Ever (The Ever Series Book 4)

by C. J. Valles

  Finally she glances in my direction, and I feel a jolt of warmth, followed quickly by another ripple of apprehension as she sees me for what I am—human in form, but also something beyond that. Her eyes travel across my features, examining them, comparing them to the marble busts in Gideon’s books from his graduate studies. The teacher delights in displaying the relics from his own education, even if these bored adolescents, for the most part, cannot wait to return to pressing matters on their mobile phones.

  As they travel across me, Wren’s eyes do not fail to capture the nature of my skin tone, the bronzed glow of which scarcely passes for human under her gaze. She looks down at her own hands for comparison. Her skin, which has not withstood millennia of shifting between dimensions, is fragile and nearly alabaster in color. I prevent a frown from marking my features as she again thinks of her relative invisibility in this new school.

  Her pink, heart-shaped lips turn up in a wry smile as she links my physical appearance to the reactions she has encountered upon searching others’ thoughts about me. Suddenly she stiffens, censuring herself for staring so unabashedly. Her review of my physical form is certainly appreciative, and as she turns away, I feel an acute loss.

  In the heat of the classroom, her scent, like cinnamon, seems to invade my senses. I wish to turn, to drink in her appearance as she has mine, but I restrain myself, painfully aware of every small breath or tiny movement only inches away. Part of me fears that my hyperawareness of her closeness is merely the beast within me, straining to break free and destroy her. I am acutely fearful that the hunter within me—which has been instrumental to our survival—now threatens the one creature that has fascinated me in a way I cannot fully comprehend.

  Ashamed by her fixation, Wren begins comparing me to that Neanderthal Jeffrey Summers, briefly conflating my appearance with narcissism. A muscle at my jaw twitches as I find her fleeting assumption more troubling than I should.

  Gideon pauses in a familiar fashion, signaling the close of his lecture. As he releases the class to work, Wren Sullivan looks down with an expression of despair at the notebook lying upon her legs. As she reaches for her bag, I force myself not to react when her knapsack collides with her tray, sending art supplies scattering.

  Jumping up, she begins gathering errant pieces of coal on the floor. Her pen is resting less than a millimeter from the foot of my easel. Retrieving it, I sit up and hold the pen out, keeping my expression empty. We have long studied human emotions. Adopting them appears mostly senseless, if not destructive, to our undertaking. While we have the capacity to simulate the expressiveness that comes naturally to human beings, the need to feign emotion is rare. Therefore, refraining from emotion has never posed difficulty for me, just as not breathing when it is unnecessary is natural to me. Now, though, watching as she notices me waiting, pen in hand, I feel myself wanting to respond in some fashion to the emotions that are expressed so clearly in her features.

  She turns to face me, her breathing disjointed. Another burst of heat courses through me as her eyes meet mine. As she studies my irises, noting their unnatural color and brightness, I maintain strict control, ensuring not a single memory escapes the recesses of my mind. Her lips part, and I hold out the pen as a string of self-directed chastisements race through her mind. Again, she is horrified by her fascination with me.

  My muscles stiffen faintly as she debates what I could be. Then her gaze quickly shifts to my hand, reaffirming that I do not match the appearance of a vampire, one of the many mythological monsters humans have created to assuage their fears of the unknown—much like the gods, plural and singular, that they have worshipped across their brief existence in this plane.

  “Th-thanks,” she whispers, her voice trembling.

  I force myself to turn away without a flicker of recognition. Suddenly she becomes very still.

  Something’s wrong. With him—or me. I didn’t get a single image from him. Not a passing thought. Nothing.

  She shivers, the absence of thoughts from my mind unnerving her until the virago on her other side sighs audibly to draw attention. When Wren turns and sees the hateful expression on the girl’s face, she locks gazes with the girl, hoping to dissuade her. The girl’s mental cacophony only worsens until Wren turns away.

  As Wren begins to imagine the coming months trapped between this insufferable girl and me, my lip twitches at the image in her mind of me wearing a toga.

  Greek god? Yes, Apollo, to be exact, according to the ancient Greeks.

  I have sat in this exact spot for months, waiting for the arrival of Wren Sullivan, who now sits only inches from me. Until now, Mandy Simmons has been the slightest of annoyances. On this day, though, listening to her grating diatribe against Wren, I have reached the end of what I once thought was infinite patience for these emotional creatures.

  Wren looks up again, flinching at the unabashed envy and hostility rolling in waves from her seatmate. She feels a fleeting temptation to repeat aloud the girl’s internal rant, but thinks the better of exposing her ability. Turning my head, I give the tiresome creature to Wren’s left what she has been wishing for these long weeks. I look past Wren and lock eyes with her strident assailant. In an instant, her irate prattling falls silent.

  Then I catch sight of Wren’s surprised, frightened expression—my own bitter expression mirrored in her gaze. Before I am able to look away, her eyes lock with mine, and I know she can see the blackness within, no matter how tightly I have contained it.

  Turning to face her, I know what I must do. I allow myself a moment to study her face, the wide green eyes, her parted lips gasping for shallow breaths as she remains trapped in my gaze, unable to escape. Then, like a scalpel, my mind resects the last few seconds of time from her mind. If I were to take any more time from her, I would risk damage that even I could not undo.

  I watch her carefully as she takes a shaky breath and turns back to her easel in a daze. Picking up a pencil, she absently begins to work, her fear and curiosity completely forgotten. By the time the bell sounds, releasing these children from class, the clatter around her wrests Wren and the girl beside her from their trances.

  Having already taken my leave from her sight, I watch from the doorway as Wren blinks and looks around before standing to return her supplies. When I reach my physics classroom, I track her hurried exit from class and anxious arrival to her mathematics class. She scowls throughout the ensuing quiz, and at its end, when the teacher calls upon her to write an equation and its solution on the board, she winces—again wishing for invisibility.

  As she passes by the supercilious instructor, she laments her status in mathematics, irritated by the teacher’s conclusion that her limitations in this subject illustrates unequivocally that she is intellectually lacking despite her emotional intelligence being many times higher than his own. Not surprisingly, the teacher anticipates, almost relishes, what he thinks of as her assured failure. She is quite accurate in her appraisal that her teacher prefers the students who do not require a cogent lesson plan in order to grasp the material.

  “Mr. Casey? Since you clearly seem unimpressed by today’s lesson plan, would you care to enlighten us as to what you find so entertaining as you contemplate empty space?”

  My attention shifts to the advanced placement physics instructor. On the opposite end of the spectrum are those educators threatened by any student whose acuity eclipses their own. I have a brief impulse to goad him, but I abandon it. Belittling the man in front of a classroom full of students would accomplish nothing.

  “No, sir,” I offer in a respectful tone.

  When he contemplates continuing to exert a false sense of dominance, I raise my eyes to his long enough to muddle his thoughts until he turns back to the blackboard.

  Sadist, Wren thinks of her math teacher as she makes her way back to her seat, drawing my attention back to her.

  As she takes a seat, I feel her thoughts shift, searching vainly for the lost time from nearly an hour ago. Her mind i
s searching for me, her pulse quickening as she struggles to remember but cannot. Then the bell rings declaring a break in classes. Relaxing as she packs her belongings and flees from her least favorite class, she walks toward her locker. I shadow her movements, moving through the corridor, ignoring the awestruck and covetous thoughts in my wake.

  Standing at the end of the hall, I watch Ashley Stewart and another one of Wren’s new lunchtime companions rushing toward her. She looks up from her locker, flinching at her peers’ expressions, which expose their unabashed covetousness for gossip and drama. Watching as they grab each of her arms and begin propelling her toward the closest exit, I walk into the empty classroom nearest to them.

  Wren looks toward the sky and zips her jacket as the girls crowd around her. The more boisterous of the two girls, Lindsay Gallo, shakes Wren, causing another strange surge of protectiveness in me.

  “What happened?”

  Wren frowns in confusion and asks for clarification, causing the other girl to approach nearly apoplectic excitement.

  “You are kidding, right?” cries the melodramatic girl with dyed pinkish hair. “Ever-freaking-Casey!”

  Through the other girl’s vision, I see Wren’s pupils dilate. Her pulse jumps, though she immediately conceals any outward sign of excitement and looks down.

  “Nothing happened. I dropped my pen, and he picked it up.”

  When Lindsay Gallo realizes that not so much as a word passed between us, she deflates. Wren begins searching her bag, thinking of the food I watched her leave on the kitchen countertop earlier in the morning. I could have taken it and left it in her locker, but it would have been foolhardy on my part to do something so reckless.

  The bell announcing the end of the break rings, sending them rushing back indoors. Wren’s mood dips precipitously with her lack of food as she walks to her next class. Shifting to the parking lot, I continue to watch her as she makes her way toward her third period French class. She struggles to follow along in class, her thoughts clouded … and angry. The teacher calls upon her twice, and both times she frowns and shakes her head.

  Her soured mood and innate tendency to attract manifestations from across the dimensional divide instills uneasiness in me as I shift to the school’s cafeteria and watch her progress as she leaves her chemistry period. Her thoughts are disjointed, and she has very little connection to her body as she walks toward the cafeteria. When Tarabocchia catches sight of her, he hurries to fall in step with her.

  I smile in amusement at the venomous glance she gives him as he begins complaining about their shared English class. Sickened by the cloying stench of his aftershave, she begins to walk faster toward the cafeteria in an effort to escape the wafting fragrance.

  She rushes single-mindedly through the double doors of the cafeteria, her eyes focused straight ahead. The boy, who is two steps behind her, sees the spilt food before she does and calls out to her, but her heel has already made contact with the linoleum. I see her expression of shock as her heel slides forward. She raises her arms, struggling desperately for purchase where there is none. Her descent is too quick for the boy behind her to do anything but gawk, open-mouthed. If I do nothing, she will hit the floor in under two seconds.

  I make my decision, confident that none of these children will notice. In less than an instant of human time, I shift, reaching out for her and stopping her momentum toward the floor. When I pull her upright, her eyes remain squeezed shut as she wonders why she has not struck the ground.

  Releasing her immediately, I retain hold of her knapsack to ensure she regains her balance. For a brief moment, she wonders if it was the Tarabocchia boy who had managed to catch her, but she quickly dismisses the idea as she opens her eyes and inhales deeply, instantly reacting to my scent. Unlike normal humans, her mind lights up with activity, recognizing the foreignness. Next, she grasps that her view of the cafeteria is blocked, which would not have been the case with Tarabocchia. Standing just above two meters, I am tall enough that my chest interrupts her line of vision.

  “Can you stand on your own?” I ask, keeping my tone cold and mocking enough to raise her defenses.

  Embarrassed, she smirks before realizing that I still have hold of her knapsack and have continued to keep her feet from touching the floor. She looks up, swallowing as she calculates the difference in our statures. When her eyes reach mine, I keep my thoughts firmly under control and the monster in me tightly reined. She clears her throat, her cheeks turning a rosy shade of pink as she sees the indifference in my features.

  “I’m fine,” she says softly.

  I lower the knapsack until her feet touch the floor, making certain before I release her that she, in fact, is capable of standing of her own accord. Straightening her spine, she tries to conceal her embarrassment by attempting to mirror my indifference.

  “You’re Ever Casey, right?” she says, taking a single unsteady step away from me.

  Her breath quickens again as she looks up at me, and I feel a twinge of irritation at the response this tiny human creature elicits.

  “And you must be Wren Sullivan,” I return with mocking disdain.

  She looks down, and I am both relieved and disappointed to have lost her gaze. I smile faintly as she ponders my accent, puzzling over why I am not in a boarding school whiles she imagines me playing a game of cricket.

  “Yeah, I’m the one who crashed into you,” she says finally.

  “Twice,” I remind her in a cold tone. “If you wouldn’t mind, let us not try for a third.”

  Aware that I all want is to prolong this interaction, I turn from her and begin walking away as fast as I can without drawing additional attention, which, at this point, is laughable, considering nearly half the student body has turned to watch us. I hear her muttered response when I am halfway across the room.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” she whispers.

  Behind her, Joshua Tarabocchia grumbles.

  “Thinks he’s a superhero, now.”

  She turns to look back at him, and I find myself pleased to discover she had forgotten his presence. I already have reached the parking lot by the time she steps into line, distractedly reaching for items of food. Her cheeks still flushed, she eagerly opens the juice she has purchased in hopes of raising her blood sugar. She ignores Tarabocchia’s audible sigh of displeasure as her three female lunch mates rush to corner her.

  As the girls launch into another round of frenzied interrogation, I wonder if, perhaps, I should have made more of an effort to appear normal to these young humans, despite the fact that I never intended to be here longer than my disagreeable duty required. Now that I have officially neglected said obligation, I wish … for things I should not.

  “Oh my gawd!” the overly dramatic girl shrieks as I step into the car. “What was that?”

  “I almost killed myself in front of the entire school,” Wren mutters in embarrassment.

  “Yeah, and Ever Casey caught you!” Ashley Stewart gasps.

  The girls’ tone is manic, and Wren attributes this to the attention my physical form has provoked. She frowns, still stung by our interaction. Physical beauty trumps all, she thinks bitterly.

  “Speak! What did he say to you?” the loudest of her companions demands.

  Wren sips her juice and gives them a straightforward account of our exchange, not mentioning her feelings about it, watching warily as their eyes widen with each detail.

  “Un-freaking-real!” Lindsay Gallo exclaims, slapping her hand on the nearest table. “He talked to you.”

  Wren frowns in confusion as I feel another bolt of regret for not attempting to blend in more with these young humans during the past months awaiting Wren Sullivan’s arrival. Searching their faces, she hesitates before speaking.

  “Um, he does talk, right?” she asks uncertainly.

  The three of them exchange looks, and Ashley Stewart shakes her head.

  “No. Not really.”

  Wren looks around for confirmation.
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  “Come on,” Wren says unbelievingly. “You guys are joking. Right?”

  She waits for an explanation.

  “Honest to God, he doesn’t speak. At least, not if he doesn’t have to,” Lindsay Gallo says without a shred of irony. “I know a girl who has physics with him, and she’s never heard him say a word.”

  Wren looks around skeptically, waiting for the others to make a fool of her.

  “But he talked just now …” she points out, withering slightly as she recalls the indifference in my features.

  I grip the steering wheel, another sharp spike of regret overcoming me.

  “I know!” Ashley Stewart squeaks. “It was totally crazy! Are you sure he didn’t say anything else?”

  Wren shakes her head.

  “That was it.”

  “Maybe he likes you,” Lindsay Gallo says in a mocking tone, joining in an outburst of laughter with Ashley Stewart.

  Wren smiles feebly and looks down.

  “Great, thanks.”

  Ashley Stewart attempts to regain control of faculties.

  “Sorry, that came out wrong,” she giggles. “It’s just that—well, you saw him. He’s frea-king gorgeous, and any girl here would sell a kidney just to have him look at her. But, seriously, he’s kind of not there. Remember, I told you he gets perfect grades and everything, but around people he’s just, I don’t know, strange.”

  I close my eyes briefly, watching in distaste as Lindsay Gallo twirls her finger around her ear and crosses her eyes. Wren laughs uncomfortably before envisioning my gaze and the emptiness she found within my eyes. She shrugs, unwilling to say anything that would expose her secret to her new friends.

  “He sounded pretty normal to me,” she says carefully. “Not super friendly, but normal. Has anybody else tried talking to him?”

  The two louder girls explode into laughter again, while the quietest, Taylor Nguyen, looks down, still stung by Tarabocchia’s obtuseness.

  “Uh, yeah. Like half the school,” Lindsay Gallo finally says.