by Everly Frost
But it wasn’t what I expected.
I expected anger, the need to survive fueling a desire to hurt me. I didn’t expect to feel hunger, a fiery need to connect underpinned by curiosity. Her touch was seeking, questioning, demanding to know who I am.
The impact of her touch made me feel… hell… more powerful, not less.
But what really scares me is that I transferred emotions back to her. The power she stirred inside me bounced right back to her. She must have felt it, because after that she moved differently in the combat ring. The final hit to my lower back actually hurt, but it made my inner beast buzz like a happy puppy.
You could teach her how to fight. Like she wants you to. My beast is dangerously alert now and I need him to sleep. I can’t afford to lose control of him in front of a crowd of students and compliance officers.
No, I reply. It’s too dangerous.
She might not give you a choice. His response is a rebuke. I hate it when he forces me to face the truth. I like her, my beast continues. She speaks to me with the fire in her heart. I want to listen—
Shut up.
My response is dominant enough to make my beast back down. Peyton knows far too much about me. Admitting that I know what I am is the most reckless thing I’ve done all year. I try to decide whether I believe Peyton’s assertion that she doesn’t know her own power. The look on her face when she realized she was levitating couldn’t be faked. She was genuinely surprised—excited even.
I don’t think she’s a witch, unless she’s an extremely powerful one. Her power is fundamentally raw and emotional. Her ability to identify and call out a liar tells me that. She’s also profoundly angry, although that could be a result of our surroundings. I wish I could have observed her in a normal environment.
Hah, normal. I don’t know what normal looks like.
There’s no figuring her out.
As I approach a practicing post and lay into it hard enough to tear the skin across my knuckles, I force my beast to back down, blocking out his impulses and thoughts. I can’t afford to let Peyton trigger him again. Ever.
I need to not only put her out of my mind, but to put as much distance between her and me as possible.
It’s going to be nearly impossible.
I may as well try not to breathe.
14. Peyton Price
The compliance officers won’t let me sit here on my butt for long, but I need to think.
I just had my first magical manifestation and I don’t know how to feel about it. It’s not like a first kiss, or getting first place in a sprint, or winning a poetry competition. It’s not an achievement I can celebrate. My survival depends on it.
I want—need—to know what I am but if what Striker said is true, I have to be careful not to let anyone else know. Levitating is hardly a definitive answer about my powers. I might be a witch or I could have some sort of angelic powers. I could even be a bird shifter. Most supernaturals would laugh that I’m even considering the possibility that I’m a shifter since my mother has the power of invisibility and my father and brother are fire mages. There are no shifters in my immediate family and shifters are always born to other shifters—except in the case of the magically repressed. If I ask Lucinda what her parents are, she’s bound to tell me that there’s never been a witch in her family.
If Striker knows what his power his, then he must have learned how to control it. That’s the only way he can still keep it a secret. I have to find out how he’s doing it.
As I pick myself up off the grass, I take advantage of these last few seconds of being alone to survey the security at the back of the Academy. The tall electrified fence extends unbroken around the perimeter, telling me that the front gate is the only way in or out. There’s no garden apart from the rose bushes. No trees, sheds, or other visual obstructions. Nothing to hide behind.
In contrast, beyond the fence line, a forest obscures the rest of the world. It’s impossible to tell how far the forest extends in any direction. Every way I turn, all I see is trees. I make a mental note to get over my fear of heights and check out the landscape from the attic tonight.
Returning to the class, I also study the other students. There are too many for them to each get a practicing post of their own, so they’re sharing them—one on each side. What they’re doing looks more like physical punishment than any sort of combat training. Kicking and hitting a wooden post is a great way to make your knuckles and feet bleed.
On this side of the two practicing posts that I’m approaching, Joseph is kicking his post hard while Lachlan alternates between kicks and punches. I catch sight of Lucinda on the other side of Lachlan’s post and Ashley’s long, blonde hair flying behind Joseph’s.
Farther behind them, two students whose names I don’t know grapple each other in the ring, but neither has Striker’s skill. They’re trying their hardest, though.
As I draw nearer, I can see that Ashley’s whacking her post as if she doesn’t feel the impact, but she’s leaving bloody smears all over it. On the other hand, Lucinda’s pulling her punches as if she doesn’t want to connect. I hear her muttering with every hit, “Sorry, sorry, sorry…”
I don’t know what she’s apologizing for. The post can’t feel pain.
Just when I spy the only free practicing post and head toward it, Ms. Hawk’s shout pierces the air. “What a sorry bunch of losers! You’re all useless today. I’d keep you here until you were covered in blood, but the Headmistress insists on Academy Maintenance today.” She swings in my direction with a glare. “Since we had to skip it yesterday.”
I bite my tongue before I tell her I’m sorry my near death caused so much inconvenience.
“Get out of my sight! Bring your game tomorrow or I’ll switch up the rules again.”
The murmurs around me tell me changing the rules is a bad thing. I quickly grab my uniform and pull it on before I head to the dining room for lunch, sitting alone at what is now my table. I’m intensely aware that I’m sitting on the guys’ side of the room and that by me taking up a table of my own, they’re cramming themselves around the other two. The gender segregation seems strict and almost pointed.
When Lachlan approaches me with a determined expression, saying, “We need the table, Price,” I glare daggers at him.
“Walk away,” I say, twisting my plastic fork in the air as if it’s a deadly weapon. “Or you’ll end up like the harpy.”
With a flicker of annoyance, he turns away again, leaving me to eat in peace.
After lunch, Ms. Sparrow’s shrill voice announces that it’s time for Academy Maintenance. She swiftly assigns us to various tasks. The guys get the lucky job of cleaning toilets and washing floors. The girls get yard cleanup, which apparently involves cutting grass and pruning rose bushes.
Three of the girls end up behind push mowers. They quickly strip off their uniforms again, sweating in the sun as they push the noisy mowers around the yard.
Ms. Sparrow hands me a pair of pruning shears and a basket. “For cutting fresh flowers.”
I guess I’ll go skipping through the meadow while I’m at it. I already know there’s a bad wolf waiting for me at the end of this task.
When I test the weight of the shears in my hand, she gives me a patronizing look again. “They’re spelled to only cut wood. You can’t use them as a weapon.”
“I guess I’ll cut up some wands then,” I murmur, but only after she’s walked away. I consider the shears carefully as I approach the first rose bush, choosing one that’s farthest from the other girls. There has to be a way around the spell cast on the shears. All spells have limitations, parameters that can be breached. Only instinctive magic is unbeatable.
I head into the corridor between rose bushes and kneel on the grass, hoping ants don’t crawl up my pants while I’m sitting here. I know enough about rose bushes to know there’s an art to pruning them. I’m clueless what the technique is, though.
Why would anybody ever need this many rose bushes
in the first place? I consider myself lucky I’m not pushing a mower, but I’m sure my time will come.
Taking glances at the other girls, I note how they’re carefully thinning out the leaves, cutting only the roses that are in full bloom. I reach for the first flower just as Lucinda takes a seat on the other side of the grassy corridor, her back to me.
She doesn’t acknowledge me, and I don’t acknowledge her.
I snip the first rose, prune off the excess leaves, and place it carefully in my basket. For the next ten minutes, we sit in silence, broken only by the snip-snip of shears.
Silence doesn’t normally bother me, but she nearly got herself hurt this morning when she disarmed Ms. Sparrow. That’s on top of yesterday’s attempt to help me.
I don’t know if she’ll hear me when I whisper at the rose bush in front of me. “Thank you for trying to help me yesterday.”
There’s silence behind me. I guess she didn’t hear me. That’s probably just as well…
Her incredulous whisper reaches me. “I thought you didn’t care.”
I should say that I don’t. That I never will. Instead I remain silent as I carefully prune a wayward leaf from a rose stem.
When I glance Lucinda’s way, I find her studying me with a furious frown. I quickly turn back to my task, angle the gardening sheers, and carefully cut a rose, placing it in the basket at my side. It gives me an excuse to turn toward her again. “You didn’t freeze me out like the others when I first arrived. Why was that?”
She levels her gaze with mine. “A fake would never scream like you did.”
I freeze. She must be talking about the magical poultice the compliance officers subjected me to on my first day.
It hurt. A lot. But I didn’t know I’d been screaming until it was over.
My voice sounds strained to my own ears when I say, “You all thought I was a fake student.”
She turns back to her roses, her whispers remaining quiet. “The chances of another Unknown are a million to one, so we thought it had to be a trick. Especially when we heard you were going to sleep in the attic. We thought it was a ploy to get under Striker’s skin.”
I try to keep my tone even. “There was a pretend student before?”
Lucinda’s fingertips hover around the rose stem she’s pruning. “About a year ago. I’d been here for a few months when this girl, Kaitlyn, arrived. She was supposedly a repressed witch like me. She had these amazing brown eyes that sucked you in, you know. She was one of those chicks who guys can’t help wanting to protect.”
“What happened?”
“Striker fell hard.”
I jolt a little, piercing my finger on a thorn. Sucking on the wound, I murmur, “I’m having trouble imagining that.”
Lucinda twists, places a rose in her basket, and gives me a wide-eyed look that says I’d better believe it. “Every time one of the teachers hurt Kaitlyn, he was there, getting in their way, defending her. He spent more nights in the pit than ever before. He came out every morning bloody and cut up. That was the first beast—the one before the harpy.”
“What was it?” I whisper.
“It was an Orthrus—a two-headed dog.” She shivers. “That dog was a nightmare. It would…” She takes a deep breath. “It would sink its teeth into one of your limbs—arm or leg—but never deep enough to make you bleed out. It would drag you around for hours, just playing with you, you know.”
She shakes her head as if she’s shaking off terrible memories. “What Striker didn’t know… what none of us knew at the time… was that Kaitlyn was a spy. Her sole purpose was to cause Striker so much pain that he would have a flicker fit and finally reveal his power. Nothing they tried before had worked, you see.”
The fingertips she rests against the roses in her basket grip the stems suddenly, a reflexive action. “He came across her one night casting a beautification spell on herself—to make herself prettier. Those big, brown eyes weren’t natural after all. But beautification spells are complicated. If she really was repressed, there’s no way she could control that kind of magic.”
Lucinda shudders. A thorn pricks her fingers, a thin trickle of blood spilling from her hand, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Striker went berserk. He nearly killed her. Nearly killed his compliance officers. They had to lock him in the pit. That was the night he killed the Orthrus.”
She grimaces. “That dog was supposedly unkillable—just like the harpy. You Unknowns sure have a way of shaking things up.”
I swallow. “What happened to Kaitlyn?”
Lucinda sighs. “She waited for Striker to come out of the pit. He was all covered in blood and gore from ripping the Orthrus apart.” She shudders. “Kaitlyn laughed in his face and then she left. She was scared of him, though. We could all see it. His compliance officers were taken away—probably to a healer—and they never came back. Nobody was assigned to guard him after that.”
Before she falls silent, she says, “Striker wasn’t the same after that night. Now he only speaks with his fists.”
I stare at the rose I’m still clutching in my hand. “He thought I was another Kaitlyn, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
I ask the question I need to know. “Was that her wand this morning?”
“It was.” She sounds far too casual when she asks, “How did you know Kaitlyn was a liar?”
“I… felt it as soon as I picked up her wand.” I don’t want to tell Lucinda that I saw snatches of Kaitlyn’s memories: moments of Striker’s pain, his shouts from the pit, his body taking hits as he stood in front of her and made himself a physical shield, and then… moments of impossible tenderness that I struggle to reconcile with the Striker I know.
I quickly change the course of the conversation. “I guess they gave me her wand to play with his mind.”
Her shears snip. “No,” she says, shocking me with the certainty in her voice. “They gave it to you because he sees her when he looks at you. He’s taking out all his hate on you, Peyton. All the hate he couldn’t take out on her. If you’d unwittingly used her wand this morning, it would have made you an even greater target.”
I pause, but my hands are suddenly shaking. The Headmistress placed me in the room right next to his. The teachers make me sit next to him in every class. I have to share a bathroom. “So it’s about me.”
“The Headmistress gave up trying to make Draven reveal his power a year ago,” Lucinda says. “He may as well be one of the guards now. You’re their focus.” She turns to me with a sad frown. “I get that you were trying to protect us this morning, but you need friends, Peyton. I wouldn’t have survived the last year without Ashley and Joseph. Even Lachlan and Ryan have helped me through stuff. You don’t have to push us away. There’s nothing that hasn’t already been done to us, nothing that we haven’t survived already.”
She fixes her gaze on me, her bruised cheek dark and blotchy in the sunlight, a wry smile on her lips. “Besides, if there’s a good time to rebel a little, it’s now. Before they get a new beast for the pit.”
She holds the rose she just cut out to me. “Come sit with us at dinner.”
There’s a question in her voice.
I consider the flower. She’s right. I’m not going to survive on my own. The more I observe the Academy and its teachers, the more I realize that I’ll need help if I’m ever going to get out of here. And maybe… some of the other students will come with me.
I reach out and grasp the flower.
It’s time to take a chance on friendship.
15. Peyton Price
That night at dinner, I casually stride to Lucinda’s table and take a seat beside her. She doesn’t make a big deal out of it, which I appreciate, but when she hands me a cloth filled with ice, I annihilate my tough act by laugh-sobbing. “I don’t know where to use this first.”
An ice pack is like gold to me right now. Unexpected pain relief.
“Try your face,” she says, holding it up to my cheek.
�
�Where did you get it?” I ask, taking deep breaths to calm my emotions as the soothing cold seeps through my bruised skin.
“There’s an ice chest on our floor. You can get ice from there any time, but I guess they didn’t tell you that.”
I give a shake of my head. “They wouldn’t want to appear that caring.”
She introduces me to the other girl at the table along with Ashley. “This is Bree. She’s a repressed water mage. Bree has been here longer than me and Ashley.”
Bree gives me a smile. She has light brown hair and soft aquamarine eyes. “I’m all that’s left of the first intake.” She clears her throat. “Other than Striker, I mean. He was the first student here.” She leans forward. “His father set up Bloodwing with our elusive Founder. Until this academy was established, the magically repressed were kept isolated in their own homes. Sometimes they ‘disappeared’ or ‘ran away.’” She air quotes the events that often led to a magically repressed person’s demise.
Ashley shivers. “As much as I hate this place, the alternative is worse. A few years ago, in a couple of towns over from mine, a magically repressed girl was murdered and her killer walked free because the Magical Magnate determined that it was an act of pre-emptive self-defense. Her parents left the house unlocked so her killer could walk right in.”
I shudder. I hadn’t heard that story before, although I’d heard others where the killer was never identified.
“They say humans fear what they don’t understand,” Lucinda interjects. “But supernaturals do too.”
Striker arrives moments before Ms. Sparrow. He strides to the back table without looking in my direction, but I catch the swing of his gaze from where I was sitting solo this morning to where I’m located now. I don’t expect my shift to go unnoticed, but he doesn’t stop or miss a beat.
Ms. Sparrow waves her wand, muttering a spell, after which food and cutlery promptly appear on plastic plates on the table in front of us. She stalks out again, leaving us with the compliance officers. I find it oddly disturbing that I’ve stopped noticing the guards as much as I did when I first arrived. They’re becoming a bit like a knife lying on a kitchen bench—a potential threat, but part of the furniture. I can’t live my life in continual fear, so I’m blocking them out.