by Jade Alters
“The-the-there’s some kind of attack outside the curtain!” the Vampire spews. I follow her pointing finger out to one of the bars across Valencia Street. Why would they… The thought clogs in my brain when I realize exactly why they would do that. I remember the first responders. The news trucks only a few minutes behind. They want to flush us out.
“Steph!” I roar through both my snout and spirit. My wispy blue mother appears before me from mist.
“Bar across the street. Already on it,” she says.
“Just possess who you can to call in 911 and get out. Don’t you dare risk anything more!” I growl.
“You know this is supposed to be the other way around, right?” Stephanie smirks. Then her form condenses into a blue arrow and fires off straight for the bar.
“Dorian!” I shout through the Soul of Fire. His armored head finds me down in the chaos. “We need to wrap this up! The Lotus is attacking outside the circle!”
“Damn hypocrites! They’re threatening to flush us out to the Normans. They think it’ll scare us off!” he roars back, just as furious as me.
“They don’t know what scary is,” I tell him. “Let’s show them.” Dorian doesn’t need words to let me know how much he agrees. He swoops low into a spiral. A veil of flame wraps his flailing wings. “Clear out, and finish off the survivors!” I order to the Vampires at large. Their eyes light up with about as much fear as their remaining Lotus opponents. The crucial difference is that the Vampires have the agility to flee in time. They explode into dire sprints for their lives. Our Vampire contingent vanishes into the nearby alleys in seconds. Just before Dorian and I unleash a draconic hell on earth.
The inferno from my throat sweeps low across the ground and rolls up. Dorian’s orange flare eclipses the city lights and night sky alike. Piping red stalactites of flame drip down to connect with mine. We form the top and bottom jaw of a momentous, fiery mouth. A few rogue bow gun bolts fling out in desperation. But burning men don’t aim well. Iron stakes whizz aimlessly around us. No one lands a hit before Dorian and I close our fiery jaw on the Lotus. Even those who manage to hide behind the bodies of their comrades aren’t spared, when the crash of infernal teeth wrenches them around.
There are no survivors left for the Vampires to finish off. The pale warriors are left with slack jaws, wide eyes and nothing to do but gawk. The form of a great Dragon peels away from the black of night to land beside me. A thin veil of embers encircles us both. When the heat blows out, we are human again, and heaving for breath. Dorian reaches out to clasp me on the shoulder, but I’m already hard at work on the next challenge. I squeeze my eyelids shut to project my mind across the Blue Plane.
“Steph, what are we looking at?” I call out.
“A bar full of Lotuses,” she answers me. As soon as she does, I see through her eyes. Well, the eyes of the waitress she’s borrowed. “And from the way they’re talking, this isn’t the only building they’ve taken hostage. They’re waiting to see if we’ll call their bluff and break these people out.”
“Poor bastards don’t realize we don’t need to be there, to do that,” I answer. I open my eyes to tell Dorian, “Watch my body? I’m going to the bar across the street. And keep an eye out for attacks on other buildings.” With the brief amount of time I take to deliver the message, I hardly notice Dorian’s proud hand on my shoulder. Then, suddenly, I’m above us. I watch my physical frame drop into his waiting arms. My Astral one has business elsewhere.
I come through the wall of the bar to a familiar room. This is one of the places Jason and I drank together on my twenty-first birthday. It’s one of the last places we sat and laughed together. I gulp, though swallowing serves no real function in the Blue Plane, and float over to the waitress surrounded by Stephanie’s pale blue glow. Several of the bar’s patrons have been bruised or cut, most likely from trying to leave.
“What are the chances the Lotus aren’t protected against possession?” I ask her.
“I’d say slim,” Stephanie mulls. We both quiet ourselves and turn to face one of the Lotus warriors when she says:
“It’s to create a need. It’s the only way to force their hand.” The woman saunters over to the chef, who’s suspended by the gruff arms of two other Lotuses. “Will they show themselves, or let you all die?”
“Your sacrifice will be remembered,” the two Lotuses on either side of the chef murmur. His pudgy face goes paler than the moon.
“I don’t know who or what the fuck you’re talking about! If you’re waiting for someone to show up to rescue me, you’re wasting your time!” the chef prattles. As the female Lotus approaches with a crooked dagger from within her robe, a bead of water rolls down each of his cheeks. “Please… This isn’t going to help you get whatever you’re after.”
“That remains to be seen,” says the Lotus. She pulls her hilt back. Stephanie’s aura tells me that she’s about to burst from the waitress with a fury. I stop her just short. I motion to the kitchen. Possessing the Lotus may be a risk, but there are plenty of things in the bar we can control.
The Lotus plunges her dagger into the chef’s stomach. He turns his wincing head to suffocate a scream. But, instead of the warm slosh of pierced flesh, the stab connects with a loud ping, and deflects from a frying pan. I reverse the pan in my grip and bash it across the Lotus woman’s skull.
“Astrals!” one of the other Lotuses realizes. “Get your Cross-”
Stephanie silences the shouter with a flinging chef’s knife to the eye. He reels back with a scream while I sink down into the gas stove. The chef scrambles away from his captors, who are now far more occupied with other matters. I ignite the burners. Stephanie releases a shockwave of Astral energy to knock three Lotuses back onto them. Their scorched bodies writhe on the floor while I seize a pot in each hand. I hurtle them into Lotus skulls with fatal intensity. I strike one square in the temple. He collapses, out cold.
“What the hell is happening?” the waitress Stephanie had possessed screeches. The battle wages on, indifferent to her plight.
Stephanie and I fling cooking tools to impale, burn or bludgeon every Lotus robe but one. The one who manages to draw her Black Cross from within her robe. It chills me right down to my spirit – to face erasure. But, before the Lotus can fling it, he’s plowed over by the chef’s driving shoulder. The chef’s valor inspires a spark of bravery throughout all of the Normans in the bar. Whether or not they understand everything they’re seeing, they know they were detained by the group on the downswing, and they take advantage. They jump on Lotuses on their knees. They punt burnt heads trapped in hands. They shove robed attackers over while they struggle to stand back up. I look to Stephanie in bewildered surprise. They don’t need us anymore. And it’s a good thing, too.
“Cece! We need you out here!” Dorian cries through the Soul of Fire. Before I even have a second to answer, a vibration rumbles the walls of the bar. Stephanie and I share another, far grimmer look, before I ride a spirit stream right back to my body.
I open my eyes to a landscape of fire. But the dragonsfire Dorian and I used to take out the Vampires is already gone. This inferno is from human explosives. The silhouettes of long robes materialize in the blaze across the street. Scalded bodies claw their way through shards of the shattered front windows of a bar a few doors down from the one Stephanie and I just cleared. I don’t even realize the feeling has drained from my body until another explosion blasts out the front of a bar on our side of the street. I jump, and blood pumps back into my veins. Hot blood with a driving instinct to fight. I move forward, but a hand catches mine. I turn back for Dorian.
“It’s too much, Cece,” he rumbles. Disappointment is heavy in his voice. But not heavy enough! He’s talking about leaving all of these Normans to die. To be swept off the board without ever realizing they were the pawns who won a war they had nothing to do with. I can’t let the Lotus do that. I won’t. I pull away, but a hand catches my other side.
“Cece,” Steph
anie murmurs as she rematerializes beside me, “there are too many, and it’s outside the illusory curtain… If we go out there, guns blazing…” I tear my arm away from her too. Much of a point as they both have, I can’t stand it. I about-face to scream at both my parents at once.
“If we turn back now, everyone loses! The Normans out here die! The Academy empties out everyone inside it like a salt-shaker!” Then I remember the people of the bar Stephanie and I just came from. “They want to fight, so let’s help them! Who cares about keeping secrets if the people they’re about are all dead?” Neither Dorian nor Stephanie has anything to say about that. I spin back around.
If any part of me still doubted, that part is extinguished in an instant. Norman first-responder vans from public hospitals and private companies file down both sides of Valencia street. The doors of the one furthest from us pop open. A man jumps down from inside, clad in a solid blue-collared uniform with an EMS emblem on the chest. A man I spent twenty-one birthdays with. A man I hugged every night before bedtime until I was fourteen. A man named Jonah. And this time, he’s not alone. I take a whimpering gasp when a second body in identical uniform jumps out behind him. She looks so ridiculous in that oversized outfit. Her frail, tiny body running to keep up with Jonah. Christa. But I rarely called them by those names. Mostly, in the days before I met my birth parents, I used to call them Mom and Dad. They trot straight toward the wreckage of the most recently exploded bar.
Three figures in burgundy robes race after them.
“Cece!” Dorian and Stephanie shout after me. Both of their reaching hands miss when I take off. My heels smack the asphalt harder than ever before. My burning heels leave scorch marks in the shape of my feet behind me. I burst through the wall of the illusory curtain.
“LOOK OUT!” I bellow, mid-transformation. My adoptive parents take a sharp turn back. My voice runs through them like an electric current.
“I told you, I saw her!” Jonah exclaims.
“Cece?” Christa shivers. But, when they find me, I’m not the girl they remember. I’m no girl at all. It’s a mauve-scaled beast that blasts through the air in a puff of fire and smoke toward them. I see fear in their eyes as I approach, but something else, too. Something more powerful than fear. They dig their heels in and wince as my canvas wings reach wide over their heads, rather than running.
I focus on the Lotus first. I’m out in the open, for a whole street full of Normans to see. At least no one has their phones out, and there aren’t any news trucks about yet. Still, I have to make this fast. The Lotus form up in a defensive rank to prevent me from doing just that. A row of robed human shields cover their faces with their sleeves, in effect becoming a fireproof wall. I have neither the strength nor the help to burn through their barrier. Behind them, a second line of Lotus warriors steady their bow guns at me.
My crystal, draconic eyes jump around from one heart-pumping detail to the next. The flames of bars and other buildings up and down the street. My adoptive parents, paralyzed by the truth of the world they left their daughter in. The burgundy robes, flickering like the coats of man-sized devils in the amber light. I suck down a long, deep breath, into my chest. Right down into where a spark should make a fire at the base of my throat. But my ribs fill with the oddest sensation. It’s not heat. It’s almost like a deep chill.
Sapphire beams shimmer from my eyes like two spectral headlights. I feel my physical and Astral bodies engage together. I crack my jaw to unleash the mysterious force, a union of my two natures I didn’t think was possible. I doubt anyone did, least of all the clueless Jonah and Christa, who are helpless but to watch. A flood of phantasmal blue flame surges from my throat. It behaves like flame, at least, but it’s made of something else. Pure energy from the Blue Plane. The Lotus have no protection against that.
I strafe along the side of the street, gushing jaw turned down. I beam my jetstream of spirit-fire over one robed body after the next. All who I pass over are reduced to particles. There’s hardly a scrap of red fabric left, when I glide on to the next unlucky cluster of Lotuses. My blue flame leaves no smoke or scorch mark, just a trail of twisting fog. When it swirls out on a passing wind and fades away, there’s no sign that anything unusual ever happened on that particular spot of Valencia Street.
I tilt my wings to cut into a sharp circle. My talons hit the street a few feet away from Jonah and Christa. They’re one of the few who don’t turn tail the second I land. People sprint into whatever alley or open building they can find, despite the explosions that happened only minutes ago. They’re more frightened of me. All but these two. The people I once considered my parents, my only family, are stuck. They search my black-slit pupils in my oceanic eyes for a sign. For a trace of humanity.
“Cece…” Christa whimpers. She even dares to take a shaky step towards me. “Is that… Are you really…” She twitches when I let a puff of gray smoke snort from my flared nostrils. She creeps toward me with this look of apprehension, though that’s not to say a touch of love isn’t present, too. It’s the same look she had on her face when she walked out of that hospital room. “I… Your father told me he saw you…while he was responding to a call a week ago. I…had to see it for myself.”
“We started volunteering as first responders right after…” Jonah tries to add on, but something catches inside his throat first. He gulps it down and starts again. “It was too little, too late, but…we went back to the hospital to check on you…and…and you were…”
“We thought we might be able to find you if you had one of your episodes…” Christa cuts herself short when I let out a warning cough of fire. “Ah, if you…used your abilities, I mean,” she tries. “I thought…we could find you.”
“We’re so sorry, Cece,” Jonah gushes, “We were just scared.” And, just for that moment, I want to take a step toward them, rather than away. Why would they go so far to put themselves in harm’s way, if they didn’t mean every word? Remorse? Now that’s one thing I never pictured, when the occasional thought of Jonah and Christa crossed my mind.
“Cece!” I hear Dorian and Stephanie’s voices at once, through neither of them come through my ears.
“The Lotus are retreating. We’ve been too visible – you have to get back inside the curtain!” Dorian pleads. My body turns before my head. The last thing to avert from Jonah and Christa are my eyes. My eyes linger on them as long as they can, before I reach the illusory curtain. I step through, and vanish from their lives again.
Cece,
The Broken Academy, Adjustment Lounge
Our return to the Academy is hardly as triumphant as I imagined. We barely survived, let alone won! And yet, there’s solemn silence between Stephanie, Dorian and I on the way back through the lightstream. Weakly as it might be hung there, it remains, a thousand feet over the city we just fought to save. The double doors of the Adjustment Lounge slam behind us. Dorian breaks off for the hall to the main hall of the Academy. It’s a little bit to do with my worry he might be angry with me, for revealing myself to the Normans, and more than a little bit because I just saw my adoptive parents for the first time in my true form. I can’t help it.
“Dad?” I blurt out. It’s one of the handfuls of times I’ve called him what I feel that he is. He winces at the word. He turns around with a smile, but he can’t hide the wrinkles of pain in his forehead from me. “What? Is it…because I showed myself?” Dorian shakes his head immediately.
“You did something most people wouldn’t. You risked your life for strangers. I couldn’t be prouder of you,” he tells me. His voice sounds like he means it. It also sounds like it’s not all he has to say. “But…” Now the smile fades completely. His lips sink into a flat line, then tilt down into the slightest curve of a frown as he looks to Stephanie. He looks almost as if he might actually tell us. Open up. Then he visibly shakes the feeling off, and says, “We have to give our report on what happened. I’m sure the others are already there, waiting for us.” I look to Stephanie for sup
port, but she seems similarly uncomfortable.
“You’re right,” she says to him, then to me, “Come on.” My mouth hangs agape, unsure how to fix what I’m not even sure is broken. All I can do is sigh and follow along when they lead out of the Adjustment Lounge. We head up the long stairway to the Administrative Wing in silence, where everyone is waiting.
Retaliation
Hoster,
The Broken Academy, Administrative Wing
It’s uplifting to see them all back under one roof. It’s also terrifying. The combined might of the Kyrie and the Academy can almost all fit in the Administrative Wing hallway, after this past struggle with the Lotus. In the course of one very long day, the fate of the Broken Academy was decided, across the locations of six Tethers around California. Two remain, as does the Academy. Even if it’s just barely…we’re all still here. I cloak myself from the meeting below, so I can float freely above the table to listen. The things we’ve learned in victory and defeat may make all the difference in survival.
“The ear plugs you designed to ward off the Lotuses disabling frequency worked well. But those orbs they use to paralyze Magicians, Witches, and Shifters…they’re not just for distance,” Rock attests in his report.
“You too, huh?” Emery asks. Rock nods. “Heren turned his into a sort of flail.”
“The group that attacked us used them as maces,” Rock presents to the meeting. “They were…extremely effective against our numbers.”
“Does it have a similar effect to the audio frequency?” Magister Reynold asks in a low rumble.
“Yes,” Rock is hardly able to muster the gusto to answer.
“They can dispel tricks, too,” Emery adds. I didn’t witness either of these, yet the images haunt my mind. Shifters and Magicians bludgeoned by steel orbs on sticks or cables. The sentiment sweeps through the grim crowd around the table. Survivors of the struggles avert their eyes and twiddle their fingers. They chase away the memories however they can until Lucidous asks:
