by Lan Chan
The sympathy turned into rage. Even in his fury, he was no less beautiful or terrifying. His icy blue eyes stared through me like they were peeling my soul open. Once more he tried to latch on to me, but the thing holding my ankle dragged me back. Lucifer’s mouth opened in a silent scream of frustration. My lungs filled with water. The thumping of my pulse in my brain had grown weak. I was drowning.
The gasping breath I took as I bolted awake in my bed had the mattress shuddering. My hand splayed on the wall, trying to find something solid to anchor myself in this reality. The weight on my chest refused to lighten. I dragged in oxygen. In my mind, I could still smell the salt air and the fishy tang of seaweed. Blue light hummed in the circles on the floor. That too reminded me of the bioluminescent lights under the ocean. For the first time ever, I cringed away from it.
“What the hell?” I said to cut the sound of my ragged breathing. The room felt oppressive. I sat there for who knows how long trying to get my heart rate to slow. Normally when I had nightmares they tended to fade as I waited them out.
Jacqueline had told me on my first day at Bloodline Academy that the human mind had a great capacity to filter out or suppress information in order to survive. My brain obviously had a death wish because it wasn’t doing any of those things right now. I could still feel the chill of the icy water kissing my skin. Despite breathing normally again, my breath was shallow. I couldn’t seem to take in enough air.
Worst of all, when I blinked, all I could see were Lucifer’s eyes peering back at me. His face was twisted up in an expression of sheer frustration. I’d witnessed his wrath before. That wasn’t what had my insides in a knot. It was the fact that he appeared to be trying to help me. As I’d sunk deeper, it looked to me like he was trying to pull me out of the water. But that couldn’t be right.
He was the Morning Star. The being who had brought about all of this chaos in the first place. Was this the source of my deathly fear of saltwater? I shook my head. Surely not. I’d been afraid of the ocean all my life. It occurred to me that during our initial trials, the board had decided to use my fear of rodents over my fear of the water in order to test me. Did they know how I would react or did they not detect it?
My mind swirled with unwanted thoughts for too long. It took me a while to calm down enough that the blue lights on the floor faded. It was only then that it clicked that Sophie wasn’t in her bed. Glancing at the light of the moon, I judged it to be around one in the morning. I’d gone to bed at a time for senior citizens. Now I’d never get back to sleep.
Not for lack of trying. After another hour, I gave up and dressed in sweats. Unsure where I wanted to go, I stalked out of the building. As soon as I set foot outside, a figure materialised beside me. Not really. He’d been standing by the doorway as though he were a chunk of stone. Which he was during the day.
“Nice night,” I said. Tony the gargoyle crossed his bulging arms over his chest.
“What are you doing out here?” he all but grumbled. Even his speech sounded like rocks scraping against each other.
“I had a nightmare. Can’t go back to sleep.”
“You’re not supposed to be leaving the dorms.”
Except this wasn’t the first time I’d done it, and I certainly wasn’t the only student who had ever slipped out of their bed. I had a feeling he was unconcerned with what the other students did.
“I’m going to the library. Unless your orders are that I’m not allowed out of the building.”
The scowl on his face deepened. I imagined a craftsman gouging his expression out of a lump of clay.
“You can tag along if you think that’s going to help you,” I suggested. I wasn’t sure how I felt when he started to pace forward behind me. So I wasn’t allowed to be alone at night but I wasn’t banned from going places either. This new set of rules was confusing. Inside the library, I used the mirror network to look up books on demon possession.
Tony’s caterpillar brows shot up to the sky. That he knew what books I wanted to read said a lot about how close he was standing.
“At least they’re not books about the Sisterhood,” I grumbled.
He stood outside my reading corral the same way he had stood guard in front of the dorms. I’d purposefully tried to pick books that we hadn’t gone through in class, but they didn’t tell me much more. Mostly it was the same rules that I had heard already in Demonology 101.
A true demon’s power lay in perverting the mind of the person it possessed. They poked and prodded the person until that person could no longer distinguish whether it was their own thoughts or that of the demon. Sometimes, the person didn’t have a clue as to what was happening. The ones who did often suffered in ways far deeper than the ones that were oblivious. I thought of Nanna. It was difficult to tell which camp she fell into. The pictures of the ones who fought the possession were gruesome. There were people who lashed out physically at either society or themselves. Their behaviour became erratic until their families swore they didn’t know them anymore.
Nanna hadn’t fought, but she hadn’t given up either. It would seem that the reaction all had to do with the demon in question.
There were no accounts of a possession by Lucifer himself. I thought of his extreme focus. There was no way he would settle for possessing a person’s thoughts. He was the type to want everything. Body and soul.
I held my hand out in front of me and drew a small circle. I heard Basil’s voice assuring me that no being from the Hell dimension could reap the benefits of the Earth. If I were possessed by Lucifer, I shouldn’t be able to draw the invisibility circle. The door of the corral opened. Tony stepped in. I let the spell drop.
His gaze landed on me. The frown was justified.
“No spells,” he said. That was new.
“Says who?”
The gargoyle ground his teeth. “Just don’t do any spells.”
I rolled my eyes and picked up another book. Mostly they all repeated the same ideas. The Academy had a wealth of information but most of it wasn’t accessible to me. Next time I was in Rivia, I made a mental note to pick up some books that were outside the scope of this place. I blinked and found my head was rested sideways on the table. Somehow I’d fallen asleep with the page stuck to my face. I was pretty sure I’d woken myself up with a snore. Tony was still guarding the door. I could see the edge of the skylight from where I was sitting. The first grey hues of dawn were beginning to light up the sky. If Tony stayed here much longer, he would turn back to stone.
I opened up the corral door and rubbed my eyes. “You can stand down now,” I said. “I’m going back to the dorm.”
He followed me all the way back. I had a feeling if I snuck back outside, it would be to the disgruntled annoyance of him right outside the door. I wasn’t sure what he thought I would be doing with the Academy coming alive for the day.
I got in an hour of meditation, packed my things into a small suitcase, and left it beside my door. When I arrived at the Grove, the nymphs were in a frenzy. I had told them that I wouldn’t be able to look after the trees for the next four days, but they were acting as though they were only just coming to terms with the news. I watered everything to the distinct sounds of little sighs and moans.
For sure they were lamenting the fact that I was a work shirker. When I was done, they turned their backs on me while I marched back down the path leading out of the Grove. They were acting as though I’d made the choice to go to Terran.
I reported to the portal field as set up by Jacqueline to find her and Kai waiting for me. He held on to a leash that attached to a collar around the neck of the dingo. I was sure some of the dingo shifters would take exception to that.
The animal’s head lifted. His nose twitched when I got close. H lunged towards me, straining against the leash. Kai didn’t move an inch. He was miles stronger than any human animal. I wasn’t sure why, but the sight of it irritated me.
When I got close enough, I held my hand out for the leash. Strang
ely enough, the dingo had stopped tugging and was now starting at me out of his brown eyes.
“Can’t you let him off the leash?” I asked.
“Why? So he can try to scratch at everything in sight?” he said. “As soon as we get to the other side, I’m letting him go.”
“The other side of where?”
“The portal.”
I sputtered. “Where does the portal lead?”
“As close to Terran Academy as possible.”
“That’s days away from where he lives. Why doesn’t someone take him back out to the desert?”
The looks on his face and Jacqueline’s said the thought hadn’t even occurred to them. “Is the tower repaired yet?”
Jacqueline nodded. “We had to get it up and running as quickly as possible. Wanda and Peter helped complete it.” Of course they did. Because yours truly was banned from stepping two feet outside her dorm.
“Can we see if he’ll go back on his own?”
Jacqueline peered up at the sky. “We’re cutting it very close to the exchange time. If we’re late, they’ll be even more unreasonable.”
“If they say anything, I’ll say it’s my fault.”
“I don’t think it’ll matter whose fault it is,” Jacqueline said.
“Then why did you bother bringing him here?”
“Basil was threatening to just throw him out on the street,” Kai said. Now that I was in front of him, the dingo sat down on his haunches. He looked up at me with eyes that appeared to still be haunted.
“I’m not going anywhere until he’s settled.”
Kai looked like he wanted to strangle the dingo, but he spoke through gritted teeth. “Fine,” he said. “But we’d better make this quick.”
Stepping forward, he touched his hand to mine and teleported us.
12
It never even occurred to me how much I’d gotten used to the climate control in the Academy. The sun beat down on us in waves. It made the horizon seem like a mirage. Everywhere I turned, red dirt with a few scraggly trees covered the land in a sweeping canvas.
“Jeez,” I said. The dingo whined. He tugged at the leash again as Kai stood there with his arm locked to his sides. I marched up and swiped the leash from Kai. He refused to give it up.
“The thing is a menace,” he said.
“That’s probably because you’re scaring him.”
Kai cocked his head to the side. After a second, he let go. The dingo went haywire. He tugged me forward. Since my body weight wasn’t much heavier than his own, the thing dragged me around on the leash like he was walking me.
“Need some help?” Kai asked casually. I didn’t bother looking at him because I could hear the laughter in his voice.
Ignoring him, I locked the end of the leash around my palm and rolled the leash up until there wasn’t much give left. The dingo whined and tried to use all four legs to back up. This was taking forever. Finally, I reached for the clip that was hanging to the metal ring on his collar. How Basil managed to get it on him was the question. I suspected magic. With some dexterous handiwork, I unclipped the leash.
The dingo went bananas. At first he bolted. A spray of dust billowed in his wake. For a second, I thought that would be the end of it. I was kind of glad. Going back to his natural habitat would be the best thing.
I was about to tell Kai we could go when the dust cloud came rolling back our way.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Kai said. The dingo returned. Twice more he did this until I realised he thought this was a game.
I knelt down and regretted it the moment my jeans hit the scorching hot sand. The dingo came right up to me and stuck his head in my face. This was not good. I couldn’t keep a pet. Half the time I could barely look after myself. “Go,” I said. “You’re free now.”
He sat back on his hind legs, tongue hanging out, eyes bright. Maybe animals had an even better mental block than humans did when it came to trauma. But when I tried to lay my hand on his paw where there was a scar that hadn’t fully healed, he pulled its leg away.
“Umm...I’m not sure what to do,” I said.
“What would you like me to do about that?”
“You’ve been around more wounded patients than I have!”
“He’s a dingo. I can’t exactly communicate with him.” Despite what he was saying, Kai knelt down beside me. The dingo eyed him warily but didn’t move. “I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as odd behaviour for a dingo. Most other animals would have disappeared as soon as you set them free.”
“What do you think would happen if we just left him here?”
He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
He covered my hand with his. I yanked it back. “We can’t just leave!”
A frown edged on his brow. “I wasn’t going to teleport,” he said. He stretched up and started walking away. After a beat, I followed. My heart sank a little when the dingo followed on behind us.
“Guess that answers that,” Kai said.
“What if it’s just because he was somebody’s pet and not a wild animal?”
Muscle tensed under his grey T-shirt. Something told me he was flat out of care for the whole situation. “Then somebody just lost a pet.”
He grabbed both of us and we teleported back to the portal field. Jacqueline didn’t seem at all surprised when she saw us. “Dogs aren’t allowed in the dorms,” she said. “They’re not accustomed to our auras.”
“He’s not a dog. But it doesn’t matter. I’m taking him to Terran. And you can both stop trading glances like I’m blind.”
Right. I might have been more nervous than I made myself out to be. “We’re just concerned about not being there with you,” Jacqueline tried to hedge.
“I’ll be fine.” There was that word again.
“If anything should happen –”
I shook my head at her. “What’s going to happen that hasn’t happened already?”
She looked decidedly uncomfortable with the whole situation. There wasn’t all that much I could do about it. Finally she seemed to get with the program.
“Kai is going to take you to the checkpoint that’s closest to Terran Academy without setting off their perimeter alarms. From there, someone from Terran will pick you up and take you the rest of the way. We’ve been warned that they won’t allow any of us to accompany you.”
Despite what she’d said, she glanced meaningfully between Kai and me. “We’re here if you need us, Lex.”
I bit my lip to force myself not mention the fact that they were there for me unless I wanted to go to the junior campus. Or to be out on school grounds late at night.
The next time we teleported, it was to a secluded section of a fern forest that didn’t appear to be reachable on foot. Somewhere close by there was the distinct rushing of a waterfall. The dingo turned around on his padded feet like he was unsure what to do with himself and the new sounds that he’d likely never heard before.
I understood. If Kai hadn’t suddenly been peering at me so intently, I might have reached out and touched the fern. I’d seen pictures of them in books of course, but this was the first time I’d seen them in their natural habitat.
“You still have time to reconsider,” Kai said.
“Can we not start this?” I asked. “I think it’s pretty clear I’m going and that I don’t have much of a choice.” I bit my tongue again. By the end of all this, I probably wasn’t going to be able to talk with all the things I stopped myself from saying. He seemed to understand nonetheless.
A sudden flash of something darted in his eyes. “I think we’re definitely going to be late now,” I said.
“They can wait.”
He took a step like he was going to grab me. I crouched down and pretended to tie my shoelace. When I unfurled, I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and headed off towards what I thought might have been the road. What I came across was a downward slope that was so steep it might as well have been a staircase. I could see now why h
e’d chosen this spot. He and some mountain climbers were just about the only people who might have been able to get up here.
I waited. After a brief silence, he exhaled and popped out of existence. The dingo was on the other side of the clearing. He was rolling around on the dropped fern branches. When Kai returned, he was scowling. “They’re in place.”
I went rigid waiting for him to teleport me. Instead, he brushed the back of his fingers over my cheekbone. He swallowed like he was holding back from saying all of the things he knew wouldn’t be helpful. Like the fact that the Sisterhood might try to turn me against Bloodline. His fingers trailed below my ear and laced through the hair at the nape of my neck. Now I was the one swallowing. The pulse in my neck pounded against his palm.
“Try not to do anything too insane,” he said. His lips parted. I knew there was a lot he left unspoken. Like the fact that with the soul gate in place, if something did happen, there would be no way for him to reach me.
For over a year I had lived with the security of knowing he was within reach. Even when he was driving me up the wall, I knew he would be there if I needed him. Not just for protection. When his lips pressed against mine, I stepped closer and allowed him to wrap me up in his arms. I heard the dingo’s whine, but everything melted at the same time my insides did.
We broke away when the dingo latched on to his jeans and dragged his leg aside. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. “It’s a good thing you’re taking him,” Kai said. He grabbed the scruff of the dingo’s neck and me around the waist.