Would he have tried to kiss me? she thought.
Getting annoyed with not being able to sleep due to these intriguing and persevering thoughts, Abby got to her feet, slipped on her shoes, and exited her room.
She moseyed aimlessly around the labyrinthine passages. There was not a soul around at this time of night, everyone had retired to their rooms or gone to the common areas. She hoped that by the time she got back to her bedroom, her treacherously dirty imagination would have expended itself and she’d be able to catch a little shut-eye.
Of course, it was not long before she got hopelessly lost. She’d been down in the warren that was the S.B.A. for a full day, and that was nowhere near enough time to get a mental map of the place. The convoluted passages led her this way and that, and she was just entertaining the idea that she might have to sleep in some random storeroom or abandoned classroom when she heard voices. Creeping as quietly as her sore and protesting muscles would allow, Abby stole up to a door that was ajar and listened. She could hear two voices which, to her, meant two people that could help her find her way back to her room.
Abby slipped through the door and found herself in a large, rough chamber. The voices echoed eerily off the jagged, multi-faceted walls and she was unable to make out the words. She couldn’t see much as the chamber was dimly lit and there seemed to be a bank of loose pebbles running all around it, screening what was in the middle from view. Carefully, slowly, Abby ascended the bank and peered over the top.
There was a large pool in the middle of the chamber, shimmering under the dim, hidden lights. It stretched off into the distance so that it was lost in the murk of the cave. It could have been an underground lake, but something about the way it seemed to fade into the distance gave Abby the impression that the part she could see was more likely a cove in some vast subterranean waterway than just one big pool. Next to the inlet, his trousers rolled up and his feet dangling in the water, was Drake. In his lap lay the head of the most beautiful woman that Abby had ever seen. She was stunningly lovely, possessed of the sort of radiant beauty that the poets would have said could light up a room. Indeed, the thought suddenly struck Abby that maybe the dim light of the chamber was emanating from the exquisite woman herself.
Abby gazed down at Drake and the strange figure. The woman’s neck and breasts were in full view – and what tits! Abby thought – but the rest of her body was hidden under the water.
Abby craned closer and, as she did so, her elbow slipped on a rock and sent it tumbling. The sound of the falling stone was like a pebble being tossed down a well. Immediately, Drake looked up. The woman’s head jerked up and, with a small startled cry, she dove into the crystalline, shimmering depths.
And Abby caught the sight of a pearlescent tail whipping into the water and out of sight.
Fuck me sideways with a raven beak, that was a mermaid!
Drake was not happy to find Abby there. Without a word, he marched up the bank, moving with the awesome inevitability of a thunderhead, and grabbed her by the arm. Before Abby knew it, he had propelled her out the door and slammed it behind him.
“What the hell are you doing out and about at this time?” he asked, glowering.
Abby was about to tell him that she was fucking twenty-one years old and could do whatever the fuck she wanted, but before she could, he held up a hand and silenced her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What you saw was none of your damned business and we’ll say no more about it. Don’t speak of it to anyone.”
He grabbed her in his vise-like grip and, without another word, escorted her back to her room.
When they reached her quarters, Abby attempted to apologize. However, the words had only just formed on her lips when Drake opened her door, pushed her inside, and stalked off.
Abby felt wretched. She got undressed and slid into bed and lay back on the pillow.
It was a mark of just how bad she felt that she barely reacted to the octopus that the other girls in her class had put under her pillow. It was with a distracted sigh that she pulled the creature out and plopped it into her toilet so that it wouldn’t dry out.
It was a long time before she managed to banish the image of that gorgeous creature – half-human, half fish – from her mind and fell into a weary sleep.
Chapter 5
As it does when one is at school, the days blurred and the weeks zipped by. Abby’s days were full of learning. She was taught more of the arts of combat by Master Tamper, spending hours at a time in his classroom, feeling more and more every day like a punching bag that her classmates were allowed to wail on to their hearts' content. She was becoming more proficient in unarmed combat, fist-fighting, and wrestling, but as soon as it came to utilizing powers, she found herself, once more, getting beaten up and thrown around like a ragdoll.
It wasn’t all fighting, though. There were lessons in creature and threat identification, basic healing, the history of the S.B.A. and what they stood for, and also the chemistry behind the caffeine – why it enabled a select group of people to tap into supernatural powers, to unleash dormant shifting abilities and paranormal talents.
As a freshly graduated chemistry major, Abby found the lessons on caffeine particularly interesting. The notion of a drug being able to unlock physiological traits – armored skin, hawk-like eyesight, adhesive finger pads that enabled people to climb sheer walls – as well as supernatural powers like eyes that could fire electricity or the ability to control water, was something that she found fascinating.
Her feud with Radella, started as it had been in their first combat class, had only been exacerbated with time. There are some people with whom, from the moment you meet, you cultivate a deep and unwavering enmity, and Radella was most certainly one of those people in Abby’s life. Master Tamper was aware of the tension and tried his best to keep them separated during practical combat lessons, but he could only divide them for so many days before he was inclined to pit them against each other.
Those were the most infuriatingly frustrating minutes of Abby’s life when she and Radella faced off in a one-on-one in which supernatural abilities were allowed. It seemed to her that some of the novices – Radella regrettably being one of them – were already pretty proficient and adept at manipulating the powers that they had naturally developed.
The same could not be said for Abby. No matter how she strived and concentrated, she couldn’t seem to get her powers to spark into life without the aid of a little caffeine boost. It exasperated her no end, as she knew that, given a chance, she could wipe the floor with Radella. As it was, the two young women were already relatively evenly matched when it came to non-supernatural combat, and their scraps drew the attention of the whole class, who knew how much the two of them despised one another. But when it came to a no-holds-barred fight, Abby was as outmatched as a boxer with her arms tied behind her back fighting a heavyweight champion. She spent her time being levitated around the room, flung around like a ragdoll, and knocked downtime and time again.
The rest of the class was okay to spar with, though she lost to any of the others that had even an inkling of supernatural ability. A few of them were still learning and struggling with intermittent powers, but none of them were as consistently useless as Abby.
One of the girls in her class was a shifter and capable of changing into a wolf at will. Abby had lost count of the times that she’d been dragged around the large classroom, her ankles gripped in the jaws of the wolf-shifter.
The only one she got along with in her combat class was the quiet albino-looking guy. His name turned out to be Auran, and his ability was, unsurprisingly, when Abby came to think of it, that he was able to become so insubstantial that he couldn’t be physically touched. He would fade, not to total invisibility, but to the point where he couldn’t be harmed by any physical blow. Magical attacks could still affect him, but no punch could land on him. This was handy, of course, but Auran had yet to master this aptitude sufficiently to be able to stri
ke his opponent while he was in his ghostly state. This made for a bit of a stalemate as far as fighting with him went, and Abby spent a lot of time chatting to him when they should have been trying to kick each other’s butts.
She had only been allowed to unleash a little of her power once, and that had been when Master Tamper had given them each a vial containing an weak robusta solution, which held only the smallest amount of caffeine. Master Tamper had told them that it was so that he could see the difference that even the slightest trace of caffeine worked on their abilities. Abby had drunk her vial and, not knowing quite how to harness any powers that might flicker out of dormancy, she’d looked at a desk – imagining it to be that witch bitch Radella – and hit it with an arc of light from one hand, which hadn’t set it on fire, but had left it charred around the edges and smoking. She had looked at Master Tamper after she’d done this, and seen that his usually placid and sanguine expression was creased with a slight frown.
***
Abby sat in the cafeteria, prodding unenthusiastically at her slice of silver springbok and dish of baked scent snail – far, far tastier than its name would suggest. She was mulling over the news that had been posted around the novice students’ living quarters the evening before. According to the posters, there was going to be a big match-up that evening to assess the progress of the new recruits that had started their training as part of the first step on the road to graduating from the Supernatural Barista Academy.
Abby gazed balefully at the coffee-flavored cup of dragon yogurt that sat next to her plate of untouched food. It was such a joke that she could be expected to fight against anyone in her class and even score a single hit on them. It was bad enough in a classroom with her peers, but the idea that there would be a whole bunch of strangers standing about analyzing and critiquing her too made the sweat break out on her forehead.
Abby slammed a fist down onto the metal table-top at the unfairness of it. She might as well not even turn up. The Masters knew it, she knew it, and the rest of her class knew it: she was useless. Unless she got a bit of caffeine into her she had no chance whatsoever.
She was jerked from her musings by someone jogging her in the ribs with a cruelly placed elbow. Abby let out an involuntary squawk and spun around in her seat, her eyes blazing.
“Jeez, easy there, tiger,” drawled the snotty voice of Radella. She was standing with one of her cronies – whose name Abby hadn’t bothered to find out – with a tray of lunch in her hands. “My, my,” she said, her dark eyes running over Abby’s countenance, “you look like you’re in a foul mood.” She turned to her friend. “What do you think, Maura? Doesn’t the human look like she’s in a funk? Maybe she’s thinking just how fucking ridiculous she’s going to be made to look tonight in front of all those people, all those qualified Guardians that are bound to be there. Imagine how much fun the lucky person who gets paired with her is going to have.”
The girl, Maura, laughed harshly, showing off a set of sharp yellow teeth.
Abby was clenching her teeth so hard that they felt as if they might shatter. There was a dull thudding in her head, as if her blood had turned to molasses.
“Golly,” Radella continued, turning back to look Abby square in the eye, “I hope it’s me. I’d put on such a show that the human wouldn’t want to show her face for a week.”
Abby’s hand shot out and flipped Radella’s tray, crushing it into the young woman’s glittering, sable dress. The cloud pepper and mango pie splattered over the immaculate garment and the fire-apple smoothie went down her neck.
Radella stood, for once, as if Abby had hit her with a spell and turned her to stone. Maura gaped. The chatter in the cafeteria died as people turned at the sound of the smoothie glass smashing on the floor.
Abby, not waiting for her anger to abate, stood swiftly up and grabbed Radella by the shoulders.
“Sorry,” she said. “I hope that wasn’t expensive.”
Then she shoved Radella hard. The young witch flailed over a bench that someone had just vacated and crashed head over heels.
With a cry, Maura launched herself at Abby, who only had a moment to savor the sweet sight of her nemesis covered in food and lying with her legs over her head and her backside on show for the whole cafeteria, before Radella’s minion tackled her and they crashed over the table. Plates and cutlery and food went everywhere, and for the next few moments, all was confusion.
Radella managed to extricate herself from under the table just as Abby delivered a well-aimed punch to Maura’s kidney. The girl stood bolt upright, her face drawn in pain, and then Abby booted her with a double-footed shot to the sternum. Maura staggered backward and tumbled over Radella as she attempted to get to her feet.
Radella, covered with the remains of her lunch, screamed in fury as she regained her feet. She raised her hands, clearly intent on hitting Abby with a bit of something inconvenient and supernatural, but before she could perform the gesture, a couple of Guardians arrived and broke up the fight.
As she was ushered away, Abby heard Radella yelling at her retreating back.
“I’ll get you for this, you bitch! This dress is one of a kind!”
Abby smiled savagely. At least, whatever happened later on, she’d always have the memory of the look on Radella’s face when she’d been covered with lunch.
The thought of what awaited her later made the smile on Abby’s face fade. But before it could disappear completely, it hardened into a grimace. She’d be damned if she was going to be made to look like a total ass in front of the majority of the S.B.A. She needed an edge, and to get an edge it’s often required that you go out on a limb.
***
That evening’s match-up – or the Assessment Duels, as the fights were formally called – was more of a big deal than Abby had imagined. Hundreds of supernaturals, both students and Masters alike, had gathered in one of the combat theaters – which resembled an ancient Roman gladiatorial arena – to watch the fights.
The stone benches that surrounded the combat circle in a series of tiers were crammed to bursting with spectators of different ages, species, genders, and colors. All of them were letting their hair down. Many of them were swigging from huge steins of coffee, filled from a couple of enormous copper cisterns on either side of the arena.
Abby was reminded of a good old-fashioned frat party but, instead of tequila and cheap beer, everyone looked to be getting shit-faced on potent caffeine. As her gaze roamed about the amphitheater, she saw a group of young guys lining up shots of ristretto and racing to see who could drink them the quickest. Another bunch of revelers was taking it in turns to do frappe funnels – pouring ice-cold blended coffees into a plastic funnel and guzzling it down. Everywhere that Abby looked, eyes were wide, pupils enlarged, smiles huge. Everyone was riding that caffeine high.
In the center of the arena, sitting in a floating VIP booth, was Miss Delphine Hightide and the rest of the Masters. They had the best seats in the house. The principal point was so that they could see how their prospective charges were getting along and how their powers were evolving.
Before any battles got underway, the names of the combatants had to be drawn randomly from an oversized mug held by one of the Masters. Miss Hightide, naturally, had the responsibility of drawing the names. At a gesture from her, the lights around the hall dimmed and everyone, revved up on sugar and caffeine, respectfully quieted.
“And now,” Miss Hightide said, “the draw.”
Of course, the universe being the devilish and black-humored thing that it is, Abby was drawn, in the evening’s final bout, against Radella. The thought of humiliating Radella in front of all these people was one of such intense sweetness that it almost made Abby’s teeth ache. However, this wishful fantasy was quickly dispelled when cruel reality descended and she was forced to confront the fact that she, Abby, was going to end up as the greatest laughingstock that the Supernatural Barista Academy had probably ever seen.
As she walked about the aren
a, distracted by her thoughts and wondering how the hell she was supposed to stand a chance in a fight against someone that could do magic and manipulate the fabric of the world, Abby heard people laying bets with bookies that circulated around the amphitheater. She was not heartened to learn that she was paying very long odds.
How can I make a chance for myself? Abby thought. What do I need to make things a little fairer?
Suddenly, the answer came to her as quickly as if she’d known it all along and simply forgotten.
What did she need to even the scales?
Caffeine.
The problem was, of course, that competitors in the Assessment Duels were not allowed to consume caffeine before the event. They were breathalyzed in the middle of the arena just before the fight started by one of the Masters, who also played the role of adjudicator. It was somewhat tricky to smuggle a flat white or a latte onto the combat circle in your pocket and then somehow drink it without being seen by the hundreds of eagle-eyed spectators – impossible, really.
But you don’t have to drink caffeine, do you? Abby thought, a smile blooming tentatively across her visage.
***
What felt like an awfully short time later, Abby stood in the middle of the combat circle, separated from her old pal Radella by a few feet of soft, sandy ground. Her fists were clenched, her palms sweaty as she held the little foil packet in one hand.
Radella was currently speaking the chosen sentence into the little breath-analyzing machine – ‘a piccolo latte extra hot with legs’ – and staring at her with an eye that could’ve curdled milk.
Abby had taken the caffeine test just before and been passed by Master Tamper, who was adjudicating the final battle.
“Remember,” he said, having to raise his usually mild voice to be heard over the din of the hyped crowd, “quarter may be asked for at any time, and given immediately by the other combatant. If we in the assessment booth deem things to be getting a little out of hand, Miss Hightide shall end the match with a clap of her hands.”
Caffeinated Magic: Supernatural Barista Academy Page 7