The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (good english books to read .TXT) 📕

Her lips pursed slightly as a thin line of smoke slid out of her index finger, then another from her thumb.

We collectively held our breath and watched both hands issue plumes of slate-gray smoke.

Cori was doing it, really doing it. This was a textbook performance of the exercise, and I was bursting with pride for her.

What happened next was hard to follow.

At first it looked like the smoke was thickening, circling and jamming into an ice cream-like swirl.

The first tiny flash of lighting inside the handful of fog was a pretty surprise.

The second, larger one was accompanied by a slight crash as it hit the grass at Cori’s feet, and we all realized that instead of a smoke screen, Cori had created a storm cloud.

“That’s enough, Cori,” Eve called out loudly.

But Cori’s face was smooth and calm now, her eyes focused on something far away, as if she were no longer present in her body.

The thunderstorm in her hands ballooned outward, sprinkling anyone within a ten-foot radius of her with a small, but driving rain. Several students squealed and scrambled out of the way.

“Smoke screen, Cori, not thundercloud,” Eve called out, striding over to try to put a stop to it.

Cori blinked as if waking up and lifted her hands slightly.

At just that moment a bolt of jagged lightning blasted out of her hands, hitting a statue of an archer on the edge of the circle.

Amazingly, the statue wasn’t harmed, but instead blinked to life. He lowered his bow and arrow, and looked around at all of us in confusion as we stared up at him.

There was just enough time for him to take a breath and open his mouth as if to speak, before he turned to stone once more.

For one golden instant, we all caught our breath.

Then the statue toppled over, his body position no longer balanced in the way the sculptor had intended.

After that, everything seemed to go in slow motion.

My eyes traced the trajectory of the falling statue to Esme’s head below, but there was no way for me to get to her in time to do anything about it.

Eve flew across the circle, moving faster than I would have thought possible, muttering the words of a spell as she did.

Esme barely managed to raise her arms over her head as the statue fell.

A gust of air moved past us all, rustling our skirts and playing in our hair, and somehow halting the fall of the statue long enough for Esme to move out of the way, but not before the archer’s stone arrow made contact with her outstretched arm.

Eve released her spell and the statue hit the grass with a resounding thud as it cracked into two pieces.

“My arm,” Esme yelled dramatically, as her friends gathered around her. “That thing almost killed me.”

I looked over to see if Cori was okay, but she was already running back toward the school, sobbing.

I moved as if to go after her.

“Stay, Bella,” Eve commanded. “Let her be.”

I stepped back, sorry that I had to leave my friend, but unwilling to argue. I was in enough hot water already with being so distracted all day.

“Okay, let’s see this injury,” Eve said, striding over to Esme with a dubious expression.

The other girls stepped back to reveal Esme, sitting on the ground with her dress arranged becomingly around her, clutching the nasty-looking cut on her forearm.

“It’s going to scar,” she moaned. “How can I be forced to take classes with an out-of-control gutter witch who is allowed to put an ugly scar on me without punishment?”

“If you’re worried about ugliness, you might want to watch your mouth, Esme,” Eve said sharply as she snatched a scarf from the neck of one of the onlookers and wrapped it tightly around the wounded arm. “We don’t use those slurs here. I’m going to the library for a healing book. Try not to start a war, or any more rumors, while I’m gone.”

The group went silent.

“What’s a gutter witch?” I asked Anya quietly, although I had a pretty good idea from context that it wasn’t anything good.

“It’s not a real thing,” she said firmly. “Just a stupid name some of the legacies have for those of us whose parents didn’t attend a magical academy.”

“How nice,” I said. “Is Cori going to be okay?”

As a fellow target of the mean-girl contingent of Primrose Academy, I felt for her. At least I didn’t have to put up with it for much longer.

“Of course,” Anya said. “She’ll just cry it out in the storage room next to the library like she always does. She doesn’t believe me, but I keep telling her that even though she’s struggling more now, she’s going to be more powerful than anyone else in class later. It’s totally worth it.”

I nodded, but inwardly wasn’t so sure that Cori wanted to be all that powerful. She was such a kind and caring soul. The power to use weather as a weapon didn’t seem to suit her. She was more the type that would use her magic to keep it from raining on someone’s picnic.

A few minutes later, Eve returned with a leather-bound volume in her hand. She marched over to Esme and paged through it as she stood before her.

Even from across the circle, I could feel the power of the thing. The only book in the library I’d handled that had that kind of force was the one with the raven inscribed on its cover. And that was only when I actually touched it. This book must be in a whole different league if I was picking up on it from so far away.

“What is that?” I asked Anya.

“It must be a book from the vault, or she wouldn’t have gone for it herself,” Anya said. “The more powerful healing tomes are kept in the tree.”

“Lucky, Esme,” I thought out loud.

“Uh, I guess so,” Anya said. “It probably would have been luckier not to