the edge of the globe.
I swallowed hard, wishing those fingers were dragging along my skin. Shaking my head, I tried to push the thoughts of the two of us together away. She was hot for sure, but I had a feeling she was more trouble than she was worth.
Zach walked over to her and set his hand on top of hers, guiding it along the globe until they reached the seam.