Power of Fire: An Academy Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Broken Academy)

by Jade Alters

  Lee’s transformation reverses itself before my eyes as he turns around to face me. His secondary razor nails retreat back beneath his cuticles. His hair crawls back up to just the top of his head. His scales soften and smooth out to his original skin, which then lightens to its natural olive color. His fitted armor shrinks and reshapes to a regular dark shirt, pants and boots. His neck shrinks back to its regular size while his snout retreats back into a rounder, human head. As his fangs retract and flatten to a standard jaw, the lips around them smile at me.

  “How was that?” Lee asks. His human face morphs immediately to regret, however, when my knees buckle. I slide halfway to the ground with the flight of all my strength. “Hey, I didn’t mean… That was too much, huh? Cece?” He calls to me, both inside and out. I don’t know how to tell him, though, when my lips don’t work, that it’s not him. It’s what’s behind him. That clear, liquidy curtain that marks the edge of the alley. Then I remember: I don’t need lips.

  “This is the place. This is where it… Where he…” I can’t even force myself to think it. The flash of my brother’s frothing blood, then fire, then the ash across my mind jumps into Lee’s. His eyes betray that he’s seen as they grow to fill their sockets, full of water.

  “Your brother… My God. I’m sorry, Cece… It was here?” Lee asks. I force my head into a shaky bob. He comes over to me, offering an arm. However much I’d like to bounce his head off the pavement for bringing me here, I use him to steady my balance. It’s always easier to point a finger, but…he couldn’t have known. I see that now, through his eyes. Once I’m steady, Lee points a finger back towards the mouth of the alley. “See that, there? That weird wave in the air, like a mirage?”

  “Ye-ye-yeah,” I tell him. I’m more terrified of what’s at the other end of the alley. What I haven’t brought myself to face just yet.

  “That’s an illusory curtain. It’s like the trick the Magicians used in the hospital to hide us while the others put out the fire. You and I can see it because of what we are. The average Norman can’t. And even things like us can’t see what’s on the trick side of the curtain from the outside.” Lee tells me.

  “Norman?” I echo. It’s the easiest part of what he’s said for me to latch onto.

  “Sorry - Academy slang. Normal Human. Norman. It’s what we call folks who can’t alter space or channel natural energy or transform into a flying lizard,” Lee smirks at me. I do my best to bounce back a little lip twitch for his efforts. “Anyway. Everything behind that curtain is Academy territory. It’s part of our training grounds. It’s also one of the entrances to the Academy itself. If you’re telling me that...what happened, happened here. Shit.”

  “You mean someone at the Academy…did this?” I ask. The pale young man haunts the vault of my memories for a few seconds before I shake him out again.

  “All I can say now is that the Council will find out, if you help them. It’s still safer for you than a hospital, where a bunch of white coats are going to scan you till you’re a potato,” says Lee. I can’t help but agree with him there. It’s what I have to face to get in that’s the problem. I try to turn to face deeper into the alley, twice, before I turn right back away again. It looks, in brief glances, like maintenance and crime scene investigators have cleared away most of the wreckage. The walls are still charred. There’s a gaping hole in the building on the right, where I melted the support beam of the apartment.

  “We… We have to go through here?” I ask.

  “Unfortunately. The Academy doesn’t exactly have a door, but the only way to the entrance is through here,” says Lee. Just then, he lifts his hands to my face. He lays his warm hands on my eyelids and gently lowers them. “Here. I’ll walk you. I promise you won’t see a thing.”

  “Alright,” I give in, before I have a chance to think my way out of it. In complete darkness, I turn around to face what I’ve done. Eyes squeezed shut, I walk forward with Lee’s arm around my shoulder.

  He steers me a little to the right. I imagine I’m sidestepping the mound of Jason’s ash and charcoal. I know that he’s long since been scattered by the wind, or swept away by people who had no idea how great of a brother he was. I’m sure Mom and Dad will have a service some day, but he’ll never be buried. He’ll never be laid to rest at the base of a tree or at the cliffside of a California beach. No, he was probably scattered into traffic by people who had no idea how much better he deserved.

  Lee has me bend down low as we move on, so perhaps the cleanup crew hasn’t removed all the debris. I have to take a high step over something metal before Lee turns me right and walks me down another long stretch.

  “Alright. You’re good,” he tells me. My dead eyes open, too dry to cry any more. The alley before us is short, nondescript and leads only to a set of stairs that go down into the concrete.

  “No. I’m not,” I tell Lee. I go the only way there is, forward. Down. Lee reaches past me to open the door at the bottom of the oddly-placed stairs. Inside is a tiny four-walled room with a mop leaning against the water-stained wall, and absolutely nothing else. Lee brushes past me to walk to the center of the room, taking my arm to bring me along. I lazily take a stand beside him. He pulls the door shut behind us. We stand beneath a single, dim, flickering yellow light bulb. “Now, you don’t have a student ID, so you’re my guest. Do not let go of me.”

  “Sure,” I tell him. I don’t have the gusto to tell the joke that automatically forms in my head about Lee’s excuses to touch me. I just take his hand. With his free one, he pulls a wallet from his back pocket. From this wallet comes a card that looks more like it belongs in a tarot deck than an identification system for a school. It’s a thick canvas material, painted with an exquisite mural of a Dragon. Its scales are the same color red as Lee’s, its wings stretched wide and its head arched back with a tiny plume of fire coming out.

  Lee holds the card up before us and covers the Dragon with his thumb. I wake from my traumatized trance just a little when I think I see it glimmer, despite the lack of light in the little room. By the time I realize it’s no eye trick, the card lights up too bright to face directly. The light fills the room from wall to wall. A sound above us calls my eyes. I gasp, a mistake, as my lungs are instantly filled with far more frigid air than they can handle. The ceiling of the room dissolves away from us. Lee shoots straight up at a speed I’ve never seen anything move in my life, as if pulled by his odd ID card. My hand in his, I fling right up after him.

  We rip up past the buildings of the alley to the sky in a freely floating tube of searing light, somehow invisible to the thousands of eyes looking up from San Francisco below. We shoot through another illusory curtain, towards something I can’t believe, despite how clearly I see it now. A gigantic building with the look of a mansion or estate floats a mile above the California coast. There are five other beams of light like ours that run into it. That’s about all I have time to take in before we zip right through a set of open french doors. We come to a rigid, instant stop, and they slam us inside on their own.

  Council of Six

  Lee, The Broken Academy

  I haven’t ridden the Tether Transporters that much, but there’s one hell of a difference between my first trip and this one. It still takes me a few seconds to reorient myself around conventions like gravity and touch. When I turn to Cece, I find the same face I must have worn the first few trips. Green. I can see in her blank stare exactly what’s coming. I grab her around the waist and walk her over to the first-timer’s station on the side of the adjustment lounge. There sits a range of waist-high garbage cans.

  “Hang on just a sec,” I tell her when I feel a dangerous tremor surge through her guts. Her open hand plugs her mouth. The temporary fix holds out just long enough for me to get her to the perfect position. “Alright, let it rip.” Cece folds over halfway to blow chunks all over the inside of the garbage can. I can tell from how most of it is just colorless liquid that she didn’t eat during her stay at the hospital. N
ot with her mouth, anyway - tubes, most likely. Cece sings a sickening song with her head inside the can for ten long seconds. Her hands grip the edge of the bin to push herself back upright.

  “What…the fuck was that?” Cece growls at me. I offer her a napkin from the dispenser on the wall, then my arm. Cece eyes both with queasy suspicion. She wipes her mouth, slam dunks the last trace of her sickness and hooks her arm through mine. I turn her around to face the short, polished dark wood corridor that leads inside. It’s lined with lit golden candlesticks that glow over a lush green carpet. The light is doubled by the ceiling of mirrors over our heads.

  “I don’t want to overwhelm you… Which part?” I ask as I lead her on. Cece keeps her pale stare straight ahead, at the end of the hallway, while she thinks.

  “The light show,” she manages to spit out. I ease my head into a slow bob. The heavy wooden doors that mark the perimeter wall of the actual Academy emerge from the hanging darkness ahead of us.

  “Right. I’m sure you noticed the Academy’s…unique location,” I lead in. Cece gives me the slightest nod to show that she did. “The stream of light that brought us here is more than just an entrance. It’s also one of the tethers that keep the Academy up here. Think of it like a battery attached to the school.”

  “The energy source that powers this place is…a broom closet in the back alleys of San Francisco?” Cece sputters. She sounds like I’m full of shit. I don’t blame her, either. It’s a vague memory, but I believe I laughed at Thise when she told me.

  “Not exactly… The flow of power just passes through that broom closet. Makes it a good access point to catch a lift. The actual source is the San Andreas Fault, under the city. Witches and Warlocks set the place up to channel six locations of immense natural energy to keep it up here. We call them Tethers,” I tell her. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like she’s entirely ready to listen. I catch her eyes rolling several times throughout the explanation.

  “Right… Witches and Warlocks,” Cece mumbles. Together, we creep towards the door. The entrance to a million more things Cece won’t believe. I suspect she’ll take even longer than I did to come around to it. Still, it’s infinitely better for her than being out there. A Dragon alone in a city of Normans who want to put a leash on her? No wonder she’s so damn bitter, and that’s not counting what happened with her brother.

  “Well…how would you explain it?” I ask to distract her from the sickness I still see in her face. Cece chews on the thought for a few long seconds.

  “Jets?” she supposes.

  “What - like under the building?” I ask. Cece nods. I consider it as honestly as I can, without the influence of my Academy education. “It sure would take a lot of fuel to keep it up here all the time. And constant refueling by helicopter. Not to mention, how would we hide it?”

  “I don’t know… Some…cloaking device? Same ones you used in the hospital. Militaries have those some places, don’t they?” Cece guesses. She doesn’t particularly sound like she believes this either. But, it’s easier to play devil’s advocate than swallow a pill the size of the Broken Academy.

  “And the Soul of Fire…” I humor her as we close in on the door, “Some sort of bug, planted in your inner ear? I’ve got the corresponding piece in mine?”

  “Could be,” Cece pouts at my sarcastic tone. I chuckle. I stop at the golden door knobs that glare out from the rich, burgundy wooden door to the inside. I put a hand on it, an effigy of an orb surrounded by twisting fire.

  “I’m afraid not,” I tell her. “See, you’re thinking about this all wrong… This isn’t science fiction, Cece. It’s a fantasy.” Any and all of her witty retorts rattle right back down her throat the second I turn the knob and swing the door in past us. I lead Cece by the arm, into the Broken Academy.

  We step out into the hallway that stretches around the whole perimeter of the Academy in a rectangle. The high, vaulted ceilings are hung with paper lanterns that have no business being as bright as they are. They also should have burned out about four hundred years ago, but then by all Norman laws, the place shouldn’t be floating a mile above California. The bodies flitting here and there are scarce compared to the daytime rush. Most students are forbidden outside their dorm halls at this time. I pull Cece down the long walk along the edge of the Academy.

  I watch her eyes swim with lights and shadows as each tall window passes. She marvels at the landscape of California at night, thousands of feet below. The lights of cities stain the dark hills and forests. The boundless ocean bounces back the silver dollar moon in a rippled echo. Cece’s eyes fix on the branching corridor of the adjustment lounge, where it juts from the perimeter wall. She follows the Tether’s light stream all the way back down to the high rises and back alleys we came from. The town she’s probably lived her whole life in, reduced to the size of a pinky nail.

  “How…do you keep this place hidden?” Cece finally gives in to curiosity. Branching halls pass us by on either side, to classrooms, gardens, cafeterias or other halls, but I lead us straight on, to the corner stairwell. There, I turn us inward and begin the climb to the Administrative level.

  “Well, part of your theory was right. It is the same way we stayed hidden in the hospital. Magicians. The Academy is hidden by one of the biggest tricks ever concocted. The Tethers and the spaces around where they’re linked to on the ground, too,” I tell her. I wait for her doubt to bud again, a subtle bite of non-belief. Instead, Cece keeps her eyes fixed forward while she asks:

  “Magicians… That’s different from a Witch or Warlock?”

  “Yeah. Witches and Warlocks channel energy from natural phenomena. Magicians manipulate light and shadow, and…other things, to fool the eye or other senses. You’d have to ask one of them to get the full rundown,” I tell her, as best I understand. After all, what use would a Dragon have in Magician’s classes? And no one pays that much attention in Mystical History.

  “Must be nice. To be able to hide whatever you want from the Normies,” Cece mutters, while she stares out the sinking windows. I snort at her, which she answers with a glare.

  “Normans,” I correct.

  “Right. Because there’s going to be a vocabulary test,” Cece rolls her eyes again. Then her face completely twists itself up with the thought, “There’s not going to be a voca-”

  “No,” I cut in with a smile. Not yet, anyway, I elect not to tell her. Each stair takes us higher, as well as closer to the center of the Academy. Having seen the place from the outside during the day, I can picture exactly where we’re going - to the smaller floor raised above the Academy by the staircase from each corner of the building. This will be my first time there. My first time meeting the whole Council in person, all in one place. Suddenly, I don’t feel like talking much either.

  Cece and I make our way across the Administrative floor, through viewing rooms, the corridor of private offices, to the waiting room just outside the Council Chamber. The place looks like I imagine the room a billionaire uses to make important clients wait does. A high desk separates rows of luscious lounge chairs from a wall of glass. Behind the clear barrier, Cece and I can see the Council seated at a circular stone podium that looks more like an altar than a conference table. They’re in the middle of an animated chat when we arrive. The woman at the separation desk half lifts her eyes from the file she’s annotating when I clear my throat.

  “Lee Kaiba, here for the Council’s presentation of new enroll Cecelia Ford,” I tell the woman. She looks almost human, probably completely human to the untrained eye. I, however, am quite familiar with the Fey. This one, like all of them, has the slightest green tinge to her skin. It’s not quite enough to make her look sick, more like her skin is made of mint. Being that Fey hide their wings almost as well as we do means the only other thing to set her apart from a Norman woman are her ears, as pointed as arrowheads.

  “The Council will be with you shortly,” the Fey sings in the softest, sweetest tone someone can sound bored. I haven�
��t met one of them that I couldn’t sit and listen to all day, the way their voices sound.

  “I understand,” I tell her. The Fey sweeps the file she was working on to the side, to replace it with one on Cece from under the desk. I have to practically drag Cece away to keep her eyes off the form as information appears on it in completely different spots from where the Fey also writes.

  “You’re familiar with cloud technology? Like a cloud for the information on a computer?” I whisper to Cece as I drag her away. She turns her head almost completely around to peek at what the Fey is writing.

  “Yeah,” she says to me.

  “It’s like that, but for written works,” I tell her.

  “But how-”

  “The best thing you can do for yourself here, Cece,” I stop her, “is to try not to try so hard to understand everything. You’ve got to throw away your old frame of reference. Try to learn everything new, from scratch. I know it’s easier said than done.” I throw in the last part to stop her from bursting at me like I know she wants to.

  “Cecelia,” a voice calls from behind the desk. Cece and I turn around to face the Fey, only to find the speaker leaning through a sliding glass panel from the Council Chamber. “We’ll see you now. You too, Lee.”

  “O-of course, Dragonlord,” I give her an awkward little bow.

  “Don’t do that. You’ll embarrass all three of us,” sighs Dragonlord Thise. I cough myself back upright and give her a quick little nod. I can’t help it. I haven’t seen her in person since my first day. I never imagined I’d be helping to orient a newly Awakened, let alone one so fearsome as Cece. “Come in.” I pull my arm from Cece’s purely in the interest of looking professional. I suspect, from the look on her face, she feels as naked as I do without her to hold onto. We gulp, and walk through the glass panel to the Council Chamber.