by Rye Brewer
I scoff in frustration, shaking my head against the albeit pleasant memory.
“Stop,” I practically yelled at my mother. “Just tell me the truth. Stop manipulating me and stop beating around the bush. I’ve been in agony, Mom. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel like a freak. I’ve been keeping this from everyone, even Kendra. I haven’t been able to be a normal teenager. I can’t even go on a date with the boy I like.”
My mom didn’t balk at my angry exclamations. She looked as if it was exactly what she expected, or as if she didn’t blame me in the slightest for being upset.
Still, she did not speak.
“Tell me who my father was,” I demanded.
“That boy over there—the necromancer… he can hear every word we are speaking to one another,” my mother replied calmly.
The reality that Aidan was privy to our conversation made me sick to my stomach, but I’d just have to remember to slip him a memory loss potion in his morning coffee.
“I don’t care,” I half-shouted. “Tell me who my father was.”
My mother sighed and leaned against the wall as if the truth was too much for her ghost legs to handle carrying any longer.
“Your father’s name was Marius Alexi Draco,” she replied quietly. “I met him when he was a student in Prague, but he was born in Romania. I came to learn that though he was young and carefree, he… he held a highly influential position in his family. He seemed, at first glance, to be a fire witch or a demon with a rather on-the-nose affection for flames.”
Marius Alexi Draco.
It was the first time I’d ever been told my father’s name. In a fleeting second, I committed it to memory, desperate to not forget a single word that my mother was telling me. I forgot about Aidan in the room. I forgot that we were at Under Realm.
All I knew was that the truth was within my reach. Finally.
“However,” my mom murmured, dropping her gaze to the floor. I couldn’t tell if it was in a show of defeat or shame or sadness. “I came to learn that he was something much worse. At that point, I already knew I was pregnant. And I had a feeling that our child would be cursed like him.”
“What do you mean?” I replied. I wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her out of desperation, as if I could knock the answers out of her. But you couldn’t touch a ghost. Not even the ghost of your own mother.
“Moira, my love,” she responded. “You are so unique. So beautiful and strong and tenacious. I fear for anyone who tries to stand in your way because I know that you are fueled by a wonderful fire within you. I can only hope that once I tell you the truth about who your father was, you will stay good like this. Promise you won’t turn to the darkness like his kind.”
Goodness? Darkness?
Weren’t we all dark creatures? Didn’t they teach us from the very first day of magical elementary school that there was no such thing as good and evil, only constructs created by humans for the sake of banishing beings like us into secrecy?
Why was she talking as if there was some kind of horrible beast within me that was on the cusp of bursting free?
I wanted my mother to tell me the truth, so I replied, “I promise.”
“Your father. He was a dragon shifter.”
I froze.
My head spun and suddenly it felt as if the earth was about to tilt off its axis. How was it possible that a sentence could make so much sense, but absolutely no sense at all? It had to be a lie. Surely, my mother was lying to me. She was still covering up the real truth.
However, as I looked in her eyes, I knew without a doubt that she was truthful.
“He… what?” I breathed.
Before my mom could respond, her form dissolved suddenly, right in front of my eyes.
She was gone.
I stared, attempting to will her back into existence with sheer force of will.
Then, I heard a low curse from behind me and I spun on my heels.
Aidan was standing up, eyes open.
He was staring at me as if he was seeing me for the first time, eyes wide with shock and something else—was that fear?
For a minute, I was confused as to why he appeared frozen in place, utterly unable to form a complete sentence as he continued to stare at me. It was unlike him. He normally had no trouble at all finding the words to ridicule me.
But then I remembered.
Aidan wasn’t looking at me like that for no reason.
He was looking at me like that because he’d heard that entire conversation between my mother and I, from start to finish.
Every single word.
I tore my gaze from Aidan’s.
Stricken with fear at the knowledge he now had about me, I threw myself down the darkened staircase of the turret.
I ran.
13
I ran faster than I’d ever run in my entire life. In fact, I was pretty sure that I was unconsciously using my witch magic to speed up my movements to an inhuman pace as I rushed down the stairs of the turret.
Stumbling on a loose stone, I nearly fell and twisted my ankle, but I managed to catch myself in midair with magic, hovering with my feet a few inches above the rough floor of the hidden tower before letting myself down gently.
I couldn’t hear Aidan pursuing me, but perhaps he was too frozen with shock to act. I was sure that he would be quick to come out of it and then come after me.
What he planned to do with the horrifying truth that he overheard… I had no clue.
All I knew was that I had to get out of there.
Throwing myself against the tiny wooden door, I swatted at the heavy tapestry that hid it and then collapsed onto my hands and knees, scraping the bottom of Adelaide Darkmore’s skirts with my fingernails until I found the painted runes. She lifted her arm obediently just as I heard footsteps thundering behind me down the stairs of the turret.
I sprinted away, unable to form a clear enough string of thoughts to reason through where exactly I intended to go. Instead, I simply let my feet carry me of their own accord, pumping my arms and panting fast as I tried to outrun the truth of who I really was.
It was extremely late at that point. Far past curfew. The castle was silent and empty, save for the whisper of dark magic that always lingered thick and heavy over each and every hallway of the school. I knew that my hasty footsteps and heavy breathing was probably causing a commotion, but no professors appeared out of the shadows to stop me in my tracks and send me back to the dorms.
I ended up bolting down the main hallway of the school, the flutters of my rapid movements echoing up to the cathedral ceiling. Silver moonlight poured in thick from the peaked windows that stretched nearly thirty feet high, causing my pale skin to glow as I ran.
Though I hadn’t necessarily intended to do so, I found myself outside. My feet moved nimbly down the grand marble steps that led up to Under Realm Academy’s austere entrance. It was as if magic was truly on my side that night, coursing through veins. It was more than just the fire witch within me. Now that I knew what other magical being was inside me, rushing through my bloodstream, it made sense that I was suddenly moving like a creature far more physically powerful than a mere witch.
Once I reached the bottom of the steps, I stumbled to a halt and doubled over, my hands on my knees. I gasped for air, choking on each exhale and inhale until I could somewhat calm the hammering of my heart. If Aidan had run after me, there was no way he could’ve kept pace or followed my dizzying journey through the castle.
Trying to catch my breath, I stood on the front lawns of Under Realm Academy’s sprawling campus and stared up at the night sky. There were millions of stars twinkling in the clear sky, glittering like diamonds suspended far above this world.
Closing my eyes, I recalled the memory of flying through the unfamiliar mountains, both arms and wings outstretched. It had felt amazing and freeing, and now it made sense why I would dream of such a thing. I wondered what it would be like to fly through the night sky at this ver
y moment, soaring above the chaos on the ground and being totally untethered from the planet.
Perhaps it wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was the… that side of me yearning to be recognized and unleashed.
Oh, God. No, this couldn’t be happening.
I was a witch.
I was a Bloodworth.
I had a fire affinity.
I was the daughter and niece of two of the most impressive witches of their generation. My family came from a long line of witches, Bloodworths spanning back for centuries upon centuries. That was what I knew to be true.
Opening my eyes, I felt my identity shattering before me. Suddenly, the stars no longer looked like gemstones, but rather more like sparkling shards of glass.
My ears pricked at the sound of someone dashing through the grand entrance hall toward the front doors behind me.
That was weird. When had I ever been able to hear that well?
I choked down that unsettling new information and started running again, angling my body toward the forest that surrounded Under Realm’s ancient castle.
The forest wasn’t particularly thick or threatening. It wasn’t as if it was an enchanted forest, like the type of spooky tales you’d hear in popular magical book series or whatever. It was simply sparse, well-maintained woods in the remote mountains that Under Realm Academy was disguised in.
The forest floor was coated with a soft bed of pine needles, which I kicked up as I ran in between the towering spires of the narrow pines. A branch whipped across my cheek, stinging sharply, but I continued, darting through the evergreens for a few more minutes until I came into a small clearing.
I collapsed onto my knees, my chest heaving as my lungs desperately tried to suck in all of the oxygen they needed to feed my screaming muscles.
Damn, I was out of shape.
How unfair was that?
Not only was I a witch, but I was some kind of freaky witch-shifter hybrid. Not even something like that could give me superior cardiovascular endurance, apparently.
Life was unfair.
I groaned. Life was so unfair.
I hoped whoever was following me—whether it was Aidan or a professor trying to capture a rogue student running around after curfew—had gotten lost. Either that, or they’d seen my shadow disappear into the woods and given up.
I blinked, the dimly lit surroundings slowly starting to take shape around me. It was silent in the forest. No lions or tigers or bears.
No beasts of any kind. Except for me.
Moira, my love… Promise you won’t turn to the darkness like his kind.
My mother’s words rang loud and clear inside of my head. It was as if she was still beside me, but I knew that she was gone. When Aidan broke the connection, using his necromancer powers to cut her off, she disappeared like smoke dissolving into thin air. Like a candle being blown out.
Your father. He was a dragon shifter.
My stomach roiled and I felt a wave of nausea hit the pit of my stomach. I wrapped my arms around my middle and leaned forward, ready to vomit if that’s what my body really felt like it needed to do.
The worst part was… it all made sense.
The truth was that having a dragon shifter for a father shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. In fact, if I wasn’t so afraid of myself at that moment, I would probably have been embarrassed that I hadn’t figured it out sooner.
Dragon shifters weren’t like werewolves, who could turn into a fully animal form. Rather, they were more like mermaids. They could shift certain parts of their body at will to suit their magical abilities. For example, mermaids could either walk on two human legs on the land or transform their legs into a pearlescent tail that would allow them to glide through ocean waves with both speed and precision.
Dragon shifters, as far as I had learned in school, grew wings from the center of their back, allowing them to fly like a bird. They also had a similar affinity to fire as fire witches did, though they couldn’t manipulate or control fire the way that a witch could. It was more like they could simply create fire by breathing and it was impossible for them to be burned.
My blood turned to ice when I realized that the reason I’d been able to literally breathe fire, while my fire witch classmates couldn’t, was because I was a different creature entirely. All along, my family and friends and professors had just assumed that I was particularly talented.
That would also explain the strange moment when I coughed up smoke the other night, moments before fainting in Aidan’s arms.
“Oh, God,” I whispered, clutching my head in my hands and willing the entire world to go away. I wished I could go back to before senior year started. Before I had that first episode in AP Potions, before everything. I wished I still lived in a state of utter ignorance, moving throughout the world as a fire witch from a good family with big dreams of being a Potion Master.
Who was I supposed to be now?
More importantly, how was I ever going to keep this a secret?
My mother had confirmed that Aunt Inez knew the truth about my condition all along. I tried not to be angry at her for brushing off my concerns in that letter, but she had lied to me. Even though she promised my mother, her sister and best friend, that she would try to keep the dragon shifter side of me dormant, that didn’t mean she had to withhold the truth from me.
Clearly, I was destined to find out that I was a monster all along.
I had a feeling that our child would be cursed like him…
I shook my head vigorously, pressing my palms tight against my temples as I tried to dispel my mother’s words. They were cruel, but they made sense.
The thing was, animal shifters had never been particularly welcome in the magical world. Our world was ruled by witches and necromancers, as well as other dark creatures like demons and soul reapers, of course. For as long as I had been alive, all I ever heard from the people around me was that animal shifters were part beast and unable to be trusted.
Like the werewolf that bit Luca at the soccer game earlier in the semester. The young werewolf had grown so frustrated that he was unable to control his anger and ended up lashing out violently. That was why Briar Academy had such a bad reputation. That was why most dark creatures tended to avoid or altogether ostracize animal shifters.
They were dangerous.
I mean, technically, we were all dangerous. After all, I could light an entire house on fire with one blink of my eyes.
But, still… animal shifters were more dangerous.
My stomach turned again when I remembered one of the other players on the Briar Academy team.
How had I forgotten? The tiny dragon shifter, the spritely boy with clever black eyes and narrow features. It was shortly after my second episode, the one that landed me in the private bathrooms, panicking at the sight of my pitch-black eyes.
The same eyes that matched the dragon shifter’s smoky, dark gaze.
I’d been wrong all along, of course. The blackness in my eyes wasn’t due to me regressing as a witch or losing my powers. It was the dragon shifter within me trying to break free.
Did that mean my eyes would turn black permanently? And not the merely dark irises of demon eyes like Calder and Talia, but pitch-black throughout with no glimmer of white?
I really hoped not. I liked my hazel eyes. Not only that, but freakish black eyes would make it really difficult to hide my true identity.
I was probably gonna have to go into hiding.
My heart began to race again, and I moaned in pain as a stabbing ache returned between my shoulder blades. I know understood that it was my wings attempting to break free for the first time.
Goosebumps erupted on my arms as I tried to control the sensation, desperate to at least remain in a humanlike form while I tried to sort out my thoughts on the dirty floor of the forest.
But, of course, it wasn’t much to sort out. The fact of the matter was that my entire future was over. I was doomed. If I was a dragon shifter, I would be c
onsidered a menace to society. I wouldn’t be allowed into a prestigious school like Brayton University. I wouldn’t be able to have an internship as an amateur Potions Master, nor would I ever be able to get a normal job. I’d face prejudice at every corner.
My classmates would no longer think I was the cool rebel who was really good at setting stuff on fire. They’d think I was a freak of nature. I’d have to eat meals alone in private corners of the castle.
Oh, no. What would Kendra and Talia think of me?
What would Calder think of me?
I moaned and dropped my hands onto the ground, digging my fingers into the pine needles in frustration.
What if I was kicked out of Under Realm Academy entirely? What if I had to finish out my senior year at Briar Academy, stuck amongst the other freaks and monsters?
But then… they would hate me, too.
Because, even if I was half dragon, I was still half witch.
It wasn’t as if I could run away and find a loyal dragon shifter colony to join and live away the rest of my life happily in whatever remote corner of the planet that those reptilian people had claimed as theirs. They hated witches. Admittedly, it was good reason, considering witches spent most of history collapsing their empires and banishing them.
Specifically, the Bloodworth witches did that.
So, I wouldn’t be welcome among the dragon shifters, either. I’d grown up among witches. I acted like them, talked like them, lived with them… for all intents and purposes, I belonged with them.
Where was I supposed to go then? Was I cursed to wander the world alone, hated by both sides of myself?
A rush of white-hot frustration flowed through my body, scorching my insides. I hit the ground in anger, but only managed to hurt the palm of my hand.
I thought of my mother, begging me to stay kind and good, despite the knowledge that she was about to give me. She had always loved me, even though she knew that I was half beast.
How could she ever love me, though? I was a reminder of the man who seduced her, lied to her, and then died on her. How did she ever love him? How could she have ever though that making a child with him was a good idea?