by Cora May
Would she be a prisoner, too?
And, more importantly, was Douglass going to be a danger to her, too?
“Chanta,” he whispered.
Chanta gasped. She had told him her name, she forgot. She was regretting it now. There was something very off about this boy, she was sure of it, and she didn’t like that he had her name.
“Help me, Chanta,” he told her. “Help me so we can… play… together…”
She didn’t like the emphasis he put on the word she had chosen. His voice was bringing a slow shiver up her spine. It crawled up in a way that caused her to shake it off involuntarily.
“Play with me, Chanta,” he told her.
“Shh,” she commanded. Fear was taking over her responses now. She looked toward the staircase. Her heart beat faster and harder. “They can’t know I was here, or else we can never, uh, play. You have to be quiet.”
“Chanta,” he said.
“Shh,” she commanded. Demanded, was more like it. The word came out in a harsh hiss.
“Chanta, let me out,” he told her.
“Why did they put you in here?” she asked again. Her feet were already inching away from the door, though. She was ready to leave. She had made a mistake.
He wasn’t going to give her the answers she wanted.
She wanted to leave this castle.
“Chanta.”
That was the last word she needed. Without a word of goodbye, without another warning to be quiet, her feet took her away. She ran past the unchecked doors, over the soft carpet, across the stone floors. Her footsteps were louder now, but she didn’t care. She hardly noticed. She just needed to be away.
She needed to be in the safety of her own room.
She actually wanted to be locked away, too—just to be safe from the boy in that room. Safe from the mystery.
She flung her door open and shut behind her.
It closed with a thud.
She didn’t care who heard.
Chanta leapt onto the bed and threw herself into the corner, making herself as small as possible in the ninety-degree angle of the wall. She held the pillow close to her chest and squeezed it into her body.
Now there was so much more to worry about than she had first imagined. That boy had looked lost and empty, and far too knowing at the same time. These people, the headmistress, must have done something so terrible to him that he could no longer function properly. That was the best explanation she could come up with.
The other possibility was that he came like that. Whatever life he had lived before coming to this school had screwed him up so badly he was already messed up, and the school didn’t even know how to fix him. But if that was the case, then their solution was to lock him up away from everyone else. If that was their solution, then how bad was he? What had he done that scared people who believed in this… this magic religion thing?
There were several other doors that she hadn’t looked into. She didn’t even know if there were more that were locked or not. She wondered now what they might hold, and if she should have checked them out, too. Of course, the answer to that was yes. She should have checked in every door, pulled on every knob. She should have done it while she had the bravery to do it, too. She wasn’t sure she would get a chance anymore.
Especially if Douglass said her name out loud to the other professors. He didn’t seem terribly competent, but he had repeated her name enough that he was sure to remember that. She would be screwed if he repeated it anymore.
It wasn’t much later after that that there was a knock on the door. It caused Chanta to jump with a start, a small gasp escaping her throat.
Had he already repeated her name to someone?
She watched the door carefully.
“It’s me,” Maleka’s familiar voice sounded from the other side of the wooden door. She said it almost like a question, like she had heard Chanta’s gasp and felt as if she should have been expected.
Chanta shook her head clear. She quickly went to the door, putting a smile on her face before she opened it.
“Oh, lunchtime!” she chirped.
Maleka looked at her with a furrowed brow.
Chanta cursed at herself, losing the smile quickly. She wasn’t looking very normal at all. She wondered if Maleka was to deliver lunch to Douglass as well, and if he would tell her, too. Even if he didn’t, Maleka could quickly put two and two together, and she didn’t seem like the type that would keep a secret on Chanta’s behalf.
Chanta took a deep breath through her nose and extended her hands toward the plate.
Maleka didn’t let go, though.
“It’s been a rough morning,” she told Maleka, her face returning to a somewhat normal function, “and I just want to be alone. Can you just go, please?”
But Maleka still didn’t let go.
“Have you found your stone, then?” she asked quizzically. “And you don’t like it?”
Chanta gritted her teeth. She hadn’t even thought about that in the last hour or so, and she certainly wasn’t happy to have the test brought back to the forefront of her mind. Didn’t she have enough to think about?
It was a good enough scapegoat, though, she decided.
Not one that she’d admit to, but something that could cause enough distress in her morning to explain her behavior.
“No,” she stated coldly, flatly. “And I don’t think that’s any of your business, now is it? I thought you weren’t allowed to talk to me. Isn’t that what you said before? And now you want to be my friend all of a sudden? I’ve already tried that with you. You’re supposed to leave my food, take my dishes, and go.”
“I think you’re beginning to understand more and more what this place is about,” Maleka said, ignoring her completely. “I can see it in your face. You’re beginning to understand what’s going on with you, too. Aren’t you?”
Chanta shifted her jaw. If only the girl in front of her knew.
But then she wondered, what exactly did the girl in front of her know? Did she know about Douglass? Did she support what was going on? If Chanta asked her, would she tell her what happened to the boy in the room in the corner?
“It’s scary when you first begin to discover who you truly are,” Maleka continued. “It’s terrifying when you realize what power you have. When I started, I was afraid I’d set the whole world on fire. But when I accepted it, when I truly let myself accept the Blessing I had been given, I realized I was stronger for it, and I could use it for the good of the world. And I have. I have, Chanta, and you can, too. Tell me, what is it?”
Chanta’s mind had wandered a little bit as Maleka had talked on. Not as if she wasn’t trying to pay attention, she just had so much to think about.
“Huh?” she asked.
“Your stone,” Maleka clarified. “What’s your stone? What test did you take?”
Chanta had to hold back a glare—but she didn’t do so well. Maleka flinched back.
“You know what?” Chanta told her. She pushed the silver plate into Maleka’s chest. “I don’t really think I’m that hungry after all. I’ll give you this morning’s dishes later.”
With that, she shut the door and turned around. She left Maleka staring at her, her mouth open like she was about to say something more.
Chanta didn’t want to hear whatever that was.
She had some thinking to do, and Maleka wasn’t going to help her with any of it. She was already brainwashed, as far as Chanta could tell.
Several hours had passed by, and tears were dried on Chanta’s face. She looked at the ceiling, the back of her head hanging off the bed slightly. Her hair had fallen over the edge, save for a few strands that were trapped between her skull and the mattress. Those strands were pulling at her skin, like small bugs biting at her scalp, but she hardly noticed. At least, not in her conscious mind—her unconscious mind was taking careful note of every, tiny follicle, and taking great relief every time one of the hairs finally snapped out of her skull and released
the discomfort.
She wasn’t sure when she had started crying, and she wasn’t really aware that she stopped. At some point, Reiter had come knocking on her door, but she didn’t answer. It had caused him to barge in and find her exactly where she was now.
He hadn’t said much then. He only looked at her, his face blanking, and uttered something that Chanta had thought to be an apology. Then he left, closing the door behind him. When he returned, he had come bearing some feminine products and pain killers. Chanta didn’t even bother using up the energy to be offended. Instead, she allowed the excuse he made up to delay her tests for another day.
She hadn’t gotten anywhere in her thinking, though. Not really, anyway. She wasn’t sure she could stand being around these people, not with the secrets they had hiding behind locked doors. But, at the same time, who else would take her? She had nowhere to go, and no one who could explain what was going on with her.
If anyone could do that, these people were the only ones who had a chance.
Plus, there was something inside of her that wouldn’t quite let her leave. She felt a pull to stay—and not to figure out what’s going on. Not with herself, and not with the school, either. Inside of her was a pull that told her to stay because there was something here for her.
Her eyes wandered over to the desk once again. She growled under her breath. What else was there for her, if not answers? She rolled off the bed and wandered over to the books again.
She went to The Book of Stones first. It was small enough, she decided she should just finish it. Besides that, it gave her a bit of insight into the heads of the houses, and she could use all the knowledge she could find. Especially if it helped her save herself in the end.
This time, though, Chanta decided to catch the highlights. She skipped past the first few paragraphs of all the stones, the parts that just talked about what a beautiful stone it was, and went straight into the parts that talked about the actual student before they found their place at the school.
She started with the Amethyst stone, the one she was supposed to be tested for that day before Reiter decided she was too sick to continue his schedule and flipped to the next page. She was almost done, she realized, with just two more stones left. The first one was Emerald, and the last one was Celestite.
The Emerald stone, though described as a very beautiful stone—and one that she knew, too, was downright gorgeous—was confusing to her in that it seemed pointless as a “Blessing.” She wondered how downright silly anyone who’s Blessing was the Emerald stone, especially since they were surrounded by all of these people who did amazing things.
A man named Olly Read was the Head of the House of Emerald. He was a high school student when Prisanni had found him, of course. But he was a young high school student. He was only twelve years old in his Sophomore year. He was exceptionally, and strangely, smart. At first, Chanta had thought that it was the intelligence that the stone brought. As she read on, though, she realized she was wrong. The Emerald stone Blessing allowed its bearer to… steal? That was the best word, the best metaphor, that Chanta could come up with. Olly was able to touch someone and borrow their intelligence, rather than have it himself. It worked for physical abilities, too, and he was able to steal the football team’s talents to pass his gym classes, though he was only a prepubescent child who was competing with stronger, more fit teenagers. He had remained under the radar for a very long time until it became clear to the colleges in surrounding states that he was going to be a student they wanted in their classes. He would bring up their averages, and they would have a child prodigy in their alumni. They began to compete for him, and then the Ivy League schools began to throw scholarships in his mailbox.
That’s when Prisanni picked up on the fact that this boy was something more than just a brilliant kid. There was something different about him in a way that people wouldn’t understand. Ivy League schools could teach him plenty of science and math, but they would never tell him who he was or why he knew things after he touched someone who understood it so well—or why he forgot it all shortly after. The Emerald stone was allowing him to briefly borrow someone else’s expertise, someone else’s abilities. So, Prisanni’s school beat out all of the Ivy Leagues and won this peculiar student among its ranks.
It turned out that the Emerald stone gave him the ability to borrow other Blessings as well. He was able to mimic the physical strength of the Jasper Warriors and take on the emotional abilities of the Amber Soothers. He even borrowed Prisanni’s own ability to communicate with the spiritual world.
Chanta found herself wishing that was her stone. It made sense, after all, since she already had two stone’s responding to her. Maybe she was only borrowing the ability to connect to those stones. In her mind, that made sense.
The last one was, by far, the scariest one. Of course, Prisanni was the Head of the House of Celestite, and the story was about her. It talked about how she communicated with her mother after she had died. The story described the lessons Prisanni’s mother gave to her, and the words that were spoken between the two. Although it was clear that Prisanni was the headmistress of the school, according to the book in front of Chanta, the lessons that Prisanni used had come straight from her late mother’s mouth. The woman had used her time in her afterlife to study and communicate with her daughter all of the things she had learned about the phenomena of the Blessing and stone pairs.
Prisanni’s story, though very revealing about the school, revealed nothing of Prisanni’s history. Chanta had no better understanding of the woman after reading it than she did before. She glanced over at the diary, the one that had Prisanni’s name on it. She wondered if it could be the same woman, if Prisanni just looked exceptionally young.
She brushed off the thought. She didn’t care who Prisanni was. She cared about who she was, and what was going on inside of her. She was wondering more and more what kind of possession she actually had. These people called it a Blessing, but she still didn’t see it that way. She still saw herself as something that needed to be contained, something that was unnatural and in need of correction.
Yet, at the same time, there was a part of her that was curious. That part wanted to know what kind of control she could learn and what kind of power she could wield thereafter. She had to see the rest of the school first, though. Then she could decide what was to happen. Because should these people lock her up like they locked Douglass up, she would need a lot more control over her own power to get out.
CHAPTER SIX: CHANTA
O ver her first week, Chanta had begun to change—outwardly, anyway. On the inside, she was still confused and scared. But she quickly realized that cooperation was the key to escape. At least, she hoped.
Reiter had slowed down with the tests, which she was incredibly glad for. Even if he thought it had only been her time of the month and that was the reason she had looked so distraught before, she realized that the abruptness of the tests had begun to wear on her greatly. It was sickening, in a way—even if that way was purely emotional. She had met all the heads of the houses at the end of that week.
Arbella, the Head of the House of Amethyst, had been a kind woman. She was slender and short, her blonde hair chopped short in a pixie cut and a smile on her face that seemed near-constant. Chanta liked her, but not nearly as much as she had liked Sahira. That was mostly because of the way Arbella had looked at her… It was as if she could see something beyond what Chanta was showing at face value. It was as if she could see that Chanta was only putting on a show now. She knew, ultimately, that with the Amethyst stone, it was very likely that Arbella really was looking past the show Chanta had put on and seeing her actual thoughts.
Whatever the case was, Chanta was particularly glad when there was no sign of warmth in the stone as she held it in her palm. It had been as cold as an ice cube, actually. It had been nothing more than a stone, something pretty to look at, but nothing that meant anything to her. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. Not this ti
me. Chanta’s mood had shifted a bit after she had met Douglass—she was a bit more motivated to understand herself—even if she only wanted to understand how she could be her own weapon if the need ever arose. So when she had given the stone back to Arbella, it was with a sad little shrug of her shoulders and a sigh that she truthfully meant.
She had met Olly the next day. He was a skinny fellow—not like the built men she had seen so far. His arms were long, his legs were lanky, and, though one could clearly see the muscle beneath his skin, his arms were so bony that even the small biceps actually looked out of place on his body. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down along his skinny throat as he spoke, like it was racing up from the bottom of his neck to the top. He wore big, round glasses on his freckled face, and his brown eyes looked sincere when he spoke. Chanta liked him, she decided. She liked him a lot because he didn’t scare her. He was the least intimidating person she had met so far—even above Sahira. Even if his Blessing meant that he could steal Nessi’s power, should he want, and change his frail, bony looking strength into something fierce and terrifying.
Plus, she had been hoping that her Blessing would fall under his house. Though she hadn’t thought much of the Blessing before, the more she turned it over in her thoughts, the more she realized what true power it actually held. She could use it to steal literally anything she wanted. At least, as far as powers went.
Ah, but alas… When Olly had given her the stone, nothing happened. She had tried, once again, to force a connection to the stone. She had tried even harder than when she had done it for Arbella, but nothing came of it in the end. So she had moved on to the next test with a dampened attitude.
Reiter had brought in Professor Kan Thurien for the next test. He was a very, very intimidating looking man. He took up most of the area around the table as a tall, wide man. His skin was pale white and freckled with red dots under his eyes and over his nose. He had long, dark red hair, tied back at his neck. He wore a white shirt that had been singed at the ends, and over that was a pristine black vest. He smelled of smoke to match the singed shirt. He looked wild and threatening.
