Tala Phoenix and the School of Secrets

by Gabby Fawkes

“C’mon,” Axel said to us. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s too crowded here.”

  It occurred to me then that everyone was staring at us.

  “What happened to Barnacle Skin?” Kian asked as we made our way up the stairs, which creaked perilously.

  “Someone tried to drown him,” Axel said easily.

  “Looks like they succeeded,” she said.

  “They did,” he said, just as easily.

  By now we were passing a second level, which featured a strange table surrounded by what looked to be coyotes, and another table with linebacker-sized men and women who looked like Hulda’s relatives. The third level had only one other group there, several red-haired women who looked like sisters, and who glared at Axel as we passed.

  He chose a spot at the far window, with a table that, as soon as we sat down, literally started hopping from one foot to another, upsetting the water that Axel put down. For a second, I thought the whole place was wobbling, but then I saw that no other furniture was hopping, while the redheaded women were smirking to themselves.

  Axel didn’t share their amusement. With one big slap, his hand slammed the table to the ground and it stayed there.

  When he lifted his hand, there was an indent in the table in the shape of his fingers.

  “Now,” he said, all civility, as he carefully picked up his fallen water glass and placed it on the table. “We can begin.”

  The rest of us choose rickety seats beside each other, ones that thankfully did not hop.

  As soon as he slid the drinks our way, Demi looked into their swamp-colored contents dubiously, and said, “We’re only 18.”

  For some reason, Axel’s gaze flicked my way. “Really?”

  “We did say we were in school,” Kian pointed out.

  “And what’s the drinking age in… where you’re from?” he said.

  Kian looked like she had a mind to lie, but then, clearly ill-at-ease accepting a mud-colored drink from a near-stranger, said, “Twenty-one.”

  Axel blinked. In one smooth movement, he transferred all three drinks in front of himself, then shoved the empty water glass our way.

  “You three can share then.”

  “Thanks,” I said, deadpan.

  “Now finally,” he said. “We can begin.”

  As we sat there silent, his expression grew more frustrated. “Thought you three were bursting with questions.”

  “It’s not like we know we can trust you,” Kian said.

  “Maybe,” he said flatly. “I’m your best bet right now though.”

  “He did take us where he said he would,” Demi said.

  “Okay,” I said. Might as well go for the big one first. “So magic is real?”

  Eyeing me, Axel’s dark brows lowered. His full lips spread into something that might have been a thin smile. “Yes. It is real.” He tipped his head in the direction of the table of women behind us. “For your fiftieth proof of the day, just watch what those three are doing.”

  We twisted around to see the three redheads tapping at their big stew bowl hastily. Abruptly it changed size, color, and texture - with little shrimp-looking shapes appearing in it.

  “Linnie, I swear to God,” the curly-haired one was saying. “If you hate the food here so much, why even come?”

  “Bad habits die hard,” the short-haired one sighed, shoving her spoon into the liquid at the same time as she lifted her eyes.

  “Sisters,” she said sharply.

  All of them looked our way, and we quickly turned away.

  “Okay, so magic’s real,” Kian said in a not-entirely-convinced voice. “What about the dead dragons then – you’re telling me that a bunch of dragons just randomly turned up dead in the Chico forest and only we noticed?”

  “Yeah – and no,” Axel said. “Every magical person on the planet heard about it. How could they not? It’s the biggest mass-slaughter of dragons ever. Twenty-four turn up dead and burning. We were just lucky it was in a wildfire zone, so the DSA could play it off easy for the reggies.”

  “The what now?” I said.

  “The regular people,” he said. “Nonmagical and nonmagically-aware people.”

  That was a whole cauldron of questions on its own, but right now Axel had mentioned something more pertinent to my friends and me.

  “And the DSA are…”

  “Magical, but they have a reggie department too. Reggies know to call the DSA when anything weird or inexplicable happens. DSA is top-secret, even for us magical people.” Axel took a big gulp of his mud-colored drink, his eyes never leaving us. “You girls told me you came from some unknown school. It was nonmagical?”

  “Yep,” I said. “As nonmagical as they come. Or maybe not. We were crazy orphans, so every few months you’d hear some conspiracy craziness. And then when we stopped taking the pills… things started happening.”

  “Things like seeing dragons on the TV,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “That was before, actually. We stumbled on the TV, and then we stopped taking the pills after.”

  “Stumbled on the TV…” Axel said thoughtfully, eyeing me pointedly – What more to the story are you not telling me?

  All Demi said was, “Only kids are allowed to watch much TV. It’s not good for teens’ developing brains.”

  Another eyebrow raise, but Axel moved on. “What happens to graduates of your school, and why have I never heard of it?”

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  “And what does the DSA have to do with it?”

  “That’s what we were wondering. We’d just have a guest or two at our yearly Founder’s Assembly who was apparently DSA.”

  Axel’s fingers clenched around his cup. “Okay. So how are you all here now?”

  “You first,” I found myself saying. “What were you doing in the woods?”

  Axel shrugged. “Investigating the dragon killing. The DSA claims it’s still under investigation, but there’s been no new developments in weeks. No new developments at all, in fact.”

  His gaze returned to me pointedly. I showed you mine, now you show me yours.

  “We ran away from the school,” Demi said. “They took our friend, transferred him – we don’t know where. They were going to do the same to us and so… we ran away.”

  Talk about just blurting out the good stuff. Although the more we talked to Axel, the more I felt like we could trust him. At least, for once the voice inside my head wasn’t yelling ‘burn the liar.’

  Now Axel was on his second drink, which I didn’t in any way understand was like a horny toad, what I’d heard him order from Cruestacio. Come to think of it, his spilled water had had two horns of water poking up, but his drink now was just a muddy green, with no sign of horns whatsoever.

  “Your school sounds like a prison,” Axel was saying. “Anyone else escape?”

  “Not that we know of,” I said. “I mean, it was surrounded by a lit-up forest and an electrical fence.”

  He put his drink down. “And you all got through that?’

  “Yeah, the electrical fence just, kind of, fell away when I ran at it,” I said lamely.

  “That’s the other thing,” Kian jumped in. “Tala did that, then has this psycho voice in her head. Demi made some random plants grow. And I somehow got these army guys thinking my friends and I went another way when we ran off, and my hands glow sometimes. So…”

  “You three are magical, yeah,” Axel said, his appraising gaze back on us. “Though I’ve no clue what exactly you are.”

  His gaze lingered on me the longest. I just glared at Kian. Even if Axel was a dick, he was a hot dick – not exactly the kind of person you wanted to know about your psycho in-head voice.

  Mmm, the voice purred in my head.

  I groaned.

  “What?” Axel said.

  My cheeks heated up and I scrunched my eyes closed. Kill me now. “Just… this is a lot to take in all at once.”

  Especially with a man whose bed you should be sharing, the
voice said primly.

  -CAN YOU NOT!

  My eyes snapped open.

  “Tala?” Demi said, clearly picking up on my unease.

  “Just...” I began, wracking my brain to make sense of the words and feelings all bashing into each other in me. “What now?”

  “What now, indeed…” Axel said. He’d finished his third drink at some point and was now dragging his gaze across us, as if there he’d find the answer. He rose. “Now I’m taking you all to Olympus. I’ve friends there who’ll know what to do.”

  A chair scraped across the floor.

  One of the women at the other table had risen, her green eyes blazing as much as her red curls.

  “That is not happening.”

  16

  Axel ripped a hand through his dark hair. His frost eyes flashed dangerously.

  Yep, he looked way scarier… and hotter when he was pissed.

  “And why not?”

  The straight-haired woman rose and lifted her stick (wand?) too. “You think we don’t know who you are?”

  Damn. In all the somersault of magic and school talk, my friends and I hadn’t even asked him that. Was he a witch, like these women seemed to be? Where was his wand then?

  Axel’s face, for the first time, flickered. “I’ve changed. There’s a reason I’ve been gone the past few centuries.”

  “We’re not buying a word you say, you murderous bastard!” the short-haired one spat, leaping to her feet and brandishing her stick-wand.

  All their cutlery swept up into the air, pointing at him, with knife-sides out. Count that Magical Proof #fifty-whatever.

  Her bulging green-eyed gaze flickered our way, grew pleading, kindly. “That… monster is not safe. He’s a bloodthirsty murderer. You girls have to come with us.”

  Talk about pitch of the year. All the blood had drained from Axel’s face and my whole body vibrated with the recognition of her words.

  The straight-haired redhead looked less sure than the others. “Minnie. Are you sure…”

  “Of course she’s not!” the curly-haired one snapped. “But we can’t let them just go with him.”

  “But the DSA should be…” the straight-haired one said.

  “Disbanded and made to carry out a transparent policy involving the consent of the magical community at large,” snapped the short-haired one who I’d figured out was Minnie, flapping her wand-holding hand. “I don’t trust them, almost as little as I trust…”

  She indicated Axel, who held up both hands. “Ladies, please,” he said. “I assure you that assaulting me will not go well for you.”

  Minnie’s eyes flashed. A second later, Axel ducked and the cutlery embedded into the wall behind him. Now that I was looking at it, the wall had clearly been through its fair share of battles – carved out-messages, three-pronged and fist-sized holes amidst random stains.

  A squawk sounded. Cruestacio was standing at the top of the staircase, Gully on his shoulder.

  “CANNAE YE BE READIN’!” he roared, jabbing what looked to be a cucumber at the far wall. Whose sign, admittedly, I hadn’t noticed until now. But there it was, in big block letters, FIGHTERS WILL BE TOSSED.

  As the redheads (witches?) lowered their wands, I glanced uneasily at the window we’d be sitting near. Did he actually mean…

  “Sorry Cru,” the curly-haired woman was saying.

  “DINNAE SORRY ME!” he cried, already turning away as he jabbed the cucumber behind him back at the sign again. “BE READIN’!”

  And with that, he left.

  “Linnie, you fool,” Minnie hissed to the straight-haired one, although she didn’t tear her glare off Axel.

  “I couldn’t just let him…” Linnie said quietly. She rounded on Axel, both hands fisted. “We won’t let you leave here with them. They’re innocent, unwary. They deserve to go somewhere with good people, somewhere safe.”

  “I won’t leave here without them, either,” Axel said. “You’re completely right. They do deserve to go somewhere safe. Not some free-for-all underworld where there’s as much crime as…”

  “Don’t you dare speak of Mathusalem!” Minnie spat. “You know nothing of it. Just because your precious Olympus is high up in the sky doesn’t mean a thing. Pandora’s box has awoken, and they say there’s only a matter of time before it opens.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Axel said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Do we get a say in all this?” Kian wondered aloud, but no one noticed.

  “What do you guys think?” I said in an undertone to my friends.

  “Witches all the way,” Kian said. “You heard them, they called Axel a…”

  “They lied!” he said, his face twisted. “I might have before… done...” He shook his head wildly. “It doesn’t matter. Now I’ve changed.”

  “If you really have changed, then you’ll let them go with us,” the curly-haired witch said tersely. “Anyway, our sisters and brothers are scattered throughout the pub. You know you’ll never manage to fight your way out.”

  Axel cocked his head slightly. “Just as you know the extent of my powers. That if you try to part me from these girls, I will break you.”

  He took a step in front of me and I shivered. From fear– or attraction?

  The god is the one… the voice was urging me unhelpfully. You can burn the others for all I care.

  Looks like my psycho voice was back to its old steady – burning as the fix-all solution. My arms and hands were burning up, but I dug my nails into my palm.

  “Fine,” Axel said. “How’s this – we all go to Athena. See what she says.”

  “Athena,” the curly-haired one, Winnie, said with a sniff, tossing her head.

  “Got a better idea?”

  “No,” Minnie admitted.

  Turning away and tipping her head together with the other redheads, they consulted. I wondered if they realized that Axel could most likely hear every word they said, and if they cared.

  “Fine,” Winnie said, turning back. “But know this: regardless of what your sister decides, we are not letting you take those girls anywhere.”

  “You don’t even know what they are,” Axel snapped.

  “Nor do you,” the witches said.

  “They wouldn’t be prisoners,” he insisted, “Together, we’d try and find out-”

  “We better get going,” Minnie said, striding past him. “Our soup is already ruined, and Linnie becomes a terrific beast if she isn’t fed well.”

  Her smile became kindly as she regarded us. “You’ll see. Us in the magical community – witches really, are honest, kind, good.”

  I tried to give her a kindly smile back. She was telling the truth too, was genuinely good, I sensed, which didn’t make our situation any easier. Now it looked like my friends and I had four would-be companions.

  All I could do was glance helplessly at my friends as we were escorted back down the staircase. Looked like things had just gotten a hell of a lot more complex.

  We went all the way to the slab-doored bathroom on the first floor without speaking.

  “But I thought we arrived…” I began as we went in.

  “Cru doesn’t want too many people coming in and out of here at once,” Winnie explained. “So he has the entrance portadoor on the walkway, then the departure one here. Has enough trouble keeping this place clean as it is.”

  She cast a disdainful look at the tilted ceiling, where several balled-up wads of toilet paper were stuck with what looked like, most weirdly of all, cotton candy and a few donuts. “Sprites.”

  There was also a bathtub, weirdly enough, in this place.

  Shutting the door, Axel held the knob and yelled, “New York Public Library!”

  I was about to ask another question, when my voice was pulled right out of me.

  When I got my breath again, I stumbled over an upturned baby carriage, which was covered in dust and dirt.

  “This doesn’t look like a library,” Kian muttered, l
ooking around.

  It couldn’t be. On the ceiling above us there were so many spider webs it looked like someone had hung a wispy shawl up there.

  “C’mon,” Minnie said briskly. “Move along now.”

  “The longer we tarry and tully about, the more risk you three have of being spotted,” Winnie said with a supportive pat on our shoulders.

  “Travel in the lap of luxury, these guys,” Kian muttered to me, crinkling her nose.

  She had a point. As we made our way along the hallway, passing room after room, it became increasing clear that this was an abandoned house. The missing floorboards, graffiti-ed walls, broken plaster and bashed-in toilet and bed frame left little doubt of that.

  “Hey, Tala,” Kian called from somewhere. I turned to see a hand giving me the finger through the wall.

  “That’s enough,” Axel snapped.

  “Whatever,” Kian said.

  “We do this for the reggies’ benefit,” Linnie explained as we continued on. “We keep our portadoors out of the way, near actual bus stops wherever we can find them. Helps us keep track of where they are if we don’t have a map handy.”

  “You guys have maps?” Demi said. “What kind?”

  “What did I say about hurrying?” Axel demanded.

  We quieted down, although Winnie passed Demi a map and, in an undertone, said, “Press it to the wall.”

  Demi did as told, and we gasped as the label ‘New York City – Abandoned Bath Family House Station’ materialized on the front as well as a You Are Here-labelled dot moving from one room to the next. Demi tapped the map with her finger and the view diminished, until we saw the label Piller Street was added and we were just a hard-to-see dot in a house, about to get outside.

  “Not exactly how I’d hoped to see the Big Apple,” Kian said loftily as we exited the building, “But it’ll do.”

  “Carpe noctum,” I said, and she smiled.

  It was night after all, though us ‘seizing’ it seemed highly unlikely. The whole using Latin thing here seemed weird too. Almost like it was just the gang again and things were back to normal. Even though they were as far from normal as they’d ever been.

  We were accompanied by three sister witches and one angry crazy fast and strong magical asshole. Not to mention that Jeremy was still gone. In all the craziness of the past hours, I was ashamed to realize I’d almost forgotten about him.