by Jenn Bennett
He gave me the most beautiful grin, and I replied with a short, happy laugh. Then I scooted closer, tentatively, and complied with his request.
Our second attempt at kissing was even better than the first. No nervousness, no pretense that it was for any other reason than the fact that we both wanted it. It was slow and deliberate and lingering, and it created a heat within me that spread like wildfire, lighting up every cell in my body.
It ended as slowly as it started, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull too far away. He must have felt the same way, because he rested his forehead against mine as my body continued to hum for him. The scent of his skin was intoxicating; he smelled safe and dangerous, comforting and alien, all at the same time. I breathed him in greedily. Then we slunk down sideways in our seats facing each other, hunched over together. He picked up my hands in his and held them as if they were made of the antique paper in one of his books— like they might crumble in his fingers.
I leaned forward and whispered in his ear, a little giddy, “What the hell are we doing?”
“I don’t have any fucking idea,” he answered. “But I wish we weren’t on an airplane full of people because I’d really, really like to stick my hand down your pants again.”
I muffled a giggle into his shoulder, which quaked a couple times with silent laughter in reply. Then I pushed his hair away from his ear. “Honestly, I’d really, really like to do the same to you,” I whispered, lips grazing his earlobe, “for starters.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered back. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m very close to dragging you off to that tiny restroom over there like the Neanderthal I apparently am, and you’re only making it worse.”
“Those restrooms aren’t big enough for one person, much less two. Unless the first-class restrooms are bigger?”
“They’re not.”
Still, I considered it. We gave each other loopy grins just as the cabin lights came back on, blinding me, and the pilot began making the announcement for the final descent.
“Ugh,” I complained, squinting. “This is so not fair.”
Sitting back up, we reluctantly faced forward again. For the remaining minutes of the flight we sat close, knees touching. After we landed and began a short taxi to the gate, as I leaned forward to fish out my purse from underneath the seat in front of me, Lon’s cell buzzed.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen. “Not even at the gate and the little bastard’s already bugging me,” he murmured before answering the phone with an impatient “What?”
I chuckled to myself, then felt him stiffen next to me.
“Slow down. Where are you exactly?”
My heart began racing in alarm.
“You’re not going to run out of air. Calm down.” He stopped to listen to whatever Jupe was saying. “We won’t call the police, I promise. I’m getting off the plane now. We’ll be there in half an hour. Don’t open the door, you hear me? Jupe? Jupe?”
He pulled the phone away and looked at the screen in shock, then shoved it in his pocket and stood up.
“Sir, please sit down. It will be a couple of minutes before the Jetway is in place.”
Yanking me up out of my seat, he pushed forward and got in the flight attendant’s face. “My son has been kidnapped. Let me off this damn plane right now.”
Her eyes widened as a low rumble rippled through the passengers around us, then she turned and ran to the phone on the wall next to the pilot’s door.
“Lon?” I yelled, shaking his arm.
His eyes were blank as he turned to face me. “It’s Riley Cooper,” he said. “She’s got Jupe cornered in a closet at school.”
22
It was after 10 p.m. when we finally made it to La Sirena Junior High. Riley Cooper knew we were coming, so Lon didn’t bother to be stealthy. He skidded into the parking lot with the same abandon that he had just used while speeding from the city to the coast in well under a half hour.
“Goddammit, I wish I had a gun,” he complained as he flung open his car door in unchecked anger. “I’m never leaving home without one again.”
I wished that he did too, though at that point I was a little worried that he was contemplating shooting me along with Riley Cooper; he was furious with me, and I was sick to my stomach.
He hiked up the front steps, but I raced to stop him.
“Hold on! My invisibility spell,” I said as I pushed up my sleeve to reveal my white tattoo. His expression changed from angry to hostile. “I just need blood to make it strong enough to cover you …” I trailed off into silence.
“You’ve got to be joking,” he snarled. “Haven’t you done enough magick? Because unless I’m missing something, the only reason my son is being held hostage in there is because you didn’t have the sense to stop for a second and think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to upload your fucking servitor in front of him.”
I suppose I deserved that. He’d been stewing the entire trip here, after I’d suggested the only obvious reason behind all this: the strange ending to my servitor’s transmitted images, when I could see her looking at me. I thought she’d somehow sensed my servitor in the room with her, or it set off a ward. But the green dot I saw must’ve been some sort of tracking spell. Maybe she couldn’t trace my energy because of my deflector charm, but Jupe was there with me, unprotected.
Lon was right. This was my fault. I tried to hold my head up, but I couldn’t maintain eye contact. He shook his head and stormed off, acting like he was going to break down the doors to the school, then changed his mind at the last second. The door was open when he tested it, so he entered and I followed.
The school was dark, silent, and eerily empty; each footstep we made was conspicuous. Rows of turquoise metal lockers lined either side of the hallway, broken up by the occasional classroom door. We crept along, frantically eying each door as we went, until I couldn’t take it anymore. While Lon was looking the other way, I bit down on a sore hangnail, wriggling it in my teeth until it bled. It hurt like hell, and it didn’t produce much blood, but it was enough. I smeared it on my invisibility ward and mouthed the incantation for the spell, momentarily losing my balance after it took hold. His neck stiffened. I was certain he felt the spell—he had to. At the very least, he could surely sense that I was being sneaky? Perhaps his immediate concern for Jupe overrode his instincts, because he continued on without comment.
After we passed under a faded paper football banner strung overhead—go blue devils!—he stopped and looked back and forth down two branching hallways. Jupe had tried to tell him what classroom he was in, but Lon didn’t know where he was going. His hand twitched as he debated, then he made the decision to go left.
As we approached the first pair of doors, one on each side of the hall, he slowed and crouched low. I peered into the room on the right while he looked to the left. Nothing. We both turned to each other and shook our heads, then continued.
I’d never tried to maintain a substantial temporary ward for two people. It made me dizzy, and it was taking everything I had to walk a straight line. Lon gave me a suspicious side-long glance, but kept going.
When we came to the second set of doors, we crouched again and followed the same routine … until a dull cracking noise startled us. We peered farther down the hall, then took off.
Running is difficult when all of your energy is being drained by a ward you’re attempting to keep up on the fly; when we got within a few feet of the cracking sound, my ankle gave out and I tripped. Right as my fingertips stubbed against the cool tile floor, Lon jerked me back up. I swayed. The gold from his halo seemed to move in horizontal trails as my vision doubled.
We moved to the side of the door, and Lon peered inside. I waited for several seconds, but he showed no reaction. I pushed him aside to get a look. The light in the room was on, but that had been the case in several other rooms we’d passed. Then I noticed the d
esks. Three near the far windowed wall were crooked and out of place; all the other desks conformed to tight, neat rows. The askew desks sat in front of a closet door at the back of the room … a door marked by the slightest tinge of blue light.
Riley Cooper wasn’t in there, but some sort of ward glowed around that door.
“Closet,” I whispered.
Lon wasted no time. He pushed me out of the way to get inside the room. I hurried to follow, closing the door behind me as he ran around the desks and bolted for the closet. I was still trying to hold the ward, but he was no longer part of it. What was the point? I dropped it with a silent gasp as I spotted him reaching for the closet door.
“Lon, no! There’s magick around the door!” I hissed, trying to keep my voice low. He hesitated, then drew back.
A weak voice floated from the bottom of the door. “Dad?”
“Jupe! I’m here, it’s okay.”
“Dad!”
Jupe began sobbing behind the door, trying to talk, but failing. It broke my heart. I raced behind Lon and stopped him just in time from renewing his attempt to open the door, slapping his hand away.
“It’s a spell! Stop! Can’t you see it?”
“Cady?”
“Jupe, can you open the door from the inside?” I asked.
“She said I’d die if I did,” he cried.
“What kind of spell is it?” Lon asked, his face tense and wired.
I leaned closer to study it. Some sort of blue energy field. An active ward of some kind.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Jupe, did you hear any of the words she said when she did the spell?”
“N-no. It was some weird language.”
“Where is she now?” Lon asked.
“I don’t know. Patrolling or something. She said she’d be right back. Dad, I can’t breathe in here much longer.”
I looked down at the wide crack below the door. He had plenty of air. Lon noticed the same thing. “He’s claustrophobic,” he muttered.
I nodded, then began trying to work out a solution. “I’ve never read about any kind of ward that would kill a body that crossed it. Especially not one that was put up fast like this. No blood or anything.”
“Me either,” Lon admitted. At least he was being civil enough to get through this.
“The worst I’ve seen is one that drained the energy out of the person who crossed the barrier.”
“No, the worst I’ve seen is the ward around both our houses,” he replied. “The sound it makes causes enough pain to make someone black out.”
A dull thump came from inside the closet. Jupe was moving around. “Please, please get me out of here,” he pleaded between sobs. “My arm hurts so bad. It’s making me cold.”
Riley Cooper was going to be back any second. Indecision might be our downfall.
“We’re going to have to take the risk.”
“No!” Lon barked, completely panicked, but before he could stop me, I got my hand on the door knob and turned it. The blue air flickered and made a loud popping noise, then disappeared as I flung the door open.
Just a warning ward. A simple warning ward, nothing more.
A muffled cry came from the back of the dark supply closet, then Jupe struggled to get up. Light flooded in from the classroom and we saw his long legs scrambling. Lon lunged forward to get him out, but jumped back when Jupe hollered at the top of his lungs.
I winced. We’d already tripped her ward and were now making enough noise to wake the dead; Riley Cooper would be here soon enough.
Lon yanked Jupe out by the legs, scooting him across the floor until he was halfway out of the closet and in the light. Hot tears left tracks on his cheeks. His eyes were shut, trying to adjust to the fluorescent classroom lighting after being in the dark for God knows how long; it was after ten, and school let out at three.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
His hand was swollen, fingers crusted with dark blood, his thumb was black and blue, and he was holding his arm at an awkward angle.
“Oh, God,” Lon whispered. “What happened?”
Jupe just continued sobbing with his eyes shut, holding his arm out and shuddering.
“She broke his arm,” I said, fury rising fast. “She did this, didn’t she?”
He nodded his head, blinking back tears.
“Get him out of here now,” I said. “She’ll be back and she might be armed or—”
Lon halted. “Does she have a gun, Jupe?”
“I-I don’t think so,” he cried.
“Sure I do,” a raspy voice said from behind us. We swung around to find a petite young woman standing in the doorway, patting the front pocket of her leather pants. “I just don’t need to use it,” she finished with a dark smile. “Yet.”
There she was, exactly as she looked in my servitor’s transmission, dressed like a slutty road warrior with too much makeup.
“So, this is the big bad Moonchild,” she observed as she slowly walked around the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. “Now that I see you, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.”
Jupe’s sobbing stopped immediately. He retreated back into the closet before Lon could stop him. Not good. Best to be calm about it, and lure her away from them so that Lon could get Jupe out of there.
“Luxe sent you?” I asked, moving away from the closet.
“Luxe made me, baby. Despite what they say about you, I think they might have made me a little better than Eleusia Ekklesia made you—or maybe all that running away that you did made you miss out on some important training.”
I took several more steps forward as she paused in front of the desk and fiddled around with some of the papers stacked there.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Let’s see, first off, it took me like one day to kill your guardian.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome. Second, your servitor magick stinks. I was able to put a tracer on it with no effort.”
“The green dot.” I knew it.
“Very good. You spy on me, I spy on you. I’d been warned that you’re hard to trace, but that little boy over there was quite easy. Nice and earthy.” She punctuated her words by scraping a couple of long fingernails across the chalk-board.
“Yeah, well, you kinda fucked up when you decided to mess with him.” I stole a quick glance behind me. Lon had managed to get Jupe back out of the closet and on his feet.
“Look,” she reasoned, “if you had just come quietly when I sent that Pareba after you, we could have avoided all this. All I wanted was for you to come with me so that you could stand trial for your psycho parents. But now you got these people involved. So all three of you are coming with me now.” She looked behind me and called out, “I see you trying to leave back there.”
She patted her gun again, still looking at them, then smiled at me.
“That seems like a lot of trouble,” I said, pressing the tips of my fingers together to reopen the wounded hangnail. “Why don’t you just take me and save yourself the hassle?”
She laughed, tapping one of the heels of her boots on the floor. “This isn’t up for negotiation.”
All right, then. No chance of a peaceable outcome now.
I couldn’t escape, because she’d only hunt me down again. She might have been an overconfident bitch about my magical training at the E∴E∴, but she was right about one thing: She knew how to detect servitor magick and tag it well enough to find Jupe. I didn’t. Maybe if my parents hadn’t been so overprotective and had taken the time to teach me, I might’ve known better; as it was, I did the best I could on my own.
But even if she could track me down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to give myself up to her, either. I hadn’t stayed alive all this time just to kowtow at the last minute to someone like her.
Still, fight or flight, after years of considering only my own survival, it really came down to one crucial thing that had nothing to do with me: sh
e had hurt Jupe. And she was going to pay for that.
“Oh, well,” I lamented as I smeared the tiniest drop of blood on my invisibility ward and erected it one more time. The air wavered in front of me, and for a second, the nausea almost dropped me to the floor. Drained from the first time I put it up, I was afraid it wouldn’t work. But in the middle of trying to keep my balance, the bewildered look on Riley Cooper’s face said it all—she couldn’t see me.
Better act fast, before she wised up and realized what I’d done.
You hear about adrenaline giving people access to superhuman strength during moments of crisis. I’d experienced this twice—once when my parents and I faked our deaths, and the other time about a year later, when a cop almost blew my alias.
I probably didn’t have enough adrenaline in me now to lift a car or anything quite that spectacular. I did, however, have enough to unhinge the wooden top off the school desk next to me. Bracing my foot on the seat, that’s exactly what I did.
The desk creaked and protested as I twisted it, then the screws popped out. I flew back a step with the flat weapon in my hand. It must have looked as if it were floating in air, because Riley Cooper’s eyes went wide. Jupe whimpered behind me after my name died on his lips.
I raced forward several steps with the desktop and as Riley stepped back, her spiked heel caught on the sunken grout between two cracked floor tiles. She faltered as I dropped my ward and materialized a couple of feet away from her out of thin air. As Lon had noted in my backyard, it was, indeed, one hell of a spell. Guess this untrained girl knew a few tricks after all.
When Riley saw me, her hands automatically went to her gun. I’ll admit, her reflexes were pretty fast, but I was faster.
With both hands, I gripped the desktop and reared it back over my left shoulder, swung with all my strength, and nailed her right in the side of her face. Hard. The hollow crack! of wood hitting bone reverberated around the room. Her body slammed against the teacher’s desk, knocking a flurry of papers and books into the air.