Reckless

by Selene Charles

  “What’s mine?” Why did her toes feel suddenly so tingly? Even the fine hairs on her arms were standing on edge, like she’d just walked through a lightning storm or something. She set the rest of the orange down on the desk before rubbing her arms.

  “We don’t know.” Grace sighed. “But that’s why you’re here and why you shall remain here for as long as we need you to. As your change continues to evolve, we’ll be able to pin down your likely ancestry, but until then, it is anyone’s guess.”

  “But you erm...you got with grandpa fairy,” she twisted her lips, not exactly sure how to phrase it nicely that Grace had gotten bow chicka wow wow on with what’d amounted to a perfect stranger. “Shouldn’t you at least know something?”

  She shrugged. “Not really. As I’ve told you before, even within familiar groups and similar blood lines each fae’s heritage can be as radically different as the sun is from the moon. He was a Hunter. But that means little in the grand scheme of things. You may be just like him, or you may be nothing like him at all.”

  It was sort of insulting except for the fact that her grandmother was totally right. She might be some weirdo, all-powerful fae, but right now she felt one hundred percent weak human.

  “So school, isn’t exactly school then?”

  Grace chuckled. “Oh no, young miss, ye’ll be getting that diploma come hell or high water. Because you were so close to graduating, we’ve been informed by the school district that you would only be required to take a few tests to earn your diploma by mail. We’re sorry you’re won’t walk the—”

  Relief coursed through her, making her almost dizzy. “No, really that’s fine. I’d rather just get it over with as soon as possible. Will I be getting a GED then?”

  “No.” Adam shook his head. “Extenuating circumstances being what they are, you’ve merely to pass a final exam to graduate.”

  “Thank God. Well, that’s one bit of good news anyway.”

  Grace chuckled. “Not really, since you’ll be taking that test after your classes today.”

  “Classes?” She frowned. “But I thought you just said—”

  “Lass, you might be done with school, but there is still much studying to be done. All fae inherit their traits from their sires, but they don’t always wind up the same. Hunter fae, like your grandfather, can take on many forms.”

  Lifting her brow, curious despite herself, she asked, “Like?”

  “Like, you could be deadly accurate with a bow.”

  Curling her nose, she slumped in her seat. “That sounds swell.”

  Adam rolled his eyes, and that just made Flint want to bristle. She might be acting childishly, but her entire life had just been turned on its head, so excuse her if she wasn’t handling things the way he thought she should.

  “Or then again, you could have shifter in you,” Grace continued.

  Flint chuckled. Everything was becoming more and more surreal. It wasn’t funny, but it was either laugh or cry. “So am I a werewolf?”

  “Again, we don’t know.” It was Adam who responded this time. “That’s the purpose of the tests. Once we’ve figured it out, then your training will begin in earnest.”

  Heart panging, Flint nibbled on her bottom lip, unable to help but wonder just what was happening to Abel right now. She hated how messed up everything was now.

  “So are you going to be training me, Grace?”

  “Oh, heavens no.” Grace chortled. “Honestly, girl. You’ve quite the imagination on you. We’ve got several members in the circus whose skills might be a suitable match to yours. We’ll pair you up until we find the perfect fit. I head back to the Order in”—she checked her watch—“a little over an hour.”

  “And tell me again how we’re going to keep this fairy stuff secret from them if I can suddenly shape-shift or whatever?”

  Adam nodded. “They all know Layla; they know of her experimentations. It’s an easy enough lie to weave. But your training will begin now. Head over to Carlito’s tent.”

  Flint doubted everyone was as stupid as Adam and Grace seemed inclined to believe, but then again, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to cook up an explanation for all the weirdness on the fly either. Standing up on legs that suddenly felt like Jell-O, she asked, “And what exactly is Carlito?”

  “Oh trust me, luv.” Grace stamped her cane down. “It’ll be more than obvious.”

  “Great. Just great.”

  Twirling on her heel, Flint marched out of Adam’s trailer and headed toward the animal trainer’s tent.

  About halfway there, she remembered the book bag sitting on her dad’s floorboard with the sword still in it. “Dangit.” She sighed.

  Last thing she wanted to do was go back and talk to either Grace or Adam. She wasn’t mad at them exactly, but she was tired and irritated. But just the possibility that the sword was somehow tied to her coming metamorphosis had her quickly reversing course and heading for her dad’s truck.

  She opened the still-unlocked passenger door and reached in for her bag but immediately knew the sword was no longer inside the moment she lifted it up. Unzipping the bag quickly, she peered inside only to discover a mound of soft dirt.

  Frowning, she sifted it through her fingers and then glanced around.

  Manny, the night watchman, lounged on a foldout chair about ten yards away. He had his eyes closed and his hat partially shading his face. He wasn’t human, but Flint wasn’t really sure what he was. He didn’t have the strange glowing eyes like the Nephilim and berserkers did.

  She’d only talked to him once in passing, but he’d seemed like a decent enough guy.

  Zipping up her book bag, she shrugged it over her shoulder and walked over to him. “Hey, Manny.”

  He looked up immediately, letting her know he hadn’t actually been sleeping at all.

  His kind-looking brown eyes flicked across her face. “Flint, right?” he asked, then reached out his hand to shake hers.

  “Yeah.” She took his hand, noting the firmness and strength of his callused grip. Dropping his hand quickly, she jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Just wondered if you happened to see anyone around my dad’s truck this morning.”

  Leaning his head to the side to glance at the truck, he shook his head. “All’s been quiet around here.”

  “You sure you weren’t asleep or something?”

  He barked with laugher. “Believe me, if anything had come this way, I’d have smelled it.”

  Touching the tip of his long nose, he shook his head.

  She had him pegged as some type of shifter maybe, but really couldn’t be sure. To her knowledge she hadn’t met a single shifter at Diabolique, but to be fair, she hardly knew anything about the people who worked here.

  A thought that had her feeling slightly guilty.

  “Okay, thanks.” Waving, she trotted back toward the animal tent.

  So if no one had come and snatched her sword away, then maybe it’d vanished, or... she’d dreamt the entire thing?

  Either way, she now had nothing to show Grace or Adam. Tossing the tent flap aside a moment later, her last thought before her grueling day began was that she really, really hoped she wouldn’t turn into a furry she-beast soon. Jacob had been hot and all, but she so wasn’t ready to go howling at the moon.

  Chapter 6

  Flint

  “No,” Carlito barked, sidestepping as she barreled toward his midsection.

  He swiped a heavy fist down at the back of her head, dropping her to her knees in the straw-dusted dirt of the training tent.

  Coughing, Flint spit dirt and sweaty strands of hair out of the corner of her mouth.

  Around five foot three with swarthy features, guyliner, spiked black hair, and a spiked collar around his scrawny neck, Flint had never pegged Carlito as anything extraordinary.

  She’d seen him around the midway now and then, holding the leash of an exotic animal as he’d walked by. She’d always just sort of thought of him as one of the many Gothed-out human
s working the place.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Sweat poured in rivulets into her eyes as she breathed heavily, fists bunching into the red dirt in front of her.

  “Look at me, carina,” he said gently. She had no idea what carina meant. It was obviously Spanish, but so long as he wasn’t calling her dinner, it really didn’t matter one way or another.

  Sucking in air like a bellows, she looked into his slitted, reptilian eyes and tried to suppress a shudder. Their green glow totally freaked her out. Not that she wasn’t used to all of them having strange eyes, but his had always been so human, or maybe she’d just never paid that much attention to the animal walker before.

  “You are doing well.” His melodic accent was about the only nice thing about him. “But I think it is obvious you are no ssshifter.”

  When he said shifter, his pink forked tongue fluttered out for just a moment, and those freaky pupils slitted even further.

  Flint grimaced. She really hated snakes.

  “I don’t know. I keep trying.”

  “It is simple, Flint.” He showed her his palm and then began vibrating it. A strange rattle hummed throughout the tent. The sound of it was coming from his wrist. “I don’t know why Adam would think the queen’s venom would have turned you shifter and not hive—”

  Smacking her lips because the inside of her mouth tasted like copper pennies now, she grunted as she forced her tired body to stand. “She did something to me.”

  Not exactly a lie.

  “Si. I know.” He nodded. “But it is odd, is all.”

  Twisting her lips, she said nothing else. Carlito had been trying for the past thirty minutes to bait her into telling him more about what’d happened to her that night. But she barely knew him, and Adam’s words still rang in her ears.

  Trust no one...

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.” Rolling her neck from side to side, she groaned. She had stamina to burn for days, but whatever the heck it was that he was putting her through, it was exhausting.

  He walked up to her and stood inside her bubble of space, and she really wanted to tell him to back off a little, but his intense concentration—not to mention the fact that she was pretty sure he swung for the other side—helped her to relax a smidge.

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Really? Do I have to?” It’s not that she didn’t trust him, but she didn’t trust him. She barely knew him.

  Planting his hands on his hips, he gave her a quelling look. “There is one final test to know for certain, though it will require I tap into your brain.”

  “Do what?” She stepped back, holding up her hands, but he snatched her wrists and held them in such a tight grip that it shocked her.

  Not because it hurt, but because he was so small. He shouldn’t have the power he did, but his strength was deceptive.

  “I’m not going to crawl inside your brain, Flint. I sense something inside you, a beast, perhaps. But you’re not shifting, so now I’m going to reach out to you with my beast. If there is something there, instinct will bring it out. If not, then we’ll know for certain.”

  Still totally wigged out, but now also slightly curious, she narrowed her eyes. “You can do that? That’s so awesome.”

  When he grinned, it was to reveal two rows of spiky teeth.

  She swallowed hard. “You know, when you first came in this tent you looked way more human.”

  Come to think of it, she’d not even seen him blink since they’d started training. And were those green scales glittering around the collar of his shirt? Oh. Em. Gee.

  “I’m a naga. Half man, half snake. I can take either form, but I’m most comfortable in the between. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, what? No. Noooo.” She shook her head, trying to put him at ease, even if her heart was currently fluttering like a wounded bird. “Course not.”

  Snorting, he finally blinked. But it wasn’t a normal kind of blink. It was, well, lizardy. His eyeballs had rolled down while the lids had rolled up, sounding disgusting, and yes, it had looked nasty. Carlito didn’t seem like a bad dude—she’d learn to get over it.

  Eventually.

  She just really, really hated reptiles.

  “You forget that I can taste adrenaline. Flint, if it bothers you I can change.”

  “Does it hurt you?” She was curious. The extent of what she knew about monsters had come from her few and far too short conversations with Cain. She knew next to nothing about any of them, and now all she wanted to do was play catch-up.

  “I prefer to be as I really am.” He shrugged. “It is natural to me. But I’ve learned to ignore my instinct for the sake of the humans.”

  The implication was perfectly clear. Humans were weak, frail little amoebas who couldn’t handle the truth. She notched her chin.

  “Well, I’m fine. And if you’re tasting my adrenaline”—she suppressed another shudder, that was just so super gross—“then it’s probably because I’m tired and worried that I might be a werebee now.”

  “Werebee.” He said it slowly and then tossed his head back and laughed.

  The strange sound was oddly pleasant. It held a note of the rattle he’d made from his palm, but it also shivered with a sibilant quality. Unique, but cool.

  She grinned. “Well, you never know. She is the queen bee after all.”

  Yes, his skin definitely held a green tint to it now. She noticed the reflection of the light bouncing off his nostrils as they’d flared for breath. But again, oddly pretty. Kind of like the exoskeleton of a dragonfly as it zipped through the sunlight, changing colors whichever way it moved.

  “You are a strange creature, Flint DeLuca.”

  And this time when he smiled, it didn’t scare her nearly as much.

  “Now trust me and close your eyes. This will not hurt.”

  That small exchange, the way he’d laughed and teased her, it helped her to see him as more human and less snake. Blowing out a deep breath, she closed her eyes.

  Every other time, Carlito had told her to look deep inside herself, seek out the box resting in her subconscious and to throw it open. It had sounded really stupid, and she’d felt dumb standing there like an idiot trying to open up some metaphysical thing inside her head.

  There’d been no box in there. She’d closed her eyes and had seen only darkness. He’d tell her to come at him and to call out the fire from the box. The fire, he’d explained, was her animal.

  Grandpa fairy had been a hunter, Nana said. Hunters could come in many forms. It would have been cool to be a wolf, or even a big, black dog. Maybe. As long as she was a cute dog and not some hellhound.

  But she’d felt like an idiot running after him, trying to beckon out some hoodoo doggy locked in her brain. Each time she’d rushed Carlito, he’d easily sidestepped and tossed her to her butt. Humbling didn’t even begin to describe how it felt.

  She tugged at her now-ruined shirt. Twitching, she tried to step back when his thumbs brushed her forehead.

  “Stop fidgeting,” he groused.

  “Sorry,” she said and then nibbled the corner of her lip.

  A heavy veil of silence settled between them after that so that all she could hear were his steady breaths and the rhythmic beats of his heart.

  His skin was smooth and dry. It had an almost rubbery quality to it but was also strangely supple. She’d half expected him to feel slimy and wet. He also didn’t smell like she’d thought he would.

  Snakes were the stuff of nightmares to her. She’d imagined he would have smelled like something that’d just crawled out of the depths of hell, but he actually smelled of freshly turned dirt and crushed grass. It wasn’t too bad.

  A strange pulsation moved through her brain. “Whoa.”

  She heard his smile as he said, “You feel me?”

  Nodding, she tried to suppress her giggle as the pulsing waves of his energy, or chi—heck, whatever it was—rolled through her brain. “You’re ins
ide me.”

  “That sounds so much naughtier than it really is.” His voice was thick with laughter.

  She snickered again. This was really weird. It was like fingers massaging her brain. And anywhere he touched her, she felt a flash of energy. Waves of colors rolled behind her closed eyelids, and a feeling of euphoria covered every inch of her body.

  Swaying on her feet, she whispered, “This feels good. Ohh...” She groaned when his chi whispered across a totally sensitive part of her brain. Her skin washed with goose bumps, and she was feeling tingly in places she’d never been tingly before.

  “Girl,” he snapped, “first, you’re not my type. Second, let’s keep this between us. Cain would kill me if he thought for even a second I was getting you—”

  Shaking her head and with a thundering heart—but not at all because of what he was making her feel—she snapped her eyes open. “Okay, fair. But whatever you’re doing, you should probably stop. Now.”

  “Berserkers.” He grinned and bit the bottom of his lip in a very suggestive way that had her cocking her head because he seemed to be remembering something. “Let’s just say once you go berserker, you’re ruined for life.”

  Carlito dusted his hands off, planted them on his hips, and then he winked.

  Her mouth fell open, because as far as she knew there were only three berserkers in this carnival. But she wouldn’t ask.

  She would not ask.

  “Who?”

  With a flick of his wrist, he chuckled. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. As to you being a shifter—you’re not.”

  Flint sighed. “Not that I didn’t expect it.”

  “You sound bummed.” His features were slowly starting to morph again. Turning less reptilian and more human.

  Take away the guyliner, the Goth clothes, and that crazy hair, and Carlito was actually kind of hot. He had nice lips, long cheekbones, and a chiseled jaw. For as short and slight as he was, there wasn’t anything about him remotely soft.