I waited for whoever it was to go away, but another knock came shortly after, this time followed by Silt’s voice.
“Damian?”
Unlike Nadia, Sofia had taken the time to change, and was now wearing a pair of plaid pajama bottoms under a long pink tank top. Her brown eyes were as dry as they’d been at Shane’s funeral, but her face was pinched and drawn.
“Is everything okay?” I looked over her shoulder at the empty hall. “Is Wormhole—?”
“Evie’s fine. Cried herself out and I tucked her in about ten minutes ago or so.” Silt’s voice was even gruffer than usual. “Glad to see they patched you back up already.” She didn’t wait for a reply, but slid past me into my dorm room, where she got the five second tour by virtue of heading to the center and slowly turning around.
I let the hallway door close, and leaned against it. “What can I do for you, Sofia?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, face turned to our room’s one window. Finally, she sighed. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”
A few things clicked into place. Her state of dress. The fact that she’d waited for everyone to be gone or asleep before coming to my bedroom. Maybe even why she’d bothered to be friends with me.
The problem was… I didn’t feel that way about Sofia at all.
I wasn’t a blushing virgin or anything—Alicia the slushy girl had seen to that—but it wasn’t like I’d seen much other action at Mama Rawlins’. I certainly hadn’t ever had to deal with letting someone down easily, outside of very young girls with puppy-dog crushes on the oldest orphan in the house.
“Sofia, I…”
I’d only made it through those two words when Silt finally turned around, took two steps and threw herself at me. I barely managed to catch her, but as soon as I did, she dropped her head against my chest and began to cry.
Oh.
This was something life at Mama Rawlins had taught me how to deal with. I wrapped my arms around the stocky Earthshaker and held her as she wept.
CHAPTER 41
I’d never woken up in bed with a woman I cared about before. Alicia and I had only ever fooled around at the shop; brief moments of pleasure that ended with her going back to her parents and me returning to Mama Rawlins’. Waking up next to a warm, curvy body showed me I’d been missing something. The soft, full boob under my hand didn’t hurt at all.
It took my brain a handful of seconds to realize that it was Silt’s boob that I was holding. I let go of it in a hurry, and scooted back to put some space between us… or at least as much space as the small bed allowed.
We were both still fully clothed, of course. Once Silt started crying, I’d finally realized she had come to me for comfort and not some hot Crow action. I’d held her on the bed until she cried herself out, much like she must have done for Wormhole earlier that day. Before I knew it, she was snoring against my chest. I’d thought about waking her, but sometime in the middle of that internal debate, I’d apparently dropped off as well.
There’d been nothing sexual at all about our night together. Which didn’t save me from embarrassment when Jeremiah walked in that next morning.
“Shit!” His eyes were white craters in the darkness of his face as he took Silt and I in with a single glance. “Put a sock on the door or something in the future. Please!”
That was enough to wake up Silt as well, but while she was still fumbling towards full consciousness, I was springing out of bed. “This isn’t what it looks like, Jeremiah.”
“This is a judgement-free dorm room,” he said. “If she wants to experiment…”
Wait. If she wanted to experiment? Even though nothing had happened, even though neither Silt nor I had wanted anything to happen, I found myself more than a little insulted. Since when did sleeping with me count as experimentation?
“I thought you were at Hektor’s,” said Silt, sleepily rolling out of bed to stretch like she didn’t have a care in the world.
“Why would he have been at Hektor’s?” I frowned.
“Why do you think?” Silt rolled her eyes, then turned back to my roommate. “Anyway, there wasn’t any experimentation going on here, Stonebrain. I just badly needed a friend, and Boneboy gives good hugs.”
“He does?”
“I do?” I asked, at almost the same time.
“Surprised me too,” said Silt with a shrug. “Anyway, thanks for the best night of sleep I’ve had in a while, but I should go check on Evelyn and make sure she’s doing better.”
She was halfway out the door when I realized I had something to do as well. I followed her out.
“Hugs are all well and good, Boneboy, but I’m not going to let you follow me home.”
“Shockingly,” I said right back, “this isn’t about you. I just remembered something Bard told me yesterday.”
“And whatever this was means you need to go somewhere at the god-awful time Stonewall woke us up at?”
“The earlier I go, the more time I’ll have to change her mind.”
Silt’s yawn was so wide I could actually hear her jaw pop. “Whose mind? What are you talking about?”
“Ishmae’s.” I felt Silt pause more than I saw it, but I kept going. When she’d caught back up to me, I added the rest. “Bard says she’s quitting the Academy.”
“And you want to stop her?”
“Not really.” I held open the door to the common room and followed Sofia in. “But I think Shane would’ve wanted me to.”
•—•—•
The first step was actually finding Ishmae. She hadn’t returned to her and Tessa’s room since Shane’s death, and I knew for a fact that she wasn’t in the medical ward, but where did that leave?
“Maybe we should just wait for Bard to get back and ask him?”
I shook my head. “We don’t know how long he’ll be away. The way he said it, Ishmae could leave at any time.”
“Well, wandering the campus isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“You didn’t have to come along. You can always go check on Wormhole like you’d planned.”
“Cram it up your ass, Boneboy. Unicorn was my friend too. Evie will understand.” Sofia dropped down onto one of the many benches that dotted the campus’ walking paths. “I’m just saying we should walk smarter, not harder.”
I gingerly lowered myself onto the same bench, mindful again of the torn skin on my back. Despite the healing I’d received, there was a dull ache in the right side of my face, and one glance in a mirror had shown the mottled yellow of a slowly healing bruise.
“So where do you think we should look then?”
Silt shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Unicorn healed her before she killed him, which is why she wasn’t in the med ward. And they’re probably worried she could be a danger to others, given her state of mind, which is why she never returned to her dorm room. But then where—”
It was the state of mind phrase that did it. I saw Silt’s brown eyes widen as we both came to the same realization.
“Dr. Gibbings!”
“Alexa,” I said, at the same time.
“Who’s Alexa?”
Apparently, not all of us were on a first-name basis with the school counselor. But when I explained, Silt shook her head.
“Dr. Gibbings’ first name is Stephanie.”
“I go see her every week, Sofia. I think I know her name.” I rolled my eyes. “Tall, slim, and monochromatic? Doesn’t blink and curses almost as much as me?”
“Damian…” Silt’s rough voice was confused. “Dr. Gibbings is pushing sixty, even wider than I am, and would probably faint if she heard the word fuck.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe they’re sisters or something?”
I shook my head. “There are only diplomas for one doctor on the wall.”
“Wow; you really do go there a lot.”
“It’s that or get my ass thrown out on the street.”
“Well, either way, I think Dr. Gi
bbings is our best chance of finding Ishmae.” Silt was built like a tree stump, but the majority of that was muscle; she bounced up from the bench with a grace that made me feel even clumsier than usual. “Shall we?”
•—•—•
Dr. Gibbings was exactly as Silt had described her, white-haired and maternal, seated behind the desk in the same office I’d been coming to for months. Even the diplomas, on careful re-examination, all said Stephanie Gibbings. With my mind going a thousand miles a second, I barely heard Silt trying to talk the older woman into giving up Ishmae’s location. If this was Dr. Gibbings, then who the fuck had I been seeing all this time? Who was Alexa?
For the first time since my arrival at the Academy, I had to seriously question my own sanity. What if Alexa was someone I’d dreamed up, a mental projection of what I thought a shrink should be? What if I’d spent the last few months only thinking I was going to the counselor? If I was already that far gone, what chance did I have?
The only thing that kept me from truly freaking out was that I knew the office we were standing in. That meant I had to have seen it before… didn’t it?
I’d missed a session with Alexa while I was being healed from Ishmae’s fire, but I decided then and there that I was bringing someone else with me when I came for my next session. And if Alexa was here, and she was real, I was going to have some serious fucking questions for her.
In the periphery of my awareness, I saw the moment the real Dr. Gibbings finally gave in to Silt’s arguments, learning—as those of us in the Fearsome Five already had—that the Earthshaker was an avalanche in motion; inescapable and unrelenting. The old counselor sighed and said something, waving a pudgy hand at the door.
“What did she say?” I asked, once Silt and I were both back in the hallway.
“Weren’t you listening?”
“I was a little busy wondering who the fuck Alexa is, and whether or not she’s a product of my Crow-given insanity.”
That drew Sofia up short. “Do you think that’s possible?”
“No clue, but if you or Vibe are willing to come along to my next session, I’m going to damn well find out.”
“Deal.” Silt was one of the few first-years who never seemed particularly concerned about either my power or my looming insanity. Even Shane, who saw my insanity as a new challenge for healing, had sometimes gotten freaked out. But Sofia just rolled on, and God help anyone who got in her way. “But first, let’s go talk to the little Pyro.” She frowned again. “Are you sure Shane would’ve wanted us to convince Ishmae to stay? She did kill him.”
“This is Unicorn we’re talking about,” I reminded her. “Since when would he have held that against her?”
•—•—•
Ishmae wasn’t all that far away. The same building that had the counselor’s office also had a handful of visitors’ suites, and the young Pyro was staying in the third one down the hall. The door was closed, but it opened within seconds of Silt’s knock.
“Oh.” Phoenix looked from Sofia to I and something in her wilted. She turned and stepped back into the room without another word, seemingly indifferent to whether the two of us followed her in or not.
Needless to say, we marched inside.
“How are you doing, Ishmae?” Sofia’s voice was uncharacteristically kind.
“Fine.” The Pyro slouched on the foot of her suite’s bed, eyes downcast.
“You don’t look fine.” I shrugged when Silt shot me a look. “What? She doesn’t.”
It was true; Ishmae had always been young and small, but she’d had a sense of presence to her—part ego, part pride, part awareness of her power. All of that was gone, and without it, she looked even younger than her age, lost beneath her voluminous robes. The dark circles under her eyes didn’t help, nor did the fingernails that she’d clearly been gnawing on.
I’d only come because it was what Shane would have wanted, but looking at the emotional wreckage perched on the bed in front of us, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. As much death as I’d already seen, I’d at least never been responsible for it.
Directly responsible for it, anyway, I silently amended, thinking of the men Her Majesty had shredded north of Los Angeles.
“Did you two come to taunt me or to punish me?” Ishmae’s voice was barely more than a breath.
“Neither.” Silt traded a brief, troubled look with me, before continuing. “We heard that you were thinking of leaving—”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you want to do that? I know how much being a Cape means to you.”
“I can’t stay here.” For just a moment, fire flickered deep in Ishmae’s eyes. “And I’m not a Cape. Not now. Not ever.”
“You can’t let one accident…”
“Accident?!? I murdered Shane! A boy who was never anything but nice, who was our nation’s best hope as a Healer, and I turned him to ash. What kind of a hero does that?”
“Someone who’s still figuring this shit out, like the rest of us,” I told her.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Right. Because fuck knows, being a Crow is a walk in the park.”
Ishmae lifted bloodshot eyes to meet mine. “You were there, weren’t you?”
It didn’t take a genius to know what she was talking about. “Yeah. Kayleigh, Unicorn and I.”
“Then I almost killed you and Vibe too. You should be happy that I’m leaving.”
“Maybe I should be. Or maybe I should’ve kept Shane from trying to heal you until more help arrived. I could’ve done it, easily enough.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because he was an adult. Unicorn knew the risks, he knew what was at stake, and he thought you were worth the effort.”
Large tears were cascading down the Pyro’s dark cheeks. “He was wrong.”
“I guess time will tell.” I shrugged. “But the thing is… if you run away now, if you take all your power and bury it, what will he have died for?”
“Nothing,” she said in a small voice. “He died for nothing at all.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way—” tried Silt.
“But it is. I appreciate all this, but I think you both should go now.”
“That’s it, then?”
“Go away. Please.”
I don’t know if it was the emotion in her plea that got us moving or if it was the way the tears streaming down her face had started to sizzle like butter on a hot pan. Either way, Sofia and I had retreated all the way to the door when Ishmae called my name. I turned back.
“Is it true that you see ghosts?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“If you ever see Shane’s ghost, could you… could you please tell him I’m sorry?”
My eyes drifted to a point above and behind her. “He knows, Ishmae. He knows, and he forgives you. Now, you just need to forgive yourself.”
I waited for a reply, but she curled up on the bed, burying her head in a pillow and tangled mess of sheets.
•—•—•
Silt and I were silent until we left the building. Then the Earthshaker turned to me. “That was ballsy. I’m just sorry it didn’t work.”
“What was ballsy?”
She shook her head and sighed. “I still don’t know you all that well, but I’m pretty sure I can tell when you’re lying. You didn’t actually see Shane’s ghost, did you?”
I thought back to that moment in Phoenix’s room, when the dead Healer had first appeared behind Ishmae. I thought of the snarl that twisted his pale, freckled face, the diamond hardness of his eyes and the way he’d stomped and raged in a circle around the seated Pyro, like an unseen storm trying to vent its fury upon unsuspecting passers-by.
“No,” I agreed. “I didn’t see him at all.”
•—•—•
The next day, Ishmae was gone.
CHAPTER 42
A week without classes at the Academy should have been the next best thing to an all-day orgy,
but the circumstances behind our mini-vacation made it feel almost like a punishment. The crying petered out after a day or two, but a dark cloud followed every first-year as we trudged back and forth to the cafeteria, or as individual students slipped out to meet with the counselor.
Which counselor they were meeting with was, of course, a question very much on my mind.
In that monotonous, seemingly endless week, two moments stood out.
First was round two with Caleb Mikkazi, aka Supersonic, aka Sergeant Sucker Punch. In a normal week, between the communal bathroom and the fact that we all had the exact same class schedule, a quick confrontation would have been all but inevitable.
On this particular week, we successfully avoided each other for almost a full day. But on Tuesday, I entered the common room from the boys’ hall at the very same time that Supersonic was coming in from outside. I’m not sure which of us changed direction first, but a few steps later, we met just behind the main couch.
“Crow.” Caleb couldn’t help but glance at the still-healing bruise on my jaw and cheek, but he managed to keep his habitual smirk hidden.
“Fuck off.”
“I’d be happy to, but I’ve been…” he paused, his scowl adding emphasis to the next word, “instructed to apologize for knocking you on your bony ass.”
“Something you only managed because Paladin was holding me down,” I shot back. “Before that, I seem to remember you eating dirt from a single knee.”
Caleb’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, bright spots of color appearing in his cheeks. “Paladin or no Paladin, if you ever threaten me again, you’ll see exactly what this Jitterbug can do.”
“And if you accuse me of killing my friend again, I promise I won’t stop with just a threat.”
“Oh for the love of God, could you two give it a rest already?” That was Winter, who was sitting on the couch, her long white hair braided and twisted into one of the dumbest-looking hairstyles I’d ever seen.
“Or at least move on from this metaphoric dick-measuring contest to something a little more definitive.” That was Tessa.
“Definitive how?” asked London, who had deigned to be cuddled by Santiago in one of the overstuffed chairs.
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