Rise of the Fomori: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Adventure (Faerie Warriors Book 2)

by J. A. Curtis

  “I don’t know how he could live with himself.”

  “Interesting,” the teacher said again. “Your opinions are the polar opposite of the new student from my last class. He said that a general who risked himself in battle was the selfish one.”

  Arius. Of course he disagreed with me.

  I slammed my pen onto my notebook. “And what if, by risking his life one time, he saved everyone and ended the war? Then hundreds, even thousands of lives would’ve been saved.”

  The teacher seemed surprised by my sudden passionate outburst. “Well,” he said with an awkward smile, “too bad General Grant couldn’t predict the future.”

  He called on someone else to give an opinion. Arius’s words stung me. Even though they came indirectly from the teacher, I felt like Arius was saying them to my face. Did he think that my decision to save him—to risk my life—had been selfish? How could he think so little of me? That night, I thought tied us together, created a special bond between us. I had finally won Arius’s trust. He finally understood me. But he didn’t. It was like he’d taken a priceless gift I had given him, thrown it in the mud, and stomped on it.

  LUNCHTIME—HALF AN HOUR to find Chels. With Arius on the lookout, odds were slim we’d miss her.

  But where Arius was at the moment, I didn’t care. Kids lined up in the cafeteria to order their lunch. I went in search of a bathroom. I wasn’t ready to confront him yet.

  When I found the bathroom, two girls casually lounged on either side of the entrance—one with short, styled, light-brown hair, the other with long dark hair. They were both thin and wore clothing more expensive than my entire wardrobe back home. When I tried to enter, the dark-haired girl blocked my path.

  “This bathroom is out of order.” the girl said.

  I glanced around her. “I don’t see a sign.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she puffed up as if that made her more intimidating. “Trust me, you don’t want to go in there.”

  “I really think I do,” I said, keeping my voice even. I tried to step around her, but the girl moved to intercept me.

  “Wait. You’re new here, aren’t you?” the other girl cut in. She turned to her partner. “Let her in.”

  “But,” the dark-haired girl protested, “we’re not supposed to—”

  “Let her in,” the other girl said. “Best new kids like her learn right away what she’s up against.”

  Dark-haired girl stepped out of the way but muttered, “Fine. But I’m not taking the fall for this.”

  I gave them a thin-lipped smile and entered the bathroom. A girl with long blond hair stood at the far side with her back to me, feet apart, posture threatening. A paper crinkled in her right hand. She loomed over another girl who was pinned against the side of the bathroom wall. The second girl had mousey red hair, wore glasses, and slouched, with knees and head bent.

  “Did you put any thought into what you wrote at all? I can’t submit this.” The blond shoved the paper into the frightened girl’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” the cowering girl pleaded. “I ran out of time. It was late. I was tired. Next time I’ll write your paper first. I swear.”

  “Give me your backpack,” the blond said.

  The cowering girl looked like she wanted to protest, but instead, swallowed whatever she was about to say and handed the backpack over.

  The blond unzipped every pocket on the bag.

  “Please,” the girl pleaded, desperation crossing her face, “you can have my paper.”

  “You should know by now that isn’t how this works,” the blond said coldly. She took a step toward the bathroom stall.

  I had seen enough. “Hey! You need to back off.”

  The blond-haired girl paused, then turned to face me. “Who are you?” Her blue eyes regarded me shrewdly.

  There was a sinking feeling in my gut. It couldn’t be. The blond hair, the blue eyes, the perfectly done up face. I couldn’t move.

  “You must be new,” she concluded when I didn’t respond. “Well, let this be a lesson to both of you.”

  She stepped into the stall and tipped the backpack upside down, emptying its contents into the toilet. She threw the now empty bag at the cowering girl’s feet and stepped up to me, her face in mine.

  “I own this school. Don’t cross me.” She rammed her shoulder against mine as she sauntered from the bathroom.

  I picked up the girl’s empty backpack from off the floor and held it out to her. “Are you okay?”

  She scowled and snatched the bag from my grasp. “Do I look okay?” She walked into the stall and pulled a dripping binder from the toilet, a look of pure defeat on her face.

  “She had no right,” I said.

  She turned on me. “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t need you making things worse for me. Go sacrifice some other pathetic person to your selfish needs.”

  Whoa. “I was trying to help.”

  “A lot of good it did,” she said, turning to the toilet to fish more of her things out.

  I backed away and left her there. Clearly, she resented my presence. And with good reason. What had I done to make the situation better?

  But as much as I regretted not doing more, I had a much bigger problem to occupy my thoughts because the hair, the eyes, the snarky but beautiful face matched the picture I had seen in Kris’s yearbook perfectly.

  Chelsea Herrington, Queen of the faeries, was a bully.

  I STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE of the cafeteria and watched. Arius had found Chels, or she had found him. They sat at the round lunch table together, the queen of Lake City High flanked by the same lackey’s who had stood guard outside the bathrooms. No one else dared approach the table. Chels smiled and laughed as she tried to engage the new boy, flipping her long blond hair over her shoulder, her eyes teasing—transformed from the ice queen she had been mere minutes before.

  My arms ached. I forced my fists to unclench. Calm down, Mina. Whatever fool Chels is making of herself, Arius is simply doing his job.

  Chels said something and laughed loudly. A smile crept across Arius’s face.

  I was halfway to their table before I realized I had moved. An arm hooked onto mine and jerked me around with a harsh yank.

  “Hey, hon, how’s your first day of school going?” Kris asked, her voice too bright for, well, anybody.

  I only got to glance back once before she dragged me out the door. Chels sat so close to Arius she looked like she was about to fall in his lap.

  After we passed into the hall, Kris unhooked her arm from mine. “I see you’ve found your queen.”

  I rounded on her. “You could have warned me.”

  “I thought this was something you should see for yourself,” Kris said, too calm. “Where did you first run into her?”

  “The bathroom, just barely,” I said, my voice still harsh.

  “Ah, yes,” Kris said.

  I couldn’t believe she’d hidden this from me. What were Arius and I going to do?

  Arius.

  I turned back toward the cafeteria, but Kris inserted herself between me and the doorway.

  “You’re still going to take her away, right?” she asked. Her eyes tracked me anxiously.

  And there it was. The reason Kris had agreed to help us even though any mention of what was actually going on freaked her out. She wanted me to take Chels, the bully, off her hands.

  “I don’t know.” I said.

  “Mina,” Kris stepped close, her voice urgent. “You know that boy that was at my house last night? He was there because of her, what she did to him. And he wasn’t the first. I’ve put dozens of kids back together because of what that monster did to them. And the older we get, the worse it becomes. She is the bully of bullies. She’s rich and popular and has the administration, the teachers—everyone—in her pocket. If you took her away, you’d stop the pain for so many. You’d be freeing us.”

  She had such hope in her eyes. I didn’t know what to say. Save an entire school from the t
yranny of one person? In the past, I would have been all over that.

  “Just one more thing,” she said. “I’ve been able to fly under her radar so far. If you could do what you do, but leave me out of it. I’d appreciate it.”

  What I do. My thing. She knew this would happen. Because she knew me.

  “You didn’t tell me because you wanted this,” I accused. “You wanted me to square off against Chels.”

  A slow, clever smile spread across her face. “I so did.”

  10

  Unconditional Love

  Arius

  “Emotion that gets in the way of duty is weakness.”—Nuada

  I FOUND MINA OUTSIDE after the last beeping that came from the speaker in the wall. The students and teachers at the school called it a bell. It sounded nothing like a bell.

  She searched the crowd, occasionally bouncing up on her toes. Still, she didn’t see me. I slid past a couple of kids holding hands, pausing to look back at them. They walked through the crowd, laughing and teasing, lost in each other as if nobody else existed. Something unfamiliar settled in my stomach. Like I was watching something both painful and wonderful at the same time. I didn’t understand what it meant, but found myself wondering if I could ever experience such a moment.

  But I was a soldier. I had more important things to worry about. Mina’s eyebrows raised when she finally saw me. Her surprise melted, and her eyes slitted.

  “We’re walking,” she said. She turned and took large strides away from me.

  “What about Kris?”

  “She’ll pick us up on the way.” Her words were fast and clipped, just like her pace. I hurried to catch up. I waited until we were a block from the school before speaking.

  “How are you?” I asked quietly.

  “Everything’s gone haywire.”

  I pondered on what a word like haywire was meant to convey before giving up. “I may not pick up on all of your human colloquialisms, but I can tell by the way you’re acting that you are not okay.”

  “Good for you.”

  If she was going to be dismissive, then I’d cut straight to the point. I stopped walking. “I saw you. At lunch when I was with Chels, the way you were looking at her. At us.”

  I recalled the couple holding hands as Mina’s heel ground against the sidewalk and she spun to face me.

  “You know why I was looking at you like that? Because minutes before she was fawning all over you, she had some poor defenseless girl up against the wall of the bathroom, threatening her. Our great queen is a bully.”

  Chels? The girl with the radiant smile and the easy laugh? That couldn’t be right. “Are you sure?”

  Pain flashed across her face. For a moment she looked as if I had just dishonored her and her entire existence. And I knew. She was sure.

  Kris pulled up in her car, the window rolled down. “Hurry, get in.”

  We rode the rest of the way to Kris’s house without speaking. Kris sensed the tension between us and seemed content not to breach it with unwanted conversation. I glared out the window, watching homes and their overly organized yards glide past.

  Arius the Blundering Idiot. That should be my new rank and title. How could I so frequently miss what others discerned with ease? Thaya’s taunting words from when I had visited her down in the dungeons haunted me.

  So blind, little Arius. I thought you would have learned your lesson.

  I was naïve. Gullible. I never should have thought I could aid Mina. She didn’t need my help.

  A blue car sat in the driveway of Kris’s home as we pulled up.

  “Great, Carlos is here. What’s he doing here on a weekday?” Kris said.

  “Your brother’s all right,” Mina said as she unbuckled her seat belt, but the warning glance from Kris stopped her. Mina was supposed to be dead. If Kris’s brother from college recognized her, things would get messy.

  Kris dug into her purse. “I thought if anybody would come check on me, it would be my abuelita.” She sighed and shoved some green bills into Mina’s hands. “Don’t come back until late.”

  “Got it,” Mina said.

  We all got out of the car, leaving our school bags in the back seat. Kris went into the house. I stood at attention, waiting for Mina to tell me what to do. Mina’s head tilted as she regarded me, but then she rolled her eyes.

  “Come on,” she said.

  After leaving the neighborhood, we walked several blocks toward downtown Coeur d’Alene. We passed small businesses with large, decorated front windows, finally entering a small café-style restaurant down by the lake called Rustic. A handmade menu hung from the ceiling, and our feet scuffed across wooden floors.

  I hadn’t spoken to Mina, and she hadn’t spoken to me. She looked like she might be as mad at me as I was at myself. And why shouldn’t she be? With as hot-tempered as she was, along with my own incompetence, a good lash-out from her was overdue. But recently, she seemed to be extra patient with me. I wished she wasn’t. It made me feel like she was tiptoeing around me, like I was too fragile to handle her anger.

  It made me feel broken.

  A terse agreement passed between us that I would find us a table while Mina ordered.

  I claimed a small table lining the wall and slumped down onto a chair. My gaze took in the Bud Light sign leaning against the large metal drink machine next to me that advertised an antique car show, and I shook my head. What humans celebrated made no sense to me.

  After ordering, Mina dropped into the chair across from mine.

  “You think I’m wrong about Chels.” She was pushed all the way against the back of her seat as if bracing for something.

  Is that what she thought? That I was doubting her again? “No, I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  “I didn’t want to at first, but that lasted maybe a minute. Mina,” I said, “I know better than to disbelieve you simply because I don’t like what you’re telling me.”

  The tension in her face melted. “Then what’s wrong?”

  I glared at the Bud Light sign. “She tricked me,” I finally said. “Made me trust her, and I couldn’t see it.”

  I gritted my teeth. I would not make this about Nuada. I hated that I couldn’t keep the pain of her betrayal from influencing me. Recently, it felt like everything circled back to her.

  “She manipulated you,” Mina said quietly. “Showed you what you wanted to see. It’s not your fault.”

  I motioned toward her. “You weren’t fooled.”

  “That’s the advantage of being me.” She gave me an awkward smile. “People tend to not think very much of me at first.”

  Her words struck me hard. I sat up slowly. “They learn their lesson, eventually. We all do.”

  “We are all blinded by our feelings sometimes, by what we want to see,” she said. And she told me about her Nana. How she had been losing her memory and Mina had refused to see it. How her parents had placed the older woman in a nursing home. How Mina had thrown a party the night she was kidnapped at Nana’s home in an attempt to punish her parents.

  “No one is exempt,” she said at last. “Nobody was trying to deceive me, but still I saw only what I wanted to see.”

  “You loved her,” I said.

  She swallowed and nodded. “And you loved Nuada.”

  The pain in my chest seemed to explode. I ducked my head. No, I hated Nuada, I wanted to say. And I did. But Mina was also right. Nuada had taught me everything I had ever known. Even though I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, like Mina’s Nana, Nuada had molded me into who I was. And I loved her for it.

  That’s when I knew—I was the broken remains on the losing side of a battlefield. How, after everything, could I still love the person who had threatened to kill me?

  WE LEFT THE SMALL CAFÉ, and as soon as the doorbell indicated the door had shut, Mina paused on the sidewalk.

  “There’s something I need to tell you—and something I need to ask,” she said.

  “
You don’t need to ask me anything. Merely command, m’lady, and it shall be so.”

  “Mmmkay. I’m going to visit Nana. And I’d like to ask you to come with me.”

  I should have learned by now not to make such unconditional statements with her. Especially with how often I disagreed with her decisions.

  “You don’t have to come,” she said, reading my response.

  I ground my teeth and stared out over the sparkling lake. Ripples lapped against boats moving across the shiny water, the orange in the sky casting a darkened tint to the scene. She had just admitted all that her nana meant to her. And yet, the thought of her visiting a member of her human family left an uneasy sickness in my gut. Not to mention how potentially dangerous it could be. Her nana may not remember her visit, but what if the rest of her family unexpectedly showed up? We were already risking a lot by associating with Kris as the sudden presence of her brother had displayed this afternoon.

  But she was going either way. She had only asked me to come with her. There was no way I’d risk letting her go alone. “I’ll go.”

  The anxious tension in her stance seeped out of her. “This way.”

  We passed more small businesses. Suddenly Mina stopped in front of a small trinket shop. She pressed against the glass, cupping her hands around her face to block out the extra light. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a few dollar bills.

  “Should be enough,” she muttered.

  I frowned, pretty sure this wasn’t where her nana lived.

  “Be right back,” she said, and she entered the store.

  I watched through the window as she grabbed a small packet that held a small heart-shaped charm and headed to the counter. A few minutes later, she exited, a smile on her lips.

  “You bought a charm for Dairlin,” I said.

  She held out her hand, palm up, to show me the charm. “I promised her I’d try to bring one back.”

  Warmth spread through my chest. With everything going on, she still thought of little Dairlin. “She’ll love it.”