by Lan Chan
I only just reacted in time to catch the fruit when she dropped it in front of me. I gulped. “What’s this?”
She flew up to my eyeline. The disdain on her face was something I was used to. “Present.” It was so shrill that’s what I deciphered she’d said.
I smelled a trick. “No thanks.”
I tried to set it down on the grass but they chattered at me. “No joke,” Purple Nymph said. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. In the end I pocketed the fruit just so they would let me go. I had to run to get to the junior campus for my first two exams.
I was puffing when I arrived just in time to watch the last of the kids enter the exam room.
Was it wrong to feel smug that you aced an exam about Demonology that was meant for kids? I didn’t care. After the disaster that was my first exams, I’d take it. History was much easier this time around too. I was so glad I’d spent all that time reading with Basil. I would borrow him as many romance novels as he wanted when this was over.
The Herbology exam was also a breeze. Not only did I know the names of all of the herbs, but when I was asked to put together the tinctures and tisanes to cure a vampire’s bite, I didn’t fumble. Mostly because I’d had practice. In all of the angst around exams, Trey got into a scuffle with a vampire and got himself bitten.
Arcane Magic proved less frightening than last time too. I could name all of the runes used in a protection spell and I was able to draw a map of the Ley lines as dictated by the exam sheet. Even the written portion of Weaponry and Combat wasn’t that bad. I knew what weapons were best employed against the different races. Silver for shifters, Hawthorn stakes for vampires, and iron for the Fae. Bunyips and other swamp and water-dwelling creatures despised fire. And demons? They were created by Lucifer from the realm of the seraphim. They could be destroyed with an angel or demon blade. Or a weapon anointed by the seraphim. Beyond that they could be trapped and sent through portals. Their essences could also be bound to an object and if that object was destroyed, the demon would die.
I even did okay in the practical application of said weapons. My arrows didn’t go anywhere near the centre of the bullseye, but they didn’t fly off the mark either. I had a few solid hits to the outer ring of the target.
Diana didn’t flatten me in less than ten seconds when we sparred. On top of that, I didn’t squeal when I went down. Bonus.
I was feeling pretty good about myself until we went to find my team for the final assessment. The examinations were being done in stages. The first few teams had their physical examinations straight away. Sophie was part of the first group. I found her huddled in the courtyard of the trial centre.
“Soph!”
Diana and I bolted to her. I knelt down in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
She tried to smile despite the tear stains under her eyes. “I’m okay.” She clutched at my hand.
“This is not okay,” Diana said. “What happened?”
She shook her head. “Can’t talk about it, remember? Spelled not to.”
A lump formed in my gut. This was not good. She tried to sit up. With our help she managed to stand and settle on a stone bench instead of the cold floor.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m just being a wimp.”
That was the last word I would use to describe her.
“Blue!” Kai called out my name.
“Diana!” Max called hers.
We looked at each other. Then we looked at Sophie. She sniffed but gave us a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry, you guys will do great.”
I stuck my hands into the pocket of the hoodie I was wearing. It curled around the Arcana fruit in there. I pulled it out and offered it to her. Sophie’s eyes went wide.
She took it from me and took a single bite. Then she pushed it back at me. Her eyes teared up. “Thanks. You’ll probably need this more than I do.” She glanced quickly at my team who were all assembling by the entrance to the trial centre.
“Good luck.”
I pocketed the fruit and ran to where Kai was standing. As usual, he had a scowl on his face. My teammates were all equally unimpressed. Looking at them, I was surprised. After Trey and Diana had told me which team I was in, I hadn’t bothered to check the lists myself.
Evan stood beside the vamp girl who had tested me in my original trial. I scrambled around for a name. Desi! That was it. Their attention was focused on the door to the centre. They spoke in a low tone.
We were all allowed to bring in a weapon of choice but neither of them was armed. He was a high-magic mage. He didn’t need a physical weapon to fight. She was a vampire. Enough said. I had opted not to bring a weapon because the chances of me hurting myself were pretty high. As long as I had my circles, I would be okay. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
“Remember what I said,” Kai murmured to me.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m here to keep a low profile. Defensive circles only.”
There was a girl in the tightest pair of black leggings I had ever seen outside of a movie. She wore a matching black singlet top. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought she was getting ready for a heist. She looked every inch a cat burglar. Then she turned to me and winked yellow eyes. Now I was sure she was a feline shifter. She too was unarmed.
“I’m Gwen,” she said, holding out her hand. “Your resident leopard.”
“Lex. The unwanted one.”
She laughed. “That’s not what I hear. It’s good to meet you.”
“I’m the only first-year,” I hissed at Kai.
“No you’re not.” He inched his head to the left. Acid burned in my chest. Isla sauntered over.
“Close your mouth,” Isla said to me. “Unless you want to catch flies.”
If I ever got what I wanted, she’d be cold in the ground.
Seeing that we were all here, Kai pushed open the centre door and stepped through. I stuffed my hands in my pocket again.
An image of Sophie’s shattered face hit me. My stomach dipped. But I braced my shoulders and followed my team inside.
38
We entered a world of mist and shadow. Barren trees like crone’s hands clawed at the full moon. Silver light cast an eerie glow on the scraggly grass beneath our feet. I had thought it might be the illusion that Kai had used for his extreme demon-killing spree, but it didn’t have the same violent atmosphere. This was much more ominous in a cheap TV Halloween movie kind of way. All we needed now was for lightning to strike in the sky above and rain to pour down. When that didn’t happen, I allowed myself to relax. My foot clipped against a rock. I stubbed my toe and cursed.
“What’s going on here?” Evan said. He balled his fists. Two spheres of white lights lit up the clearing. I wondered if Fred could do that these days. As far as I knew, he’d basically dispensed with his light magic. I wished Evan had left things dark. Because now I could see that the rock I’d tripped over wasn’t a rock. It was part of a gravestone that had cracked and fallen off.
We were standing in a graveyard. I backed up away from the site. A shiver ran up my spine.
“Creepy.” I took another step back and ran into a body. Isla didn’t make a snide remark which was creepier than the graveyard. In the glow from Evan’s hands, her skin was white as a sheet.
“What?” I asked.
She was mute. Her arms crossed over her chest. She’d put away her wings when we walked into the centre but now they popped out. They began to flutter. She lifted off the ground.
“Isla,” Kai said. “What’s happening?”
The ground beneath my foot trembled. I yelped and leaped away. I realised I’d still been standing on the burial plot. My mind put two and two together.
“Ah shit,” I said. “I think the dead are rising! Should have brought a weapon.”
Kai stepped back with me, putting himself between me and the closest grave site. I turned around and Isla had disappeared.
“She better not have run off,” Kai bit out.
“I think she’s up there.” Gwen pointed up into the trees. Now that she said it, I could see some gold against the black of the branches.
“Is she really hiding in a tree right now?” Desi snapped. Her fangs had shot out. The tremor in the earth turned into a solid rumble. The dirt under our feet crumbled as it shifted. I kind of wished I could fly now too. “Do we run or do we fight?”
“We fight,” Kai said. “We’d never just leave undead to roam free if this was the real thing.”
“What if the trial is to make it to the end of the course?” Evan asked.
Kai skewered him with a deadly glare. “Okay, okay.” Evan held up his glowing hands. “It was just a suggestion.
The first appendage that came out of the ground was of course a hand. I imagined the corpse had spent all its time scratching at its grave, desperate to get out. That did not help my quivering stomach. A second hand pierced through the earth and then the undead scrambled to claw away the dirt around it. More and more hands shot up.
Kai’s sword appeared. Rather than wait for the undead to pull themselves out, he stepped forward and sliced through the first skull he saw. The undead shuddered. It gave a cry that shouldn’t have been possible with no throat. It was like a scrape of bone mixed with the howl of the wind.
And then it turned to ash. In the time it had taken for Kai to dispatch one undead, half a dozen had surfaced. Now that they were being attacked, they popped out of their graves so fast I hardly had time to count them. What the hell kind of cemetery was this? A whimper cut through my nausea.
Isla wasn’t coming down any time soon. Desi and Gwen went for it. They attacked anything that came at them with a ferocity that made me breathless. Desi started laughing. They were enjoying themselves. Meanwhile, I was trying to be as small as possible so they wouldn’t notice me.
My eyes bugged out of my head when another hand popped out of the same grave of the undead Kai had killed. We’d made the assumption that it was a single undead to each grave site. That wasn’t the case. The grave closest to me was a few metres away. The undead that rose from it sniffed.
How did it do that with no fricken nose? The thing’s face was half-decayed. Strips of blackened skin hung off its bones. Maggots crawled in its empty eye sockets. I knew that because it turned its head in my direction. Ah shit.
I had no hope that the undead would be slow. They were coming thick and fast now. Their reflexes were every bit as good as the shifter and the vamp. Gwen let out a sharp cry as an undead sank its teeth into her calf. Her night-glow yellow eyes blinked before she booted the undead in the head. It flew into another undead coming her way.
In the treetops, Isla screamed. Just like they’d found me, the undead had sensed her. I had a feeling they were feeding off her fear. Mine was no less potent.
The sickening stench of decay and the sound of bones rubbing together had the hairs on my neck standing straight. Evan shot a pulse of fire in the direction of the undead trying to climb Isla’s tree. It left his side open. An undead reared up behind him. It would have latched teeth onto him had Kai not taken its head off.
In the fight he’d had to move away from me to protect the others. Now I was standing out in the open. A sitting duck.
“Evan,” I said, backing up some more. I thought I would hit the door we came through eventually, but it never happened. “Can’t you do anything about this?”
“Necromancy is a forbidden practice,” he said, throwing yet more flames at the undead around him. “They don’t teach it at the Academy.” We were being swarmed. They were coming out of their graves like ants. Soon we’d be overwhelmed.
Isla screamed once more. I turned my head towards her to find an undead scraping at her ankle. “You’ve got wings,” Gwen screamed at her. “Fly, you idiot!”
Isla did no such thing. She was paralysed by such fear that all she could do was scramble farther up the tree. There wasn’t much more leeway.
The first undead came at me and its teeth snapped in my face. My brain scrambled. I did the only thing I could think of and drew a circle around it. I imprinted it with the command to unbind. It was about to take a chunk out of my face when it stopped and disintegrated. A green light flashed behind it.
Kai and I looked at each other. “Was that you or me?” I asked.
But his attention was pulled away. We couldn’t keep going like this. Either we ran, or we’d have to find a solution.
“Screw this.” I crouched down and placed my hand on the ground. If they couldn’t get out, then maybe they couldn’t hurt us. Most of the graveyard was given over to annual and perennial weeds. The kind with very shallow and porous roots. But the trees weren’t as dead as I’d thought.
“What are you doing?” Evan asked.
“Not sure.”
I drew the circle around myself first. Couldn’t help anyone if I got bitten. I closed my eyes and tried to locate the well of Earth magic. The roar of it almost had me falling back on my butt. As the others fought, I grabbed on to the roots of the trees in my mind and forced them to come alive.
Not real, I kept thinking to myself. I knew I was a hedge witch at heart but there was something that I disliked about bringing things that had died back to life. It felt like it was going against the natural order of things. Just like these undead shouldn’t have been brought back.
As the roots reacted to my command, they sent their tendrils into the earth. I forced them to grow over the holes in the graves, sealing them over so that nothing could come through. Faster and stronger they grew. But there was only so much nutrition in the ground. “Isla!” I screamed. “I need rain!”
Instead of listening, she was attempting to get into another tree. “Isla!”
“Shut up!” she shrieked. Desi shot through a horde of undead and grabbed her. The vampire threw her across the open space. Isla landed with a thud not far from where I crouched.
Scrambling to her knees, Isla crawled behind me. She was using me as a human shield. My patience ran out. I snagged her by the collar of her blouse.
“I said I need rain.”
She clawed at my hands and face. “What’s wrong with you? We’re in the middle of a trial here. Can you just set aside whatever crazy issues you have with me for five damn minutes?”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s not a crazy issue,” she said. “You’re an abomination. You shouldn’t be alive.”
I sputtered. “Well, you shouldn’t be in my fricken dimension!” I shook her. “But right now I don’t give a damn who or what is right. I need bloody rain!”
Beside my head, I heard the sound of teeth scraping against metal. I turned just in time to see Kai’s blade pierce through the head of another zombie that was just about to bite a chunk off my nose. I stared into the cavernous eyes of the zombie. Something snapped inside me. This was real. The committee might have conjured up the creatures via magical means, but now that they were here, they were one hundred percent real. And I was a million percent crapping my pants. The undead in front of me spasmed. Its limbs jerked before it turned to dust.
Kai pivoted, his sword swinging with lightning speed. Isla curled into a ball and whimpered. “Isla!”
She moaned. “They’re disgusting,” she said. “They shouldn’t be here.”
In those words, I understood what it was she meant. I assumed that in the Fae dimension things were always beautiful. The undead was the antithesis of everything she had ever known. If I was terrified, she was delirious with fear.
But we didn’t have time for a breakdown right now. Two zombies tag-teamed Desi. While she was fighting off the one in front of her, the one behind grabbed her by the shoulder. Desi twisted, her arm reaching back. She was fast but so were they.
Fire raged around her. Desi screamed. I remembered what Sophie had said to me in our first trial. Vamps and shifters were all susceptible to magical fire. But Evan had no choice. He wasn’t trained for physical combat at the level they were. All he had was magic. And he knew we were losing gro
und. Evan clenched his fists and fire erupted from the ground. It began to sweep across the graveyard.
An undead leaped onto Kai’s back. He unfurled his wings to use as extra limbs and shoved the undead off. If he wanted to, he could fly clear of the graveyard altogether. He could leave us and still make it to the end. There were no actual rules against abandoning teammates. He was a Pendragon. The prince of Bloodline Academy. He could do whatever he wanted. And yet he chose to stay and fight. To protect us at all costs.
My heartbeat spiked when an undead caught him by a wing. It scratched poisoned claws down the membrane. Blood wept from the wound. Kai let out a soul-crushing roar and ran the undead through the eye socket.
I smashed Isla across the jaw with my closed fist. “I swear to Oberon if you don’t give me rain this second, I’m going to open up the circle and let a zombie feast on your wings!”
She clutched at her cheek. Her mouth opened as though she couldn’t comprehend that I’d hit her. “You little shit!”
“There’s more where that came from! I’m not dying here in a stupid exam!”
I wrenched my shoulder back fully intending to smack her even harder. She pushed me aside and stood. I could see her knees trembling. I closed my eyes and injected the intent of invisibility into the circle. We just needed a little bit of time.
Gwen yelped. The fire Evan had created was setting the undead alight. They burned and disintegrated if they got too decomposed. Before that happened, they were walking matchsticks. Now no one but Kai could get close to them. Either we were going to be overwhelmed or we were going to get mauled to death. Not fun choices.
The first drop hit my eyelash. My eyes flicked open as the well in my mind sighed. The roots of the trees had been straining to maintain their hold, but they were beginning to break against the insistence of the undead.
Another plop of water fell on my cheek. Then my nose. I grinned. The mist of rain escalated until it became a downpour. My reaction to the water was like the parched earth of a desert. I lifted my head to meet the droplets. The roots of the trees renewed their growth. They twisted and shot out to drag the undead back to their graves. The rain doused the fire so that the others could resume taking out undead.