by Emily Mckay
Every time I deflect one of her blows, her gaze hardens even more. People in power rarely like skilled opponents.
Then Master Flores barks out a word, something I don’t quite catch. I pause, glancing at Master Flores, thinking it must be kumon, the Korean word for “end.”
That moment of inattention costs me. Something in Chelsea changes and her eyes blaze—not with malice but with fierce determination. Instantly, her inexperience falls away and she becomes a skilled fighter.
She spins, feinting to the left then lunging forward to swipe her bō at my legs. I barely manage to leap out of the way, but she brings her bō up with lightning speed, knocking my own staff out of my hands. It clatters to the floor, several feet away.
Which should have ended the match, but Chelsea keeps coming at me.
“What the hell?” I ask.
“Fight me,” she growls.
“You won.” I stumble back. What the hell is going on? “You disarmed me.”
She twirls her bō, her gaze cold and distant. “Grab it,” she orders.
I take my eyes off Chelsea long enough to look for Master Flores, thinking she must not see what’s happening. But she is standing there, her expression intense, her gaze focused on me.
“Get your bō,” Master Flores barks when she meets my eyes.
“I can’t reach it.”
“You were made to want things beyond your reach,” Master Flores says, coldly. “Now grab your bō.”
“I can’t.”
Chelsea feints to the left again, but as soon as I dodge out of the way, she clips my left shoulder. Pain blazes down my arm.
This is bullshit and I’ve had enough. I’m getting that bō staff.
I drop into a roll, but Chelsea’s bō slams down on the ground mere centimeters from my hip.
“Fight me, damn it!” she roars.
An instant later, my bō spins across the floor and slams into my palm, just like a lightsaber propelled by the Force. Except, this isn’t Dagobah and I’m no Skywalker.
So what the hell just happened?
I don’t even have time to worry about it, because Chelsea’s right on top of me and not letting up.
“You are useless.” Her voice is a low snarl as she swipes her staff to the left. “You may be Untethered, but you are no child of the Kingdoms of Mithres.” She sweeps at my calves, knocking my feet out from under me.
I fall onto my ass.
“You have no hope of finding the lost Ivah.”
I get my bō up just before she slams her staff down, straight at my head.
But even my bō isn’t enough to protect me. It splinters beneath the force of her blow. Her staff smashes into my skull with bone-jarring force. My vision blurs and goes black.
Excerpt from
Book Five of The Traveler Chronicles:
The Traveler Undone
I don’t like Sleekers very much.
For one thing, they use their magic as a weapon.
Okay, I knew that sounded ironic coming from someone who got in as many fights as I did. But when I used magic in a fight, it was to protect myself or someone I love. Occasionally it was to protect someone who hired me to do it.
It was never—never—to impose my will on someone else. It was never because I was a control freak who thought things had to be done my way or else.
And it sure as hell wasn’t because I wanted more power than I already had.
I was powerful enough, thank you very much.
As far as the Council of Sleekers was concerned, there was no such thing as too much power…as long as it was all in their hands.
CHAPTER TWO
I wake up, flat on my back, staring at the fluorescent lights of the gym.
What the hell just happened?
I just had the shit beat out of me by Chelsea-freakin’-Banks! While she was muttering a stream of utter nonsense. Except it wasn’t nonsense—it made sense to me. At least some of it had. Had she suffered some kind of psychotic break? Had she been possessed by demons?
Given the things she’d said, demons seemed more believable. If, you know, I believed in that kind of thing. Which—despite my reading habits—I did not.
I cautiously push myself up onto my elbows. I feel a little woozy, but that’s it. I raise a hand to the crown of my head expecting to feel a knot, but there’s nothing.
I hear an unfamiliar voice say, “Can you call her mother?”
That gets me to my feet, because the last thing I need is my mother freaking out.
Most of the other girls are waiting by the gym doors, like they can’t wait to make a run for it. Chelsea’s surrounded by a cluster of concerned-looking girls. Like she’s the one who’s been traumatized.
The school nurse has pulled one girl aside and is obviously about to send her off to the office.
“Wait!” I step forward, surprised that I’m as steady on my feet as I am. “Don’t call my mom. I’m fine.”
Nurse Graw, who I met the first day of school, hurries over, a sympathetic frown on her face. Master Flores is standing by the door, her expression unreadable. Turning to the other girls, she waves them out. “You may go change.”
Only Chelsea looks at me before leaving the room.
“How are you feeling?” Ms. Graw asks.
I rub at my forehead again. “Okay, I guess.”
“But you don’t want me to call your mom?”
If Mom knew I’d been hit on the head with a bō staff, she would freak.
“I don’t want to bother her at work,” I fib. “Why don’t you check me out for signs of a concussion? If you think I’m okay, I’ll just tell her about it tonight.”
I give Ms. Graw my most winning smile.
Frowning, she pulls out one of those little flashlights and shines it in my eyes.
“You look okay. Any nausea?”
I follow the light with my eyes. “No.”
She flicks the light off. “From what Master Flores says, one of your classmates caught you when you fainted, so you didn’t hit your head very hard.”
“When I fainted?” I ask. “Is that what they’re calling it?”
This is bullshit.
I get the crap beat out of me by the school’s most powerful and influential student and they’re going to look the other way? I want to say something. I’m itching to say something.
But what? The truth is, I feel fine. I’m not hurt. Chelsea may be a bitch, but she didn’t do any lasting damage. And if I throw a fit, who is it going to hurt?
Not Chelsea. Not that weirdo Master Flores.
No, it’ll hurt me. And my mom.
The reason Mom accepted this job in Austin is because the daughter of her patient got me admitted to this school on scholarship. AIBS is one of the top private prep schools west of the Mississippi. Spending my junior year here will grease the wheels of my college applications. But not if I throw a fit about Chelsea Banks.
I know how these things work. Teachers and school admins are no more immune to mean girls than the rest of us. Maybe less. If I demand she be punished, her dad—the governor—will just come down here and shit all over my credibility. Or maybe he’ll have an army of lawyers do it for him.
So I let it go. There’s no point in making waves for Chelsea when it’s my boat that will end up capsized.
When I head out of the gym to go change, there’s a girl waiting just outside the doors. She has pale, freckled skin and bright red hair dyed with chunky black strips. She’s like Emo Strawberry Shortcake. She’s dressed in the same yoga pants and tee that I’m wearing, so she must have been in the Tae Kwon Do class, but I don’t remember seeing her before.
“You’re okay?” Her voice is high-pitched and delicate…and just as cute as the rest of her.
“I’m Brena,” the girl says, holdi
ng out her hand and smiling.
I shake it. “I’m Edie.”
“Yeah. I know.” She blushes, like she’s said something she didn’t mean to give away. “I mean, in a school this size, everybody knows when someone’s new, right?”
So far, she’s the only person I’ve met who seems like a real person and not just a walking Instagram feed.
“You weren’t out long. If we hurry, we’ll have time to change before the next class.” She flashes me a smile as we head for the changing rooms. “So Master Flores says you’re a real Tae Kwon Do badass. Like a black belt, right?”
“Yeah.” Second degree black belt, but I don’t correct her. I don’t want to be that person.
Besides, now that I’m not stressing about a head injury anymore, those moments right before Chelsea knocked me out are circling around in my mind.
I shove aside my baseline WTF reaction and think through what happened.
What had Master Flores said? You were made to want things beyond your reach.
What did she mean by that? And why does it sound familiar?
As for the rest, the stuff Chelsea said? That I definitely remembered. You may be Untethered, but you are no child of the Kingdoms of Mithres.
The Kingdoms of Mithres. The Traveler Chronicles are set in the Kingdoms of Mithres.
Does Chelsea Banks even know what they are? She does not strike me as a hard-core fantasy fan. If she was going to have a breakdown, I’d have expected her to be yelling about shoes or K-pop.
Brena reaches for the door to the dressing room, but I stop her, putting a hand on her arm. “When Chelsea and I were sparring, did you hear what she said to me?”
Brena looks startled by my question, but shakes her head. “No. I…I wasn’t very close to you.”
Which explains why I don’t remember seeing Brena until I walked out of the gym.
Before I can press her for more details, she slips into the dressing room. Chelsea and all the other girls from the class are changing already.
When Brena and I walk in, Chelsea gives me this look like I’m a slug on the sidewalk. Then she leans over to one of her minions and whispers. The other girl titters.
I don’t need this shit. People like Chelsea Banks are so not worth my angst.
I walk right past them to my locker and put in the combination. Thirty-six right. Seven left. Sixteen right.
The lock pops open. See? Ignoring them is easy.
Except my clothes are gone. The locker is empty.
Giggles erupt behind me.
Of course, it’s not just my clothes that are missing. It’s my backpack. My cell phone. My school-issued iPad.
Shit.
It’s been in my possession less than forty-eight hours.
I whirl around. “Where are my clothes?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, there’s a problem. Where’s my stuff?”
“Have you looked in your locker?” Chelsea asks, all dewy-eyed innocence.
Behind her, one of her minions giggles. Another kicks the giggling girl, as if she’s honestly afraid the giggling is going to give them away. These are real mental giants I’m dealing with.
I fling the locker door open and gesture. “Yeah. I checked my locker. It’s empty.”
“Are you sure that’s the right locker?”
The chime rings, signaling the end of the class. Suddenly, I’m just done. I’ve had it. Forget flying under the radar.
I stalk across the changing room aisle and get right in Chelsea’s face. “I’m done playing your games. You want an easy target? Find someone else. So you thought it was funny to go all psycho when we were sparring and hurl some random insults at me. Whatever. But you took it too far when you knocked me out with the bō. I could have been hurt. And stealing my stuff? That’s against the law. And don’t think I won’t press charges. Because—”
“Stealing your stuff?” Chelsea sneers. “Like I’d want your cheap-ass stuff. And I didn’t knock you out. You fainted.”
“After you hit me in the head.”
Just for an instant, Chelsea’s bravado flickers. It happens so fast, I almost don’t see it. A spark of confusion. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
Then she rolls her eyes. “Whatever. You fainted.”
“I didn’t faint,” I insist, even though my mind is reeling and I’m not really talking to her. “You broke my bō. You hit me in the head and knocked me out.”
She shoves past me. “I didn’t even touch you.”
Despite her words—and the way she shoves past me—there’s panic in her voice. Not because she’s afraid she hurt me, but because she knows she didn’t.
I can see it in her eyes. She believes she’s telling the truth.
Suddenly, I’m the one freaking out. I grab her arm. “What did you say to me when we were sparring?”
“Let go of me, you freak.”
She wrenches her arm, but I cling to it like a lifeline.
“When we were sparring. What did you say to me? Did you say I was untethered? Did you say I was a child of the Kingdoms of Mithres?”
Her eyes are wide now, her gaze fearful. “I said you were a social climbing weirdo and you would never fit in here.”
I let her go. The other girls—Chelsea’s followers and the awkward bystanders—grab at their clothes, tugging on shirts and zipping up skirts.
Dazed, I sink onto one of the benches.
When the chime signals the beginning of the next class, everyone has cleared out.
Alone, I search the dressing room until I find my stuff. It’s in locker number 00. Some imaginative person wrote the letters L and SER on either side of the zeros. Chelsea’s minions can’t spell for crap, because I’m guessing they thought they were spelling loser, not looser. Idiots.
Not that I care.
Their opinion of me matters a lot less now than it did fifty-five minutes ago.
Chelsea and I have completely different memories of what happened in the gym.
I remember sparring with her until she went all freaky weird and called me Untethered and a lot of other crazy shit. And then she broke my bō and knocked me out. She thinks she called me a misfit and then I fainted.
There’s no way both of us are right.
I can’t let Chelsea or her friends know they’ve gotten to me, so I try to look cheerful and serene as I go to my next class, but inside, I’m wailing.
Because there’s only one logical explanation for why Chelsea and I have different memories of what happened in the gym—one of us was hallucinating.
And, since everyone else remembers Chelsea’s version, chances are, it’s me.
Excerpt from
Book Five of The Traveler Chronicles:
The Traveler Undone
Demons aren’t very smart. And they do not play well with others. You never see more than two of them working together.
So when I rounded the corner and saw a pair of Vargon ice demons standing between me and the exit, I wasn’t worried.
“Surrender,” one hissed. “You’re outnumbered.”
“I’m outnumbered? By two demons?” I shook my head. “I’ve been fighting demons since I was twelve. I can do this in my sleep.”
The male launched himself at me. I raised my blasting rod. This was almost too easy.
Then something hard smashed down on the back of my head. An instant later, everything went dark.
I woke up with my head throbbing and my muscles screaming. The room was dark, but from a distant corner, I could hear the scratch of demon claws on concrete.
Huh. Guess I couldn’t fight demons in my sleep after all.
CHAPTER THREE
As of last weekend, Mom and I share a six hundred and eleven square foot “guesthouse” located behind the Buford mansi
on owned by Mom’s latest patient.
I’ve been home from school about ten minutes when Mom strides across the back lawn of the mansion toward the guesthouse. Mom works long hours, but tonight Mr. Buford is leaving for D.C. and she’s going with him. It’s not surprising that she wants to squeeze in a little time with me before she leaves, but after the day I’ve had, I’m not ready to deal with her yet, so I take sanctuary in the shower.
The water is still heating up when she knocks on the bathroom door.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Great!” I blurt.
Please don’t let her have heard about the fainting spell. Please, please, please.
“I got sweaty in gym and need a shower,” I call out.
“Okay,” she answers.
In the shower, I let the water wash over me and my please, please, please mantra gives way to a stream of curse words so long and repetitive, I wish I knew more languages to cuss in. #Lifegoals.
But the scalding blast of water isn’t enough to sear away the panic that’s been building inside me all day. No matter how you slice it, hallucinations aren’t good. Especially given the fact that my dad has a history of mental illness.
All of Dad’s mental stuff, it wasn’t the kind of thing you see in those “Talk to your doctor about…” ads on TV. Not to minimize any of that stuff, but Dad’s sickness was full-blown, hearing-voices-seeing-demons schizophrenia that struck out of the blue. One day he was fine. The next, he was holding Mom and me at gunpoint and SWAT had to take him out with a Taser.
Which makes all of this that much scarier. Because, hell, yesterday, I seemed fine. Mildly antisocial and insecure, with a touch of anxiety. But basically, okay.
Today, not so much.
Whatever happened in class, me freaking out won’t help. Mom finding out won’t help.
Ever since the incident with Dad, Mom has been “a little overprotective.” That’s her description, not mine.
She makes your average helicopter parent look like a Buddhist hippie.
For example, two years ago, my high school went into lockdown for like five minutes because a homeless guy tried to panhandle in the front office. Mom pulled me from the school, and I’ve been in private schools ever since.