Chapter Twenty
Leo and I walked down the hill and through the orchard on our way to the dining hall, and I didn’t ask him anything else about what he meant when he said he’d always lose control. I hoped he would tell me.
The dining hall was buzzing with even more people than there were this morning at breakfast. I scanned the faces for Alita, or better said, I scanned for her bright red hair. She was sitting at the same table we were at for breakfast, along with Alec, Bryce, and Rhea, none of whom I’d seen since we all went our separate ways for the welcome assembly. I wondered if Alita’s first honing class was like mine—if her Gnome teacher had told her the same story about how their queen got them all kicked out of The Garden of Eden.
“Well, well, well,” Rhea said as Leo and I approached the table. She shook her head and looked us up and down. “And where have you two been all afternoon?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Somebody missed third year Fire and Flight Prep.“
“I think I showed everybody this morning that I don’t need that class,“ Leo said, returning her taunting tone.
Everyone else at the table whistled low, stopping only when Rhea stared daggers at them. She eventually laughed it off and turned to me with a wink. “Just because he’s an expert at bagging new blood he thinks he’s an expert at everything.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Alita sucked in a breath and covered her mouth, her green eyes suddenly wide as she jerked her attention to me.
“No way…” she gasped, risking a quick glance at Leo.
Both Alec and Bryce gave each other knowing grins, then Alec slapped him on the back in some kind of congratulations.
“Uh, no guys…” Leo started with a raised hand, but I cut him off, furious.
“Are you actually kidding me? I’ve known him two days,” I said, consciously having to control my volume.
“That long? Wow…” Rhea said, mocking me with feigned surprise. “He must be thinking about proposing then.” She laughed low in her throat until Leo picked a grape from Bryce’s plate and tossed it at her. He laughed out loud when it went down the front of her shirt, and just that fast, the tension in the air was broken.
“OK, so seriously did you and Leo—“ Alita leaned in and whispered to me as I took a seat.
“No!” I said loudly. Too loudly for as close as she was to me, and she visibly jumped.
The whole table laughed even harder as she looked at me in shocked amazement. “OK, OK, all you had to do was say so.”
“I did say so…about ten seconds ago. You just—oh my god, never mind,” I said, fighting to keep from calling her out for being so vapid. It’s a good thing she had a Citadel wall to protect her from the real world her whole life.
Leo must have seen me fuming because he quickly interjected. “Let’s get a plate,” he said, brushing his hand over my shoulder as he stood. Surprised looks ricocheted around the table, and heat rushed through me all over again.
“Great idea,” I said, glaring at everyone as I turned to head to the pasta bay, which was on the other side of the dining hall. Leo walked with me and handed me a plate once we arrived.
“Sorry about them,” he said, spooning ravioli into a bowl. “Rhea can be…petty.”
And there it was, the secret key that unlocked Rhea’s apparent problem with me since I met her this morning. They had history.
“How long have you two been broken up?” I asked, scooping spaghetti into the pronged ladle.
“What? No,” he shook his head adamantly. “No, we’ve never been a thing.”
“Well, she probably wants to be a thing in that case,” I said, my stomach in knots about how to make this all go away because it was only my second day here. Rhea obviously had issues with me, and they were the instant-onset variety, so there was probably very little, if anything, I could do about them. I moved to the other side of Leo and put some steamed broccoli in a bowl.
“I don’t think jealousy is her problem, but I’ll have a talk with her and find out what is,” he said, adding a roll to his plate. “She shouldn’t have set you up for all that back there, whatever her motivation was.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I answered too quickly. “I mean, thanks, but I can fight my own battles. Almost every girl I’ve ever known has been like her. She’s not my first jealous-for-no-reason mean girl experience.”
“Well, if your suspicions about her are right, then I wouldn’t say she has no reason to be jealous,” Leo said, giving me one of those smiles that lasted a few seconds too long to be casual.
I didn’t understand how anyone could have the kind of insight he had. Every word he said either put me at ease or made me feel like at any second I was going to shoot into the sky like a rocket. And I wasn’t sure what I thought about that. I’d never made time for guys with trying to get into The Citadel, not that I’d have wanted to date any of them in The Grind anyway. Maybe this is just what it was like to be with someone.
Not that we were together.
I tried my best to shelve everything about that entire topic for now. I’d only been here two days. Two days? I let the reality of how much time that was sink in. What was I doing? Getting caught up, that’s what. Getting distracted from the real insanity of finding out I had some kind of pre-human blood running through my veins. Blood that had been unceremoniously activated by a girl who took a drug, got a disease, and then passed that disease onto me when she bit me!
That’s all this was, then, I’d decided. Distraction from the upside down new reality I was living. In psychology class back at school they’d talked about latching onto something else in times of stress—just something to take your mind off reality. That’s how addictions started, as little escapes that just built up over time. And with as much as I was obsessively aware of Leo’s presence, maybe I was well on my way to being addicted to him.
“Halsey?” Leo said, which startled me out of my thoughts. I turned to him, surprised that we were already halfway back to the table. “There you are.” He smiled. “You OK?”
“Fine, sorry,” I said, shaking off the web of thoughts I’d just tangled myself in. “My mind was just wandering.”
“Yeah, it’s been a busy few days,” he added. “And I have a feeling your week leading up to them was probably pretty hectic too.”
“Definitely an understatement,” I said, letting myself laugh about it now that everything with Lauren and Jen was all really in the past.
“Well, I probably didn’t help all that earlier,” he said, then cleared his throat and slowed his pace.
“Oh, don’t worry, no… That was—” I started, but he stopped me.
“You don’t have to do that, it’s OK. I just got ahead of myself. I know that sounds like an excuse, but I’d like to get to know you. And I want to do it right.” Leo came to a full stop and met my eyes. “Will you meet me tonight, before everyone else gets to the cliff? I want to show you something.” I stared up at him, dumbfounded for several seconds. He suddenly dropped his eyes and started again. “I understand if you don’t want to, I just thought…”
“No!” I interrupted. “I mean, it’s OK. That would be, if you want to, um—” I babbled like an absolutely drunk person and had to suck in a quick breath to stop the deluge of nonsense coming out of my mouth. “Yes, is what I’m saying.” I winced, pressing my lips into a hard line to prevent any more felony class dumbassery from escaping.
Leo’s mouth quirked as he nodded. “All right then. I’ll come by around seven.”
“All right, it’s a date,” I somehow said, my blood instantly freezing in my veins. Why would I say that? It wasn’t a date. It was just, meeting…together. Romantically. Maybe. But—
“It’s a date,” he repeated with a little nod, effectively stopping my runaway train thoughts with a slow, impossible smile.
“Halsey! You are screwing Leo!?” Alita literally yelled halfway across the dining hall, which made me jump so abruptly it nearly resulted in a meatball storm for ever
yone within a five-foot radius of me.
The entire dining hall froze in a coordinated, gaping stare at us. It was like a flash mob, but instead of dancing, it was staring. Then it was laughing with the staring.
I sent Alita an I-will-kill-you-with-your-own-hair look, which I maintained without blinking the entire, double-timed walk back to the table.
I put down my tray and sat about an inch from her face. “Are you actually high right now? Did you snort some kind of fake Garden of Eden freaky fruit and just yell that shit over like, five lunch lines at me?” I hissed every word through my teeth.
She didn’t have a chance to say anything before our own table erupted in laughter, and I wanted to kill everyone with my spork.
I had no choice but to make a hand cave and put my head in it, and there, quietly wait for the fatal dose of embarrassment to take me to Jesus. Rhea started laughing herself into a coughing fit, but I secretly hoped she was choking on her cabbage roll.
In that moment, with that realization, the aftermath of the adrenaline started to kick in—the fear after the fight or flight, and I felt my throat closing with the imminent threat of tears. They stung my eyes the second I started to panic, and then the floodgates opened thanks to my acute awareness that the only thing worse than what Alita just shouted in front of everyone would be if I sat here and cried about it in front of everyone.
But there was something even worse than that.
My wings snapped out and cleared the tables on either side of me—at least a dozen magical lunch eaters were all swatted to the floor, their various entrees falling like a food typhoon all around them.
When I realized what had happened, I lost all control. My hands curved into feathers faster than they had even after the hurricane berries, and the burning sensation in my throat and eyes intensified until I couldn’t see at all. Pain ripped through my whole body, sharp and abrupt. I screamed, but it wasn’t my voice anymore. It was the eagle screech.
I fell to the floor and tried to find my bearings, but no matter how many times I blinked, I still couldn’t see anything but black all around me. I screamed—no, screeched again, but this time, the ear-piercing sound somehow brought my vision back. It was blurry at first, but at least I could see. I blinked several more times, and then I could see better than I ever had in my life—the individual eyelashes of everyone staring at me…each freckle, each hair follicle from clear across the room.
I had to get up. Up…get UP, I thought, wanting more than anything to run out of there as fast as I could. I searched for the door, which in that second pulled open as someone rushed out. Get up! Run! Go, before it closes! I thought again, and the next thing I knew, I was moving fast.
But I wasn’t running.
Chapter Twenty-One
I darted through the closing door just in time. The only thing I could think to do was run to my dorm and lock the door behind me. Maybe I’d even wedge a chair under the handle so Alita couldn’t get in. I reached for the key in my pocket, and immediately face-planted in the grass. I rolled over and over for several seconds until I finally stopped and tried to get to my feet, only I was already upright, and already on my feet. Everything in my head was on a weird five-second delay.
“Halsey!”
“Halsey, wait!”
I heard a few different voices call my name. And then I heard their footfalls over the grass as they began running in my direction.
I didn’t think beyond getting away from them, so again, I ran as fast as I could.
And again, I wasn’t running. I was flying.
It only lasted a handful of seconds before I crashed into the ground, but I’d somehow managed to make my way over the orchard trees. I was expecting a hill past the orchard, but instead I found the beach. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or maybe it was a different orchard?
Take a deep breath… I remembered Leo saying. You can’t fight a tidal wave.
“The seawater,” I said out loud, and although the words sounded strangled, at least they were words instead of the screech. I took another deep breath, but the fear of being discovered in whatever half-state I realized I must be in was terrifying. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t calm down long enough even to try to reverse the sensation of my skin being set on fire. I couldn’t retract the feathers I saw in place of my fingers, and I couldn’t stop the blood-freezing horror I felt at the sight of something new—a bony ridge had developed all the way up my arms, and dark gold feathers began creeping over my shoulders like they were trying to knit the partial wings on my back to them.
I had to get to the water. It had stopped my skin from burning after I’d eaten the hurricane berries. It has stopped the shift altogether and reversed it.
“Halsey! Stop!” Leo shouted behind me, but I was only a few yards from the water. “Halsey! It’s not the same water!” he shouted again, but it was too late. The surf washed over my feet, but instead of it alleviating the burning feeling like it had before, it made it worse. Ten-thousand times worse.
I screamed, a mangled half-screech sound, and stumbled backward. As I scrambled back from the water, I turned to see Leo lowering himself to the beach. His arms seemed to pull out of the black, armored wings that were kicking up sand and debris as he touched down. They disappeared the second he landed, and the final whoosh of air blew what was left of my shirt in every direction. I looked down and wrapped my deformed arms around myself upon realizing the buttons of my shirt had all been torn off and the sleeves had split all the way up each side.
“You found her!” Rhea said, but when I looked up, it wasn’t Rhea I saw. At least, not completely.
Her long, blonde hair started to reappear over the armored gold scales that had just been covering her head, throat and torso. They caught and reflected the last of the setting sun in the same moment her red and gold shimmering wings also began disappearing behind her. But before they were gone, I could see they were feathered like mine. She stood there bare chested and completely unfazed by it as she pulled a wadded tank top from the pocket of her skort and slipped it over her head. “Is she all right?” she asked as Leo scooped me up and carried me back from the surf toward her.
“I think so. She just got caught mid-shift.”
“Oh no, her feet…” Rhea said blowing out a breath. I couldn’t see what she was talking about, but at the mention, the searing pain ran up my legs all over again.
“Go to the admin house and bring the water,” Leo said, and before he could finish the sentence, Rhea was already taking off her tank top and shoving it in her pocket again. I watched in fascination as her skin hardened into the shimmering golden scales it had been a minute ago, her hair disappearing in the same interval her beautiful red and gold wings appeared. In an instant, she shot over the trees and out of sight. She was the most stunning thing I’d ever seen, except for Leo’s black dragon—but I’d only seen parts of that through the trees.
I was suddenly very much aware of the gnarled, monstrous appearance of my arms, and I was paralyzed with fear for what my face must look like because my nose and mouth tingled, and I could breathe like I never had before. Each inhale felt like five, and the surge of energy after each one was almost too much to bear.
“Don’t…look at me,” I said, my voice hoarse and strained as it tore from my throat.
“Stop, Halsey…” he said, pulling me against him as he kneeled beside me and buried his face in my hair. He kissed the top of my head. Heat radiated from him, and with everything feeling like it was already on fire, I had to pull away.
I looked down at my legs for the first time, and saw that my feet and ankles were covered in burns. How could that have been just from the seawater? At the sight of them, the intermittent feathers over my thighs and shins started to recede, and the tingling in my lips and face stopped. I held out my hands, which were also no longer covered in feathers, so I immediately brought them to my face to make sure everything was the same.
No beak…no feathers exc
ept for what felt like a few near my temples, but even those were receding.
“What’s happening to me?” I said, my voice breaking on the last word.
“The shift recedes if you’re hurt so it can heal you from the inside,” Leo said. “It channels it’s energy to repair your injuries.”
“What?” I asked, breathlessly watching the grotesque ridges in my arms get smaller until they disappeared entirely. I gripped my elbows, pressed my fingers into the joints to feel for the bones that were just there, under my skin. They were gone, and so were the burns on my feet and ankles.
A sudden gust of wind came off the ocean, blowing the shreds of my shirt back, and my bra was gone! I pulled down the pieces of my shirt and crossed my arms over them, all at once feeling my center of gravity shifting again like that night with the hurricane berries.
I stumbled backward and fell, the weight of my wings too much to stay upright.
“It’s OK, Rhea will be here with the water soon. You can put my shirt on then.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s clean. Dragons are obsessive about hygiene.”
A laugh bubbled in my chest. “How…?” was all I managed to say before the threat of tears closed off my throat again. My sandals were gone, and in an effort to regain my composure, I tried to occupy my mind with pinpointing when I must have lost them. Oh, and when my bra had disappeared. I would be absolutely murdered by the embarrassment if it were hanging off the dessert bay in the dining hall right now. I closed my eyes at the thought and sighed.
“Your wings just shot out pretty fast, and they’re sharp at first…” Leo said, running a hand down the side of my calf. “The first time I shredded a shirt to ribbons, I had no idea how it happened either.” He went on, and I looked at him, amazed again at his insight as to what to say to me right now. He pulled in a long, easy breath. “But…you don’t have to be embarrassed, I mean, just judging by the way you’re clinging to the scraps of your shirt like that.” He nodded to what was left of it and smiled as I risked a glance at him, his eyes warm and kind. He raised his brows and nodded. “Hey, Sylphs and Salamanders walk around the island topless all the time. Nobody cares. The only reason it’s not happening now is because it’s honing week. New Bloods have enough to stress about without adding public nudity to the picture.”
Academy of Magic Collection Page 68