“What took so long?” She asked. “I was out there for like, a minute.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was-”
Kiera held up her hand. “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to know what took so long.” She shook her head, obviously afraid of what my answer was going to be.“What are you going to do today? Are you going to the chess tournament?”
The tournament had been the talk of the school all week. No one in my classes had even noticed me, really, because they’d all been completely caught up in the upcoming tournament. It was a big deal to the school and an even bigger deal to the warlocks in particular. Apparently, warlocks were really, really good at chess.And apparently, playing chess was one of the only things to do at Hybrid Academy on the weekend.
“Uh, I wasn’t planning on it,” I started. “I have a lot of homework, and-”
“Oh, don’t be lame,” Kiera waved her hand, interrupting me. “Your homework will still be there when you get back. Come on. Let’s go. We can still make it.”
Before I could say anything else, she grabbed my hand and pulled me from my room. I managed to close the door before we scurried down the hallway side-by-side. It was a bad idea, I knew. Grams had always told me that ignoring schoolwork was a slippery slope and a sure way to fail, but life was short, right? Maybe it was time to lighten up and have a little fun. Maybe this was exactly the reprieve I needed to clear my mind and just be a normal student.
“What’s the tournament like?” I asked. “Who will be there?”
“Everyone,” she said, confirming my fears. So, I’d be in a huge crowd, no one would know me, and I’d be the only one struggling with my magical spells. I had managed to get pretty damn good at unlocking my doors, but the rest of my magical abilities seemed to be floating in slowly. Eventually, I was certain I’d be able to do more than just walk into my room, but who knew how long that would take?
It had been 19 years before I’d been able to do even a simple spell. I hope it wouldn’t take another 19 years for me to learn my next one. The reality was that I kind of liked being able to open doors with the right words. It made me feel powerful in a way I never had before.
“Are you sure it’s…that sounds like a lot of people…” I said slowly, but Kiera just laughed.
“Come on, brave girl. Don’t chicken out on me now.”
“I’m not chickening out.”
“Sounds like you’re trying to,” she said pointedly. I sighed. She definitely had me there. Kiera was nothing if not observant. Maybe that came from being a fairy or perhaps it was something she’d learned at Hybrid. Either way, I wasn’t going to be able to sneak anything by her.
We made it to the main building and found our seats just as the tournament was beginning. We sat side-by-side in the back of the bleachers. The two warlocks who were going to play first made their way to the center of the auditorium. I guess we were in a school auditorium. It looked more like an arena. It was huge. In fact, it seemed almost too big to actually fit inside the school. I pointed this out to Kiera and she nodded as though it was totally obvious as to why.
“Yeah, yeah,” she waved her hand. “They did a spell. Made the room bigger inside.”
“Who did a spell?”
“The headmistress. She’s pretty incredible, you know. Used to lead a coven.”
And now she led a school.
How interesting.
Miss Wilson stood in front of the noisy and excitable crowd. Everyone was freaking out and cheering for their favorite player. The boy on the left was one I didn’t recognize. He wore green and purple robes. Green, I had learned, was the color demon students wore. The other player was in my potions class. He was a first year shifter. His robes matched mine: purple and blue. So, today’s match was against a demon and a shifter. Who would win? I hadn’t been part of the school long enough to know who I was rooting for, but a little part of me, deep inside, wanted to see the shifter win.
“Students,” she said. “It’s time for the games to begin. You all know the rules.”
The crowd mumbled and yelled and spoke all at the same time. The sound was deafening, but I didn’t cover my ears. Kiera chuckled. A boy slid into the space next to me. He didn’t have robes on: just normal clothes. I glanced over at him and he smiled at me. Something about him was familiar. Maybe we had a class together. Unable to place where I knew him from, I turned back to the scene in front of me.
Miss Wilson was explaining the rules of the game. Everyone seemed to understand these but me, so I was grateful she took the time to explain how the entire process was going to work. The game was like normal chess, but with a magical twist. Spells could be cast every third turn and they affected the other participant, but enchantments could only last a single round. This meant you could cast something silly or weird on the other person, but the enchantment either had to wear off quickly or you had to end it after the person’s turn. It seemed like a recipe for disaster. The entire crowd was going crazy and the games hadn’t even started yet.
“Last year, someone turned their opponent into a frog,” Kiera whispered hastily, gripping my hand.
“That’s nuts,” the boy next to me said, obviously eavesdropping on the conversation. Somehow, it didn’t bother or offend me nearly as much as it should have. Strange.
Kiera leaned over in front of me and nodded at the guy beside me.
“It was horrible,” she said. “He couldn’t move his pieces and he got completely agitated and turned around, so when it was his turn, he couldn’t do anything except make frog noises.”
“Ribbit?” I asked.
“Ribbit,” she confirmed.
“Ouch,” I said. “But I thought you weren’t here last year.” How did she know about all of this?
“I wasn’t,” Kiera said. “It was a legend. Besides, there’s a video.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” she said. “You don’t think something like that would go unrecorded, do you?”
I guess even at a place like Hybrid, people had contraband phones on them. One of the conditions of attending school was that we wouldn’t use modern tech for harmful purposes. The headmistress had requested that students not have cell phones on campus property or any sort of recording device. Most of the witches and warlocks here craved their privacy. Maybe we weren’t all running from something, but we definitely all wanted to be left alone as much as possible.
“First round,” Miss Wilson said, gesturing to the boy I didn’t know. “We have Jeremiah Happenstance.” The crowd cheered, obviously excited, and I turned to Kiera.
“Is that his real name?”
“Yeah. Unfortunate, right?”
“It sounds fake.”
“It’s definitely fake,” the boy next to me said. “Nobody has a name like that.”
“Jeremiah will be competing against Raymond Dash.”
Again, the crowd cheered. I knew Raymond. His name sounded slightly less fictional. He was in my class and he was not exactly a nice person. Maybe I needed to give him a second chance. Maybe I had judged him too hastily. But still, he gave off a certain vibe that made me wildly uncomfortable. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was.
The wizards bowed to one another and then the crowd sat down. It was quieter than I thought it would have been. Apparently, wizarding students took their matches pretty seriously. It was easy to tell which people in the crowd were fans of Jeremiah and which students were fans of Raymond. Everyone had signs and little flags they were waving. Students were casting spells that shot flames of their player’s colors up into the air above them.
“Are you going to do that?” I asked Kiera, gesturing to some of the colorful flames, but she shook her head.
“Above my level,” she shrugged. “Maybe next year.”
One particularly pretty group of witches waved their wands in unison and created an intertwined and swirling cloud of blue and purple. If I wasn’t going crazy, the concoction even smelled good.
How
weird was that?
I’d never seen anything like it. Curiosity threatened to overwhelm me. How different would my life have been if I’d been exposed to magic like this long ago? Would I have been able to cast spells sooner? My grandmother had done her best to try to train me, so why hadn’t it worked? Why had it taken her loss and me traveling to Hybrid Academy to be able to perform any type of magic?
And why did I feel like I was missing a big, huge puzzle piece that was right in front of my face?
The match began.
Jeremiah made his move first. He considered what he would do for a moment, and the crowd sat silently in anticipation. Then Jeremiah cast a spell that made Raymond’s arms squeak like a puppy’s chew toy.
“Unfortunate,” the boy next to me commented. “That’ll be distracting.”
“What are the specific rules for the spells?” I asked Kiera. I had zoned off a little bit while Miss Wilson was explaining. I’d been too caught up in everything around me. It was all so crazy and new.
It was all totally unexpected.
“They can’t cause permanent damage,” Kiera said.
“Or pain,” the boy next to me said. “Well, not physical pain. Emotional trauma is another thing altogether.” I thought of Kiera’s comments about the year before. I wondered if there were any long-term grudges held there.
“Have you seen one of these before?” I asked him. “A chess match like this?”
“Nope,” he said with a cocky grin. His eyes flashed another color – yellow, maybe? – and I wondered what kind of shifter he was. He was obviously some type of animal, like me, but it didn’t seem polite to ask.
Instead, I asked, “What’s your name?”
“Henry.”
“I’m Max.”
“Pleasure.”
“Ahem,” Keira coughed loudly.
“This is Kiera.”
“Hi Kiera.”
“Hi Henry.”
“Now that we’re all acquainted,” I mumbled, turning back to the game, and I couldn’t believe what I had missed. Raymond’s turn had come and gone and now Jeremiah had taken his second shot. It had been a harsh one, too. Raymond was a piglet: an honest-to-goodness little piglet. He was running around screeching. I figured Miss Wilson, as the monitor, would try to get him to calm down long enough to move back to the game, but she just stood there watching, observing. Strange.
“Bloody hell,” mumbled Kiera. “They’re never going to get him calmed down. Raymond hates pigs.”
I looked at Jeremiah, who was leaning back in his seat comfortably. His arms were behind his head and he looked around the room with a cocky grin. Smug. He looked smug. Instantly, I hated him for embarrassing Raymond and making him uncomfortable. I might not be close friends with Raymond, and I might not even particularly like him myself, but no one deserved that. Nobody deserved to have their fears exploited that way.
Having a little fun with spells was one thing, but purposely hurting another person and transforming them into something they hated? That just seemed cruel. What a bully. The crowd seemed very conflicted. Half of the students were cheering and yelling. The other half just seemed disgusted at the low blow. Apparently, Raymond’s distaste for pigs wasn’t a particularly well-known fact around the school, but a few people knew he didn’t like the animals. He ran around squealing, circling the chess board. Miss Wilson seemed to find something very interesting about staring at her wand. Jeremiah just smiled at his handiwork. He turned and looked at the crowd. Then he had the audacity to wink.
Yeah, this was a Grade-A jerk who had nothing better to do than mess with people for no good reason. I understood that it was all just a game, but it didn’t look like Raymond was having a particularly good time. What was the point of watching a sporting match if it was less fun and more cruelty?
“Come on,” I said, standing up. “I’ve seen enough.”
Kiera shrugged but got up and followed me. To my surprise, Henry did, too. The three of us made our way out of the auditorium and into the quiet hallways of Hybrid Academy. Once we were away from the crowd, I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes for just a second. I couldn’t get over the smug look that had covered Jeremiah’s face. Maybe Hybrid Academy really was just like the horror stories I’d heard about high school. There were the bullies and there were the nerds. Then there were people in-between. I guess I’d dared to hope that Hybrid would be a little different.
“That was something,” Kiera said, leaning against the wall beside me. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked over at me, waiting to see what I’d say. The problem was that I wasn’t quite ready to verbalize my feelings. I’d dealt with a lot of emotional changes during the week. I wasn’t ready to self-analyze my feelings or talk about my own reactions to the situation. The reality was that the chess match had nothing to do with me, but it felt personal. It reminded me terribly of all the times that Tony had picked on me at work and how no one had ever stood up for me. I wasn’t sure if I should have stood up for Raymond or not. He had agreed to the match, after all, but it left me feeling gross and bad. I was relieved we’d all walked out of the match.
“Maybe it’s time for them to try another game,” I said finally, and Kiera smiled.
“You aren’t wrong, but chess is a fairly new thing around here. It’ll take everyone some time to get the kinks worked out of the game. They’ll see how well the current rules work and then they’ll revise them as needed. It’s what the teachers here do. They love to mix and match and adjust and change things as necessary. It’s one of the reasons the school is so successful.”
“I heard they tried checkers a few years ago,” Henry said helpfully. “So, chess definitely wasn’t their first choice when it came to games.”
“And before that, they used to play magical poker. Every game has its own problems,” Kiera explained. “Nothing is perfect when it comes to this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Magic users in large groups,” Henry scoffed. He didn’t seem like he was a fan, but he was here, wasn’t he? Why would he come to the school if he didn’t like the idea of large groups of magic users? Or perhaps he was just being dramatic. Maybe I wasn’t the only one whose emotions were running high after watching Raymond.
I turned to him. “What are your abilities?” I asked him. “I noticed you aren’t wearing robes.”
He looked down and feigned surprise. Clutching his chest and then his stomach he asked, “What? Really? I’m not!?” He looked up and his mouth formed an “o” shape. “Whatever will I do?”
Kiera burst out laughing, but I frowned.
“Hey, that’s not funny,” I protested lightly, but Kiera just smiled.
“It’s a little funny,” she said.
“Not really,” I grumbled, feeling like the odd one out.
Again.
“Hey,” Henry said, reaching for me. His eyes searched mine. “I was just messing with you.”
“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”
I didn’t know why I was always so sensitive about stuff like that. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe it had just been too much excitement for one girl for one day. Who knew?
“Let’s go,” I said, looking around. “What else is there to do on a Saturday?” We all needed to get out of the castle, at least for a little while. I was ready to clear my head and stop feeling worried or stressed. I was pretty sure everyone else was, too. Surely there were other places to go on the Hybrid Academy campus that didn’t involve watching people bully one another.
“We could go on a walk?” Kiera phrased her suggestion like a question. “There are lots of different places to go. There’s a forbidden forest, a haunted hill, and oh, there’s even a supernatural stream.”
“You had me at forbidden forest,” I told her with a grin.
“Let’s go.”
Chapter 8
By the time we were finished exploring the stream, the hill, and the forest, it was almost time for dinner. Since we had
to eat at the school, none of us wanted to miss the meal. It was going to be a long time until breakfast the next day and I didn’t have any snacks in my room. Not yet, anyway. I was planning on making a trip to the school store at some point during the weekend, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. There had simply been other things occupying my time and keeping me busy. Snacks had been put on the back burner, which was unfortunate. Exploring had been a lot of fun and none of us really wanted to come back. It was just that after an entire day of fun, we were all hungry.
When we arrived back at the school, the tournament was just ending. Rows of students streamed out of the auditorium. Most everyone was in their human forms, but I was caught off-guard when I noticed a couple of lions roaming the halls with the students. They were very big and very beautiful, but I was intimidated. Is that what I would look like in my own shifter form? Would people feel a sense of intimidation when they looked at me?
“Don’t worry about them,” Kiera said. “They’re harmless.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, but I swallowed hard.
Harmless?
Lions?
Seemed impossible.
I wasn’t any sort of expert on shifters, but just looking at their sheer size made me think that they weren’t safe. Not really. Not at all. How much of a shifter was really under the person’s control? How much was ruled by instinct? My grandmother had talked about shifters in passing, but never seriously. I tried to think about the things she had told me about them, but every time I tried to grasp at a memory, it seemed to dissipate. Would a shifter go crazy if they came across some prey, for example? Would they be overcome with hunger if a rabbit ran across their path?
More importantly, what would it take for one of those lions to actually come after me?
“Seriously,” Kiera said, sensing my agitation. “It’s going to be fine. They aren’t interested in you, anyway.” She pointed to a group of fairies who were walking with their wings out. The fairies were bright and glittery. They seemed to practically glow. She was right, too. The lions were completely enamored with the fairies. They didn’t seem to be concerned with me at all.
Hybrid Academy Box Set Page 8