by Lucy Auburn
Now, he knows how to make a girl wish she would die, just so her ears stop working. Thank fuck that karaoke machine was a one-time rental.
“Is everyone ready?” I’m not, but I have the feeling the question is rhetorical. “The song will play in three... two...”
Here it comes.
The song starts out innocent enough. Like the pied piper leading little children with his pan flute, it makes me want to get up and follow its lead. It has a certain seductiveness to its melody that makes my eyes flutter half-closed and a tiny curious smile curl up the corners of my mouth.
But seduction is only the first step.
The step that follows is despair.
Reaching deep inside my chest, the song takes hold of everything inside me: the self-doubt, grief for the whole, happy family I wish I grew up with, the constant desire to run away from my problems, my guilt about Meyer hurting people the other night, and it smashes it all together into a giant ball of anxiety and self-hatred.
My stomach twists, my heart thumps with heavy, hateful beats, and suddenly I get this sinking feeling deep inside.
A feeling that tells me everything in the world is wrong, and I’m the worst part of it.
It takes all the effort in the world just to force my eyes open and look around the room. I desperately search for a distraction to take my mind off the discordant harmony currently playing in my ears, insisting that I’m all alone in the world, worthless and weak, incapable of fighting back at all. Based on the expressions I see around me, the other phoenix students are fighting the same fight, though half of them have dopey blissed-out looks on their face.
I wish my siren song made me look like I ate a shit ton of edibles. If it’s different for all phoenix, of course a Grim-born Black Phoenix like me would be stuck with the song that makes me want to give up on life itself. That’s what I get for having Meyer’s blood run through my veins.
The more the song plays, the worse I feel.
I can’t do this alone.
Thankfully, I don’t have to.
Though the bond feels far away, pushed deep down inside me past acres of blackness by the siren song, I know it’s still here. I couldn’t draw on it the night the demon-masked man got me and chained me up, but that was months ago, before I grew strong. Back when I thought the bond was something to be ashamed of, the demons accidents I summoned and not another four pieces of me living on the outside.
I know better now. They’re a part of me, each a complement to my own strengths and weakness in their own way, and they’ll never be so far from me that I can’t get them back.
There. I find the light of the bond deep within the darkness the siren song has blanketed over my mind. It’s a tiny, pulsing little glow, like a firefly in the distance on a pitch black night. I can see it, but I’ll have to get closer to touch it.
In the meantime the song is working its influence. You’re all alone. Unwanted little foster girl, lost and abandoned, couldn’t keep a mother or a father. Even Sara didn’t want you in the end. It’s a mistake to think you won’t die alone, just like you’ve always lived. Give in to the darkness and despair. Give in to feeling nothing and being nothing. It’s your only hope...
How comforting and refreshing. If I give in, though, I’ll look like the other students around me: slack-jawed and completely out of their faculties, unable to resist. This is how Grims crack open rib cages and steal still-beating hearts from the chests of their victims.
I won’t let it happen to me.
With every bit of my strength, I grind my teeth together and pull on the tiny little light that is my bond with the demons, bringing it to the surface. Illuminating the darkness.
Until one by one their souls are summoned around me, prepared to help me in my fight against the siren’s lulling song.
It feels silly to summon them for a final, but if I’m going to be targeted with a siren song for a Black Phoenix, I’m going to fight back like a Black Phoenix. Just looking up and meeting Ezra’s strong, sure gaze is enough to jerk me a little from the song’s throes.
Because of the noise-canceling headphones, I can’t hear them. But I do feel it when Sebastian reaches out to brush his fingers across my cheek. I sense it when Mateo says something so outrageous that the other guys roll their eyes, all while he cracks a smile at his own no-doubt-inappropriate joke. And I feel it when Lynx starts talking, probably saying soothing, fact-based stats about siren songs that he read in some book, almost definitely one written in a foreign language.
It’s not enough to make the darkness go away, or to keep the song from continuously pulling me down, like a weight on my ankles as I try to swim to the surface.
But it does keep me from drowning completely. When Shimmer claps her hands and the music stops, I pull the headphones off with relief and blink my way out of a semi-stupor, glad that I didn’t let the song get all of me.
“Good job, everyone,” she says, beaming around at us. “At least half of you will be getting bonus points based on that last portion of the test. Now, classes will be ending for the winter break at the end of this week, but before you go I want to make sure all of you have checked your email accounts for the download link I sent you. I want you to practice listening to short bursts of pixie song and siren song while you’re away, to keep your minds sharp. When we return next semester...”
I let myself tune her out, focusing instead on the guys. Silently, I mouth my thanks at them, and am rewarded with Mateo’s wink and Ezra’s nod of acknowledgement. It’s hard to dismiss them yet again, but I do, wanting to focus on preparing for my next final.
It’s going to be a real shit show.
Chapter 16
Tuesday 3:00 PM: Shifter History Final
Skimming the questions, I know I’m in over my head. But I do my best to remember the facts: the year the first lion shifter in Egypt rose to power by posing as a god, only to be killed by the very people who claimed to worship him. The true name of the wolfdog shifter known as Balto who was one of a team that helped bring much-needed diphtheria antitoxin to Nome. A short answer question about the bat shifters who were also researchers and aided the discovery of the rabies vaccine.
Fascinating stuff, if you’re someone like Lynx. I’m not someone like Lynx—all of this info is the sort of thing I like to know in the moment, when it’s most relevant, not hold in my head for weeks or months at a time.
Unsurprisingly, when I summon Lynx and glance up at him hopefully, stumped on a short answer question, he gives me a look that makes it clear he won’t be helping me cheat.
Wishes, horses, beggars, choosers. What can I say, I like to use any advantage. If there’s anything life has taught me, it’s that refusing to break the rules just gets you in the back of the pack.
Also, I almost got memory-wiped by my surprise biological father the other night, and I saved Headmaster Towers’ life. Is it too much to ask that I make my first A in a class that isn’t all about getting distracted or pretend-stabbing people?
Thankfully, I manage to remember enough details about the story of Bisclavret, my favorite French werewolf legend-not-legend from a British story, to write a short essay about the subject. It has a few flourishes and embellishments that will make Ocean Johnson frown and get out his red pen, but I’ve managed to remember enough facts to get by with a passing grade. I hope.
If most people knew just exactly how many of the things that go bump in the night are real, they’d probably shit themselves. I know I nearly did that night on the cliffs, and I wasn’t even the one who got their dick severed.
As I finish up the test and turn it in, I can feel the weight of it. This, and a tiny bit of hand-to-hand combat, is all I have to do to finish up my first semester at the academy.
It’s felt like a whole damned year.
I just hope the next seven semesters aren’t this eventful. For one thing, it would be a real mind fuck if I got a new evil bio dad every three months. Let’s hope that by winter break there’s
some form of normalcy in this shapeshifter-filled place where some of the students come back to life. Otherwise, they might have to turn the Great House into a crematorium.
Friday 6:30 PM: Winter Break Celebratory Dinner
Somehow, overnight, the Great House has been turned from a large, imposing, and historic-style building where I eat cereal and try to cheat on tests, into a kind of Winter Wonderland.
As it turns out, the supernatural celebrate the winter holidays with their own kind of style.
A very loud, very impossible to ignore style. There are silver garlands running up and down the stairs of the Great House, sparkling with hundreds if not thousands of feet worth of twinkling Christmas lights. What feels like real snow crunches beneath my slippers as I make my way down the staircase towards the dining hall, eyes fixed on the impossibly tall pine tree sitting in the lobby, the star on its topmost branch practically brushing the ceiling.
While the tree itself is humongous, what really takes my breath away are the decorations. The bottom part of the tree has an actual motorized train running on a track that sits on its branches, impossibly tiny and realistic, somehow taking turns around and around without even disturbing the pine needles. That’s not the only moving decoration: I spot a little wolf crouched in the back of the branches, three tiny birds spinning around near the top, and what almost look like fireflies dancing around near the strings of light.
Between that and the cool feeling of the fake snow beneath my feet, it’s almost like...
“Magic.” Liam is standing next to the tree, studying the decorations. He looks up at me and chuckles, making me realize that my mouth is open in wonderment. “I was wondering if the headmaster got the mages to come by and get things going for the break. She always makes sure there are festivities here for students who don’t get to go home while classes are out.”
So, orphans like me. I’d be resentful of being on the receiving end of so much pity if it weren’t also so damned amazing. I’ve seen a lot of gaudy Christmas trees in my time, but never one that was its own village—and I haven’t even gotten the chance to look at the other side of it yet.
“How in the world did they set this up without me waking up?” I marvel at all the moving parts and twinkling lights as I walk around to the other side of the tree. The snow under my feet is so thick that I feel it through my academy-provided velvet flats, and find myself pulling my blazer tight around me. “You’d think something like this would be audible. My bedroom is just a few doors down upstairs.”
Liam shrugs. “Magic. Don’t ask me for the details—mages don’t like to talk about it. They’re so tight-lipped we don’t even know how many there are. Most study at this fancy school in Europe, or in secret academies around the States. But if I had to guess, they probably put some sort of spell around the lobby so you wouldn’t hear the noise.”
“Wow. No wonder they set it up at night.” I snort a little at the thought of actual, real-life mages tip toeing around downstairs while I slept, like Santa’s elves or something. “They didn’t want us to see their secrets.”
“I guess it would spoil the fun.” Liam glances over at me. “How are you doing, by the way? Since, y’know...”
“My murderous psychotic father got locked up in a weird offsite prison on a secret remote island?” Just saying it out loud makes me feel like a conspiracy theorist. It’s the sort of sentence you’d see typed out on a forum devoted to nonsense, not the type of thing that's supposed to be real. “I’ve been better, but I’ve also been worse.”
“As long as you’re not going to turn into the depressed lump of sadness you were before. I guess that was when you lost the demons. You never really talked about them with us, y’know. I mean, I knew there was something going on, and you mentioned seeing stuff on the cliff the first night, but... you kept the rest of it a secret.”
I shrug, feeling uncomfortable. “I’m not one for oversharing.”
“No.” Liam puts a hand over his chest in mock shock, voice taking on a breathy tone. “Dani Carpenter, keep secrets? Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I roll my eyes at him. “I just thought you’d all think I was crazy. Like, seeing things and hallucinating. Or if you thought it was real, you’d be horrified. This school doesn’t exactly like demons.”
“Guilty.”
“Once I found out I wasn’t just any ‘regular’ phoenix, but also a Grim, I decided not to talk about it because I thought everyone would hate me. So I just... kept it a secret.” Thinking back, I realize just how much I’ve kept from the people here I also consider my friends. “I’m sorry. I should’ve trusted you. I mean, you’re my friend, and you saved my life... I know now that you would’ve still been my friend if I’d told you about them earlier.”
“You’re forgiven,” he says lightly. “As long as you let me brush up on my sword skills with your demons. I’ve heard one of them favors the single-edged blade, and I really need to get better at that by the end of next semester or Kade will make me take summer classes.” He wrinkles his nose. “If you think Group Combat drills are terrible, summer classes are worse.”
I hadn’t even thought of summer. I wonder what I’ll do then—if everyone leaves campus, but I’m stuck here, it might get lonely.
Unless Mateo and I find things to blow up for our own amusement.
“C’mon.” Looping my arm through Liam’s, I drag him towards the doors to the dining hall. “Let’s go find your girlfriend and dig into dinner. I am, as always, absolutely starving to death.”
Chapter 17
Standing outside the Great Hall, a wool coat wrapped around my shoulders as an improbable amount of snow blows on us—we’re really, really not in Santa Cruz—I watch all my friends go away one by one.
It’s strange to see them bring their bags out of the dorms, wheel them towards the gates, and leave when Yohan calls their name. Their parents are waiting for them in the parking lot behind Patel’s Grocery, where they’ll be picked up and ferried home.
Liam leaves first, kissing Olivia goodbye; then Sam leaves to catch a flight to Hong Kong, where his parents are visiting family. Finally there’s Petra going home to the improbable beaches of Southern California, where her family winters, and Olivia returning to her parents in Missouri, who know nothing about the supernatural except that it took their daughter away.
By the time she leaves, using a crutch for support on one side, there’s no one left here except the faculty, a few shifter students who aren’t going home until tomorrow, and the rest of the phoenix.
Apparently going back to the mundane world outside these gates would put our lives in danger—or so the headmaster says. Given that Grims have attacked the campus more than once, I’m sure she’s right about that, but she also may very well be wrong about how safe this place is, especially with fewer people to guard it.
At least I’ll always have my guys at my side.
Also, without most of the students here, there’s no line in the dining room. I always like to count my blessings.
After everyone leaves I feel restless, so I wind up going out to the back woods near the picnic table, where Mateo and I once set off a tiny (little itty bitty) explosive. The air is chill with winter, my breath fogging in front of me. It’s strange to know that if I walked outside these gates I would be in Santa Cruz again, but in here we have our own little Northeastern cold weather.
“Do demons celebrate Christmas?” I glance over at the guys, who are lounging on the picnic table, looking bored out of their minds. “We always celebrated it at the group home. I guess because we got donations—if you call cheap bicycles and corny clothing gifts, that is.”
Lynx answers me. “We don’t really celebrate any holidays. It’s not like there’s a calendar down in Purgatory. Also, Hell isn’t big on the whole religion thing. Too busy punishing people for being shitty to care which god they worship.”
“I have a theory that Santa is a demon.” Mateo gives us all an it-could-be-true l
ook. “He punishes the naughty with coal and gives good people rewards. Besides, who else would know what every dumb kid’s worst sin is?”
Sebastian rolls his eyes. “You’re aware that Santa isn’t real, right? He’s just some Pagan nonsense rolled up into a bunch of commercial bullshit and Hollywood money-grabbing.”
“It could be real,” Mateo argues. “For all you know some fat demon invaded people’s homes through their chimneys and weighed their souls centuries ago. Hell, it could’ve been Lynx in a past life. We have no idea how long they punish any of us for.”
As the three of them start arguing about the myth that is Santa Claus, Ezra breaks off from the pack and paces over to where I’m standing, near a tree some enterprising shifter kid has clawed their initials into: H.R. I watch him approach, wondering why it is that my heart seems to beat a little faster whenever he’s near, even after so much time together.
“You know,” he says, green eyes studying me, “we can go visit him.”
I frown at him. “Huh? Who do you mean?” But I get it the instant I ask. “I don’t want to see Meyer.”
“He is your father,” Ezra reminds me. “He may have answers to all your burning questions. And it’s not like he can hurt you from inside a jail cell.”
“The headmaster has the key.” I shake my head. “I doubt she’ll let me into Darkness Island.” Just saying the name of the place makes me want to roll my eyes in disbelief. “I mean, I could ask her... maybe she would say yes...”
“She would.” He makes it sound so simple, so easy. “You’re the one who put him there, after all, and he’s your father. I think she’s been waiting for you to ask.”
I swallow, looking down at my toes. “He’s not my father. Not really. He abandoned me. That’s not what dads do.”