Hallowed Omen

by Emma Nicole

  Seraphina pushed past one of the students and grabbed Kai’s shoulder to steady him.

  “Lionheart!” One of the hunter’s yelled at her, using the correct term for what they were – or what they thought they were. But there was nothing lionhearted about any of them. “I said stand to attention.”

  “I’m helping him,” Seraphina snapped.

  “He’s fine on his own.”

  Seraphina saw red for a moment. The adrenaline from the fight still pumped through her veins and she was still furious at the students, the stupid guild and everything for making this Seraphina and Kai’s best option for survival. They were training with a bunch of brutes to be a brute and kill monsters according to petty guidelines that were just as likely to get them killed.

  Kai’s hand wove through her own aching fingers and he squeezed them, clearing her mind.

  “What happened here?” The hunter asked.

  “They led us here,” Daria said. “They tricked us. The guys targeted Kai and dragged him out here and then they tricked us in to coming too.” Her voice wobbled only at the end, betraying her feelings.

  “The monster had a dagger!” Yates said and pointed at Seraphina. “She was going to kill us!”

  Some of the other guys mumbled their ascent.

  “I didn’t.” Seraphina lied.

  “That is a serious accusation,” the hunter said and eyed Yates.

  “He’s lying,” Daria added quickly.

  “It’s right here.” He picked up the blade from the ground.

  “One of them was carrying it,” Daria implored.

  The hunter stared at them all levelly. “Don’t think any of you are getting off of this lightly. Do you want to be known as the lot who gave all students under eighteen a curfew?”

  Seraphina knew with utmost certainty that these hunters were insane. She remembered the television shows she’d watched as a science experiment where people worked in cafes and laughed about relationship problems. She wondered if she would ever consider that a big problem compared to her life.

  Chapter Three

  More hunters arrived on the scene and had the students shunted to the infirmary, where they were then split off from each other. None of them tried to split up Seraphina and Kai. They did the sweep, the bright blue of Seraphina’s hair and then Kai’s pine green. They met both their eyes too quickly and quickly looked at the rest of their normal selves before looking back at the hair or eyes again. It was good they didn’t try as Seraphina wouldn’t let go of his hand. Now, they both sat on the side of a hospital bed and a nurse and a doctor had come in.

  “My name is Johannessen,” the doctor said and smiled. “And this is Cecilia. Seraphina, isn’t it? Would you let Cecilia check that head wound of yours while I look at Kai here? Kai, would you like to go to another room?”

  Kai shook his head once and that’s when Seraphina noticed his upper lip quiver. The nurse came around to inspect the side of Seraphina’s head and also gave her the opportunity to stare at Kai more.

  You can go, she said to him.

  But there was no answer and she couldn’t sense any feelings from him but nothing, as if there was some void in his head. She squeezed his hand, but he didn’t answer.

  The doctor began to check him over, rolling up Kai’s shirt to reveal the already purpling bruises on his stomach and sides. Seraphina could only think about murdering those hateful students. She barely felt the sting of Cecilia treating her head wound. The nurse said something to her, but Seraphina hadn’t really been listening and the nurse didn’t say anything again so it couldn’t have been important.

  It took maybe ten minutes for the nurse to finish tending to the wound and then sticking a very puffy plaster over it.

  The doctor had finished a while ago but had waited for the nurse to finish. “Kai,” he said. “I’d like to take you for an MRI just in case… it’s like an x-ray but more detailed. Do you know what one is?”

  “No,” Kai gritted out, his voice sounded strained.

  His yellow eyes hadn’t moved from where he’d fixed them on the wall above the doctor.

  “Ah, well an MRI machine looks for organ damage –”

  “No.” Kai said.

  That’s when Seraphina realised what the problem was. Technology and magic didn’t work together and Kai was using magic right now. “Sir,” Seraphina said to the doctor. “He doesn’t want any tests. We both have Power and we’ll heal fast. He also hates machines.”

  “It’s very important. Power can’t heal everything.”

  “We have more than most.” Seraphina said. “I’ll talk to him… can you both leave for a minute please?”

  The doctor looked at her for a moment before leaving with the nurse.

  Seraphina loosed a sigh.

  “Curtains,” Kai gritted out, his hand slowly released hers.

  Seraphina drew the blinds to both windows and then looked around the ceiling for cameras, she couldn’t see any but she sent out a loose amount of magic. She waved it around with her hand so it would spread around the room and fry anything electrical. The lights flickered momentarily and Seraphina dragged her palm back, to pull her magic away too.

  Kai had his hands covering his ears, his high-fae ears. He’d been Glamouring them this entire time, creating an illusion that would make his ears appear like any other humans. Now they were much bigger, longer and ending in a tip. He’d had them since the scientists that had created him, no other science experiment at their level had them but Kai did. His head fell in to his lap as he curled in on himself.

  “It hurts so much,” he muttered. “Trying to keep this up. They were hitting me and I was trying not to drop this. It’s so hard to do anything while hiding these.”

  “Kai,” Seraphina murmured and hurried towards him. She rested her hand on his head. “Do you need magic?”

  “Can we not pretend right now, Elaina?”

  Seraphina shivered at her old name and she wanted to say she didn’t see their new names as pretend. They were freeing themselves from their pasts, she’d said this to him before but she didn’t push it right now. “They’ll come back soon, Kieran. Do you want me to Glamour them for you?”

  “Can you?” He murmured. “For how long?”

  “I’ve never held a Glamour for longer than fifteen minutes. So we’d have to leave. Do you need the MRI?”

  “Well, I can’t have one with a Glamour on. Magic will heal it up.”

  “Take mine too.” Seraphina readied her own magic inside of herself.

  “No, you need it to help me back to the castle. Shall we go now?”

  “If they let us.”

  Kai lifted his head from his hands to look at her. She had the vague sense of his feelings now, sadness, exhaustion and pain. The nothingness had been him concentrating. She pulled him in to her arms, hugging him. She wanted to hug him tighter but she was aware of her own aches and pains as well as what he must be feeling. She wanted to remember the guy she’d known for almost all of her life. The Kai, the Kieran that would never change.

  She willed the Glamour in to place once they parted, slipping her hand back in to his as they made their way out the door. The nurse was standing by a desk facing the door. “You both need to stay,” she said.

  “Kai needs to rest. You heard what the doctor said. I’ll come back after I walk him back, okay?”

  The nurse looked down the hall and then at Kai. “You really won’t have the MRI?”

  “No,” Kai said.

  “Ten minutes,” she said to Seraphina.

  Seraphina nodded quickly before hurrying down the hall.

  The walk back to the castle was undisturbed thankfully. Seraphina’s head was pounding by the time she released the Glamour in Kai’s room.

  “How did they get to you?” She asked.

  “They asked me if I wanted to train with them and so I came out.”

  “Really?” Seraphina asked.

  “That guy, Derek convinced me, he seemed gen
uinely sincere. Stupid, I know.” Kai lowered himself on to the bed, sucking at his teeth.

  “I’m giving you some of my magic,” Seraphina said as she reached for him.

  “You need some. What if they try something else on the way back?”

  “I doubt it seeing as I literally shoved my magic in to two of them… I think I might have killed one of them.”

  Kai reached for her hand and squeezed it from where he laid on the bed. “I doubt it.”

  “I poisoned him with my magic, he had some too. You saw what happened to those fae who were forcibly given other fae’s magic.”

  “Not all of them died, Elaina.”

  “They could kick us out if I killed one of them. We’ll heal faster than them and make the damage they did to us look like less.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t help me then?” Kai smiled grimly.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Seraphina whispered.

  She willed more of her magic in to action, it had dwindled greatly since the fights but she still had more than enough to survive. That’s what made her and Kai different, past their Gemness and being fae-touched, they were also what the fae called Fated. The fae believed those that had compatible magic types were meant to be together forever, essentially soulmates. Seraphina didn’t believe in that stuff, she knew her and Kai would never be parted but she could never love him like that. It sounded absurd to her and how the fae had taunted them both about it.

  Seraphina let go of Kai’s hand as her core shivered. The core of a person was where magic normally resided, unless that person had too much and then it tended to course through their body and in to their blood stream.

  She smiled tiredly at Kai. Maybe exhaustion would stop her from doing something stupid, like picking a fight with Nor and those meat-headed guys. She hated them, these people that were training to protect humans. Except she wasn’t human to them and they didn’t even know she was a Gem, they hated her because she’d spent a year with the fae.

  “Elaina, don’t do anything stupid.” Kai said. “Promise me, you’ll go back and do what the hunters say. Don’t get in to more trouble.”

  “Since when have I tried anything else? All our lives we’ve been hiding,”

  “But you don’t anymore.”

  “Really? Last time I’ve checked I kept our secret pretty well under wraps.”

  “I mean you pick fights and arguments… you haven’t been careful since we got here.”

  Seraphina paused at the door for a moment and eyed the bare room. Neither of them had any money to furnish the place and to be honest she wasn’t sure what she’d fill her room with if she’d been given the choice. She was sure Kai was the same. “This place is different. We have a shot to be good at something here. The fae were too powerful and we didn’t know enough back then to do much but hide, same with the scientists. Now we’re with humans and we have more magic than them. These are also the kinds of people that will crush us if we let them.” She didn’t wait for him to reply as she left, hoping he’d at least think about what she said. He needed to try harder, train more.

  Chapter Four

  Seraphina had never been in the basement level of the office building, which was the only other guild building that wasn’t under protection of the wards of the castle, it also meant electricity worked. It had been three days since the fight. All of them had been suspended from classes and Seraphina had been avoiding eating at peak times in the cafeteria since all the students had attempted to extract gossip from her. Thankfully the snippets she’d overhead later assured her that no one had died and they were all going to be okay. Kai slept off his injuries in two days and Seraphina couldn’t even feel any of the blows that she took, all she had was a yellowish bruise on the top of her forehead.

  The basement was cool despite the summer heat and she could hear the whir of the air conditioning above her. It had been around six months since she’d left Faerie and yet she still couldn’t get over the unease technology gave her. Maybe because it reminded her of the scientists and their iron tight control.

  Seraphina loosed a breath and looked at the room number, B121. This was the place she’d been instructed to go to. The hunters were treating the fight as a serious incident and almost with the severity they would with the adults. So she and a number of the others were chosen to take a polygraph, a lie detector test.

  She knocked on the door and a guy only a couple of years older than her opened the door. She recognised him from around the guild, the leader’s son, who was also named Ignatius. Ignatius the fourth smiled tightly at her, he was a good head and a half taller than her but Seraphina tried to ignore her niggling smallness. He was probably the spitting image of his father when he was the same age. Brown skin, broad cheek bones and styled straight black hair. But it was the eyes that caught her interest, they were dark brown but with lines of grey through the irises.

  “Seraphina Luxgrove?” He said.

  “That’s me. I need to take a lie detector test?”

  Ignatius nodded and stood aside to lead her in to the room. There was a desk with some machinery on top. Another hunter sat there, he had bushy dark hair and quietly furious eyes, Daria’s father. Seraphina straightened her shoulders, she would not be intimidated by these people. She had learnt to lie from the best, all she needed to do was fool a machine.

  “Aren’t you too young to be doing this sort of thing?” She asked Ignatius.

  He straightened his leather hunters jacket, Hallowed Omens emblem glowed silver over the breast pocket. It was two scythes crossed with wings either side. Seraphina saw judgement and brutality when she saw it and it was everywhere in the guild.

  “If you’re good you get fast-tracked,” he said simply and sat beside Daria’s father. “Take a seat, Seraphina.”

  “Or if you’re the guild leader’s son?” Seraphina grinned impishly as she sat facing the two hunters.

  “On contrary if I wasn’t any good my father wouldn’t let me out of his sight,” he said and gathered the wires on the table. “I am going to attach these wires to you and they will measure your reactions to my questions. From this I can tell if you’re lying or telling the truth. Do you understand? Give me your arm.”

  Seraphina’s heart jumped at the wires and for a moment she could only think of the scientists and the tests she was put through. The polygraph machine looked just like one their contraptions. She’d fooled the scientists for years, she could do this too. Seraphina handed her arms over and then Daria’s father rose from his chair to attach more wires to her temples. Seraphina watched their every move as breathed in and out. She counted to ten to calm herself like the scientists told her, then again and again. The machine would measure her heart rate and maybe other things too, so she just couldn’t get worked up. It was simple, easy.

  Once the wires had been attached the hunters took their seats.

  “I will ask a series of questions, Seraphina, some will be random, then I will ask you about the incident. Do you understand?” Ignatius asked.

  “Yes, what’s he going to do?” She glanced at Daria’s father.

  “He is supervising me, as I’m only sixteen.” He flashed a brilliant smile at her. “Firstly, how old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “When is your birthday?”

  “The fourth of August.”

  Ignatius rested his hands on the table. “How long were you in Faerie?”

  Seraphina frowned. “About a year.”

  The polygraph machine was spitting out pieces of paper with jagged lines across it, she couldn’t tell what they meant.

  “Are you sure it was year? They say time moves differently in Faerie? It could have been longer or shorter.”

  “You’re right.” Seraphina said, “That’s why I checked what year it was when I escaped. I was twelve when they captured me so it was 2011 and when I got it was 2012. My escape was a few days after the anniversary of my capture.”

  “So it was over a year?”

  �
�A little.”

  “By how many days?”

  “Eight days.”

  “How are you so sure? I’ve heard the fae can alter memories. They could have made you believe the night of your capture was that day and it could have been a hundred years before then.”

  “They could have,” Seraphina said. “There’s a lake in Faerie, one that is known to alter memories and more as I found. I went there once as it’s said that the lake grants wishes and now my hair is bright blue and I have magic.”

  “Did you have magic before that night?”

  “Yes, but I wanted more. I wanted to be able to protect myself and Kai.”

  Daria’s father jumped in. “Ignatius, is this necessary? This has nothing to do with the incident.”

  “Arthur, would you want to know more about Faerie at a time you can be sure the information is valid?”

  Seraphina smiled. “You could just read one of your thousand year old text books, there are enough of them.”

  “Yes,” Ignatius murmured. “I have… but there is something more interesting about talking to someone who has been there personally. Someone who isn’t mad, are you mad?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Ignatius smiled, chuckling to himself. “What are you afraid of?”

  “A lot of things; the fae, monsters, being abducted in the middle of the night by vigilante hunters.” She smiled back at Ignatius and she felt like there was some sort of shared secret between them.

  “Ignatius,” Arthur muttered. “She is a child and this is inhumane to pry personal information from a person through a Poly unless it is relevant to the investigation. Seraphina, on the night of the incident did you bring a dagger?”

  “No.”

  “Explain to me what happened.”

  “I was woken up by Daria and Yates, they told me Kai was in trouble and they led me to him. Yates…went to attack us but we stopped him, distracting them all enough for Kai to try and run –”

  “I understand you used magic during this, when?”