The sense wasn’t there, but the faculty didn’t appear to give a fuck about that. Why would they? I was human born, an anomaly, something they didn’t particularly trust, but a part of their people now whether they liked it or not.
The human born had been around for centuries, and no one knew why they were even a thing.
One day, a young human female had popped up with wings, and ever since, in every generation, there were a few human borns who manifested in the race.
Though we were considered Fae thanks to our wings, from the way they treated me, I knew I’d never be trusted and would be isolated so long as I was a part of this shitty world. I was A-Okay with being ignored, indeed, I preferred that to what was about to go down—a battle.
I wasn’t a fighter. I didn’t know how many times I had to make that declaration, but I wasn’t. Nobody seemed to care because everyone, whether they were admin, instructor, or warrior caste, all trained in this way.
The field ahead of me was empty. At a human school, there’d have been crap everywhere to train with. But here, we were armed with what we could fight with.
The size of a football field, I stood at one side with a line of forty other Fae, while at the opposite end, there were another forty Fae just waiting to attack us.
In my hand, I had my sword and that was it. That was what I’d be heading into battle with.
A sword.
Me.
A fucking sword.
Even knowing this was how the Fae fought didn’t make this any better. I was still certain there was some kind of cosmic joke that had given me wings because I had zero affinity with anything they did.
When Jeanien began flying across the field, I tensed, well aware what was about to happen. She came to a point at the side of the pitch, somewhere in the middle, and with both sides able to see her, shouted, “Allez!”
The Fae also had a preference for French. They really cut me no slack, did they? Couldn’t they have preferred Spanish? Sol’s sake.
At her call, all around me, wings fluttered gracefully into action and I was suddenly surrounded by the sight of a lot of boots as they passed me by.
Before cars had been developed with a starter motor, they’d had a rotary starter at the front of the car. I’d seen a movie once where the driver had gone to the front of the vehicle, then had turned some kind of rod, and that had started the ignition… That was me.
I felt like an old, original Ford made with Henry’s hands in a field of brand-new Porsches as I forced my wings to start moving. The muscles that guided the wing structure still felt alien to me. I knew that was weird considering they were a part of me, but I’d had eighteen years without them, and seven years spent ignoring them. Shoot me. Some folk hit fifty without doing a press up—and I’d been one of those sensible people before this place.
Forcing my wings into action, I managed to stir them into getting me up and off the ground. I guessed I was getting better as I didn’t have to take a running leap to drift upward anymore. With a grunt, I surged higher, up to where the battle was taking place. Already, I could hear swords clashing and even a few cries of pain coming from above me.
As I looked, some Fae were fluttering downward, their armor already breached. We wore chestplates over the uniform of our leather jackets which added to my weight and made it even harder to get up and off the ground. The chestplates bled red when they were scored with a sword, and that meant that particular student was out of the game.
The irony was I’d probably be last to get hit considering it was taking me a lifetime to get up to their battlefield which ran as high as small airplanes flew.
Yup, I had to get to twenty thousand feet—where the wind blew at hurricane speeds and the Fae had to use magic as well as fly to remain at those altitudes—before I could start ‘playing.’
Sweat covered my brow as I ascended, and even though the wind buffeted me, it didn’t dispel the sweat. The chestplate constricted me, my wings were already aching, the sword felt heavy in my hand, and I couldn’t wait to be hit so I could soar back down to the ground. But I knew that Jeanien would be prodding me in the ass with the tip of her sword as she forced me ever higher toward the front of the mock battle if I even thought about backing out.
Only the prospect of being speared on her sword forced me higher, and when I finally hit the fight scene, there was an irony to the fact that the first person I saw was Joseph because his violet eyes could spear me more than Jeanien ever could hope to with her pointy stick. My wings stopped moving for a few seconds as I processed the punch he packed without having to do more than look at me, and as they froze, it had me staggering and dropping a couple of feet.
In response to my reaction, his mouth curved and I frowned at him. With an ease I envied, he headed toward me, his sword pointed at the ground as he came to hover a few inches away from me.
“They shouldn’t have let you on here yet,” he told me, his tone calm, as though the clashing of swords wasn’t happening a few feet above us.
“I was lucky they let me have as much time as they gave me,” I called to him.
“No luck about it. I spoke with the Headmaster.”
“And he listened?” If I gaped at him, I figured it was a worthy moment. Especially when he shrugged. “Aren’t Headmasters supposed to tell students what to do? Not vice versa?”
Another shrug.
I grunted at his lack of an answer, then I grunted again when his sword came out and, quick as a flash, carved a line down my chest.
“Flutter to the ground, little birdie,” he told me, the words mocking, but his tone wasn’t.
If anything, it was like stone.
I frowned at him, but I wasn’t about to complain, not when I could get out of here.
About to do as he bid, I swirled around, then screamed when a male approached me, his sword twirling around me so fast it was like a baton in the arms of a rhythmic gymnast. Holy Sol, how did he move the damn thing like that?
My arm was suddenly wrenched back, and I was twisted around so quickly that I didn’t have much of a chance to even scream. Within seconds, I was staring at Joseph’s back and peering over his shoulder as he growled at the other guy, “She’s out. There was no need for that shit, Dyrian.”
Dyrian raised his hands in surrender then surged upward and into the fray once more.
Joseph spun around and demanded, “Are you okay?” His hand cupped my chin, forcing me to look up at him, to stare into his eyes.
My throat felt thick as I fell into those mesmerizing orbs, and if my heart stuttered a little, then who could blame me?
It took me a while to get my brain in gear because it felt like he tied my tongue as hard as he yanked on everything female within me.
I’d never considered myself a woman that could be stymied by a man. If anything, I liked doing the stymying. I was accustomed to easy, casual hookups, and felt no shame in having a strong sexuality that I needed to burn off on a willing victim occasionally.
I mean, I was no Black Widow, but I definitely didn’t mind taking advantage of a guy’s body.
But this guy? Yikes. He made me feel fragile. Delicate. And even as I hated that, I had to admit that I was fragile and delicate in this place.
This wasn’t my world. Even if I was forced to be here for the moment.
He pinched my chin, jerking my attention back to him. “Are you okay?” he repeated, his voice a rasp.
“Yeah.” I blew out a breath that had my fringe flopping onto my forehead. “He just took me by surprise.”
That had fire dancing in his eyes again. “Dumbass,” he ground out, glaring up at the battle. To me, he murmured, “Get out of here before you get hurt.”
His house bands glinted in the sunlight as he took off without another word, surging back into the fight like I was nothing more than a memory to him. Swallowing at the sight of him, Sol’s power making his snowy wings blindingly white, I let myself drop, gliding down toward the ground where I was safe.
It was only when I happened to see a stray shard of light reflect on my arm that I looked up and saw he’d lied about returning to the fray. Instead, he was hovering above me. He wasn’t approaching, and he maintained a strict distance, but he was watching over me. And only the gleam of his house bands in the sun gave his position away.
My heart felt oddly full as I returned to the ground, and it was just in time too—Jeanien saw me and was definitely on the rampage.
“Did you even make it to the battlefield?” she ground out, and I had to admit, I was getting a kick out of making her mad.
She was one of those irritating women who liked to think they never got angry. I knew in the Fae, anger was seen as a loss of control and something to be ashamed of. It was why most of the warrior caste students were all po-faced and looked like they were sucking on a lemon.
It had taken me a while to realize it wasn’t a poker face at all, just something they’d had to adapt to hide all their emotions as feelings were a weakness.
Yup, sucked to be them.
I pointed to my chestplate where red was oozing out of it. “Proof.” Silently, I tacked on, bitch.
She narrowed her eyes at me, but there was disgust on her face as she did so. “Go and wash up.” Her attention swerved to my sweaty-as-fuck face. “We’ll be discussing battle tactics in Forum Three after this is done.”
Well, that sounded like fun. Not.
Huffing, I nodded and turned on my heel. None of the other Fae had been dismissed to go shower, they were all watching the ‘match’ overhead. Seemed like I was the only one with sweat glands in this godforsaken place.
As I trudged off, I mentally flipped them all the bird.
Well, not Joseph.
He’d saved my butt from that Dyrian dude, after all. That deserved gratitude not the finger.
Three
Gabriella
“How many are seated on the Conclave’s inner council?”
As I sank back into the uncomfortable seat I’d selected in the Forum, I watched as Daniel’s hand shot up into the sky.
My boredom and lack of interest were getting to the point where I was starting to count how long it would take him to put his hand in the air.
If he wasn’t so earnest, I’d have dismissed him as an asslicker regardless of how pretty he was.
Plus, his interest meant that the instructors rarely had to look elsewhere for answers which, I figured, in the long run, saved me a lot of face seeing as I didn’t know most of the shit he did.
Okay, so, I was getting to be a brat but isolation did that to a person, didn’t it?
It didn’t make them friendly and cheerful. It made them lonely and miserable.
Lonely and miserable were my watch words at the moment.
Three months. Three months without a call from anyone in my family and only sporadic calls from friends back home. It didn’t say much about me, did it? Didn’t say much about how I was as a person, or how shitty a friend I must be if people could forget me so easily.
“Yes, Daniel,” Instructor Peli asked, her amusement at his eagerness evident. It said a lot that she didn’t even turn around from the board to ask him to answer.
“There are eighteen members of the inner council,” he parroted.
She hummed and finished up with her drawing. Each instructor had their own style. Leopold never used the boards, Jeanien, on the rare occasions she was in a Forum and not out on a field, used her magic to draw shit on them, whereas Peli used chalk and wrote stuff the old fashioned way—until she didn’t, which was why I liked her classes the most.
Because it reminded me of when I was a kid, I quite enjoyed the sound of chalk rasping against the board, so watching her pretty crappy drawings was quite restful even if it did make me want to pick up a pen and paper and create something that was halfway decent.
When she stepped back, we got the full effect of what she’d drawn.
On the right side, there was a shape of a comma. Heavy on the top, curving down into a point at the bottom. On the left, there was the shape of an apostrophe with the same heaviness on top and thinness on the bottom as the comma but inverted.
“These are the mantels that make up the inner council of the Conclave, and the inner sanctum of the Assembly. Just as there are eighteen members of the Conclave’s highest council, there are eighteen Assemblymen.
“What do the mantels remind you of?”
I normally didn’t take part in classes, a stance I hadn’t budged on in all the months I’d been here, but there was no denying the yin and yang shape so I raised my hand.
“The domes in Gaia’s Temple,” I told Peli when, brow raised, she nodded at me to answer.
She beamed at me over her glasses, her fluffy blonde hair a little more on edge than usual—she tended to get static a lot in her hair. Maybe because of all the polyester and nylon she wore? Who the Sol knew? It was weird, but she looked like a female version of Danny DeVito so I kinda liked her.
She wasn’t statuesque, built like Xena, and didn’t wear leather. I.e., she was my favorite instructor.
“That’s correct. Gaia is a proponent of balance in all things. That is her power, where her harmony lies. She brings peace to the table—what does Sol bring?”
“War,” I muttered.
“Exactly. That is his role. To be Gaia’s opposite.” She pointed to the mantels. “Each nation’s Conclave and Assembly has one of these, forged from the same piece of marble. They’re set into metal and used as a center piece as a reminder.” She peered over her glasses at the forum of students. “Anyone know what kind of reminder?”
Daniel’s hand, of course, shot up.
“Yes, Daniel.”
My lips twitched at her knowing, still amused tone.
“That they can bring war or peace to their people?”
“That’s right.”
She turned back to the board and pressed her finger to the chalk. I sat up because I liked when she did this shit. Her house bands gleamed, and it was weird because I’d seen Fae use magic before but had never noticed how their house bands changed. Maybe, before, I’d thought it was a trick of the light, a play of shadow. But when magic was called upon, their bands glinted. When they were at rest, they were dull.
Now, hers were glinting as the chalk lifted from the board. The flat drawings morphed into 3D and, as gold and chalk powder merged, she created a mockup of what the mantels looked like in the flesh.
I’d never seen anyone do this before so it always intrigued me when she did.
“Now, I’ve visited the North American Assembly and was even invited to the Conclave a few decades ago.” She beamed. “It was most illuminating.” Her hands waved, the house bands gleamed some more, and dust appeared, sprinkling from out of nowhere as she added onto the drawing.
Suddenly, the 3D comma and apostrophe became craggy and roughly hewn. They gleamed with light as they were set into metal, and then, they were positioned at the middle of a room. Long tables appeared beside the mantel, but they weren’t straight, they were curved and morphed into a seamless, oversized Lifesaver mint.
Chairs appeared around it, eighteen in all.
“Though the Assembly has more power, it’s well known that without the Conclave’s backing, they’d have no might.
“Balance in all things, you see. Quite, quite clever.”
I narrowed my eyes at that because, yeah, clever was the right word. For the Fae. The Conclave was dumb. Totally useless, in fact, for the people it was supposed to be protecting and guiding. There was no balance, just lies and more BS.
As the class continued, I learned more shit about the power of the Assembly. It made me wonder what these students had been taught at their schools. In the human world, I’d learned about the government when I was in middle school, so what the hell did they teach in their version of that?
When Peli let us out, I retreated straight to my room. The place might be the size of a closet, but I didn’t feel like going to Templ
e. Not after learning how the Fae thought they were epic because they mimicked Gaia’s ‘ways’ when it came time to governing their people.
The self-aggrandizement was nauseating in the face of the truth of their manipulative manner. If there was balance in all things, why did they ignore me? Or, if they didn’t ignore me, why didn’t they try to make my life easier? Why didn’t they think to bring me into the circle more?
Instead, I felt like a dog at the pound, just waiting for its forever home. Sol, it was worse than that. I felt like an old dog at the pound, beside a cage of puppies. People always wanted the puppies but never the old dogs, and that was exactly how I was feeling right about now.
Kind of abandoned and a lot disillusioned.
When I returned to my apartment, I did what I hadn’t done in months—cast a spell. With the misery had come apathy, and I was starting to get less worked up. My magic wasn’t burning to be let out anymore so I did as I’d always done—stored it away.
Until tonight.
I didn’t want to go to the dining hall. Didn’t want to be around these egotistical assholes, so I made food. It was something I could do easily without much thought so I just crafted myself something simple—a PBJ sandwich to get me back into the swing of things.
Magic was supposed to be practiced every day. It was like a muscle. You stopped using it, it would make you pay when you began working it again.
I knew, tomorrow, I’d get payback in the form of an epic headache but it was worth it not to have to face a room full of smug Fae.
Stepping deeper into my sanctuary—a room that was about twelve by twelve feet—I went to the desk I never used and picked up a notepad and pencil. Most students took notes of their classes, but I didn’t. I had a good memory, so I remembered most of what I learned, but when it came down to their version of the SATs, I’d be screwed.
Good.
So, the notepad that should have been full was empty, and I carried it over to the patio doors I opened up so I could sit down on the tiny balcony and do something else I hadn’t done in a while—draw.
The Ascended: The Eight Wings Collection Page 4