Hereditary

by Jane Washington

  It was easy for me to pass through, as I’ve been doing it since I was four years old, but even I managed to tear the sleeve of my tunic-dress by the time I finally broke free into the game trail that would lead me to the outskirts of my own village settlement. I checked to make sure I hadn’t dropped any of my books, and then began the long walk, finally free of the constant stares and whispering. It didn’t take long for the forest to begin its seductive call to me, and eventually I let my guard down completely. Everything around me seemed to immediately slump, the leaves bending as if some invisible wind pushed down on them, even the grass started to curl in on itself. I didn’t panic though, merely closed my eyes, revelling in the connections all around me, as I let my feet lead me down a path that I knew off-by-heart.

  Gradually, the buzzing connection started to lift the depression that had settled on my mind, and I felt a lightness flare in my chest. I didn’t have to open my eyes again to see the change in the forest, because I had seen it so many times before. Everything would be magnified, the grass would stand taller, the colours would begin to saturate, the starved plants would feed from my peaceful state, and everything else would prosper. I had forced plants to bloom out of season before, but when I discovered that it actually shortened their life span, I stopped. I couldn’t heal the forest, couldn’t help the plants that were already dead, but they fed off my connection, and it seemed to bring them as much peace as it brought me.

  “Well now, when they told me that Caroline’s daughter would be starting up at the Academy, I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”

  My eyes flew open, my whole body freezing over at the soft-as-silk voice, which had sounded frighteningly close. The man was standing right before me, blocking the path ahead, if he hadn’t spoken at that moment, I would have run straight into him. Taking a hasty step backward as my brain struggled to catch-up, I let my eyes take him in, with a growing sense of realisation and horror. He was beautiful, uncommonly so, in varying shades of gold. His hair was misleadingly dark, though it was indeed still a shade of gold, and his eyes were just as misleadingly light, almost masking the intensity of his gaze. His skin was a similar shade to my own, dark golden-brown, though his was admittedly more beautiful, and it only took a moment to concede that there was no fae shimmer to it. Structurally, he was—quite simply—perfect. Broad shoulders spread beneath two thick straps of leather, which crossed once over the muscles of his bare chest, to meet up behind his back. And his lean waist tapered to renegade pants, in camouflage colours, with boots of a similar make. He wasn’t a renegade though, of that much I was certain. Despite the fact that renegades almost never travelled without a pack, they also all harboured tattoos on their necks, indicating their clan, and occasionally their status. This man’s neck was bare. He wasn’t a vampire either, because I felt no repulsion in his presence, which was supposedly the one easy way to tell a vampire. They might be vicious, fast, and super-humanly strong, but there was something in our systems that immediately repelled them, so it wasn’t necessarily easy to be fooled by a vampire.

  I didn’t bother asking how he knew my mother, or how he knew that I would be starting up at the Academy, as it seemed everybody knew as much.

  “Who are you?” I asked instead, taking another quick step back.

  He put a hand over his heart in mock outrage, though I had a strange feeling that the theatrics were only meant to distract me from the fact that he had taken a step closer, to bridge the space that I was trying to put between us.

  “You don’t even recognise your own kind, how sad.” He made a bow, and caught a hold of my hand, raising it to his mouth in clear defiance of my now paralysing horror.

  “The name is Nareon Soulstoy.” He said in that silky voice, his eyes glimmering wickedly as his kiss brushed across the back of my hand.

  The horror slowly melted away the moment his lips touched me, and I felt another feeling spreading through me, a billowing cloud of awareness. It permeated my very bloodstream and tingled right to the tips of my fingers, a feeling that was as unnatural as it was unfamiliar. Despite how very convincing it was, my mind seemed to be working perfectly fine, and while my nerve endings suddenly stung with awareness, I was fully aware that I was, for the first time in my life, experiencing the power of the synfees.

  “Please don’t kill me.” I whispered, barely even realising the words had left my mouth as his eyes flashed with amusement and he lowered my hand, though he did not release it.

  “You won’t be dying today, Beatrice.”

  “Bea.” I corrected automatically.

  He was suddenly very close, and his smell was delicious, his skin impossibly smooth, as the back of his hand slid across my cheekbone, and beneath my chin, lifting my face for what felt like an inspection.

  “A glamor,” he muttered, “interesting.”

  For the first time that day, I didn’t bother disputing the glamor comment, only gazed at him with wide eyes, wondering why he wasn’t trying to eat me yet. And then something else occurred to me.

  “If you’re… if you’re…”

  “A synfee?”

  “Er, right. If you’re one of those, what are you doing so close to the kingdom?”

  “Waiting for you.” He said it as if it were obvious.

  “Why?” I asked dumbly.

  “You’ll be eighteen in a week, and then your inheritance power will come into full fruition. I’ve been instructed to make sure that you can control it properly, these people,” he gestured a hand back toward the castle walls, which were now hidden behind the looming cover of trees, “they don’t know the first thing about synfee inheritance. If it’s not properly monitored, it will kill you.”

  He seemed to finish his appraisal of me then, and abruptly turned to continue down the game trail that I had been travelling. Embarrassingly, if he hadn’t still been holding onto my hand, I would have stayed where he left me, my mouth still hanging open.

  “Aside from the fact that none of that makes sense,” I stuttered, as soon as my feet remembered how to work again, “what do you and your people care about it anyway?”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  “I think it is.”

  He paused, bright eyes turning back to me in astonishment.

  “Did you just argue with me?”

  As he said the words, another wave of feeling suddenly swept through me, and my eyes narrowed until all I could see was the glittering, light-golden tint of his irises, until I was suffocated simply from the force of his gaze, boring into mine.

  “No.” I whimpered.

  He pulled back, and the feeling retreated, making me stumble and almost fall. He caught me, and it struck me as strange that I wasn’t protesting at the arm that wound about my waist.

  “I’ve been watching you for a few weeks now,” he started again, once we were moving forward, “and you have a pretty good handle on parts of it, but others are building up, and you’re ignoring them. Keep doing that, and you’ll start experiencing some pretty dark mood swings. Of course it’s worse for you, because your power is quite strong… In fact the last person who had your kind of power ended up killing himself only a few days after he came into it.”

  “And I come into it in a week?”

  “Correct.”

  “And it is what exactly?”

  “Our people call it Force. You can control the forces of nature around you, the wind, the clouds, the sky, the flowers, the vines, the heat, the rain… all of it.”

  “That’s absurd. I didn’t even specialise in earth.”

  “Earth isn’t a force.”

  We had reached the outskirts of my village now, where the game trail branched off suddenly to go deeper into the forest. The arm about my waist retreated, and as the touch disappeared, so did the entranced feeling that had held me in check so far. I jumped back hastily, throwing my hands up when he made an annoyed gesture in my direction.

  “Stay where you are!” I shouted, stumbling backward
s until I felt the roughness of tree bark catching on my dress.

  Instead of darting forward as I expected, he simply considered me thoughtfully.

  “Compulsion works very differently on you. I suppose that’s because you’re only half human, but it’s going to make this whole job a little harder.”

  “Don’t ever do that again!”

  His brows arched high, and I realised that he really wasn’t used to people refusing him, questioning him, or ordering him around. That probably meant that he had a position of status among his own people… Which didn’t bode well for me. If they were sending someone important to me this close to the kingdom, they really were invested in this inheritance ability of mine.

  “Look, Nareon, I don’t know what you people want with me, but I’m not harmless. I know at least fifty different ways to kill a man, and I’m not afraid to use any one of them on a monster like you. So you’ll just have to go back to whoever it is who told you to come here, and tell them that I’m not interested.”

  “I’m not a man, little spitfire, none of your father’s tricks will work on me. If you doubt what I say, you’re welcome to test the truth of my words. But if you fail, I will kill you, so I would think twice before attempting anything. You may have the synfee blood, and it may make you more powerful than any of those silly human fools, but your powers are unruly, and they control you more than you control them.”

  He suddenly disappeared, and I felt him behind me, pushing me away from the tree even as his arms wound tight around me to keep me from falling forward. One muscled limb anchored across my ribcage, the other winding restrictively about my neck.

  “And I am not the only one who will come to find you, spitfire. I am only the first. Remember that.”

  I barely even got a chance to register that my breathing had been cut off before the air was suddenly flooding back into my lungs, and Nareon had disappeared again, this time for good. With shaky steps, I hurriedly pushed my way off the trail and wound through the trees in the direction of my village. By the time I burst into the cottage, the sun was already setting, and my father was asleep at the table, a half-eaten bowl of soup in front of him.

  I relaxed almost as soon as my eyes set upon him, and I quickly cleaned up the mess that he had left, having no appetite myself. He awoke just as I was climbing into bed, and appeared in the doorway of my bedroom, looking bedraggled. His skin was dark from working too often in the sun, and his eyes were a serious blue, now fixed anxiously upon me.

  “You were home late, everything ok?”

  For just a moment, I deliberated over whether to tell him about Nareon. Seeing a synfee and living to tell the tale was only an absurd notion until my mother and father happened to the Read Empire, and even then, not many saw her. But my mother had been a different kind of synfee, different because she had been born wishing she was human. Nareon was the regular, monster-type.

  “Everything’s fine Dad, I had a long day and wanted to spend some time in the forest. You look a little beat-up yourself.”

  And it was true; there was a bruise blossoming along his cheek, and a red stain on the collar of his shirt. He winced, and passed a hand across his face, a gesture so achingly familiar that I felt my heart well in response.

  “I guess I had a long day too, I’m not a young man anymore.”

  “Get some sleep Dad.”

  “Will do,” he turned from the doorway and hesitated, looking back, “you’d tell me, if something was up, wouldn’t you Bea?”

  “Of course.”

  I felt bad, watching him shuffle away, but I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. There wasn’t any room in my father’s life for extra worry. I was constantly anxious that he would come home one day with more than just a few blood splatters and a black eye, and I knew that if I told him my secret, it could very well be the distraction he didn’t need. The distraction that would see he didn’t come home one day at all.

  The next day, I slept in, and hurried to dress before I was late to my first class again. Pulling on a light-green summer dress and my somewhat battered training boots, I grabbed the empty linen bag that I usually carried vegetables around in, and piled it full of my books. Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed an apple as I ran out the door and tossed it in atop everything else. I wanted to by-pass the forest completely, on the off-chance that Nareon appeared again, but wasn’t sure that I’d make the cut-off time for Academy students at the main gate, so I headed back to the game trail. I didn’t close my eyes once as I raced toward the abandoned garden, needing the comfort of the plants, which I could feel straining toward me, but not daring to let my awareness slip, lest I be taken unawares again. Fortunately, the journey passed uneventfully, and I made it to Magical Materials just before the professor, and a good third of the class.

  Of course, those who were already seated stared at me as I entered, and there weren’t any seats free at the back of the classroom, so I had to feel the eyes of people burning into the back of my head all lesson, but at least the lesson’s focus was off individual power for once.

  When the bell rang, I didn’t wait for everyone else to leave, but scooped up my books and hurried out the door first myself. Finding the classroom for Races and Religions wasn’t as easy as my first classroom had been, and I had just begun to panic when a familiar voice jolted my eyes from my timetable to Cale’s grinning face.

  “I win.” He said, by way of greeting.

  “Win what?”

  “The bet my friends had running, as to whether you’d return to the Academy today.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “That’s the spirit,” He snatched my timetable, and spun me around to face the building I had just come out of, “and you were right the first time, the boring, non-magical classes are always in the buildings that aren’t lined with silver. This one is upstairs.”

  “Oh right, I didn’t see the stairs.”

  He walked me to class and slipped a small, folded card into my hand before he pulled his usual disappearing act.

  “Those are the details for our session this afternoon,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ll tell you more at lunch.”

  The next class passed in what I was beginning to think of as the ‘usual blur’ of unwanted, uncomfortable attention, and an overload of information. Though these theory lessons were actually easier as far as the workload was concerned, as the general history side of things covered the only subjects that the tutors were successfully able to teach me. Though I did make a mental note to find out what day the synfee race would be discussed, so that I could skip class.

  At lunch time, I headed to the same courtyard as the day before, but didn’t go anywhere near the cherry-blossom tree this time, even though that particular group was nowhere in sight. I re-claimed my seat by the greenhouse and looked down, surprised, when a small vine-like plant snaked out a tendril from below my seat to wrap around my ankle. Shocked, I grappled for my connection, intending to urge it somewhere else. It was harder than I expected, and my shock doubled. No plant had ever resisted me before.

  “I’ve heard that every girl likes her shoes, but really, those are a little battered, even for your admiration, little synfee.”

  I looked up from my wide-eyed stare to see Cale standing before me.

  “I thought I saw a lady-bug.” I explained lamely.

  “Right.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me for a second, but it seemed Cale wasn’t the kind of person to press for details. He sat down beside me, folding his hands behind his head and tipping his head back to the sunlight, closing his eyes.

  “It’s a beautiful day, a little intense maybe, but beautiful all the same.”

  I looked up, only now realising that he was right. All the colours were burning brighter, even the sun felt hotter, and that vine… Panicking a little, I quickly re-checked the connection, confused because I hadn’t felt any of my power leaking out. Retreating into myself wasn’t something that I usually did when
people were near—or at least, when I knew they were near—but the last thing I wanted was a bunch of over-enthusiastic vines binding me to the seat in plain sight of the whole Academy. To my utter astonishment, there was a steady stream of power flowing from me, and I immediately slammed a wall down on it, cutting the flow off abruptly. What was even more surprising, was that as soon as I was back in check, I felt a heavy, constricting sensation settle over me like. It was dismal, and it made me uncomfortably agitated in my own skin. Pushing the moodiness aside, I returned to a much duller world, and to Cale’s scrutiny, as his eyes were now open, and trained unblinkingly on me.

  It was an expression I had seen before, on Hazen’s face, and I don’t know why it filled me with such panic, but I suddenly wanted to run as far away from him as I could. Except that, at that moment, Hazen himself appeared. He was flanked by his usual group, and they were spilling out of a nearby building, heading toward their cherry-blossom tree. None of them seemed to have noticed Cale and I yet, except for Hazen, whose head swung in our direction the moment he stepped outside, his eyes landing on Cale, before sliding to me.

  “Well,” Cale’s light tone broke through the intensity of Hazen’s indecipherable glare, “that was strange.”

  “What was?” I deliberately avoided looking at him, instead bending to busy myself with digging out the apple that I had stashed in my bag earlier that morning.

  “One minute the grass is greener than green, the sun is hotter than hot, like there is an energy pulsing through everything, drawing out the very essence of it all. And the next… it’s all normal again. You’re eyes were closed, so I suppose you missed it.”