Faeted: A Dark Prince New Adult Bully Romance

by Deiri Di

  She had to figure out what she wanted from herself first.

  Benjamin sat down on her other side.

  "Hello, gorgeous," he put his arm around her and hugged her.

  How did this even happen? All she wanted to do was quickly talk to her friend and leave, and now she was surrounded by the hottest guys in the school, both of which were vast piles of complicated confusion.

  "I don't want revenge," Mari turned away from Benjamin to reply to Chase. It wasn't like Benjamin needed her attention. If he was going to play weird games with her when they were in front of everyone else, she wasn't going to bother with him. They could talk under the bleachers when he felt like being real again. "Revenge doesn't do anything but cause more problems. Anger begets pain begets regret."

  Chase looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. "But what if they don't stop? What if the person who poured milk in your locker keeps harassing you, doing something worse every time. How will you stop them if you don't take action?"

  "I didn't say I wouldn't take action. I just said I wouldn't get revenge."

  "What is the difference?"

  "Revenge is when you act with negative feelings for a negative purpose."

  "But..." Chase stared at his hands. "When someone hurts you, how can you not want to hurt them? How do you let go of anger?"

  Stephanie read off of her tablet. "Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place."

  "Who said that?" Benjamin asked.

  "The quote website says Kurt Vonnegut."

  "But if you don't crush your enemies, they'll find a way to crush you. You have to destroy them the first chance you get. Softness only gets you killed." Chase said.

  "Does that mean you're going to crush me?" Mari didn't ask the question for her own benefit. She was afraid for Chase, not of him.

  "What? No! Never!" The vehemence in his voice stopped the conversations on the other side of the table. The other students listened to them. "Why would you ask that?"

  "Because you've hurt me, and I've hurt you." The rock came down over and over again. "Doesn't that make us enemies? Don't you want revenge?"

  "Whoah, what are you guys talking about?" Benjamin asked.

  "Yeah, tell us."

  Chase grabbed Stephanie's hands and brought her tablet closer to him. Even as he did that, his other hand snaked around the side of Mari’s hip. He grabbed her and slid her across the last few inches of space that separated them, pressing her close against his body.

  While Stephanie still held it, he scrolled through the website.

  "Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness," he read. "It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. Mary Oliver."

  The words slipped through Mari's skin.

  He set the tablet back in Stephanie's hands. "Mari, you never hurt me. You saved me and set my world tumbling into a different dimension of experience."

  "That's a good quote," Stephanie piped in. "But it doesn't explain what you guys are talking about. Come on, tell us."

  "I tried to tell you, Stephanie, but you couldn't listen." Mari looked at her sandwich in her hand, barely eaten. Maybe it was a good time to retreat. Maybe it was a bad idea to sit down and talk openly. Maybe she would do better as an outcast. Maybe every action she took was the wrong one, and she should just give up and do nothing at all.

  "Chase, that doesn't really explain anything."

  "Try 'My friend, thou art not my friend' by Khalil Gibran."

  "Hey, butterfly," Benjamin bumped Mari with his elbow. "Why is there a leash tied to your backpack? Why does it go in your backpack? Are you hiding a puppy or something?"

  "Don't change the subject! We want to know what they're talking about," Stephanie insisted.

  Chase was looking at her backpack.

  Uh oh.

  The dragon was what Chase wanted.

  Mari didn't want Chase to die.

  But she wouldn't let anyone take Miss Kitty away from her. Especially not someone who would train her with violence, then use her to secure his right to the throne with blood and fire.

  Miss Kitty wasn't anyone's to use.

  She was Mari's to protect.

  Mari lurched to standing. "Bye."

  She grabbed her lunch in one hand and her backpack in the other and fled.

  Sometimes it was okay to run away.

  At least, that is what Mari liked to tell herself.

  [ 10 ]

  Mari knelt in the school's garden.

  She dug her fingers into the soil and pulled up another weed, tossing it into her basket. The weeds would go in the compost bins, large rainwater barrels put on their side and mounted between triangles, allowing them to rotate freely. The rotating stirred the compost, causing it to decompose and turn into high-quality organic soil faster than a normal, stationary compost bin.

  Urban gardening was an elective class.

  There was a waiting list to get into it. Everyone wanted to take the aquaponics and tight living urban gardening courses. Being able to grow your own food meant the difference between daily happiness or daily struggle. Proper nutrition meant excelling at sports. It meant a sharp mind capable of getting better grades and a body able to grow and push to new physical boundaries.

  It meant health in a crowded world.

  Some time ago, Mariposa's school had gotten a large alumni donation specifically to transform the school into a self-sustaining system. This meant rainwater collection and solar panels. It meant building an aquaponics, urban, and small scale gardening program to give the students the means to learn how to feed their families. Produce from the gardens went to the school's lunch program, providing free, healthy meals for anyone who wanted them.

  It wasn't completely sustainable yet.

  The greenhouse-like aquaponics lab still had quite a bit of water loss due to evaporation – the building wasn't as element proof as it should be. That wasn't really that big of a problem. It just meant that the water levels had to be monitored in the fish tanks.

  Could dragons hunt fish?

  When Miss Kitty got larger, maybe she could take her deep-sea fishing.

  But then she would have to worry about mercury levels. The ocean clean-up projects were only a few years into production. There was still a long way to go before seafood was truly safe to eat again.

  The tomato plants rustled.

  It was the black whippet sized weasel, the egg hunter.

  It rattled its pinions together, clacking as it sniffed the air.

  Miss Kitty's nose appeared from the opening of Mari's backpack. Her eyes were wide, gems that glistened as her prey, a creature half her size, turned its head to look the other direction.

  The dragon darted out of the backpack.

  The magical weasel bolted.

  The two dashed through the plants. The weasel reached a gopher hole, too small for it. That didn't stop it. It dove headfirst into the hole, shrinking in size until it wiggled down, vanishing inside. The dragon stopped at the opening, just a little too big to follow it under.

  That wasn't going to keep her from her prey.

  She inhaled, cracks of red under her skin glowing brighter.

  "Flame!" Mari said in a firm voice.

  If you can't stop a powerful creature from doing something, you can always order her to do it as she is in the process. You trick her into thinking she is obeying you simply by using clever timing.

  The fire shot down into the hole.

  As the smoke puffed up with the scent of burnt pinions and seared flesh, Miss Kitty sat at the opening of the hole. She looked down at the hole, then back at Mari, then mewed. Mari put her gloved hands on the ground and crab-walked over to her.

  "This is gross, and I don't enjoy this." Mari looked into Miss Kitty's eyes while she spoke. "But I'm going to help you because I love you."<
br />
  She reached into the hole with her garden glove shielded hand.

  When she pulled out the charred corpse, Miss Kitty lunged for it.

  "No!" Mari yanked the corpse back. She placed her other hand on Miss Kitty's chest, pushing her back. "Sit."

  Miss Kitty hissed, eyes locked onto the meat.

  "Sit." Mari placed a hand on the dragon's hips and gently pushed her down. It didn't really work. Miss Kitty focused entirely on the corpse.

  "Look at me," Mari said. "I am the most important creature in your universe, and you WILL look at me."

  Miss Kitty looked at her.

  Mari held a picture in her mind of the dragon sitting. It was clear and visual, an image rather than words.

  The dragon sat.

  "Good girl!" Mari praised enthusiastically as she handed the gopher into Miss Kitty's waiting maw. "What a good kitty!"

  The dragon purred as she ripped into flesh.

  "What's going on over here? What is that smell?"

  Mrs. Brown, the supervising teacher for the entire urban gardening program, shaded over Mariposa. "What is that?"

  She was pointing at Miss Kitty.

  Could she see the dragon?

  "Miss Kitty," Mari replied.

  "Your cat is eating a gopher," Mrs. Brown placed her hands on her hips

  .

  Mari nodded.

  Mrs. Brown smiled. "Good. You can bring her here at any time. As long as she keeps eating those pests, she is welcome. Feel free to set her after those damn rabbits, too." She hesitated a moment before heading down the row towards the other students. "It's always nice to see a student taking the initiative."

  Yet another thing to think about.

  When faced with something she couldn't understand, Stephanie simply forgot about it. When faced with something she couldn't really see, Mrs. Brown saw something else.

  What would happen to people when Miss Kitty was full-sized?

  Mari stared at her little dragon, happily crunching bones between her teeth as she stripped skin from flesh and suckled on the marrow of her prey.

  How big would the dragon become?

  #

  The underclassmen, the girl with frizzy brown hair and a camera, was standing in front of Mari's locker writing on it with a black sharpie. It was Mari's free period, something all the seniors got to encourage them to work on college applications and figuring out what they're going to do for the rest of their lives.

  Mari snuck up behind the underclassman.

  This time the word of choice was: Whore.

  "Hey," Mari grabbed the girl's shoulder to keep her from bolting. Her hand tingled ever so slightly with the touch. "Why are you doing this?"

  The girl wobbled.

  A flash of green ran through her hair like fire as her features shifted for a moment, like wax melting off of a candle. Mari's spine buzzed along with her hand.

  The girl wrenched her shoulder free.

  As they lost physical contact, her features settled back down to normal – brown hair, freckles, and braces: nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary.

  "Why are you messing with my locker?" Mari demanded. "Why did you take those pictures and send them out to everyone? Who the heck are you? Because if you're going to shift appearances when I touch you, then you certainly aren't a normal student. Fess up, magic-user. I caught you."

  The girl glanced around.

  Nobody was within sight.

  "I don't know what you're talking about." She turned to walk off. "You can't prove anything."

  As if that was going to work.

  Mari reached out with her blackened hand and grabbed the girl's arm.

  This time she held on tight.

  The hand tingled, and Mari focused on the sensation. Whatever spell was on this girl, whatever was going on, she was going to break through it and find the truth. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her magic wasn't just the passive kind. She wasn't just resistant to spells.

  She could control them.

  That had to be why the elves made a competition out of killing her kind.

  She wasn't just a human that could break the glamor.

  She was something else.

  The girl struggled, but Mari didn't let go. She fixated on the tingling in her hand, pushed on it like it was a part of her, and funneled it into the other girl.

  The girl destabilized.

  Her hair straightened, flowing out into silken green locks that a hair model would be proud to flip about on television. She grew in height, shooting up until she was taller than Mari. Muscles thickened her skinny arms, padding out the shape of her body until it formed into someone that Mari recognized.

  Mari could disrupt magical creatures.

  This particular magical creature was a shapeshifter named Gin. She had been assigned to guard Mari back in the fae realm – a duty that involved punching her in the gut when the human tried to escape.

  "Uaaagh!" Gin bent over and wretched.

  Looks like Mari finally got to return the favor.

  Gin heaved up the contents of her stomach right in front of the lockers. When she came up for air, her face was ashen and grey. "That was worse than being stuck in a vorl hole covered in jetsper! In the Great Tree's name, what did you do to me?"

  "Why are you harassing me? Why on earth would a shape-shifting bodyguard for the royal family abandon her post, run away to the human world, and start bullying a teenager in high school? Don't you have better things to do?"

  There had to be something better for her to do than high school.

  Seriously, these magical creatures were all completely nuts.

  "My mission is to make you want to leave."

  "What mission? You quit your job!"

  "Slavery is not something you quit." Gin spat out a vomit loogie. "It is something you reject with every ounce of your being. Those sick and twisted ones can not keep my people in chains. Now is the time that freedom comes, and the blood of our captors will soak the soil to feed the forest's growth."

  "What does that have to do with me? I'M JUST A GIRL!"

  Gin held her hands out to Mari, palms up, a gesture of placation.

  "You have the power to free us," Gin said. "You are the one we have waited for, the one who can resist the binds of the twisted ones, the one who can free us all from our chains."

  "I couldn't even free myself," Mari said. "I didn't know what was going on. I asked to leave, and you guys dumped me outside a hospital to bleed to death. If I couldn't even save myself, why would you think I could save your entire race?"

  "You were the first to ask," Gin said. "The others couldn't even resist enough to speak. They didn't learn the power of words. They just died."

  "It's not like a lot of people have to go through that."

  The elves couldn't have killed that many people.

  "They have hunted your kind for years beyond the scope of your recorded history. There has been genocide perpetrated against your kind, and the game they played with you is simply to draw out the last breaths of a rare and unique creature." Gin wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "They will come, and they will not ignore you. When they come, you must not be here."

  "Why not just say that? Why bully me?"

  "Your human information box told me that it was the way to make you want to leave school. Teenagers leave school because of bullying."

  Mari sighed. You could learn lots of things from the Internet, but it was up to the individual to figure out how to use that information properly.

  "Listen, Gin – this is ridiculous. I'm almost halfway done with my senior year. I can't just up and leave. I have to get my high school diploma, so I can go to college."

  So I can accept a huge debt to afford it and spend the rest of my life as a slave to a paycheck simply to pay it off. So I can repeat the lives of everyone else before me and everyone else around me.

  So I can be normal.

  "You can let others decide your fate, or you can be
come the champion that changes everything. You can change this world, Mari. You can change it for the better."

  "I can join the army and change the world, right? What makes your army any better than the one my step-mother wants me to join?"

  "There is a difference between joining an army and freeing one."

  "Gin, I don't know. I just want to have a boyfriend and go to prom and have someone kiss me because they love me, not because of whatever other reason they're all kissing me, which is stupid. I don't want to be the savior of your people! I just want to be the best person I can become."

  Mari shook her head and turned to walk away.

  "What's in the backpack Mariposa?"

  Mari stiffened but didn't turn around.

  "To become the best person you can become, you must have the courage to transform your burdens into such a joy that it burns the old world to the ground!" Gin called after her. "If you don't choose to walk your own path, fate will give you a push. You might not like the way the world shoves. It isn't always gentle."

  Miss Kitty chirped from inside the backpack.

  "It's not the world shoving! It's you!"

  "What's the difference? What makes you or me any different from the world that we live in?" Gin asked. "You don't have long, Mari. We won't let you get caught in the crossfire, not now, not when you don't understand your true strength. Come with us before that happens."

  "How much time do I have to make up my mind?" Mari asked.

  "The Queen gave Chase till the empty moon to find the dragon," Gin said. "It's in three days. When black hangs in the sky, they will come for him and take him home to face the consequences of his failure."

  Three days.

  Three days to choose her own fate.

  Three days to save Chase from his darkness.

  #

  Benjamin didn't really care about her.

  She watched him as she tightened the laces on her jogging sneakers. Despite the difficulty of the morning, she was going to stick with it. She was going to huff her way all the way home. For the next three days, she would keep with the program. Just because things were taking a crazy turn didn't mean that she should abandon her decision to take control of her health.

  Benjamin was across the courtyard, talking to Sarah.

  There she was with her coiffed hair and stylish clothes. When they stood next to each other, they looked like an advertisement for the perfect couple. Sarah was closer to his height. She had social poise and inherent grace. Sure, Mari had seen her be awkward, like when she tried to pick up Vladmir in the library once upon a time ago, but that didn't matter.