Fireborn (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 2)

by Ripley Harper

  Things are not going well.

  Before we sat down to dinner, I only had a short time to check in with everyone, but it was long enough to establish that they’re all healthy and extremely pleased with me. Apparently, my firemagic not only cured Ingrid and my Skykeepers but all the rest too because I gave some of my power to Principal Sweeney, who then used his earthmagic to Heal them. (I say “apparently” because I can’t remember a thing of what happened when I woke up the last time. Like so many other things, that stupid Enthrallment spell wiped the entire night from my mind.)

  In any case, everyone was delighted with me for about five seconds, but now they’re all arguing again and, as usual, ignoring me completely. As if I have no say in my own life.

  “If she really is a firemaster now –”

  “I told you. There’s no doubt about it.”

  “Well, then there shouldn’t be a problem.” Jack Pendragon has a satisfied little smirk on his face. “She can’t be in flux anymore, so this time an initiation will definitely work.”

  “If you think I’d ever expose her to the bloodmagic in this house again, you’re even crazier than I thought. And I already think you’re completely insane.” Ingrid looks ready to jump up and whack Jack Pendragon against the head. With her eyes blazing and all her wiry muscles tensed like this, it’s almost impossible to believe that this is the same woman who, less than two weeks ago, lay on the brink of death, nothing but skin and bones.

  Jack Pendragon raises his hands in mock surrender. “Look. I’m willing to admit that some errors were made during our last attempt to initiate her into bloodmagic. I can only apologize if I underestimated you or your ward. But you have to admit that none of us considered firemagic as an option then. Who knew that the kitten would turn out to be so very gifted in obscure and half-forgotten magics?” He turns his whole head to look at me, giving me a too-wide smile from across the table.

  Ugh. It was bad enough when he despised me; now that he thinks the sun shines from my butt, it’s almost unbearable. There’s something about Jack Channing’s fawning admiration that’s creepy and somehow just plain unnatural, like being drooled on by a friendly snake.

  I don’t return his smile. “I’m not a kitten,” I say.

  “But of course you aren’t! Forgive me, you’re far too powerful to be called a kitten.” Again, that too-wide smile. “A lion maybe? Or a tigress?”

  “My name is Jess.”

  He looks as if he’s about to disagree, but then he gives a deep, overly-respectful nod. “If that’s the moniker you prefer, I would be happy to oblige, of course.”

  “What’s a moniker?” I ask suspiciously.

  “It’s a name,” Ingrid says.

  “A kind of nickname, really,” Jack Pendragon corrects her. “A name one uses when one’s own name is too precious to be said out loud.”

  “You’re on thin ice, Jack.”

  He raises his hands again. “Then I apologize wholeheartedly. Please understand, my only wish is to be of service to your ward.”

  “Like hell it is.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Sofia says impatiently. “We need to decide which path she should choose next and –”

  “It will not be bloodmagic,” Ingrid says. “Not while I am her keeper, and definitely not in this house.”

  “Lilith’s heirs always did choose seamagic first,” Jonathan says. “I was taught –”

  “Be quiet, boy!”

  “Don’t call me that.” Jonathan’s voice is tense with anger.

  “You are my son. I will call you what I want.”

  “I remember the exact day Grandfather stopped calling you ‘boy’,” Jonathan says. “As I recall you didn’t much like it either.”

  He must’ve touched a nerve because his father’s face turns bright red. “Are you threatening me?”

  Jonathan shrugs. “Just saying. I ran this place for months while you were in a coma. Perhaps it’s time you started treating me with a little more respect.”

  “Respect? You have no idea what my responsibilities are, boy. If you think all I do –” He stops himself, looking around the table with a frown. “But we have guests. Perhaps we should discuss this some other time. In private.”

  Noah is the first to fill the awkward silence that follows. “I understand why you’re all focused on her magic right now, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture. The world is far more than the Order of Keepers, especially these days. And her fame is only growing. We need a strategy going forward or we’re going to run into real trouble.”

  “If we keep her out of the spotlight for long enough the whole thing will blow over,” Ingrid says. “People have a short attention span.”

  “No,” Gunn disagrees. “Noah is right. The mystery is only fanning the flames. She went completely off-grid for months and look what happened. We need to contain this, and we need to do it now.”

  I take a last, delicious bite of my food. “What’s going on?” I ask. “What’s spinning out of control?”

  “Unfortunately, the uproar created by the leaked footage of the attack at school hasn’t died down the way we expected it to,” Ingrid says. “You are now what I believe is called ‘an internet sensation’.”

  “It’s not just the internet,” Jonathan says. “It’s everything. Magazines, TV, computer games… But yeah, the meme thing is out of control. Not to mention the conspiracy theories. And the feminist backlash and the racism thing aren’t good.”

  I feel my mouth falling open. “What are you talking about?”

  Daniel shakes his head. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “The worst kind.”

  “I’m all over the internet?”

  “What Jonathan said. You’re everywhere. People have lost it; you’ll have to see for yourself.” He pushes back his chair and stands up. “I’ll get my computer.”

  “Sit down.” Jack Pendragon’s words must be drenched in bloodmagic because Daniel sits down immediately, as if his legs were chopped off. “This so-called ‘fame’ of hers is nothing but a distraction. What do we care about the outside world? They are nothing to us!”

  “Times have changed,” Gunn says. “Because of their technologies, ordinary humans now have powers that even the most powerful keepers can’t rival.”

  “Nonsense. They might have mastered some of the surface skills—a basic manipulation of the elements and so on—but they have not even begun to delve into the deep skills. They are no threat to us.” Another creepy smile. “And they’ll never be a threat to her.”

  “Nonsense,” Sofia disagrees. “They have their own deep skills now; you know that as well as I do. A year ago, you could Enthrall the town to forget what she did. How will you do it today, now that the whole world has seen that video? The strength of their numbers is becoming greater than the strength of our magic. And Gunn is right: we need to harness that strength, not fight against it.”

  “Every single time we’ve involved the outside world in our affairs, it turned out to be a disaster,” Ingrid says. “I can’t see why this time would be any different.”

  “It will be different because she’s different…”

  For the next ten minutes or so I listen to their arguments while I eat my dessert. (It’s salted caramel ice cream and so delicious that it’s literally the only thing in the world that could keep me at this table.)

  It’s soon clear to me that Ingrid and Jack Pendragon have formed an uneasy alliance; both of them are convinced that my “fame” will soon blow over, and that we should just ignore the whole issue and focus on developing my magic. Daniel’s parents and Gunn take the opposite view; they’re convinced the entire thing is about to spiral out of control and that we should do some damage limitation immediately.

  Neither Jonathan nor Daniel says a word. They’re eating their ice cream in silence, just like me.

  When I finally push my plate away, I raise my voice for the first time, interrupting their argu
ment. “Can I be excused, please. Daniel wanted to show me something on his computer. The food was delicious, thank you.”

  I get up, motioning for Daniel to follow me.

  “That can wait,” Jack Pendragon says. “We first need to decide –”

  “Look,” I interrupt him, smiling politely. “I appreciate your input, but I don’t think I will be able to make an informed decision about my future until I know exactly what’s going on.”

  Then I leave the room.

  When Daniel said things were bad, I knew I was in trouble. But it’s much worse than I expected. Worse than I could ever have imagined. I’m everywhere. Everywhere.

  And yet, strangely, it’s as if I’m not really out there at all.

  Apparently, in the past three months or so, people have created this character called “Jezebel.” (For some reason everyone insists on using my full name, which I’ve only ever seen on my driver’s license.) “Jezebel” looks just like me and went to my school and is clearly recognizable as me on the awful footage that was taken that night at school. But that’s about where the similarities between us end.

  People have masses to say about this “Jezebel” character they created. Millions of words have been written and thousands of comments have been posted and hundreds of videos have been made. But even though everybody on the planet seems to have an opinion about Jezebel Sarkany, it’s blatantly obvious that nobody is really talking about me. It’s like those ink blotch tests that psychologists do: people see what they want to see, depending on their own experiences, backgrounds, politics, beliefs, and levels of craziness.

  What makes it even more confusing is that a great deal of my own, real life has been used to serve other people’s agendas. I went off all social media ages ago, right after the trial, but I made a few big mistakes. First, I disabled instead of deleted my accounts (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, the usual) and second, I used the same password for all of them. Someone, somewhere, must have guessed my password and hacked into my accounts because, at least for a while, some of my old accounts were reactivated and made public for all the world to see. Which means that all kinds of random people are using all kinds of random things I posted years ago to make me look like someone I never really was.

  It’s… surreal.

  The sheer scale of the thing is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. The original footage from the school cameras has since been edited in about a thousand different ways, but the most famous version is a two-minute clip with rousing music and carefully selected shots that cut the worst of the violence and make me look like some kind of superhero. You see “Jezebel” silently screaming and struggling against her bonds. Shooting out of her chair to attack Jeffrey with one hand. Smashing the steel gates with a fire extinguisher. Dragging Daniel, and then Maggie, and then Chloe to safety. The schoolgirl hero the world has been waiting for. Strong, fearless and brave.

  On YouTube, that video has now been watched more than 200 million times—the mere idea spikes my anxiety levels to the point where I can actually feel my heart hammering in my ears.

  For many people, it seems, the person on that video has become an icon and an inspiration. An Icelandic YouTube star, for example, started this weird thing, #BeLikeJezebel, where people post videos or stories or pictures of themselves doing something brave. Some of it is moving (a brother donating a kidney to his sister), some of it sad (a girl reporting parental abuse to her teacher), some are funny (a hen chasing a cat away from her chicks), some a bit odd (a really big guy playing football in a tutu). But every single person claims to have been inspired by “Jezebel”, the heroic schoolgirl who feels no fear or doubt and always does the right thing.

  Whoever the hell that might be.

  There’s more: some still shots from that footage have been photoshopped to make “Jezebel” look a lot better than I do in real life. The original video was in black and white and rather grainy, but these pictures look highly stylized and glossy and inspirational. On the most famous of the pictures I’m dragging Chloe—my mouth open in a silent scream, my face bruised and bloody, my eyes filled with tears, my shoulder muscles bulging. In another I’m desperately attacking the steel gates with a fire extinguisher. And then there’s one when I’m jumping up to attack Jeffrey, the library chair still taped to my body. All treated to look like a scene from some blockbuster action movie rather than a traumatic moment from a real person’s real life.

  Bizarrely, the picture where “Jezebel” looks so bloody and desperate and determined has become an inspirational meme, captioned with captions like: If you think you’re having a bad day…, or Stand firm in the storm, or Bravery is the capacity to function in spite of your fear. The second one, where it looks as if “Jezebel” is attacking steel gates (I wasn’t; I was trying to break a small lock—it was a totally reasonable thing to do) has become a meme about attempting the impossible: I CAN therefore I WILL, or Only those who try the absurd achieve the impossible, or Never give up! etc. These memes have become an industry: you can find t-shirts and aprons and posters and God knows what else, all with “Jezebel’s” desperate face on it, inspiring you to greater things.

  It might even have been funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.

  People seem to be really interested in my life too. There’s a lot about the fact that I spent so much time in “foreign wildernesses” while growing up; there’s a lot about my mom’s death; a lot about the fact that I don’t have a dad. Especially the story about how I beat up Ty in our freshman year seems to have grown out of all proportion: if you read most Jezebel-the-hero accounts, the fragile, slimly built “Jezebel” bravely attacked the enormous school bully to protect kids more vulnerable than herself from being victimized in the same way she had been. What an inspiration! And then there’s this whole mythology about how “Jezebel” dyed her hair green to rebel against “small-town preconceptions of beauty,” and how “Jezebel” got suspended from school for standing up against sexual harassment… It just goes on and on.

  Some of the stories have a kernel of truth, but most are utter fabrications or highly exaggerated. Which is basically exactly what happened to my social media history: things have been used out of context to fit this image of “Jezebel” that’s been created in people’s minds, but that’s got nothing to do with the real me at all. So you can read about the 7 Times When Jezebel Knew What It Was Like To Be You, or you can take a quiz to determine How Jezebel You Are, or check out how Jezebel’s Style Will Give You Life and about a hundred more in the same vein. All constructed from photos or comments or videos that I might have posted once, long ago, but which were never meant to be used in the way they’re being used now.

  I have become a real feminist icon too, not least because Eve wrote a piece on me for her “secret” blog that went viral. In the piece, My Friend Jezebel, The Feminist, she claims I’ve always “rebelled against the patriarchy”; that I’ve spent my life “fighting female oppression and male entitlement”; that I’ve always refused to “be objectified as Other” and about a dozen other things that only Third Wave could ever have come up with in a million years. (I’m going to kill her.)

  Needless to say, after “Jezebel” became a feminist icon, whole truckloads of haters crawled out from under their rocks, all with issues that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me.

  Many of them seem to be trolls of the most horrible sort: there are dozens of disturbed individuals out there who think I’m too ugly to rape; masses of comments calling me fat and stupid; whole threads arguing that I’m a cheap slut or a dumb bitch or a foreign whore. Some of these are really crass or cruel or just plain backward. Others seem genuinely convinced that by criticizing me they’re unmasking some kind of conspiracy against men. (Example: under one stylized picture of me attacking Jeffrey, you can find the caption: If a guy does this to a girl he’s a murderer; if a girl does this to a guy she’s a hero—and that’s been shared almost thirty thousand times!)

  These types are determine
d to prove I did everything wrong that night at school and that, far from being a hero, I’m just another stupid girl who thinks with her emotions and who’s incapable of logic or long-term planning. I should’ve negotiated with Jeffrey, they say. I should’ve persuaded him to change his mind instead of acting so hysterical. I should’ve told Miss Anderson to run and get help instead of letting her cut me loose. I should’ve incapacitated Jeffrey instead of killing him. I should’ve used Jeffrey’s gun to shoot open the lock. I should’ve broken the office window and used the landline to call the police. I should’ve asked other students to help drag my friends from the library…

  There are so many things I should’ve done; so many things I shouldn’t have. And so you can read about The 5 Dumbest Things Jezebel Did (And How Men Fixed Her Mess) and Why Jezebel Is No Hero and Never Send A Girl To Do A Man’s Job. They blame me for both Miss Anderson’s and Jeffrey’s deaths, and mostly use a picture of Henry’s bloody, one-eyed face after the explosion as the meme for my stupidity.

  It hurts. I’m not going to lie.

  That’s not their only meme either. Under the picture of me attacking the steel gates with a fire extinguisher, there’s the caption Women’s Logic. Under the one of me dragging Chloe, there’s Too Weak To Carry. And then there’s a photo of Ty with a black eye (which he got in a football game; it had nothing to do with me!) with the words It’s only wrong when we do it. DUH underneath.

  And the anti-women people aren’t even the worst of what’s out there.

  There’s also this whole movement (girls as well as boys) that’s trying to make Jeffrey into the real victim of the night. They talk about his tragic past: how he was abandoned by his parents and had to grow up in the care of his grandmother. They argue that he must have had a good reason to imprison us in the library, and they all come to the same conclusion: Chloe, Maggie, Amanda and I must be the real culprits. We must have driven him to the brink of insanity by our relentless bullying, they argue. Or by our slutty teasing and sexual manipulation. Or by our tactics of humiliation and abuse. (Pick a reason depending on your personal crusade.)