Fine. It's on.
"Okay fine, prince. Teach me how to expand a stick." I used the stick like a baton, twirling it through the air as I bowed to him from where I sat in the grass. Rowan shook his head, Eddy giving me a warning stare from right behind him, which I ignored.
"Close your eyes and focus on your magic." I gave him a look, the single raised brow hopefully telling him how stupid he sounded.
“That’s the same damn thing every teacher tells us when they are trying to teach us something, Princey.” I still didn’t know what it meant.
"Well, then try it. Focus on your heart, on the way your magic moves. The way everything around you has energy, you can feel it. Your magic, the magic of those around you." His eyes were closed now, his voice breathy and far away as everything grew silent. The birds, the wind rustling through the leaves, I could have sworn they were whisked away.
I swallowed. Had it gotten a few degrees warmer, or maybe I had been transferred to the edge of the sun. Rowan wasn't the only one sweating. I mean, Eddy was too, but that was mostly because he was grunting and gasping trying to get the thing to double in size.
"Well, they say it's not something you learn until next year," Rowan suddenly said, his eyes snapping open, flitting right to me, making my breath catch. "But it's worth a shot anyway. Once you master that, you can push your magic into the stick and see it from the inside. Each cell, each fiber, each ridge, then you can prompt it to grow."
He was still looking at me, his green eyes dark and smoky as the broken tree branch in his hand doubled in size. A nice big stick in the palm of his hand. I nearly choked.
"Your wood got bigger," I said with as straight of a face I could manage, Rowan growing as red as a watermelon as the stick fell to the ground. Eddy was reduced to gasping laughs behind him.
Rowan looked ready to melt into the grass, but I gave him my biggest grin.
"Please, Princey. Tell us what happens after the wood grows nice and big."
He kicked the stick away, every scrap of exposed skin turning a nice red color, like my feet after I had left them in the sun too long. Eddy was still standing behind him, although he took a noticeable step back, his eyes bugging out of his head as he watched us, still desperately trying to motion for me to stop.
"Is that really where you are going to put that?" I asked, nodding toward the shrinking branch. My grin was stretching so wide it hurt. "I think you missed."
I sat there, purposefully spreading my legs an inch just to watch the guy’s blush deepen. Instead, he exploded.
"Can you grow up?" He said it so loud that a bunch of other sweaty guys who were passing by turned and snickered before shuffling away with one stony glare from the prince.
"Excuse me?" I was up before I could stop myself, moving dangerously close to the guy who was now growing darker rather than a brighter shade of watermelon.
"Grow up, Gemma. Stop playing whatever it is you are playing. Stop being so selfish, before you kill someone." He grew louder with each word. The tree behind us was shaking dangerously, at though the massive thing was trembling in fear.
Okay, so maybe I should have listened to Eddy’s warning.
"Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? That I need to stop being selfish?" I roared, stepping even closer to him. "Me? Selfish. Says the prince who disappears for days at a time to hide in his estate rooms and eat candies. The prince whose mommy pampers him and keeps his precious constitution safe from all the mean Drains so he can date a girl who tried to murder more than one Undermortal in your masochistic race. The prince whose family shits on my people and locks me up so I have no chance to help them. Tell me, Rowan. When was the last time you did something for someone other than yourself? When was the last time you tried to help anyone?"
“Gemma, stop,” Eddy mumbled, still backing up, we both ignored him.
"I tried to help you!" He roared, the tree continuing to shake overhead. Blood red leaves fluttered around us like angry rain. "I tried to stop you from killing her! From hurting everyone!"
His voice vibrated the air, my magic bubbling with anger as I opened my mouth, ready to unleash hell on the bastard prince. Instead, my throat closed up.
"What? Killing who?"
"I tried to help," he continued on, like that somehow answered my question, or clarified anything of what he had said. "I've always tried to help."
"Stop fucking trying and do something, then," I hissed, my confusion in what the hell he was talking about thankfully drowning my anger enough that I wasn't yelling anymore. "Tell your cousin to stop shitting on my people. Tell Cail to help me get the food out. People are starving. Not like you even notice anything beyond your glistening walls to care."
I snarled, looking up to him as I let my magic flare. I knew I was playing on dangerous ground but I didn't care. I would fight him. Part of me wanted to see what he was capable of, if he was capable of anything at all.
"You don't care, do you?” I said, letting my magic flare around me until I was sure he could feel it. “Or is it that the rumors are true and you're too weak to do anything."
Black fire flames in his green eyes, the ebony anger pooling over his face as he roared, the air filling with fire as a crack echoed through my ears, the sound rattling my skull. I flinched at the sound that was too close to a gun, the sound made worse as a thousand bright red leaves rained over us as he leaned closer and hissed in my face.
"Never call me weak."
I could only stand there, leaves falling over me as I watched him go, Eddy looking behind me in horror.
I didn't dare turn; I didn't dare turn from the retreating back of the prince. His words echoing in my head. Long after he had gone, long after the leaves had settled around me like a blanket, did I turn around to find the tree cleaved in two. The trunk was split right down the middle, sending the two halves to the ground, bows snapping under the weight.
“I told you not to piss him off.”
19
Rowan
I had overreacted.
Then I had overreacted further when I had returned to my dorm and thrown one of the overstuffed chairs through the window. Glass and stuffing were easily repaired, but it didn’t stop my father’s disappointed scowl from filling my mind, his eyes flashing dangerously blue as he reminded me to ‘watch my temper’.
Maybe this time all of those reminders and disappointed looks had a point. After nearly three months in this school, sleeping longer than before, and dealing with Sia and everything else, I was clearly walking a fine line.
Suppressing my magic was making everything more volatile. I needed to keep it under control if I was going to regain control of the dreams and my magic.
I was about as far away from that as I could be, considering that one buzz from my phone sent me jumping and the lamp on my bedside table shattering to the ground.
"Shit!" I yelled, barely catching the phone that I had thrown above me, Angela's picture twisting through the air as the screen flashed.
Thankfully, I had shattered the lamp and not the phone.
"Hello? Angela?" I said, the second the call connected, my heart in my throat. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah." Her little voice was swallowed by static, the connection buzzing. "Did I wake you up?"
Wake me? I glanced at the thankfully unbroken alarm clock on my nightstand. Two a.m.
"No, no. I was up."
She was the only one, besides our parents, who really understood what was going on. In a way, it was nice to have at least one person who knew. My throat closed up, the hairs on the back of my neck pricking up as I sat upright on the bed, the blankets I had been laying on shifting underneath me.
"Wait. Angie? Why are you awake?" The tension didn't leave as I waited for her answer, listening to her breathing and all the 'ums' and 'ehs' that usually came before she found her words.
"I had a bad dream." That could mean so many things, especially for her, it did nothing to ease the tension.
"Did y
ou tell mom about it?" I asked, pinching the bridge of my nose in an attempt to banish the headache pounding at the base of my neck. I didn't know if I was in a place I could help her.
"Mom's not here." Her voice was nothing more than a whisper, but it slammed against my head like a bass drum.
"Dad?" She exhaled, she knew what I was doing.
"They are both gone, some emergency thing. But I don't want to talk to them, Row. I wanted to talk to you." Nine years old and she could already put me in my place. She clearly inherited that from mom.
I leaned back against the headboard, pressing my spine against the carved wood as if it could brace me for what was coming.
"What is it, Angie?"
"Dramin said you were my age when your sight first came, when Mom had you drink from the mug. Can you tell me what that was like?"
The wood I leaned against cracked in two places, whether it be by magic or by pressure, the sturdy support would have never been enough to prepare me for that.
"Why did he...? What did...?" Nothing was forming, words were falling through the cracks as I was. Everything sped past me as that night and the memories that I had spent years locking away sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
"He told me because I had another one of those dreams, like when I was little. He said you had one like it." Normally, I would tease her that she was still little, that Drak powers didn’t set in. Tell her that a bad dream was a bad dream. But my jaw was still working on its own, my heart migrating into my throat now. Words weren't coming anytime soon.
Luckily, she plowed on, every word she spoke adding to the pressure on my chest, pushing me through the abyss that had opened up behind me.
"I saw Talon and Analine with you, they were yelling. Then some glass broke and there were swords, and blood, and a little girl was screaming. She looked like me, Rowan. Can you… can you see yourself in sight?" There was a pause, the tense air filled with breathing, filled with my tears as those damn images from my very first sight pushed their way back into existence. "Rowan?"
She couldn’t make me say it. I wouldn't say it. I couldn't stomach it. It all hurt too much.
"I wouldn't know, Angie. I don't have sight." My voice caught with every word, her little gasping breath pulling through the static of the phone and making it clear she was crying.
I wanted to hold her. I wanted to run home and hold her and take all of this away from her. She shouldn't have this. No one should have this. But I couldn't move, I was trapped in a dorm room hundreds of miles away, staring at the remains of a broken lamp on my floor.
"I know you do, Row."
"I don't," I snapped, my hand shaking against my ear.
"Please tell me, Rowan," she whispered, her words broken by her sobs now. "I'm scared. I need to know. Is everything I see going to happen? Are you going to kill me?"
I forgot to breathe, I forgot to cry. I was free-falling through the abyss now, frozen in a bed that was as hard as steel, tumbling past a life that I had tried so hard to force into reality, into one that I didn't want. Into a moment I first saw ten years ago, the one and only time I had drank from the mug and felt the black water hit my tongue.
My mother had been pregnant, the baby coming soon. We knew it was a girl based on her magic and so my mother decided to have my first sight be of the baby. My little sister. She wanted my first moment as a Drak to be full of all the joy. The laughter. Her first steps. I saw every wonderful moment, right until the last one when I stood over her, her blood on my hands as I laughed. My malicious chuckle echoed over everything, my eyes smothered in the charcoal light of sight as her tiny frame slunk lifelessly to the ground.
As I ended her.
I didn't want that. I had done everything to stop it. But it was still there, everything I had done to save her was for nothing. Angie had seen the exact same thing.
I wanted to scream, to run away from the memory, from the moment. But I was trapped inside of it. It was everywhere, like a toxin pulsing through my veins.
"Rowan. We can change it, right? Please tell me we can change it."
"We can change it," I answered her sobs, although my voice sounded hollow and dead in my own ears. A reflection of my soul.
"Everything you see is pliable. Sights are echoes of what may come, warnings of things that could be. We can always change them." I echoed exactly what my mom had told me years ago. The words ones I still did not believe. No matter how much I wanted to. "Mom saw dad's death. She even saw her death in the war. But none of that happened. They are both still alive. You are still alive."
"But for how long--"
"I won't let that happen, Angie," I cut her off with a snap, the phone cracking as I clenched it. "I won't let anyone hurt you."
"Have you seen what to do?" she asked after a moment, the sobs in her voice lessened somewhat.
"Ya," I lied, staring at my dresser, at the drawer that held the mug my mother had sent me with. The one I hadn’t held since that first day, the ugly thing looking like nothing more than something a child would make.
Everything was pulling me toward it, a breeze moving over my neck as something powerful prodded me closer.
Begging me to hold it. To drink. To see the images that had been twisting through my mind.
"I told you, I'm going to fix it."
"Okay, I believe you. I trust you," she paused, "I love you, Row."
"I love you too, Angela," I whispered, watching the specks of salt water accumulate on my bedspread as I cried.
"Come visit me this weekend, kay? And bring that girl I saw you with, the one you were kissing."
"Kissing?" My head snapped up, staring into those vile moments with Sia that I was suddenly scared that Angie had seen.
"Yeah, your girlfriend." Her giggle seemed out of place against what we had talked about. Against the tears that were still falling down my cheeks. "I like her hair. I wish I had pink hair."
I was back to clicking and gasping instead of actually forming words.
“Ang… what--?”
"Bye, Row!" The phone clicked off before I could even catch my breath, the room twisting together in a swirl of color. Color and magic and power that would give nothing more than to drag me down.
I might just let it.
20
Sia
There was far too much chatter for this early in the morning. The sun hadn’t even fully risen, but the grounds and expansive halls of my home were full of light and energy. Eager preparations and commands echoed through the closed door and whispered through the window that had been cracked in hopes of defusing the rancid smell of my father’s preferred cigars. It hadn’t helped.
I had helped the CCC prep for a raid many times before. I had even gone on a few, shuffled to the back to watch the aftermath rather than be at the head where the carnage was. This time, however, I had been taken away by my mother’s personal assistant, Kay. The stern-faced woman said nothing more than to ‘wait here’ before she locked me in to a room I had been in only a handful of times before.
My father's office had always been one of those forbidden rooms growing up. Much like my mother's dressing room, or the servants quarters. As a child, I had heard Father yell, scream and rage from the other side of these walls. But now, I was locked on the inside with the cluttered hard wood desk, and the drawers of trinkets and tokens from his adventures around the world and all the communities he had conquered.
There was a painting given to him from a king in Japan, photographs of graffiti and rotted out trains. Piles of what looked to be rocks sat atop papers of reports from The Wastelands and the new camp they were trying to open up deeper into the nuclear dead zone, where the concentration of valuable fallout debris was deeper. We needed bodies to mine it, and the Drains provided the perfect source.
It was to only thing they were good for.
“Get the north company ready to move,” my father boomed, his voice echoing as loud as his shoes against the wood floor, every beat bringing him closer
to his office. Exhilaration thrummed with each step. I straightened, smoothing skirt and hair and gripped my phone harder, staring at the number on the screen.
“I want them to come in from the south side, intelligence says there is a tunnel there that they don’t know of.”
The door squeaked open, my father and the CCC captain, Jer, strutted in with the sound of two full-grown bull elephants. It wasn’t far off from the truth. The two were massive men. Their demeanors were as large as they were and made even more ominous by the black-armored uniform that had replaced their usual suits. The skull masks that were set atop their heads only added to the oppressive display.
Seeing them in their raid gear made my heart sing. Soon, I would lead my own raid, father had given me my own skull mask when I was only ten.
I had almost grown into it.
“The one on the left, near the old station?” Jer asked, grabbing two papers from my father.
“Yes.”
I sat still, watching my father shuffle papers as Jer stood at attention. Neither of them looked at me, my father’s silent dismissal of me was screaming in my failure, but I ignored it. I sat still, silent, maniacally straightening my hem with one hand as I clutched my phone with the other. The damn thing was turning into a lifeline. Especially with how the old man was acting.
“Once we secure this one and redistribute those Drains we will have all the entrances to the river surrounded. We will be two away from taking the city,” my father said, his eyes scanning over a map of Prague pinned on the far wall.
That same map was in millions of classrooms and books, I had even seen it painted on to buildings. Looking at it now, was like looking at a child’s drawing. It was colored with prisms and squiggles that I didn’t understand.
“We will be ready in an hour, Giovanni. We should arrive just as they begin to wake up for the day. Too tired to do anything, not that they could in the first place.”
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