“Crew, what are you doing here?” I asked, my head peeking out from behind the door.
“I needed to talk to you,” he said. “I did tell you that, remember?”
“Yes, I—look, it got late and you were dancing,” I explained, “so I figured you had forgotten.”
“You could have reminded me,” he said, shuffling toward the threshold a little.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” I said. “Like I said, it’s late and I have a ton of work to do this weekend—”
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Crew said, his face turning serious.
My skin went cool and my brain chided me again.
See? It’s about work. How could you have ever thought it would be about anything else?
“Do you . . . have a minute?” he asked, when I didn’t say anything.
“I suppose,” I muttered.
“I was wondering if you would come somewhere with me,” he said.
I sighed. “I’m in my robe.”
“You can change,” he said, a hint of a grin on his lips. “I don’t mind waiting.”
No matter how much I wanted to keep to myself for the rest of the night and keep my distance from this man, so I didn’t continue to delude myself with the idea that our spending time together might mean something, I knew I couldn’t tell him ‘no’.
“Fine. Just a minute.”
I closed the door. My heart pounded despite the deep breaths I took to try to calm it.
As I slipped out of my robe and into leggings and a t-shirt, I shook my head at myself.
This is not the time to go boy crazy, like a stupid, careless teenager, over a colleague you just met.
Stepping into my slip-on joggers, I opened the door again, pulling them up over my heels one at a time.
“Ready?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Alright,” he said with a smile, “let’s go.”
* * *
He led me to my classroom, a large round room in one of the two main towers of Shadow Lane Academy. The entrance was located at the top of an arc-shaped wall and desks lined the north side of the room, leaving the south side open for demonstrations.
Last year, I had had the desks spread across the room evenly, filling the whole chamber, with just enough room for my chalkboard at the far end. But this year we had been up and moving around a lot more, which wasn’t my preference. I was definitely more of a book-study type teacher.
Crew jogged to the far end of the room and opened the storage room door behind my desk. He pulled out Sentry dummy after Sentry dummy, swiveling them out of his way, on their wheels, as he moved farther and farther into the storage room. I had about ten in there.
My heart stopped and I froze however, when he emerged from the storage room holding a real Sentry. His muscles tensed and his face reddened slightly as he hauled the seven foot steel monstrosity out toward me.
“Crew, what the hell?” I finally managed to utter, my voice feeble in my shock.
“I brought this with me,” he said as he set it down in the middle of the room.
“It’s real!” I barked, some strength returned to my vocal chords.
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “I know.”
“What if—I mean—how can this be safe?” I sputtered.
I had only been near a real Sentry once in my life, just a few months earlier, and it hadn’t ended well. I had fainted as soon as it came near me, and if it hadn’t been for Iris and the shop owner immobilizing it, long enough to haul me out of the store to momentary safety, who knows what might have happened to me.
“Don’t worry.” He grinned softly at me. “Sentry Force rewired this one, so that it produces an area of pure light that is only a fraction of the size of a full-strength Sentry. I am in complete control of when it powers on and off.”
“We can’t use this with the kids,” I muttered, shaking my head. “At least not without sending a letter to the parents—”
“This one isn’t for the kids,” Crew replied. He rapped his knuckles against the shiny steel torso, sending a metallic ding echoing through the round chamber. “It’s for you.”
My stomach sank, partly from nerves, but also because I finally put together what was going on.
“I see you have had plenty of time to discuss my ineptitude with Headmaster Greymore,” I grumbled. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Marigold, no—”
“I’m so hopeless he thinks he has to get the best in the world just to get me up to speed and save him embarrassment?” I snapped.
“I am hardly the best in the world and that’s not it at all,” Crew argued, stepping away from the Sentry and toward me. His hands found my shoulders and my skin prickled under his touch.
He cocked his head and his eyes narrowed as they searched mine intently. I could hardly breathe as his face inched closer to mine.
“He hasn’t told you why I’m here?” he murmured, a hint of question in his tone.
I couldn’t speak through my tightened throat, so I shook my head ‘no’.
“The whole teacher thing is a ruse,” he explained, his face more serious than I had seen it all day, “—a cover, so that the students and parents won’t panic. Sentry Force sent me and Layni here.”
“What?” I uttered. “I don’t—”
“We have intelligence that suggests that one of the Sentries’ targets is currently here,” he said. “At Shadow Lane.”
CHAPTER SIX
My head spun. My body threatened to go with it, but thanks to Crew’s grip on my shoulders, I barely moved at all.
“I’m sorry, I thought—I thought maybe you knew,” he said softly.
“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “My father likes to keep me in the dark. He didn’t tell me anything about the ‘changes’ he announced this morning. He didn’t tell me any of this.”
“Well, when we met with him a few weeks ago, to let him know what we had discovered and to work all this out, he did ask if I would protect you,” Crew said. “I told him ‘yes’.”
I clenched my jaw and my fists. I hated that my father saw me as a little helpless girl that needed a big man to protect her.
“So, I am going to do just that,” he said. “I am a man of my word.”
“I don’t want it—” I started, but he stepped back and held up a hand.
“I’m going to teach you,” he interrupted, “how to protect yourself.”
I snorted a laugh through my nose.
“I don’t know anything about your past efforts, and I don’t care,” he said before I could launch into a description of how awful I was.
“Oh, why, because you’re so amazing that you can teach anyone?” I teased, realizing too late my tone was much snarkier than I had intended.
He shook his head. “No, because I know you can do it,” he said. “Anyone can.”
“You overestimate me,” I chuckled.
“You underestimate yourself,” he countered, his face still serious but his voice softer than ever. Then his lips split to reveal gleaming pearly teeth curled into a smirk. “And yes, I am pretty damn amazing at this,” he joked.
I smiled and let out a laughing breath through my nose, but on the inside I was still terrified.
“Do they—does Sentry Force—know who the target is? Do they have any ideas?” I asked, my throat tight and my tone hesitant.
He shook his head. “Unfortunately no, but we expect a scout mission sometime soon: possibly this week. Hopefully that will tell us more, if we can capture one and research it for clues.”
“Sentry scouts are coming here?!” I uttered. “This week?!”
“Possibly,” he said in a soothing voice, placing a hand on my back as he situated himself next to me, and facing the Sentry. “So, we should get to work, right?”
“Right now?” I coughed.
“Preparation is the key to success,” he chimed.
I whipped my head to the right to look at
him. “How did you know I say that?” I asked. “How much time did my father spend telling you about his daughters?”
“Very little, actually,” he grinned, turning his head to face me. “Mostly it was about what your job is here. He said that you’re the responsible one, Iris is the wild one, and you’re both extremely talented, intelligent, and too beautiful for your own good. He also said that I definitely shouldn’t get involved with either one of you or he’ll have me run out of New York City.”
My stomach flipped and twisted and my chest filled with a strange electricity that I wasn’t sure I had felt before.
He pointed past the Sentry to a cross-stitch hanging on the wall behind my desk.
A student had given it to me after my first year of teaching. It was a scene of a princess, in black robes, protecting herself from an onslaught of flames from a huge green dragon, using a giant magical shield. Above the scene were the words the students had teased me for saying every day that year: ‘Preparation is the key to success’.
“It’s cute,” he said. “And it’s correct. If you tell it to your students, you should tell it to yourself.”
“I do,” I said.
“Good, then let’s start preparing.”
Icy sludge sloshed through my insides and my pulse pounded in my ears and neck. My hands began to shake, and so did my legs, as Crew muttered an incantation and the Sentry whirred and buzzed to life.
As Crew had mentioned, the typical bright, blinding light was absent; replaced with a dim, blue glow. Even though this Sentry had been reconfigured to be less powerful, I backed up, putting several feet between us but I still felt its heat. The familiar, world-ending, life-scorching heat that had knocked me out earlier in the year, in that nightmarish encounter.
I ran over everything, every spell and every strategy, I had learned from my research but as it lumbered toward me I couldn’t focus on a single one.
“Each Sentry has a core,” Crew stated, his lips near my right ear. “There are many ways to disable the core, and that’s the surest way to stop a Sentry.”
“How do I find it?” I asked, searching the metal monstrosity in front of me for clues.
“You feel it,” he answered.
“Okay, then, what does it feel like?”
“Close your eyes,” he murmured.
“That doesn’t seem smart—”
“Close them.”
I did as he suggested, resisting the urge to keep one eye open and fixed on the Sentry. My heart raced and my whole body shook.
“Imagine there’s a star; a tiny white-hot ball of flaming gas,” he started, and I pictured it in my head behind my closed eyes. “It's in a case, or a glass orb—something, it doesn’t matter. It’s contained, but now it's getting too hot to remain contained; it’s becoming brighter and brighter, until it shatters its container. Then, when it has become so hot that it has melted everything around it, it dies, and starts sucking everything into its death void.”
We took a deep breath in unintentional unison and he whispered. “Do you feel that?”
I nodded. As he had narrated, I had started to sense a strong deposit of energy a few feet away from me. Locking onto it, just as I would a magic source, I opened my eyes and saw that the Sentry was within a few steps of me, its arms outstretched as if it meant to grab me.
How to dismantle the core?
Crew’s words stuck in my brain. Too hot. Too hot until it burns out and dies.
I took a step backward and my backside hit a desk. Backing up would be more difficult now. I was out of space and needed to decide.
Overload it.
Focusing on the energy source, I believed to be the core; I raised my hands and thought of the incantation for the best pure energy spell I knew—lightning bolt. Ulgar Fulmenos.
Electricity crackled at my fingertips, then built into wiry, forked tines that looked like claws of light, until finally enough power had built up to shoot out a bolt, straight in front of me, aimed at the Sentry’s core.
The Sentry twitched as the core revved audibly. Then, to my horror, the heat increased. The dim glow turned to blinding-blue shafts of light. Its lumbering, languid steps suddenly picked up the pace and it leapt at us, closing the gap in a matter of seconds.
Heat filled my bones, just as it had the first and only other time I’d come face-to-face with a Sentry, and I stumbled backward as my head throbbed and my vision blurred. Tripping over a chair, I started to plummet to the floor, but Crew swooped me up before I fell and suddenly the Sentry stopped.
The light went out and it froze in place like a steel sculpture with a horrifying, dead-eyed mask.
The fear, pain, exhaustion and failure all hit me at the same time as Crew set me down in a chair. I wanted to cry, but I pursed my lips together and swallowed to keep from doing it in front of him.
“That was really good,” he said, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder again.
“You’re just saying that,” I laughed, choking on an almost-sob.
“No! No, I’m not,” he said with a warm smile. “I overload cores all the time. It’s really smart. Most people go for some sort of physical destruction or detachment, which works, too, but tends to require more effort. Using the Sentry’s own mechanics against it is really intelligent.”
“It didn’t work!” I groaned in frustration, throwing my hands up.
“It did, actually,” he chuckled. “That tactic just doesn’t work on the underpowered practice Sentries. Basically, you turned it up to regular function. If you had done it again at that point . . .” he trailed off and made an explosion sound while flicking his fingers open.
I sighed; feeling a little bit better that it had almost worked. At least I was on the right track.
“I should have told you to do it again, but I—I don’t know. It got so close to you, I kind of panicked.” He shrugged. “I don’t usually teach other people. I’m pretty used to just doing my own thing. I don’t want to put you in danger.”
“It sounds as if I’m going to be in danger whether you put me there or not,” I murmured softly, remembering the possibility of a Sentry, or Sentries, coming to Shadow Lane.
“You’re right,” he said with a nod. “Unfortunately, you are absolutely right.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Once I had regained some strength and lost the shakiness in my legs, Crew walked me back to my room, his hand rarely leaving my shoulder. Usually that would have bothered me, but it didn’t with him.
When we reached my door, he said, “You really did do a good job tonight.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I laughed nervously, “still, thank you.”
I put my hand on the knob, but he took me by the shoulders and gently spun me around to face him.
“I threw a lot at you and I didn’t even warn you. It’s been a long day on top of that. I just—don’t be hard on yourself. Please, please don’t give up,” he said, practically begging, as his hands squeezed my biceps.
“I won’t,” I murmured, losing myself in his electrifying eyes. They were almost the same color as the Sentry’s light . . .
HIs voice interrupted my musings. “Do you have time tomorrow?” he asked. “I think I might also need a little help to prepare for being a teacher.” He laughed softly, looking down at the floor in a moment of what seemed like self-consciousness, something I didn’t expect from a strong, handsome twenty-something man of his success and renown.
I nodded. “Sure. What time?”
“What does everyone do for Sunday brunch around here?” He looked up and grinned.
“There are a few places we used to go to in the city, but . . . well, since Sentry attacks have become more common, we mostly stay around here,” I answered.
“What’s your favorite place?” he asked.
“The Harold,” I answered immediately. It had been my favorite restaurant since my mother and father had taken Iris and me to the Empire State Building, when I was ten and she was seven.
&n
bsp; “Mimosa or Bloody Mary?” he asked, his grin curling his square, five-o’clock-shadowed face further up.
“Bloody Mary.”
“Eggs Benedict or omelet?”
“Neither. Croque Madame. Split an order of French Toast.”
“That’s a lot of bread,” he laughed, his grin turning into a smile. “which is good. You’re gonna need as much energy as you can get.” He gave my shoulders a quick squeeze before dropping his arms and backing away. “I’ll meet you out front at ten.”
“Wait, we’re not actually going out tomorrow morning—”
He smiled as he backed down the hallway and threw his hands up. “Hey, I’m a teacher at Shadow Lane, now.” He winked at me playfully. “When in Rome, right?”
I had a thousand questions and a handful of arguments, as I watched him turn and walk away. What about the potential Sentry attack? Shouldn’t we skip brunch and get to work earlier? Is Manhattan safe for us right now?
Truth be told, I wanted to go out with him—even if it was just for brunch before we got to ‘work’.
I opened my door and went into my room. I changed into a nightgown and got into bed, but too many thoughts swirled around in my brain to let me fall asleep. After what felt like an hour of restlessness, I finally conjured myself a sleepy tea, knowing that I might not be able to fall asleep at all, if I didn’t do something to relax.
* * *
At nine thirty the next morning, I had just about finished getting ready, when I heard a knock on the door. I jumped and my heart raced. I thought Crew had said to meet him out front of the academy? At ten.
I walked to the door and opened it and Iris looked me up and down.
“Are you straightening your hair?!” she uttered in shock and amusement.
I yanked her into my room by her arm and shut the door.
“And skinny jeans—where are you going?” she demanded.
“To brunch in the city,” I answered, keeping my voice down.
“With whom?” she interrogated, crossing her arms and jutting her hip out to the side.
Bonded by Fae's Magic Page 3