Read Online Delusion by Laura L. Sullivan - Free Book Online Page B

suddenly he was screaming for help, pulling against his ropes until his skin peeled away.
    “Shut up!” Phil hissed desperately. If he brought all those madmen running...even with her weapon, she might not be able to hold them off.
    Arden ignored her. It all made sense. If this girl was who he thought she was, her ancestor was stripped of his magic almost three hundred years ago. The textbooks said that made him a commoner, devoid of any ability to use the Essence. But there were whispers that it had made him something even worse than a commoner. What if he, and his descendants, were utterly separate from the Essence, immune to it? If she was here to attack them, there was nothing their magic could do to her. An Albion had almost destroyed the college before. He wouldn’t let this one do the same.
    He shouted for help until he hardly had breath. What this girl’s sudden appearance meant, he could not say for sure. All he knew was that something very close to panic had seized him. She must be put down, like vermin.
    “Be quiet, now, or I’ll—” She raised the tulwar, this time aiming the spiked pommel at his head. A hard blow might knock him unconscious. Or it might kill him.
    She couldn’t, not quite. Puffing an exasperated sigh at what she called her weakness, she ran to the door and listened again, then slipped out and down the portrait-lined corridor. Arden’s yells echoed behind her.
    Holding her tulwar high—she had visions of impaling herself in a headlong fall, and wouldn’t that be a pretty way to go?—she dashed around corner after corner, getting ever more helplessly lost. It wasn’t until she chanced peeking behind a closed door and caught a glimpse out a window that she even realized she was on the second floor. She could see the lake and the blushing maples and tried to keep that orientation in mind when she resumed her search for an exit. She barreled past a line of little boys who looked at her in thrilled amazement, though not fear. Racing, armed, red hair flying, Phil was like an air raid siren shrilling through their rote lives.
    Were there no stairs in this damned place? It was all hallways and rooms. She checked more and more doors. Some led to empty bedrooms, some to vacant classrooms, but none led to egress. Nearly at the end of her tether, she flung open one more door and found a man just stepping out of a claw-footed bath. Phil was about to retreat in shame when she decided, no, this had gone on far too long. Pointing her blade at his chubby pink and white nakedness, she said, “Show me how to get out of this madhouse.”
    He fumbled for his spectacles, gave a girlish shriek when at last he saw the interloper clearly, and dove for the nearest garment he could find, which, alas, was no more than a polka-dotted necktie. Still, it covered the vital bits if he didn’t walk too fast, so Phil gritted her teeth, torn between mirth and mortification, and urged him with gentle pokes out to the corridor.
    He led her silently, with nervous backward glances, to an ornate double door carved with spiral patterns. There he stopped, trembling.
    “Oh, very well,” she said, and pushed both doors open herself. But instead of a rush of sunlight and freedom, she saw a spacious, windowless, torch-lit room with a massive wooden table in its center. Seated around it, in chairs only a step down from thrones, were some twenty men and one little boy half-hidden in the shadows.
    Phil turned on her nearly naked guide with a snarl, but before she could flee, he gathered the last, perhaps only, drop of his courage and shoved her as hard as he could, propelling her into the room. His momentum sent him after her, and he collapsed in a dead faint, his necktie, unfortunately, askew.
    The doors closed behind them, apparently of their own volition.
    She tugged at the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. Whirling, she glared at the conclave. “How dare you treat me like this! I’m an English citizen and a representative