by Lan Chan
I couldn’t fault him there either. Chanelle was every red-blooded male’s wet dream. She literally outclassed me in all the ways it usually mattered. Yet when I lay in bed at night, when the world was silent and I allowed myself to let go of the reins, I felt Kai’s love through the bond like a beacon. He loved me for all the reasons everyone else found abrasive. My sharp tongue made him laugh despite himself. My complete refusal to yield just because he was Malachi Pendragon gave him a sense of relief from the pressure of being Malachi Pendragon. And though he was terrified of losing me the way he lost his family, my stubbornness gave him hope that I would never break in the face of my fear. How did a person just give that up even for the good of a species? I didn’t have an answer.
James took my silence as a personal insult. “You’re such a selfish litt –”
“Finish that sentence and you’ll regret it,” Sophie said.
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“Finish the sentence and you’ll see.” Her posture became deceptively languid. James sneered.
“So easy to talk big in a room full of your friends,” he said. I reared at the implicit threat.
“That’s about enough of that,” Doctor Thorne said. His eyes were two golden pieces of ice. Nobody wanted to poke the basilisk. He nodded at me and then proceeded with the class in the best way he could. As though I wasn’t there.
“It is true that the Nephilim bond has often been contentious, but never moreso than it is right now. We all know the reasons why.” He frowned suddenly.
“Yes, Emily?”
“Umm.” She was fidgeting with the blade’s position when I turned around. Great, I hadn’t just given her a weapon. I’d also handed her a security blanket. “I did a semester of sociology at uni. One of the topics was traditional marriage rituals throughout the world. Did you know that often, socially paired unions are more successful than –”
James snorted. “You’re just saying that because you’re mooning over Pendragon too!”
Emily’s skin turned a shade of watermelon. “No, I didn’t mean –”
“Save it, sweetheart.”
I could see what she was trying to do. Ever the peacekeeper, Emily was actually trying to help James out. It wasn’t her fault he was denser than a brick. Unfortunately, her theory rubbed most of the supernatural students up the wrong way.
“But with the steady increase in divorce rates...” she kept saying.
“That’s just for humans,” Orla spat. She actually did spit on the floor. I made a mental note not to step on it on my way out of class.
“Alright!” I found my voice. “Everything is shit and complicated. Let’s just get over it.”
I ate my own words when getting over it meant Doctor Thorne made us read through the centuries of notable Nephilim bond choices for the rest of the class. Surprise, surprise, none of the bond mates had been humans with Lucifer’s blood.
“That can’t have been fun,” Isla remarked when the bell rang.
“Next lesson we will discuss Fae courting rituals and how they often end in death,” Doctor Thorne announced. I returned Isla’s smirk with double smugness. She rolled her eyes at me.
Five minutes after veering off from Sophie and Diana to go to the illusion training room, I noticed I had a shadow.
“I’m not trying to follow you on purpose,” Emily said. “I was told to go to this place after classes today.”
I paused to allow her to catch up. “By who?” She stood a good two metres away from me and wouldn’t come any closer. Sigh.
“The headmistress.”
“Where are you going?”
She fumbled around in her backpack while I balanced on the balls of my feet, regretting engaging her now. If I was late, Giselle would chew my ear off yet again. “Here it is!” She waved her timetable around the vast expanse of space between us. “Umm...Illusion Training Room with Giselle Hartnett.”
Well, at least now I knew I wasn’t the only one the universe hated.
28
I was literally still choking on that information when we walked into the room. Giselle’s serial killer stare pinned Emily to the spot. The former assassin didn’t blink as she did a mental assessment of her new student.
“No. I don’t have time for this weakling. The other one is bad enough.”
Though I could tell Matilda agreed with her, she had a little more tact and just didn’t say anything. It was Eugenia who tried to smooth the situation over. But only after she spotted the heavenly blade attached to Emily’s side.
“Don’t be like that, G,” Eugenia said.
Giselle’s expression became deadpan. “I told you not to call me that.”
Eugenia winked at her. She sidled up to Emily. “Aren’t you just the sweetest thing? That’s a very pretty skirt.”
“My, what a big mouth you have, grandmother,” I said, latching onto Emily’s arm before the sorceress in sheep’s clothing could influence her. Emily squirmed and made a soft shrieking sound.
Eugenia’s grin could have lit up a stadium. “Who’s the wolf in this scenario?”
I gave up. Shooting them both a dirty glare, I tossed my backpack carelessly into the corner of the room. “What unusual form of torture have you got in store for me this evening?” I asked Giselle.
Her corresponding smile was terrifying. Like a shark showing you its teeth before it chomped down. “I hear you’ve been learning about how soul stealing is illegal,” she said. Suddenly, she was standing just a foot away from me. Matilda loomed on my right.
“Ah, yeah.”
“That’s what people in charge tell you when they’re afraid of you. Last time you followed orders, you ended up dying.”
I felt like a mosquito stuck in amber. If I moved back, she would think she was intimidating me. If I stayed where I was, I would continue to be subjected to her dead-eyed conviction. And then Matilda piled on.
“You already know instinctively how to manipulate a soul,” Matilda said. “But if you’re weaponless, this might be the only way you can defend yourself.”
My hands fisted. “If my brain goes kaput, I don’t think I’ll have the ability to reach my magic.”
Giselle made a grumbling sound at the back of her throat. “I didn’t realise you were mentally deficient. Your great-grandmother bound a deity and the soul of a mage. Those constructs remained intact even after she died.”
“True. But you remember when you were trying to kill me because of what Hilary had done?”
“I was trying to kill you because you’re a monster-loving traitor!”
Over on the other side of the room, Emily was staring at us with white-rimmed eyes. Giselle paid her no mind.
“Tell me what you really think,” I said.
Matilda body-blocked Giselle as she turned her hip towards me. “You think this is funny?” Giselle hissed. She pointed a finger at Emily. “We’ve got a walking prophecy machine over there saying that you’re going to destroy the world. Now might be the time to let go of what’s legal and what’s not.”
“I don’t think this is what Kai had in mind when he asked you to train me.”
She smirked, her eyes flashing dangerously. “I think that Nephilim monster would turn a blind eye if you started killing people and eating their hearts if it meant keeping you alive. There are a lot of instructors he could have chosen from the ranks of the elite guard. But somehow you ended up with us.”
It would have felt so good to contradict her. But just as the retort was forming, it fizzled because I couldn’t fault what she was saying. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. There were many elite guards trained in hand-to-hand combat who could have taken me under their wings. As a bonus, I wouldn’t have to be yelled at and ridiculed every night. But Kai had chosen Giselle. In his twisted kind of logic, he believed Giselle would be my best chance at survival. By extension, he gave his consent for whatever tactics Giselle chose to employ.
I let out a heavy breath. “I�
��m not stealing anybody’s soul. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t love the idea of murdering people.”
“As if you could do that right now anyway,” Giselle said. “Most of what you’ve done is borne of terrified instinct. You’re just lucky you’re a bone witch.”
I was lucky my self-esteem was protected by a layer of mental Teflon. “Shoes off. On the mat,” Giselle instructed. She and Matilda always showed up in stretchy, flexible clothing. I had learned to do the same or face the consequences.
Eugenia on the other hand adored theatrics and never left the house in anything less than a costume. Today her emerald dress dragged along behind as she moved. Thankfully, the simple thrust and pivot exercises she was doing with Emily didn’t require much flexibility. “Hold the blade tighter, dear,” I heard Eugenia say. “At this rate, it’ll just fly out of your hands.”
I suspect if it did, the blade would find its way into Eugenia’s pocket and we would never see it again.
On my knees on the mat, Giselle made me close my eyes. “Drop into the soul dimension.” That was the Sisterhood name for the Ley dimension. They refused to bow to supernatural terms, of course.
I dragged the contentiously named dimension around me. Emily was a surprisingly massive white light in my periphery. Her aura was so bright it almost blocked Eugenia’s glowing red one beside her. Strangely, Giselle and Matilda registered a similar iridescent silver.
“You understand the process of gripping a soul and pulling them from their body.” It was a statement. My thoughts returned to that Shadow Ball game at Charles’s birthday where I had watched them attempt to do just that to Kai. At the time, everything had happened in a blur, but I would never forget the way I’d seen it happen. Like unwinding the stitching around a quilt
“I think so.”
“Good. Try and take my soul.”
My eyes flicked open. “What?”
They both blinked at me, somehow knowing I had thrown off the Ley dimension in my shock. “You heard what I said.”
“But that’ll kill you!”
Her laughter was dry. “Yes, it would. If you succeed.”
Dubious, I dropped back into the Ley dimension and reached out tentatively for her soul. As soon as I tried to grab hold of it, lightning snapped up my arm and tossed me six feet in the air. I braced and landed stoutly on my side.
“Lesson number one,” Matilda said. “A soul is cosmically geared towards staying exactly where it is. If you want to take it, you have to be ready to use force because it sure as heck will blow up in your face otherwise.”
I remembered Professor Suleiman’s class on soul magic and how human souls could be used as an energy source. “How do I take one without getting myself killed?”
“Soul dimension,” Giselle ordered. I dropped back in. “You see the edge of the aura where the soul meets the cosmic lines? That is its tether. It’s constantly moving. Energy is never static. You need to be able to pinpoint where a soul is tethered to its original energy source and then sever that connection. Once you do that, you’ll have to separate the soul from its body while fighting the spirit of the host all the way.”
It was the worst multi-tasking lesson ever. Feeling deviant, I surveyed her flickering aura for a while. To my surprise, Matilda’s aura was stronger than Giselle’s. But in a clash of craziness, I would put my money on Giselle. It cemented in my mind the notion that tenacity beat out raw talent any day. I had a lot of untrained power and almost zero discipline. Was I ready for this?
The Ley dimension had always been a vast landscape of shimmering stars in my eyes. Tonight, I blinked and tried to inspect each one of those stars for the tether that held it in place. The links in the Ley dimension were complex on first appearance. But the more I focused on each aura, the more connections branched out from it to form a multi-faceted web. Finding a single tether amongst all the connections proved more difficult than I’d imagined. It was like trying to cut the right coloured wire on a bomb.
Except instead of just red, blue, or white, I had hundreds of different choices. “There’s too many,” I sulked.
“Boohoo. Did you think this was going to be easy?” came Giselle’s acerbic response. “Which one do you think is mine?”
Inspecting the crisscrossing lines of energy that swirled around her made my eyes water. It was too much feedback. It reminded me of when I meditated and couldn’t focus on my breathing. An idea popped into my head. Outside of the Ley dimension, I sat down cross-legged and took a deep, calming breath. In the near distance, I heard the soft scrape of Emily’s bare feet on the mat and Eugenia’s voice encouraging her not to treat the blade like it was going to grow a head and bite her.
In the room next door, somebody was coughing their guts out. Outside of the training room, I faintly heard the flap of wings from a pair of Nephilim guards doing their regular sweep.
As my breathing evened out, I drew dampening circles around myself in the Ley dimension. In real life, I’d learned to use the circles to help me block out irritations. In here, I tried to attune the circles so that they filtered out everything but the connections I was looking for.
It took a long time to find the right sequences. First, I cut out Giselle’s connections to the people in the room. Then her link to the Sisterhood. Then her link to humans. By the time I had set up more than a dozen dampening circles, there were only three links left that I could see around her. One was a bright white that circled around her mind. The other was a multi-faceted thread that literally stitched her soul into place. And the last ran from a central line that originated outside of her body. As it hit the orb of her aura, the thread bloomed into a network of tendrils like the arteries in the body. Her soul tether.
Grinning, I held my hand out to touch it.
A fist connected with the apple of my cheek, sending me sprawling across the mat. When I blinked, the Ley sight had disappeared.
“What the heck?” I said, pushing myself up on my elbow. Emily had stopped her “drills” to gawp at me clutching my grazed cheek.
Giselle canted her head. “Did you think your target would just sit there idly while you steal their soul?”
“Can you at least give me a chance to practice it without hitting me?”
“Why don’t you ask a demon that next time you’re in a fight. See how that goes.”
The rest of the lesson was spent trying to find Matilda’s soul tether without getting beaten to a pulp. Success eluded me.
Trying not to groan on the way out of the training room was futile. Eugenia clasped my elbow before I could disappear. Emily chose that moment to make herself scarce.
“I have a bad feeling about her,” Eugenia said.
“That’s exactly what she thinks about me.” I leaned against the wall with my arms crossed over my chest. I was going for nonplussed. Like I hadn’t spent the whole lesson being beaten up. Eugenia’s knowing smile said I looked constipated.
“I’ve got somebody who might be able to do what you need.”
My attention suddenly sharpened. “What’s the price?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“What’s the price?”
“Your blood. A vial for a vial. Blood for potion.”
Disturbed, I tried to stand up straighter. “I can’t give away my blood!”
One: it was too powerful. Two: there was a lot a mage could do to me via my blood. Three: I just didn’t want to.
Eugenia’s lips pressed together. “It’s the only thing he would take. I offered him your money but that’s not how these kinds of transactions work. He wouldn’t take a tooth, hair, fingernails, or any other organ either.” My face must have displayed my thoughts on those options because she nodded. “The whole supernatural world knows the worth of your blood. They won’t accept anything else.”
I chewed on my bottom lip but in the end, I couldn’t do it. “The risk is too high.”
She held her hands up. “No justification required. Just putting it out there.�
��
It was well after dinner by the time I hobbled back to the dorms. My fantasies of a hot shower and crawling into bed were cut off by the sound of a gut-wrenching roar that tore apart the stillness of the night.
It was followed by the shouting of dozens of students. Quickening my steps, I turned the corner of the junior Academy building to the ornamental lawn and froze. Instinct kicked in. A circle drew around me as the blazing tip of a glowing red angel blade came hurtling right for my head.
29
There wasn’t time to complete the circle before a heavy body crashed into me. I lost equilibrium as arms tensed around me and we rolled away from the trajectory of the blade. My senses scrambled to take in everything happening at once. I caught a whiff of brimstone and damp fur. The claws digging lightly into my already bruised back said shifter. The undulating pitch of the growl in his throat said Charles.
When we came to a stop, he was mid-shift. His hair grew two inches a second, flowing out into a thick mane that worked as both armour and scare tactic. Muscles contracted in the arm gripping me, his skin squirming like it was being electrocuted. I grit my teeth at the snap of tissue and bone, the sound always causing me to wince at what must have been a painful transformation.
Charles pushed me behind him as he shook off the last of his humanity. Even on two feet, I could barely see over the top of his corded back. My jaw hit the ground and refused to shut. His lion form was massive. Easily as big as Max’s and bigger than most shifters I knew. Seriously, what was Shayla doing to these boys? Charles’s fur was golden tan, interspersed with streaks of silver. I blinked when a glimmer of green seemed to flash across his hide. That couldn’t be right.
James wasn’t as impressed with Charles’s lion form as I was. The Nephilim hovered in the air a few metres from us. He spat a wad of blood onto the ground nearby. Lovely. What confused me were the groups of students crowded around James. The rules of a fight were simple. You stood behind the person you supported. So why was it that Luther and Sophie were frantically waving at me from way back behind the enemy line?