by Jaymin Eve
It was too late though. The moment I felt my safety was compromised I was out of there—an instinct that had saved my life more than once growing up. Spinning, I got no more than a single step in before I slammed into a hard wall. Strong hands wrapped around my biceps, stopping me from bouncing back into the table. I knew before I even lifted my head that it was going to be another one of the five. I hoped it was Calen, because the devil you know … but my luck had officially run out.
Sea-green eyes streaked with silver met mine—it was almost as if silver had been melted through his irises, that’s how bright it was. Even through my jacket, I could feel the heat of his hands, and my heart started to race as I fought against myself. I needed to get away, but I couldn’t make my legs move.
Asher continued to run that disconcerting gaze over me, and I wondered how the fuck he was real. Lashes that were dark and thick framed his eyes, topping a nose that was straight and proud, no sign of ever being broken, unlike most of the dudes I knew back home. His skin was golden … bronze … and his face was strong and perfect, like every piece of him had been hand selected and assembled by those many gods they worshipped.
He towered over me, almost as tall as Jesse. “Uh,” I stuttered, both of us doing the silent staring thing for an uncomfortably long time. “Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t scowling like Rone, so I took that as a positive sign. When his full lips finally curved, the slightest outline of dimples appeared, and I all but groaned. He probably had a huge…
My eyes trailed down him, and I jerked my gaze back up. Yep, not a single flaw I could see on him.
Was it fair that one person … supe … got to be so perfect? No, it wasn’t.
13
Before things could get embarrassing—and we might have already been past that point, I was too flustered to tell—Ilia and Larissa appeared like the guardian angel friends they were and all but hoisted me out of Asher’s hands and into a safe space away from the “kings of the Academy.”
Then we were walking, and I was still unsure about what the hell had just happened. The only thing I knew was I could still feel the burning imprints of his hands.
“What are you doing?” Larissa hissed as we hurried through the tables. “You were sitting with them?”
I choked out a strangled sound. “I—I didn’t realize it was their table. I— Fuck…”
When Ilia was satisfied that we were far enough away, hidden behind two ivy-covered pillars, she released my arm and got right in my face. “Holy shit, Maddi! We leave you alone for twenty minutes and you end up in the midst of them!” Her shock faded away to be replaced by a huge smile. “Tell me every. Goddamn. Thing.”
Larissa wasn’t quite as excited. “You ran from them last night, but today you sat with them… I don’t understand?”
“I don’t understand either,” I replied. “It was only Jesse at first and then Axl, and it didn’t even seem that weird.” My breathing was finally starting to calm. “Is it an Atlantean thing?” I asked. “Because I wasn’t afraid of them; I didn’t want to leave.”
“Like I told you, they’re nice and scary, and you never know what you’re going to get,” Ilia said, her eyes shifting back to the general direction of where they were, even though she couldn’t see them through the pillar.
I shook my head. “Jesse ate so much food … and he even offered to share it with me—”
I was cut off by a huge gasp. This came from Ilia, and she was blinking at me like I’d just told her that the world was going to end tomorrow.
“He offered you food?” she asked, and I tilted my head as I squinted in her direction.
“Yeah, but I mean, he ordered like eight meals. I’m sure he wouldn’t have missed a few bites.”
Larissa cleared her throat. “Did you take the food?”
I looked between both of them. “Should I have taken it?” I asked hesitantly.
I was missing something here, one of those “rules” or “etiquettes” of this world.
Larissa and Ilia exchanged a quick look, and I was about to yell at them to just tell me already, when Ilia answered, “Shifters are very primal. A lot of their instincts go back to their animals within. And there are some things that are universal between them all. Food is a bonding experience. They love it. They revel in it. It’s an experience for them. If a shifter offers you some of their food, it’s about more than just sharing. It’s about pack. About even … romance, sometimes.”
I swallowed hard. “So, Jesse was like … shifter-style flirting with me?”
Ilia shrugged, and Larissa nodded.
“He was definitely doing something,” Ilia added. “Only time will tell what that something was.”
“Be wary,” Larissa said seriously. “Jesse has a long-term girl: Chellie. I mean, they’re off and on all the time, and I heard it’s definitely off right now, but she can be a real bitch when someone tries to touch her man.”
“Even when they don’t,” Ilia said with a snort of laughter. “She’s the other mean girl in the school and is best friends with Kate.”
Well, great. I now probably had two bitches gunning for me. I hadn’t seen the Clovers at lunch, thankfully, so maybe they wouldn’t find out.
“Well, I’m relieved to say that I didn’t take his food, so hopefully he’ll see that as a rejection.” And stop shifter flirting and creating a huge issue for me.
Ilia lifted her hands and pressed her palms to her chest, and then to either side of her forehead, leaving just the tips of her fingers sticking up above the side of her head. “From your mouth to the mother god’s ears.”
A prayer gesture.
I had so much to learn.
The music rang out across the air again, the magic tingled in my blood, and I realized that lunch was over. Wow, that two hours had felt like five minutes, and I’d barely even seen my friends.
“Sorry we were late for lunch,” Ilia said, looking around as students started to move. “I got caught up with Princeps Jones. He needed some advice on another bounty they’re searching for. A bear shifter who has been living in a forest in Germany… Anyway, it took longer than I expected.”
“And I had a group project,” Larissa added, “that ran way over in my last class. I mean, trying to get a vampire and fey to stop arguing with each other took half the lesson, and then there was no time for actual work.”
I laughed and shook my head. “It’s totally fine. I don’t need to be babysat. You do your thing and I know we’ll find each other at some point.”
I’d been independent my entire life; it was enough to know they were there. That they had my back.
The girls dropped me off at my next class, which was back in the classroom section. I had no idea what to expect from Demon Mythology 101, because all I knew about demons was that they were soul-sucking entities from hell. I was interested to find out what was real and fake in the human lore on them.
Dropping my fancy bag beside my table, I waited for the class to begin. It was filling with a lot of students that I’d seen in my last classes, and a few I hadn’t. Curious expressions met mine, and two hostile ones from pretty, dark-haired chicks. They looked so similar that I guessed they were twins.
I had no idea how they could have hated me already, since I hadn’t ever seen either of them before. I must have stared a little too long, because one of them sneered at me. “Whore,” she muttered. “Think you can stroll in and take the Atlantean-five?”
Ah, right. This was about me sitting with Jesse and Axl. No wonder everyone was staring at me. I’d definitely broken some kind of unspoken rule at lunch. I returned her glare with one of my own. “I didn’t take anything,” I said, not showing an ounce of weakness. “If they wanted you, then they would be with you. Don’t blame me for your lack of—”
The teacher breezed into the room then and I cut myself off. Both brunette bitches shot me one last glare before they swung in unison to face the front of the room. Tw
ins that spent a little too much time together.
No one sat at the desks on either side of me; I tried not to take offence to that. I was pretty used to making social fuckups. This was par for the course. Simon wasn’t in this class with me, which was a disappointment. I’d have to ask him for his schedule next time I saw him.
Focusing on the teacher, I was surprised to see that she was barely five feet tall. Her hair was short and curled, strands of red and orange intertwining. Her skin was dark brown, with hints of red, and when she smiled a bright white smile, her teeth were slightly pointed. Overall, she was the most interesting-looking supe I’d seen so far.
Outside of Mossie, because there was nothing topping a goblin.
“Good afternoon,” the teacher began. “Welcome to Demon Mythology. I’m Coco, and I’m half demi-fey, half magic user. Sorcerer level, of course.”
Of course.
I wondered what sort of demi-fey she was. I hoped we’d get to explore their school as well at some point, because that’s where the truly unusual supernaturals would be. I wanted to meet them all. Especially the mermaids.
“This class has two parts to it,” Coco said. “First is history of demons and the world they now inhabit, and part two is warning and reason. Because I don’t like to give you rules without making you understand why.”
Whatever noise had been in the classroom faded away, and the focus was completely on Coco now. “Demons were once fey that lost their souls to the darkness. They became so tainted with the evil energy that upon death they could not move on to the world after. They became stuck in purgatory … in the land with no energy and no life.”
No one in the room moved, all of us entranced by the dark tale Coco was weaving.
“Demons are nothing to mess around with,” she continued, “and as magic users you will be tempted through your journey to sorcerers. You’ll be tempted with your own darkness. Tempted with the power of the demons. It’s my job to prepare you to deal with that temptation.”
The rest of the class was a history lesson on demons—bodyless entities that existed in a parallel world between ours and Faerie.
I added another planet to my mental image of Faerie and Earth, and I was pretty impressed that I’d nailed the parallel world thing. Even though it also made my head spin at all of the weird in my life now.
“Step-throughs are the fastest way for sorcerers and sorceresses to travel,” Coco continued. “We use them to move between the worlds and within our world. This is a fast, complex, and dangerous way to travel. You’ll not do any classes on them until at minimum your fourth year. Do not ever attempt to open one yourself. You most likely will die.”
Alrighty then. As warnings went, that one was pretty solid.
Someone raised their hand and the teacher nodded at them. “What do the demons want?”
Her expression turned fierce. “Mostly they want power. They wanted it when they were alive and they want it even more after death. They’ve drained their own world. There are no ley lines there.”
No one else looked confused, and I quickly flicked through the textbook in front of me to find the section on ley lines.
Ley lines are beams of energy that run in multiple axes around the world. Deep under the ground, invisible to the naked eye, they power the earth, magic users, fey, shifters, and a multitude of other supernatural creatures. Ley lines are used for particularly strong spells that an individual does not have enough power for.
There was more under this, going into deeper details, but I stopped reading when another student asked, “Why don’t they just come here? The demons. What’s stopping them?”
Coco’s smile was tormented. “The specters that are left are almost parasitic in nature. They can’t come here without a host. Their essences cannot survive on Earth. Which is why this class exists. Demons are seductive … they’ll make you crave the power. But you must never give in to it. My entire family was killed by a demon-touched sorcerer in one of the last battles. It’s why I’ve dedicated my life to teaching other supernaturals of this danger.”
Her words were heavy, and sadness pressed to my chest. I didn’t know Coco, but her pain was tangible. It made me want to really pay attention and learn the lessons she was about to teach.
We had seemed to only uncover the very basics of the origins of demons when the music chimed and class was over. After Demon Mythology, it was time for Sword and Sorcery. This was in the practical section of the school, and I followed the crowd because I figured some of them had to be in my class.
Sword and Sorcery ended up being in the same room as Basics of Magic. With bark underfoot, we all crossed to where a very tall, very handsome man stood waiting. He was the tallest person I’d ever seen. Like … ever. I tilted my head back to try to take him all in.
“Is he part giant?”
I swung my head to find Simon at my side and I shot him a broad smile. “He’s got to be seven feet tall,” I agreed.
Not only was he seven feet tall, but he had a fully shaved head, and since he was shirtless I could clearly see his multitude of tattoos, ranging from a panther along one arm to a dragon that spanned his entire back and side. The only thing he wore was black leather pants.
His feet were bare, and I wondered if the bark, despite its squishiness, still felt like walking on LEGO pieces.
“Hurry up,” he said brusquely, waving his hand toward the stragglers still making their way slowly into the class. “I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
His voice boomed, and the students started to run. No one spoke, all of us staring at the very intimidating and quite spectacularly Viking-hot teacher. “I’m Striker,” he said shortly. “I’ll be teaching you how to defend yourselves using weapons and magic. I’ve been in five wars and have killed hundreds. Or at least I stopped counting in the hundreds.”
He wasn’t bragging; he spoke factually, like he was reading from his fucked-up resume.
“Most of you are learning the basics of your magic, so for now we’ll be discovering our weapon of choice and training with it. It might take you some time to figure out which is the weapon that resonates with you, so try more than one.”
He waved his hand toward a wall that was somewhat hidden back in the shadows. I hadn’t noticed it until now, and as we moved closer I wondered how I’d missed it—it was huge and filled with shiny weapons. Countless different styles of swords, knives, chains, whips, maces, and a ton of shit I’d never seen before and had no name for. Most of them looked deadly, like the sort of object that I could easily kill myself with.
“Today just touch the weapons … lift them if you feel the urge,” Striker shouted. “No one is to use any of them in attack or you will find yourselves out of my class.”
Simon stayed close to me as we moved toward the wall. I was nervous about touching the sharp and shiny swords, but I didn’t want to piss off the scary teacher, so I reached for what looked like a pair of nunchucks, twin silver handles with a spiked chain between them. The handles had spikes too, surrounding a small open space that was just large enough for me to wrap my hand around.
I felt no spark or need to pick it up, so I moved on to the next one. This continued on and on, and by the end of class nothing had called to me, which was actually a relief.
Simon, on the other hand, had a pair of short blades that he was half in love with.
“I’m a warrior,” he said, eyes wide as he held his hands in front of him.
I laughed. “Yes, Simon. You’re a warrior. Now put them back before you cut your own arm off.”
I basically had to pry them from his hands so we wouldn’t be late for our next class. Race Morphology was back in the classroom side, and we had to run to make it before the music tolled again. Sliding into the last two free desks, I got fewer prying looks, but there were still some. At least the twins were not in this class. There were quite a few faces I hadn’t seen before though.
“My name is Sasha,” the teacher said, running her hands through
her short brunette bob. It was bluntly cut, framing her cute heart-shaped face. “I’ll be your teacher for Race Morphology. This class is about learning the differences in the four main races. There will be a short section on the demi-fey also, but they are unique and diverse enough for their own entire class, so in this particular subject, they’ll only be briefly touched on. For now, we’re moving into part one, which is shifters.”
I understood then why there were so many new faces in this class—there were more than just magic users here; this was a class for any of the four races. I started to pick out the shifters and vamps and fey in the room. Identifying race was turning into a stupid, obsessive game for me.
Sasha wasted no time handing out a very thick textbook that had a variety of animals on the front of it. “Shifters are one of the strongest races in the supernatural world,” she started, jotting down notes on the board as she went. I followed suit, adding them in one of my notepads. “There are many different animals that shifters can change their form into, and the strongest is the wolf; the strongest and most prevalent.”
Someone interrupted her. “What about dragons?”
She paused and eyed the student who’d spoken out of turn. “Dragons are, of course, the absolute strongest, but they’re rare. So rare that we cannot count them.” She paused like she was waiting for another argument, but there was none.
“So, as I said, wolf is the strongest, and a lot of their pack mentality has been adopted by the other shifters, despite the fact that those animals wouldn’t normally have packs.”
She continued to explain about the shifters, how their need to shift would start around puberty, or even a little older, and that for a few years they would be subject to the whims of their animal. They had wildness in their souls, an animal instinct. They were strong, with exceptional eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell.
We learned that bear was the most common after wolf. Then there were the rarer lions, panthers, and leopards. She touched on some of the weaker animals, like rabbits and squirrels, which were not uncommon but hid themselves outside of the supe communities most of the time. She didn’t mention dragons again, but I couldn’t actually stop thinking about the fact that there were real freaking dragons in the world.