by Jayme Morse
I wanted, more than anything, to fly with them.
Slade and Drew had chosen the dragons—I hadn’t wanted to leave Drew alone at the Academy, because I was afraid that we’d come back and he’d be missing, just like Jordan was. I could only handle a manhunt for one friend at a time.
That left Tristan to deal with the basilisk, a giant snake that slithered through the trees and was capable of swallowing all of us whole.
I absolutely hated snakes, but it was so fascinating to think about. It would have been exciting to see one up close.
But nope, Noah and I were stuck looking for the boring ass ogres.
“You’ll like it,” he teased. We had been only using mind-speak as we walked through the woods. Noah thought it was best that the ogres didn’t hear us coming.
“The only thing it’s more interesting than is the poison arrows. I’m glad Julius picked that one. But ogres sound so… boring.”
“How many chances have you had to see an ogre in your lifetime?”
“None,” I admitted honestly. “But that’s the same amount of chances I’ve had to see dragons, too. They sound so majestic.”
He chuckled. “One day, I’ll take you to see the dragons.”
“Today?” I asked.
He seemed to consider it. “It’s a date.”
“I’ll take you,” Slade’s voice popped into my head, and I knew it was because he didn’t want me to have a date with Noah.
I didn’t want to acknowledge that he’d said anything. It kind of already felt like I was on a date with Noah.
I would have felt guilty if I focused my attention on Slade instead of him.
It would have been so rude.
And yet… all I wanted to do was respond to him.
“It’s okay,” Noah said with a shrug as he ducked his head, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I get it. You can’t help it. You’re into all of us.”
“I just don’t get why I can’t help it,” I told him. “The ones that make the least sense are Tristan and Julius. I’ve been around them the least, and yet I’m still so drawn to them, almost as much as I’m drawn to you and Slade, just in different ways. It feels like I know them so well—like I know all of you so well, without ever having a single deep conversation with any of you.”
I stopped walking and closed my eyes then.
My mind played what I figured was a memory of Noah. I saw what he’d seen the day he had ran off a cliffside and dove into an ocean. It was an ocean in Greece, near the town where his great-grandfather had lived.
“Was that a memory or was my mind making that up?” I asked him as I opened my eyes again.
“Real. You can tap into all of our memories, if we allow you to. There is a way for us to block you from our minds, but we’ve agreed that we want you to see. At least for now. And we can tap into your memories, too. That’s why you feel like you know us so well.”
“You don’t know me all that well if you really think I wanted to go see an ogre,” I complained.
He chuckled. “You could have decided for us. You let me decide, so I went with the safest option out of them all. I’m not bringing you around something super dangerous,” Noah replied in my mind. “I’ve already put you in enough danger since we first met.”
“Apparently, I must like danger,” I commented.
“Really?” His blue eyes found mine, surprised by my words.
“Well, I like you, and you’re the most dangerous guy I’ve ever met in my life.”
He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he just kept walking.
As we reached a clearing in the woods, the ground changed. The hard, rocky ground began to get soft and squishy.
A disgusting scent traveled into my nose.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“That’s how we know we’ve found the ogres,” he told me, his dark blue eyes lighting up with a look of excitement. “Are you ready?”
I nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be to see an ogre,” I replied.
He turned around. With his back facing me, he said, “Hop on.”
“Why?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“We can’t go walking through an ogre village. We have to be discreet,” he explained. “It isn’t a good idea to stay near the ground around the ogres and their massive bodies.”
An ogre village?
I’d thought that we’d maybe see one ogre instead of a whole village of ogres.
I hooked my arms around his neck and allowed him to lift my legs up. I wrapped my legs around him, too.
“Okay, but why do I have to get onto your back?” I asked once I was on top of him. Call me crazy, but nothing about this seemed even the slightest bit discreet to me.
“We’re going up there,” he said, looking up at the sky.
A moment later, he took off into a sprint. I closed my eyes tightly.
“How do you move so fast without getting dizzy?” I asked.
“You get used to it,” he said.
We landed on top of a tree limb with a thud. The branches shook wildly beneath us.
“I don’t think this is necessary,” I said as he continued to move from tree to tree like a squirrel. “It’s so dark out. They won’t be able to see us anyway.”
That was what I thought, anyway, until I spotted my first ogre.
He was outside of his little house, which was illuminated by lanterns and string lights. There was a roaring fire in yard.
He was large, tall, and dirty-looking. His skin had a greenish hue to it, and he looked really hairy, even from a distance.
The ogres lived in a section of the woods that was close to an algae-covered pond. The village was lit up by torches that sat outside each of the shacks they lived in. More burning torches surrounded the pond. The stench of the pond—or maybe it was just the ogres, themselves—was unbearable to my sensitive nose, and that said a lot since we stayed at the very tops of the trees.
The ogre looked like an oversized, slightly disfigured, man. He looked completely harmless as he chased a deer around his garden. I didn’t even understand how he was a danger to this forest. He seemed so innocent—almost like Snow White with her woodland animals. Except he was more child-like.
That was, until I saw the ogre scoop the deer up into his oversized arms and snap it in half with his bare hands.
More ogres came out to join him as he started to eat it, gnawing on one of its legs.
“Holy shit,” I thought.
“Told you ogres aren’t boring,” Noah said.
“They’re terrifying as fuck.”
They didn’t even cook the deer, and with all the fires they had going among all of the tiny shacks in the woods, they had plenty of places to cook it. They just preferred to gobble it down raw.
They had even swallowed the deer’s antlers.
“Unless they’ve already eaten Jordan, I don’t smell her anywhere,” Noah told me as he took a deep breath.
I started panicking at the idea and he said, “Sorry. I don’t think they got to her. She moves pretty quick in her wolf form.”
He took another deep breath to confirm that he couldn’t pick up on her scent.
He was brave. I wasn’t willing to breathe deeply here.
I was trying hard not to vomit as it was. I turned my head away, nestling it into Noah’s chest.
I breathed in the fresh scent of his cologne. The musky mix of citrus and floral smelled even better than usual, next to the scent of the ogre village below us.
That deer could have been me if the guys had let me run off into the woods to find Jordan.
I was so lucky that the guys had held me back.
I just hoped that Jordan hadn’t run into their neck of the woods last night.
Judging from the way the ogres had munched down on the deer, there wouldn’t have been anything left of her to find.
Chapter 21
Riley
None of us found anything. Thankfully, Jor
dan hadn’t been struck by a poison arrow, so that meant that she must have made it past them. She hadn’t entered the ogre territory. She hadn’t reached the dragons and basilisk territories, either. Not one of us had been able to detect her wolfy scent anywhere in the woods so far—though that didn’t say much, because I didn’t really know how to detects scents with my nose as well as the guys did.
But I figured that they knew what they were doing.
That left the dark fae as the last spot to check out.
If Jordan wasn’t there, I wasn’t sure where she could have been.
As we waited for the rest of the guys to make their way over to us, we sat on one of the boulders that overlooked the river.
I slipped my feet into the water and inhaled deeply. The scent and sounds of the rushing water were so calming.
The view was gorgeous from here.
The reflection of the stars and moon cast a glow over the water below us. Each star reminded me of a faerie.
It was perfect. Everything about this day was pretty perfect.
Well, aside from waking up in the coffin. And being afraid that Headmaster McCullough was going to have Drew and me arrested and sent to Nightshade Vampire Penitentiary. And having to watch that ogre eat that poor deer. And having to find Jordan, and hoping she hadn’t been eating by an ogre, burnt to a crisp by a dragon, or swallowed whole by a giant snake. There were so many ways in which she could have found herself in trouble, but I had to believe she wasn’t dead. I had to believe she was okay.
Okay. So, the kiss with Noah was the only part of my day that I’d thought was perfect. And seeing this view with him was pretty perfect, too.
“I agree.” Noah’s eyes met mine through the darkness.
I placed my hand on the rock next to his, comparing our rings. They looked almost identical, aside from the color of the gemstones. While mine was green, his was a shade of yellow orange.
“Do you want to know a secret about our rings?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Each ring is infused with the magic from a dead faerie. That’s why me, Tristan, Julius, and Slade are able to do magic while other vampires can’t.” He glanced over at me. “And while you already have magic since you’re a faerie, the ring will only make your magic stronger.”
I stared down at it, trying to make sense of it all. Was that the reason Dylan had left the ring to me? Because I was a faerie? I’d thought that he hadn’t known, but what if he actually had known? Had he known that I was already going to be magical and that the ring would only help?
“You know how we were smelling the air to try to see if we could detect Jordan’s scent?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Can vampires detect the scent of a faerie?”
“Yes. Normally we can smell a faerie. That’s why it’s so good that you’re a part of our coven. You wouldn’t be welcome at Nightshade Vampire Academy if all of the vampires at the academy could smell that you’re not a full-blooded vampire. Our blood is linked together now, so it hides your faerie scent.”
I had so many questions about all of this. I glanced over at Noah. “I don’t understand how the rings made us a coven.”
“We’re not sure why or how it happened, but one day, many years ago, I bumped into Julius, and our rings reacted to each other,” Tristan said as he and the others approached us. I wasn’t sure why he was speaking through mind-speak. There were no ogres or any other paranormal things around, that I knew of.
As far as I knew, there was no one around for miles.
But there was Drew. I wasn’t sure how much the guys really wanted Drew to know about them or our coven, since Drew wasn’t a part of it.
I noticed then that Tristan was limping.
“What happened to you?” Noah asked, furrowing his brow.
“Found the basilisk. She snuck up on me. Knocked me out of a tree,” Tristan said as he limped past us.
“He’ll be fine,” Slade reassured me. “He just needs some blood.”
“So glad you went with me,” Noah told me. “Pretty sure Tristan can’t protect you as well as I can.”
We didn’t know that. But… as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had kind of already been thinking the same thing.
“Back to the story. Our rings reacted to one another’s one day,” Julius took over from there. “We were walking home from the war that had just ended in our world between the vampires and the witches—”
“In ‘our world’,” I repeated, interrupting him.
“It’s a paranormal world that exists in another realm. It’s the world we call home,” Noah explained.
“You’re not from here?” I asked.
He shook his head, a sad look in his dark blue eyes.
“Right now, we’re in a town named Devil’s Hole. It’s the town where all of the ‘bad’ paranormal beings are sent. Vampires, evil witches, werewolves, dragons, gargoyles, and demons are sent to live here.”
“And ogres and dark fae,” I added.
He nodded.
“And all of the worst of the worst live here, too. Anybody ‘good’ that’s turned ‘bad’, or who has been deemed to be ‘bad’, anyway, has to come here for training. They either have to go to school, or go to prison, before they can re-enter the human world or one of the other paranormal worlds.”
“Am I bad?” I asked. My eyes glanced around at them nervously. “I must be bad. No one here is good.”
I didn’t want to be bad. I couldn’t have been bad. In the human world, I was a good girl.
I just wanted my old life back.
“Never, Riley. You could never be bad,” Slade said, his eyes meeting mine reassuringly.
I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Then again, I was taking his word for it, and he was stuck in Devil’s Hole, going to school, too. I knew that had to have meant that he was bad, too—that we all were bad—so I wasn’t sure if he was the most reliable source.
But I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t have an urge to do bad things. Even with my desire to drink blood, I didn’t feel like I wanted to harm anyone in the process of getting that blood. I planned to drink just the right amount of blood to survive. That was it.
The group had gone silent.
No one tried to convince me again that we weren’t all bad.
“Anyway, that day, Noah and I were both going back to our homes when we crossed paths,” Julius continued.
“It felt like a lightning bolt had gone through us, between our rings,” Noah added.
“That’s kind of what happened to me!” I said excitedly. “Except it went from my ring to the Ouija board.” It felt so good knowing that they had experienced what I’d felt happen with my ring, too.
“It went through the Ouija board, but it also went to my ring. The jolt of it knocked the lid right off of my coffin,” Noah said.
“It went to all of our rings,” Slade said as Tristan and Julius nodded their agreements.
“I was on my computer at the time, doing my homework, when I felt it. I’d thought that I had gotten electrocuted,” Julius told me.
“We all felt it because that ring connects you to us on a deeper level,” Tristan explained. “Somehow, it was able to pick up on the fact that you’re meant to be a part of our coven.”
I frowned. “But I thought the only reason I’m a part of your coven is because I was wearing the ring,” I insisted. “I thought it was the very thing that connected us.”
“It is what connected us, but we have met others with these rings. Plenty of others. They didn’t all automatically become members of our coven,” Slade explained. “Something about this ring chose you to be a member of our coven.”
“Who else has these rings?” I questioned, twisting mine around my finger.
“Anyone who belongs to the Nightshades or the Moonstrikes,” Julius explained.
“The… what?” I just stared back at him with wide eyes.
“The Nightshades and the Moonstrikes are two fraternit
ies on campus,” Noah explained. “They’re both co-ed fraternities, so both guys and girls join them. The fraternities are made up of various vampire covens on campus.”
“We’re not the only coven around,” Julius explained.
I remembered reading ‘moonstrike’ on the inside of my ring. “Dylan was a Moonstrike, wasn’t he?”
Now that I knew that Dylan was a vampire, I just somehow knew that he was going to be going to Nightshade Vampire Academy. It only made sense—especially with this inscription in the ring that had belonged to him.
Slade nodded. “Yep. He was our enemy. We’re Nightshades.”
“The Nightshades and the Moonstrikes automatically hate each other,” Tristan explained. “There’s been an ongoing war between the two fraternities since Nightshade Vampire Academy came to be. No one even knows what it all started over, but no one has tried to solve this feud, so it will probably go on for the rest of forever.”
I frowned. “If Dylan was a Moonstrike and you guys are Nightshades, then why would the ring he had given me—his ring—decide that we were meant to be a part of the same coven? Wouldn’t the ring have wanted me to be a part of a coven that belonged to the Moonstrikes?”
I wasn’t going to lie. So little about this actually made sense to me.
“We haven’t been able to figure that part out, either,” Noah told me. “But the ring knew what it was doing. You’re clearly meant to be with us. You’re ours. It feels like it’s meant to be, doesn’t it?”
I knew he was right; it was a feeling I could feel deep in my gut. I wasn’t sure how or why, but I was meant to be a part of them. I was pretty sure I was meant to be with them—with all of them, as crazy as that sounded.
The guys glanced around at each other, and I knew that they must have heard my thoughts. I wasn’t sure if it made them feel uncomfortable, but it seemed to make them feel something.
I wondered if they were able to communicate with each other without me hearing their thoughts.
I felt a little awkward with the idea that they had probably all just been talking about me.
“We can,” Julius informed me.
Oh. Great. Somehow, they got privacy amongst themselves, but I didn’t get any privacy at all—even when it came to my thoughts about them.