Mage of Shadows by Chanel Austen

who was standing on the opposite side of the body with the crowd that had begun to gather by the glass doors of the library. She was staring in numbed shock; I could only imagine what she was thinking at the moment. This was probably her first brush with violent death. I wished I could say that it had been mine, as well.
    The crime in front of me wasn't so far from what I had done myself last night. Admittedly, I hadn't meant to nearly kill Two-Bit… but I could still hear his screams. A life was a life, and I had almost taken one last night.
    Power could be a beautiful gift, but reflect it in the mirror. See it from another perspective, and I guarantee you will see an equally terrible curse.
    I held it in my grasp, and it was real… I had power over others. So many times over the years I wondered if it would be better if I didn't have it. I had fled across the country, seeking more power at the same time.
    It was a hunger, a thirst that couldn't be sated. I needed more, so I struck out at people whom I thought deserved it, if only to further my skills. That was exactly what had happened with the thugs the night before whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not.
    It felt very much like a slippery slope, and one that I couldn't climb out of. Whether I wanted it or not, magic was mine to use.
    With all the people shuffling around me, the buzzing conversations clamoring for the attention of my ears, I suddenly felt very claustrophobic. I began to turn away and felt like I was going to be sick just from that brief motion. It was only the sudden shouts of disbelief that made me stop to look at the girl- at her corpse- again.
    Her blood was moving, not just pooling around her, but moving.
    From the spreading well of blood, thin lines dashed away, scurrying across the ground as if they were bloody serpents. They wriggled together in ways that were inconceivable in the purely physical realm. In seconds where there had only been blood, words had formed. I stared at them along with the other spectators of the phenomenon, almost as confused as they must have been.
    ET IN FRATERNITATIS EGO
    Magic. Deep and deliberately controlled magic.
    Written in blood, it was a sinister taunt. My eyes scanned quickly for the source, but I couldn't pick out the person making a spectacle of a girl's death. It was a measured taunt… the killer, or someone they were working with, was here with me.
    The party responsible was in my presence. My eyes swiped across the students, looking for any sign of them. I couldn't stop her from dying, but maybe I could avenge this girl's death.
    So distracted by everything that had happened, I had long missed the significant entrance of the two blue uniformed officers, who had finally pushed past the crowd to get to the body, and had been staring at the unnatural words along with the rest.
    Just as I remembered exactly why it was important to get as far away as possible from the cops and the obvious crime scene, Officer Rodriguez waved her hands at the crowd and shouted for the students back away from the body.
    Her dark eyes tracked through the crowd with a practiced ease.
    Then they locked onto mine, and my fiery anger gave way to icy fear.

Chapter 3: A Tangled Web

    Everyone makes mistakes.
    That is an absolute certainty that you can count on in life. Your friends make mistakes, your teachers make mistakes, and you make mistakes. Even your parents, maybe even especially your parents, make mistakes all the time. Maybe you were one of them.
    No one is perfect.
    There are things in my life that I wished I could change. Things I would have given almost anything to go back and fix. The frustrating thing about living in the present is that none of us could go back to change the past. I seriously doubted that it was just me that thought about this stuff. What could I have done differently to change my life? Make it better?
    Hell, there was a whole sub-genre of movies and shows that dealt with this exact trope.