by Abbie Lyons
The dark gray set off the gray of his eyes, and when he threw a look at me, I felt it into the core of my very soul.
If I even had one.
But no, I supposed I did.
Aidan jerked a thumb at me, whispering something. Marius shook his head gently. Aidan didn't seem to like this. The discussion grew more heated as the line shrank, with Marius and Aidan getting closer to the front and their demon dance partners.
Finally, after Marius said an unequivocal no, he stepped out. The girl he was to do the little dance with was right in front of me, an insanely tall gazelle-like thing with a dark green undercut and platform boots who looked like Lucy’s roommate Rowena’s twin sister.
Then it was Aidan’s turn. And my turn.
“You,” he said, aloud this time.
“Hello.” I curtsied and took his hand. Aidan was too stunned to contradict.
“Walk,” I said tightly through my teeth. “You don't want to upset the proceedings, do you? That would be very improper.”
“How dare you?” he said in a low voice.
“I'm just a pesky human,” I said. “And guess what? I've got nothing to live for. So you crossed the wrong girl.” We’d started our circle, slowly rounding the floor. “The whole thing was very clever, though. I guess you went a little bit rogue from whatever the Order was telling you to do, however. Marius didn’t seem too pleased.”
As I said the words, a vein throbbed in his neck. Up close, I could see puckered skin and bruises just peeking out of the collar of his shirt. But he said nothing as we finished our first turn around the obelisk.
A rumble growled beneath our feet. It was working. Two guardians—well, one guardian and a human—was, even in its small ritualistic way, throwing off the balance. Just two more go rounds. Keep him distracted.
“Still, I have to commend you. Setting fire to my apartment to see if my little soul boost would get some poor homeless guy to save my life? Giving him my letter so that you could lure me here? Oh, and don’t forget just straight-up making me homeless, too, so I didn’t really have a choice. You even duped Professor Kennedy, and she's pretty sharp. So, you know, kudos.” I did a little golf clap on top of our joined hands. Another rumble, this one more prominent. Murmurs in the lines of students.
“But it's fucking sick,” I said. “Instead of accounting for some things that don't quite follow procedure, instead of being willing to roll the dice and not know what might be on the next square of the map, you decided it was better to burn away any part of the map you couldn't draw yourself.”
“There are rules,” he said. “I wouldn't expect a human like you to understand.” He glanced around his shoulder, obviously panicking that someone would notice that we weren’t doing what the rules wanted us too. His dedication to the stiff upper lip was commendable.
“There are rules,” I agreed. “But there's also randomness. That’s what makes it a game.”
“This isn't a game.”
As if in response, a heave jolted beneath our feet.
“Maybe not to you,” I said. “But you know, for the first time in a while, I'm starting to have fun. Just answer me one thing.”
He glared at me as we began our final go-round around the obelisk, but still, didn’t react. He wouldn’t—not with everyone watching. Almost there.
“Did you murder my brother too?”
“I didn't kill your brother. You—how dare you?”
“I know how desperate you are to be in the Order. I said how desperate you are to impress all those guys to get on the team. You think you're so much better than people like Steve, who only ever wants to be nice and make friends? Who literally put themselves for the ringer for someone else? No, for you, it's all about looking out for number one. And you know what? I admire that. I'm selfish too, a lot of the time. But I also give people money if they're broke and addicted and need help. I share stuff. I try to make friends. And maybe I'm not a guardian, but I kind of get the principle a lot better than you do. And that makes you shitty, no matter how many Orders you're in.”
As we took our final steps around the third circle, an ear-piercing hum shot out from the obelisk, sending a shockwave through the entire temple.
“Oh my gods!” People yelled. In an instant, the two lines scattered. The music skipped, as though a giant record player somewhere had been jostled.
“What the fuck?” Aidan looked at me and dropped my hand.
Oh yeah, I said. Oops. Looks like you were too busy trying not to cause a stir among polite society that you let me do my little unbalancing thing. That's a pity.
“Stop,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you do this? Don't you know what this can make happen?”
I shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea to roll the dice.”
And with that, the obelisk fell free of its perch and rolled side over side, down the temple floor, a shower of sparks spattering in its wake.
I had just enough time to jump back before everything blinked out white and then cracked fiercely, followed by thuds and screams.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Twenty
“Well, I'm sure this isn't how you thought your first semester was going to go.” Professor Kennedy gave me a smile from across her desk. I smiled back.
“I think I could say the same for you.”
She chuckled. “I'm used to things happening unexpectedly. Chaos is the rule, not the exception.” She shook her head. “You know what I mean? Not chaos chaos, but...right. You holding up okay?”
I shrugged. My body still felt a little stiff, but it turns out guardian medicine is pretty potent stuff. It all looks like herbal supplements, but it gives you a real kick.
Which kind of made me wonder why Steve had looked so beat up all the time. Maybe he just forgot that he could heal himself.
“Never a dull moment.” Professor Kennedy sighed and drummed her fingers on her desk. “Reminds me of a ball when I was in school, same kind of thing. Walls literally crumbling, fighting to get out, the works. Maybe I'm bad luck.”
I shook my head. “I think if anyone's bad luck, it's me.”
She smiled sympathetically. “Bad luck doesn’t exist, remember? So no, I don’t think you’re bad luck. And I don't think you're fully human either.”
I swallowed hard. I’d started to suspect as much, but didn't know how to bring it up. The past few days had just been recuperating, hanging out with Steve and Lucy, taking stupid supplements, and lolling around on the grass. Casually throwing the disc around, even. No one seemed ready to bring up anything that had happened, although I’d made myself a mental promise to give Lucy an exclusive interview with me—that knew would get her paper some readership. But for now, we were all psychologically shielding ourselves.
“Yeah.” I breathed out. “I don't think I am either.”
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “Because if you were a guardian, if you had the power, as we would have known, we would have recruited you. That letter would have been sent to you on purpose.”
And I should have had them from birth, right? Powers or something?
“You should have,” she echoed, “but maybe...” She chewed her lip. “Maybe there's another way to get our powers.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “I need to preface that this is just a theory. We're talking like, big bang level of radical here. It's the best guess we have, but that's it. Some people believe that originally there was only one kind of being, that the specializations arose: human and supernatural, and then angel and demon from there. But the theory goes that perhaps it's not a one and done pass-it-down-the-line thing. It's not like human genetics, where traits have to have precedents earlier in your bloodline to show up in you. This theory is that sometimes they just spontaneously generate.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that sometimes powers manifest with no reason,” she said simply. “They just need to be at the right place
at the right time. Something about everything in the fabric of the universe clicks into place and voila, you gain guardian powers.”
I shook my head. “I don't believe that's possible.”
“Most guardians don't believe it's possible either,” she said. “So you're in good company. It's pretty radical. And, honestly, it feels ridiculous saying it out loud. We put so much emphasis on training, so the idea that someone could just one day wake up with powers is a bit...contrary to our entire purpose. And it would explain why you threw off the balance because, well, suddenly there's one more guardian that the universe wasn't planning on.” She smiled ruefully.
“Well, I was an accident,” I joked. “That's why I’m so much younger than my brother. Or so the family legend goes.”
She chuckled. “Well, anyway, I've spoken with the Dean and he said that if you're interested—” She paused. “You can stay and continue your studies at Elysium. Even if we're not fully sure exactly what kind of powers you're going to have, he says, and I agree, that it's in your best interest to figure out how to use them. And there's no other place to do that but here.”
“So I'm not being kicked out.”
Her eyes went wide. “No, not at all. Why would you think that?”
“I don't know, maybe because I'm the reason that the temple was destroyed?”
She waved a hand. “It's been destroyed and rebuilt countless times at this point. I don't think there's an original stone left in the thing.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I should have put that in my article. Well, not that I wrote it.”
“Your what?”
“Oh, nothing. My friend just wants to start a student newspaper. And I said I would do some research on the architecture of the school.” I shrugged.
Professor Kennedy’s eyes lit up. “You know, that's a great idea. I think something like that would be a wonderful way to bring the student body back together after all this crisis.”
“Yeah?” I said. “I'll tell Lucy to talk to you.”
LATER THAT DAY, WE sat on the grass, basking in the sun and eating a huge spread of picnic hamper provided by the dining hall.
“They're really going all out,” Steve said, tucking into a strawberry tart. “We should be emotionally traumatized every week. It makes the food a lot better.”
“Come on, Steve,” Lucy said a bit hoarsely. I knew she was a trouper, but it was clearly difficult to see the guy she had a crush on turn out to be a wannabe evil mastermind.
In a way, it was like finding out that your brother threw himself off a bridge. It made no sense. It changed so much. And it took something away from you that you maybe never had in the first place—a stable universe. The rules.
“Well, while we're speaking of emotional trauma,” Steve said with a heavy sigh, “I have some bad news.
“Yeah?” both of us said.
He nodded glumly.
“Oh, Steve...” I immediately prepared a battalion of soothing phrases, which was really not my forte. “I'm, uh, really, sorry?”
“I didn’t even say what the news is yet,” Steve said. “The bad news is...that the season was canceled due to the Coliseum being consumed in a lake of fire,” Steve said. “Bummer, but it happens. An aftereffect of all the Chaos. But I also have good news.”
“Okay, so what's the good news?” I asked.
“I made the team!” Steve said. “After Aidan was, you know—"
“Expelled?”
“—they need a new striker. And I was the only one who wanted to try out on short notice!”
“Wow,” I said. “I'm genuinely shocked.”
“Congratulations,” Lucy said.
“Thank you, thank you.” Steve nodded. “I promise to discharge the duties of my office with, uh, fidelity.”
“So do you have practice or something?” I asked. “How’s that work?”
“Well, probably not,” Steve said. “Because of the whole lake of fire thing. The team is suspended until the start of next semester. And then there will be more tryouts, so honestly I’d probably just get right back to training.”
“So wait,” Lucy said. “What you're saying is you made a team that's not currently playing, and by the time they start playing again, you're going to have to try out for the team again anyway?”
Steve frowned. “I mean, basically. Yeah. You know, when you put it that way, it sounds like kind of a downer.”
“It's not,” I said. “I think it's great news. We're proud of you, aren't we?”
“Absolutely.” Lucy nodded, and lifted a glass to toast. “To Steve!”
“Hear, hear!” Steve said. “To me!”
I didn't know when I would see Marius again. And I tried not to think about it. It wasn’t like it was hard to keep our distance since we didn't really overlap socially at all.
I spent the remainder of the class-free week taking it easy. Violet and I were fine, of course, but she was busy studying. Either her research or her actual schoolwork, I wasn't sure.
So the afternoon when there was a knock at our dorm room door and she was engrossed in something, I leaped off my bed to open it. And there was Marius.
“Oh, hi,” I said. “Hey, Violet?”
“I'm here to talk to you,” Marius said. He looked over my shoulder at Violet. She turned around in her seat.
“Hey,” she said.
He nodded. “Hi.”
He looked back at me. “Do you have a minute? We can go for a walk.”
I looked back at Violet, but she’d turned back to her notes. “Sure.”
Out on the quad, it was a sunny but chilly day. I stuffed my hands in my blazer pockets and tried to keep up with Marius’s long strides.
“Violet and I broke up,” he said.
“You did? I'm...sorry to hear that,” I said.
“She can do better,” he said ruefully. It was a joke, but barely. “I don't blame her. It's a lot to handle being with me. And she was right. She needs to grow on her own. I have a ton of respect for her, but...”
“If you love something, let it go?” I said. Sorry. “That's a total cliché.”
He shrugged. “There might be some truth to it. I think we can still be friends. She's certainly mature enough for it. And I might be getting there.”
“Philia,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“You know,” I said. “The different kinds of love. Agape, philia, and eros, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I certainly respect her as an equal. Hell, I think I respect her more for dumping me. It was the right thing to do.”
I said nothing. When we walked a few more steps in silence, there was a tension in the air. But not an unpleasant one.
I didn't like my reaction to hearing he was single. I couldn't help it, maybe, but I definitely could hide it.
“So that's what you wanted to tell me,” I said. “Just that you and Violet are done?”
“I figured you should know,” he said, “although I suppose you would have found out eventually.”
“I don't pry into personal lives,” I said, “so if Violet wanted to tell me, I would've found out.”
“Fair enough.” He licked his lips and tipped his face into the sunlight, squinting. “Anyway, that's not the only reason I wanted to talk to you.”
“I talked to Professor Kennedy,” I said quickly. “She said—”
“I know,” he said. “I'm not surprised. And you're going to stay?” He looked right at me.
It took a moment, but I nodded. “I don't have anywhere else to go,” I said, “and I think I have to.”
Another few steps in silence.
Marius turned, stopped, and faced me.
“Then I need to tell you about the Order of Eden.”
Also By Abbie Lyons
Hades Academy Series
First Semester
Second Semester
Third Semester
Fourth Semester
Fifth Semester
Sixth Seme
ster
Free Prequel
Brothers of Hades: Raines
Enchanted Penitentiary Series
Prisoner of Fae
Captive of Fae
Bound by Fae
Free Series Starter
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“The truth was, I didn’t know why I’d been having the nightmares. Hades Academy was the only place that could fix me. And I was going to get myself back together if it killed me...”
Learn just what happened to Raines before he arrived at Hades...