by Bob Dattolo
My small smile fell away completely. “If he tries, come to me and I’ll protect you if I can, just like I did Rachel.”
She shocked me by bowing her head. “Thank you. I’ll try. And…thank you for being here with me.”
We moved away from the upsetting talk into more generalities about classes and she described some of the basic fighting forms I’d been studying. When lunch time came around, I surprised her by getting a cart from the nurse and collecting food for us both, getting more than enough to fill us.
All in all, it was a leisurely few hours spent with Lacie as we talked and, I’d like to think, bonded. At least a little.
Who knows, maybe I’ve created a new friend?
Once Lacie fell asleep again, I left, heading back to my room to find that most of my floor was gone. Armand was still there, but he was reading some sort of magical book about conjuring and working on his breeze again. I watched him for a bit, then left him alone. Leticia was the only other one there, and she smiled when she saw me.
“Hey girl, how’re you doing today?”
I collapsed into the chair in our little lounge area. “I’m not really sure?”
She moved closer and patted my leg. “Come tell Auntie Leticia all about it.”
Her attempt at a matronly, professional woman made me laugh. “I’m not even sure what to say! This is all just so, so bizarre. My life has changed in ways that I never could have even guessed! I spent most of the morning with Lacie. Did you know that she’s been there since our fight and no one in her dozenal has visited her? None of her friends even bothered to stop in and check on her!”
Leticia nodded. “I’m not shocked by that. You wouldn’t see that in our dozenal. I’m not sure about the other two, but I think people would show up. I know that folks stayed with Dawson until he healed. But Corey’s dozenal? Yeah, no, I’m not surprised at all there.”
I rubbed my face. It’s becoming a habit for me lately. “I just don’t get it. I more understand why she confronted me. Not why she attacked, necessarily, but her attempt to get me to heal Corey? That I understand. That’s not even it, though! The whole rest of this is, yeah, way outside of my comfort zone! Everything I did with all of you! What I did with Zach or even Steph this morning! I’m trying to accept it all, but it keeps pushing at me. I feel like I’m adrift in my life right now. Like nothing is what I expected it to be, and even looking around for something normal only lets me see abnormal. Does that even make sense?”
She smiled and nodded. “It does. Does that surprise you?”
“Uh, a little?”
“I get it. Or, I don’t understand some of the specifics. Like being naked. That one skips right by me. It’s not something I ever learned. No shifter learns that. And it is learned. It’s taught. Kids don’t give a fuck that they’re naked. If you continue to raise them that way, they’ll never learn body shame. I get, though, that you were raised with it being a sin. That’s fucked up, right there. You said you had to raise your younger brothers and sisters, so how your parents justified being able to see them naked is beyond me. But that’s neither here nor there. I think we’ve nailed down that your parents are fucked in the head.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Back to your life…it is adrift. Everything you knew isn’t really reality. Or, a lot of it isn’t. They couldn’t lie about everything, but they lied about enough. It doesn’t help that you have no idea what you are and can do, although it seems like you can do a ton of stuff. I can’t even tell by your smell since you seem to cover some of almost everything that I can think of. But even that’s neither here nor there.” She cocked her head at my questioning look. “Seriously, it’s not. The sheer reality of the situation is that it does not matter, at all, what you are. On the surface, you’re a mage, so just roll with it. Even as a mage, you have a crazy long life ahead of you to figure the rest out. That’s only one facet of your life, though. The rest of it? Skin? Fuck it. Seriously. We’ve all seen you naked. Everyone in this building and on this campus has seen a naked girl before. Literally. It means nothing to us. At all. The sex? Not to be funny, but fuck that, too. I’m able to understand that one a little more because of movies and books and things like that, but it’s not a big deal. My parents were like three feet away from me when I lost my virginity. They cheered us on. It’s a big deal, but it’s not. It’s just a fact of life. I get that you tie other meaning to it, but most of the concerns you have when you thought you were human don’t apply. At all. You can’t catch a disease from it. Mages aren’t immune to everything like vampires and shifters, but I’ve never heard of an STD that’ll stick to a mage. Your healing is out of control, so I doubt you can catch anything. Pregnancy? That one’s harder. As a general rule, supernaturals don’t get pregnant easily. I doubt you can, either. The rest is all fluff for the most part. You were raised to think you’d go to hell, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember the questioning about Adam and Eve?”
“Of course.” It was rather eye opening.
“Okay, they were in the garden, right? They were together, hanging out naked, having sex. They eventually had kids.”
“Right.”
“At what point did they get married?”
My mouth fell open. “I…uhhh…”
She nodded. “Right. Now, in your belief system, maybe God married them. That’s a possibility. But I’m thinking it wasn’t quite like that. I’ve actually seen interviews with angels where they commented on sex before marriage and noted that it is not a sin the way they look at it. Not just sex.”
Pinching the bridge of my nose didn’t help absorb the information. At all.
She waved it away. “All right, skip that then. Your life is adrift. All of our lives are. Granted, the rest of us have better ideas of where we need to go and things like that, but that’s only because we were raised like this. You may not have been, but you’re part of it now. Being adrift doesn’t have to mean that it’s scary. At all. Being adrift and not tied down to docks, to continue the boating theme, simply means you can decide where you want to go with your life.”
She gestured to herself. “Look at me. I’m a wolf. A decently powerful one, but not an alpha. Within reason, I have a pretty good idea of where my life is going to go. At some point I’ll either get married or find a mate and get married, then I’ll join a Pack, find work, pop out some kids, and then hang out for hundreds and hundreds of years until I die in a fight or from an accident. Yeah, not the most thrilling thing, right? But it’s part of what I am to have that be my goal, at least for the most part. I see other girls that want to go out and be, I don’t know, the president or something, and I think that’s cool. Then I really think about it for me, and I end up with not wanting to do it. I’m driven towards wanting to have a mate and have kids and be part of a Pack. Steph is driven to be separate from us, to the point that she finds it difficult to connect sometimes. Her nature demands that she find a mate, pop out a baby or two, and then live until something kills her. She has a better option of being president than I do, but she still wouldn’t go for it. Rachel is the only one in our dozenal that is really wide open that way. Or, the mages have more options, but she’s the only one that really has a wide-open path. She can do or be virtually anything that she sets her mind to. I mean, assuming she can achieve it. She’s not driven by biological imperatives telling her to do certain things. Well, she’s driven to create safety and security and strength, but that’s different.”
She leaned back against the couch and curled her legs up underneath her. “You mages have more options than pack shifters. Most follow their magical strengths, but some don’t. They find something they love and they go for it. But it’s still driven by family pressure, personal pressure, and things like that. You…you don’t have any of that. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not entirely a good thing, since you don’t really have a family right now, but what I’m trying to say is that you have no expectations on you. You have a
unique opportunity to make yourself into whatever you want. Well, within reason, I guess, but still, the idea is the same. Learn about your power and your new world, and you’ll find that opportunities will become available to you. Until you accept that you’re not what you always thought you were, you won’t be able to see those opportunities. You’ll stay adrift, lost in a fog of confusion. Acceptance will help wipe out the fog.”
She let me sit there silently for a few minutes, thinking through everything.
“So you’re saying that I just need to accept that I’m not human? Not that I never have been, just that I’m no longer that?”
“Pretty much. Unless you do that, nothing else will really click into place. That’s the foundation for everything.” She held up her hands. “I know you’ve been trying to do that, and you’ve made huge strides already, but we both know you haven’t really accepted it. True enough, it’ll be a work in progress to accept it, but you need to really jump on the idea and latch onto it.”
Wow…just wow. True, too. As freaky as that is to think about, even though I’ve been trying to accept things, it’s pretty much piecemeal at best. It would be more accurate to say that I’ve really just allowed certain things to happen without pushing them away.
She’s also right that I have been working on it, but there’s always that thought in the back of my mind that it’s temporary. Like maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to go back to being human again. Which, arguably, I never have been.
Or, no argument about it. I have never been human.
Ever.
That thought made me grunt in shock. “I’ve never been human…” She didn’t respond. “That’s such a strange thought. It’s the foundation of so much in my life. What my parents taught me. What I was led to believe. Everything. I still can’t stop thinking that I need to find something to flog myself to cleanse the evil from me. I’ve been trying to accept everything, but there’s that part that’s just lurking in the background that pops up and smacks me with how I was brought up. I’ve been told repeatedly that my parents lied to me. I’ve seen it. But they have their hooks in me.” I rubbed my face again. “I’m not sure how to do it, but I need to stop paying attention to their lies and really move forward. Somehow, I need to let it go and work on what I really am.”
She finally nodded. “It would be like getting into an accident where you lose your legs. Going forward, you can’t keep sticking with oh, but I have legs as an argument. It’s just not true. While you may have in the past, you don’t now. Now you need to work with the reality of your situation and move ahead. You’ll never grow and achieve if you’re stuck believing something that’s just not true.”
Huh…such wisdom in a 16-year-old body.
“All right. So I’m not human. I’ve never been, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m not any longer.” My mind focused on Rachel. “Huh, that’s part of Rachel’s problem too, isn’t it? She could be number one in the school, but she still doesn’t really accept what she is.”
Leticia smiled and nodded. “Bingo. She’s trying, but she still holds to her human thoughts. She doesn’t want to kill, so it holds her back. None of us want to kill, but at least the shifters know it’s part of life. No one in the school is a psychopath to just go out and randomly slaughter people, but every one of us would kill to protect one of our own. In her case, she could stop a fight by attacking first and just putting a shifter down hard. She’s afraid of Corey’s magic since fire and vampires don’t exactly get along, but she could literally crush him before he could react. The problem there is that she’d have to kill him or control him with her gaze, but she doesn’t want to do either of those things.”
“Wow…that’s crazy. So she’s mostly accepting of what she is, except on the tail end of things. Where I have problems accepting the start, but the tail end isn’t as much of an issue.”
She cocked her head at me. “What do you mean?”
“When everything starts happening, I don’t have a problem with what happens. Like my magic. Or licking their blood from my hands. Or drinking Connor’s blood. It bothers me after the fact, but at the time? Not even remotely. I would have killed Connor yesterday, except Lacie stopped me. I didn’t care and I still don’t care about that. It’s the other things that seem to trip me up. I’m working on them, but still…”
She nodded. “I can see that. I think you’re right.”
“So I’m not human…” that thought kept rolling through my head, bumping into all of the things I’d been brought up to believe. Every time that little thought that I needed to cleanse myself for even talking to Leticia popped up, it was walloped by the thought that I’m not human.
After a minute, I patted the arm of the chair. “All right…so in that case, what do people do here Saturday afternoon?”
She smiled. “It all depends. Why, want to do anything in particular?”
I looked at my defense book. “Can you help me with my basic forms?”
She nodded. “I can.”
Her smile made me think hard. “Do I need to pay you somehow for the help?”
Her laugh was nearly infectious. “Pay me? No. We’re not quite like that in our group, but I wouldn’t mind a little something-something.”
She lost me on that. “Something-something?” When she rubbed her chest, I’m pretty sure my eyes dilated. “Oh…that…actually, that sounds delightful.”
We spent an hour with her coaching me on forms. The reading I did this morning and my conversation with Lacie helped immensely and I wasn’t too horrible with them. Definitely improvements needed, but it wasn’t an outright joke.
When the hour was up, I couldn’t wait any longer, stepping in and kissing her. She tasted like honey. That thought distracted me and overrode the voice of my father in the back of my head.
I’m not human. I can do this.
Two hours later, the door to my room opened and Steph walked in. I’m proud that I didn’t even start to cover myself. I was still coming down from my last orgasm, and I was entwined in Leticia’s arms.
“Hey, is everyone back?” She didn’t move from where she was resting against my chest, fingers still resting on my sex. She didn’t act concerned in the slightest. Mainly because she wasn’t.
Steph smiled wide as she took us in. “Yeah, I think everyone’s back? You guys have any plans for dinner?”
Leticia looked up at me and let me answer. “Not that we talked about? Does everyone eat here on Saturday for dinner? Or go out? Or something else?”
Leticia slid out of bed, kissing my lips softly before standing. “We tend to do something as a group, although not all of us every time. It just depends.”
Steph left the door open and sat on her chair. Armand walked past in the hallway and glanced in, but didn’t react as if he saw anything strange.
I’m not human. I can do this.
“I’m okay with doing something together? Have any plans been made?” Leticia handed me my underwear, and I fought off a blush as I got dressed.
“Nothing so far. Tom was talking to Sarah about possibilities.”
When I was dressed, I grabbed my phone. “All right, let me hit the bathroom and we can go check?”
Dinner was freaking awesome. They decided on a wood-fired pizza place and we commandeered a table in the back corner. The pizza was amazing, but the company was even better. We actually managed to get everyone to attend today, so it was a big group. I learned more about each of them over the meal than I would have guessed, and they didn’t even fixate on me, which was even better.
Our waitress was beyond shocked by the number of pies we ordered, but she brought them once she confirmed that we could pay for everything. It was an amazingly normal time at a time in my life where so many things are abnormal. Or, abnormal for the way things used to be. Now they’re normal. My little mantra about not being human is going to get seared into my brain until I believe it wholeheartedly.
When we were done, we hit the movies and I enj
oyed more time with the group. It was a ton of fun being with everyone. The fun only continued back at the dorms where they broke out Cards Against Humanity. I’ve never played it before, but it was a ball of laughs. And, yeah, it turned into just a bit of group sex afterwards. I even got to try two guys at once as I straddled Carl with Nick behind me. Steph didn’t think I could take them both, but I proved her wrong. My ass ached in just the right way when we were done, and I’m pretty sure I broke open some of my mental barriers. Granted, not the magical ones that my mom put into place, but the societal ones, I guess.
Chapter 14
A snort distracted me, “Still no luck?” Armand watched me from the door as I sat at my desk, starting at the candle.
Sitting back in frustration, I glared at the offending pillar of wax. “No luck. Nothing. Zilch. I’ve tried everything that I can think of based on the book and what Mr. Reynolds said. I swear I can feel heat inside, but I can’t seem to move it to the wick. Or if I am, nothing is happening.”
He moved in and crouched next to my desk, staring at the candle for just a second. I felt something move between him and the wick, before it burst into a tiny, perfect flame.
I grunted as something else flowed towards the candle and the flame went out.
“Yeah, I see it. I can even feel what you’re doing. Or that you’re doing something, I guess, but I can’t seem to get it to work. At all.”
He patted my leg before sitting on my bed. “It’s a basic step in magic, but it’s not a simple step. Don’t for a minute think that because the mages in our class learned how to do this at like five years old that it’s an easy thing to do. You don’t see the months and months of sweat and tears that we all had to go through. I don’t know anyone that learned how to do it easily. I think the shortest time I’ve ever heard is like two weeks? And no one in the school that I know of had it that short. This is only your second attempt at it, so don’t give up. We all need to make that connection with our power that you need to make. We’re attempting to do the same thing, light the candle, but how we go about it is specific to each of our abilities. I’ve heard of some people having to ask their power to do something. Others command. Others just work hand-in-hand. Hell, that could all be crutches for how to access power for all I know. I just know that until you figure out how to make your power do what you want, the candle won’t light.”