by Lucia Ashta
“Ah, here it is,” the troll with the pink fro-hawk announced, turning back toward the counter with the file in hand. His step hitched for half a second while he caught me staring, before he continued up his stepstool. “Like what you see, Jasmine Jolly?”
“I’d like to see what’s in that file,” I said instead of what I wanted to tell him about using the name I hated.
“We all want things we don’t get, now don’t we?”
The three other trolls resumed their duties throughout the office, seemingly satisfied that everything had returned to normal in their micro world within the admin building.
“Yeah, maybe,” I grumbled, casting a quick glance behind me at Ky. His gaze was already on me, but instead of appearing annoyed as I’d expected, I could have sworn I detected longing. Realizing I was taking him in, he snapped his eyes to mine, and whatever he discovered there had him immediately looking away, suddenly far more intrigued with the wall than with me.
He definitely took some crazy pills this morning. He was behaving stranger than usual.
“Your attendance is confirmed, Jasmine Jolly,” Jerkwad said, and I spun back around to glare at him.
A delighted twinkle sparkled across his dark eyes.
Was he messing with me?
One look at the grin spreading across his stubby lips confirmed that yes, yes he was.
“Motherfucker,” I mumbled under my breath. I couldn’t decide if I was impressed or hella annoyed, but either way even I knew not to get too lippy with the trolls. They might be fun to mess with, but they were no slouches on the magical battlefield, I knew that much from stories Dad had told me and from how they’d risen to the occasion the last few terms the rogue faction of the Shifter Alliance had invaded the school.
Jerkwad’s grin widened, and I swore he heard me.
“Jasmine Jolly…” he started, making me certain he had. The effer was messing with me big time. I’d just put big, glaring spotlights on my main pressure point, and he was pecking at it at every opportunity.
“Place your hand on the determinator.” He slid a crystal-ball looking device across the counter toward me, if said crystal ball had been sliced neatly in half.
I eyed the curved apparatus. “What’s a determinator? And that’s not a random question—it’s relevant.”
“It’s new this term. After all the trouble we’ve had, Sir Lancelot has increased security measures across the board. This verifies that you are indeed who you say you are, and that you are the student whose enrollment I’ve just confirmed.”
When I hesitated, Ky and Boone moved closer. “We both had to do it too,” Boone said, subtly telling me that Jerkwad wasn’t singling me out for some trial runs of some new torture device or something.
The heat of Ky’s body radiated into my back and side. He was standing close, and my body wanted to melt into him. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, and for a second I lost track of what he was talking about.
I nodded to cover the effect Ky had on me and stepped forward, hand extended.
“Jasmine Jolly, wait,” Jerkwad said and my nostrils flared at him and his repeated taunting enough to set my dangling nose ring to swinging. He grinned his mischief, but then slipped into serious mode. “I have to say my part. If not, the spell governing the device won’t work.”
“Okay,” I said, waiting while my thoughts turned to how I could get back at the pygmy troll.
He cleared his throat and announced, chest puffed with importance: “Determinator, the student before you is Jasmine Jolly. She’s been admitted to the Magical Creatures Academy as a fourth term student, after having properly fulfilled the requirements of the first three semesters. Her identity has been confirmed at the gate”—I winced internally. “Now I ask that you call on your magic to confirm that this student is indeed Jasmine Jolly.”
I stared at Jerkwad through narrow slits.
“Jasmine Jolly, you must now place your hand on the determinator.”
But instead of doing that, I growled softly until Ky placed a comforting hand on my lower back. I relaxed some and extended my hand toward the half orb. Its previously clear surface swirled within with what looked to be smoke. The concave crystal glowed and pulsed with a milky, opal mist while nestled in its metal base, designed with intricate vine patterns climbing up the crystal.
As I drew my hand near and hovered my palm over the determinator atop the counter, the crystal began to vibrate.
“Don’t delay, Jasmine Jolly,” the troll said, and I glared at him while bringing my hand down, willing it to just be over already so I didn’t have to hear my full name for the rest of the term at least.
But as I drew my hand down, the determinator began to shake until it vibrated the length of counter beneath it. I didn’t turn to see them, but I could feel the attention of the other three trolls on me as they abandoned their duties to watch.
“Do I still touch it?” I asked.
The counter shivered beneath me, its joints creaking as the wood and marble moved in ways they weren’t meant to.
“Of course you do, Jasmine Jolly,” Jerkwad snapped. “Isn’t that what I just told you to do?”
With a growl I didn’t bother swallowing, I slammed my hand onto the determinator.
The vibrations sped up my arm and across my chest, making my teeth chatter.
And a violet light sped back down in the opposite direction, heating my skin as it went.
6
The violet light brightened and spread across every part of my body, flashing everywhere at once. It coated my bare arms and shoulders, and raced down my legs, visible beneath my short skirt.
“What the…?” But I couldn’t get the rest of my exclamation out around the sudden violent clattering of my teeth. I dropped my jaw open to avoid breaking them.
The counter the determinator rested on shook aggressively, its hinges and joists creaking loudly. They wouldn’t hold up for long.
“What’s going on?” Boone shouted at the trolls from right next to me.
“Let go!” Ky told me, reaching out to tear me away from the determinator.
“No!” Jerkwad yelled as the three other trolls hopped down from their stools, dragged them across the floor beneath the counter, and then popped up next to Jerkwad to join him in staring at me.
“She has to let go,” Ky insisted. “It’s hurting her.”
It wasn’t—not entirely. It felt like I’d placed my hand in a live electric socket—while standing in a bucket of water. But I wasn’t sure the violet light, whatever it was, was actually hurting my body, and I was too rattled to properly decide.
“She can’t let go,” Highlighter-yellow said in a harsh, urgent grumble. “It could make whatever is happening worse.”
“What could be worse than this?” Boone asked, though I already knew the answer. Having Wren’s fifty-foot tall willow tree fall on my leg was a gazillion times worse than this.
But Highlighter-yellow, who was apparently more in charge than the other trolls, ignored Boone’s question and started barking off orders to the others.
“Poompoom, get Fianna and Nessa here immediately. Use the Brick Bam. Tell them we need Sir Lancelot now.”
The troll with the violet fro-hawk hopped down from his stool. While he ran around the counters and popped out on the other end of the room in front of the bare brick wall, Highlighter-yellow commanded Midnight Blue.
“Cascatch, you go find the messenger flowers in the lobby. Call Mordecai and Albacus. I think they’re out in the forest today. But the plants should be able to find them.”
Without a word, Cascatch hopped from his stool, popped back into sight once the counters ended, and sprinted through the open door to the admin office.
“Fooshfoo, go find Egan. I have a feeling he’ll be needed.”
“And where do I find him?” Jerkwad asked while my brain cells rattled inside my head.
“I don’t know, but I have faith you’ll locate him.”
Without f
urther ado, not even a passing mention of my full birth name, Fooshfoo jumped from his stool and disappeared from view, trailing Cascatch out the doorway.
Then Highlighter-yellow’s eyes trained on me. “No matter what you do, you do not let go, do you understand?”
I nodded at him, but who knew how my nod came off. My entire body was one big mass of nonstop, jerking movement.
“She has to let go,” Ky hissed at the troll. “It could be destroying her inside.”
“‘Kay,” I managed to eke out, but I didn’t think Ky understood what I meant to say, and instead of reassuring him that I believed I was actually going to be okay once everything stopped moving, my one syllable answer only furrowed his brow further and had him reaching out to me.
“Do. Not. Touch. Her,” Highlighter-yellow warned, his tone a menacing rumble.
Ky growled back, and a part of me realized he must be distressed to direct his frustration like that at the troll.
A flash that didn’t originate in the determinator illuminated the room. It had to be the Brick Bam. As if the spelled brick were a disco ball instead of a tool to transmit messages, beams of rainbow hues glittered across the wall I faced, circling it a few times before dissipating.
Power streamed through the determinator and into me while Poompoom pitter-pattered beneath the counters. By the time he popped back up next to Highlighter-yellow, his violet fro-hawk at attention, the energy rushing through me made my vision hazy. All I could see of the trolls were smudges of bright colors.
“Jas,” Ky said from one side of me, while I also sensed Boone close on the other.
But I was beyond responding.
A nearly blinding violet glowed from the determinator, the same hue as the magic that coated my outstretched hand and arm. I squinted at it, but couldn’t bring it into focus.
I gasped when the energy seemed to concentrate in the pendant between my breasts, concealed beneath my tank top.
“Are you all right?” Ky barked.
I attempted to nod but couldn’t.
The pendant burned with an unnatural warmth, nearly scalding my bare flesh beneath it.
Suddenly, it became difficult to breathe beneath the combination of the burning heat and the energy swarming me, pressing inward against me. And just as suddenly, it began to hurt. The power, or whatever the hell it was, seared me like it was branding my soul with a hot iron.
Opening and closing my mouth like a fish desperate for water, it was all I could do to hold on and pull in enough air to keep me standing.
Fuck what Yellow said. I was letting go right the hell now.
I pulled my palm up, willing it to disconnect from the determinator … but nothing happened. If anything, another surge of this energy pulsed from the crystal and into me, depositing perhaps within the pendant at my chest. Or was it the other way around? I couldn’t tell what exactly was happening anymore, other than that I was beyond ready for it to stop.
As if I were wading through sludge, I brought my other hand up to grip my wrist and tugged at my immovable hand.
“Don’t!” the bossy troll said, but it didn’t matter at all. No matter how hard I yanked on my hand, it didn’t budge.
And when I went to remove my second hand from where it clamped against my wrist, the hand slipped from my control, sliding down my wrist, until finally it snapped to the other side of the glowing, pulsing orb like a magnet drawn to its irresistible pull.
“See!” Yellow yelled. “She shouldn’t have done that.”
Too bad I couldn’t move or I would’ve kicked him in his little pygmy troll balls—status as staff of the academy be damned.
My hands clutched the determinator, fingers digging into the now-scalding hot crystal, and I wondered for a panicked moment if I’d ever be free of it. The way my body responded to it suggested that maybe I’d never be able to let go.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore, the power streaming through me amped up. My body ceased its vibrating and chattering. Every inch of me became rigid. My elbows snapped to a line straight with the rest of my arms. My knees locked in place as if I were an unfeeling statue.
“Her hair,” Boone whispered, but I had no idea what my hair was doing. At least that I couldn’t feel, thank fuck.
A pop rang out above the buzzing that filled the room like the hum of an electric power station. Fianna zoomed into view, her tiny eyes widening as they trailed from the determinator to me and back again.
A second pop signaled Nessa’s arrival, and when she flew around to check out what had her cousin so enthralled, she gasped at the sight of me.
“Go get Sir Lancelot,” Fianna the Crimson ordered the slightly smaller fairy, and Nessa nodded her bright blue head of hair and popped back out of view.
“Don’t you think she should let go?” Fianna asked Yellow.
“No, I don’t, and I told her so. She ignored my orders and tried anyway, but she can’t disconnect the contact.”
Yellow was definitely deserving of a kick to the balls. To choose this moment for an I told you so?
I glared at the blurry yellow image of him, but it was useless.
The pendant heated to the point that I wondered if it might be possible for it to burn a hole through my chest. I winced and caught a fuzzy Ky hovering around one side of me, hands extended, searching for a way to help.
“We have to stop this!” Boone boomed. “Fianna, where are Albacus and Mordecai?”
“They’ll be coming,” Yellow said. “I sent Cascatch to get them.”
“Well, he isn’t working fast enough,” Ky growled.
“He is too,” the troll said. “We always execute our orders swiftly and flawlessly.” I pictured him pointing the nose on his little-old-man face up in the air, and I wished I could say something—anything.
Every muscle ached from the tension rolling through me. I fleetingly wondered if a human body could actually break or shatter. If so, I was a prime candidate for this eventuality.
The violet glow emitting from the determinator, or my hands, or maybe both, expanded to fully conceal the trolls on their stepstools. All I could see now was light, and as my jaw began to tremble from the unyielding rigidity running through it, I willed it to be over before I did something embarrassing like cry from what had fast become unbearable pain.
Please, stop, I begged within the mush that was my current state of mind.
A crisp pop punctuated the air, an instant before the sound of flapping wings wafted through the open doorway. I caught sight of Nessa—or what I imagined was Nessa given the bright blue tinge to the tiny blur—appearing right in front of me, too close to my gaze to focus on even if I had the wherewithal to do so, and a blurry, brown pygmy owl banking toward me, when it all just … stopped.
One moment I was connected to the half sphere against my will, and the next nothing was holding me up; my legs sure as shit weren’t. Every part of my body that had been rigid as stone swapped out for the consistency of Jell-O. My knees gave out on me without warning and I crumpled to the marble tiling. My butt hit the floor with a hard smack, and I was surely flashing everyone in front of me. But before I could slam my shoulders and head against the floor, Ky caught me. He scooped me into his arms, pressing me firmly against his chest.
My head sagged against him. His heart raced beneath my ear as if he’d been the one zapped by a damn determinator instead of me. “You’ll be okay now,” he growled, and I managed to tilt my head up slightly to take him in. Yep, the hard clenching of his jaw and angry set of his eyes confirmed that growling was all he was capable of.
He pulled me more securely against his chest, tightening his grip around my back and legs to preserve my modesty. Ky was a fucking knight in shining armor. Who knew?
“I’m taking her to the healing wing,” he grumbled. “She needs Melinda to look at her.”
“We need to figure out what caused the reaction with the determinator,” Yellow stated, but Sir Lancelot cut him off.
“
Lord Kylan is right, Koochkoo. The well-being of our students is our utmost priority. Lead the way, Lord Zimmer,” Sir Lancelot called to Boone. My friend immediately turned around and stalked through the threshold, rushing across the opulent lobby to hold the double doors open for Ky and me in his arms.
Ky all but ran across the lobby to emerge from Acquaine Hall. As soon as we were outside in the springtime sunshine of mid-afternoon, Sir Lancelot swooped overhead and pointed away from the healing wing, which was immediately next to the admin building.
Fianna and Nessa zoomed to fly right next to me as his proxy, and the pattering of feet behind us suggested that some of the trolls were following as well.
Boone once more rushed ahead to open the doors, and the very moment Ky entered the serene space of the healing wing with me in his arms, Melinda swiveled from where she stood arranging things in the large room.
The badger with a gift for healing and the temperament of a butterfly immediately clutched her ample Little House on the Prairie skirts in her paws and ran toward us. “Over there.” She gestured with her snout toward the first empty bed. “Lay the poor thing down there and tell me what happened to the dear.”
Ky lowered me atop the bed with infinite care and then didn’t withdraw, hovering at the edge of the bed nervously. Before I could think it through, I grabbed his hand and clutched it in mine. He didn’t move or complain, and I didn’t meet his waiting gaze. I had bigger fish to fry than trying to figure out Kylan Bond Mont today.
“What happened?” Melinda prompted again as creatures piled into the room after me.
“We’re not exactly sure,” Ky said as Boone settled beside him, pulling out his phone—to call Wren, I presumed. Fianna and Nessa hovered above my head, peering down at me, while Poompoom and Cascatch loitered by the door. A few moments later, Egan stormed into the room, his hooves clicking against the wooden floor of the healing wing, with Fooshfoo, AKA Jerkwad, on his tail.
Yellow must have remained behind to supervise the admin office. I’d never witnessed the trolls abandoning their posts, no matter what the circumstances. They seemed to value duty above most everything else.