by Sarah Jaune
Nodding, Eli felt his eyes drift shut. He found himself back in the forest, staring at the wolf.
Then the wolf’s mouth opened. “We’re hungry.”
“I’m not food,” Eli informed the wolf. “Go eat deer.”
“There are no deer,” the wolf told him. “I will eat you.”
“Why are there no deer?” Eli asked, but the wolf lunged at him, and he jumped, startled and woke up in a cold sweat.
The hospital was quiet around him, save for the beeping of a few machines, and Ivy’s gentle breathing in the bed next to his.
Eli glanced around, half-convinced that a wolf would be ready to leap out at him.
Reluctantly, he closed his eyes again and fell off into another fitful sleep.
CHAPTER 8
BROTHERS
They left the hospital two days later and were back in school well before Eli wanted to be. His whole body hurt with every step as he hobbled along with Ivy, Oliver, and Graham at eight in the morning.
“You look like an old man,” Graham snickered. The sun, which was just coming up over the horizon lit his light brown hair, making it almost blonde.
“Shut up,” Eli growled with a wince as he tried to step up on a curb and felt his ribs scream at him. Just because he felt like an old man, didn’t mean he wanted his younger brother mentioning it.
The really annoying thing was that his brothers were being nice to Ivy, either because she wasn’t technically part of the family, or because she was a girl. Oliver had offered to carry her bag to school for her. Her face, where the wolf had bit her, was still bandaged and swollen. They were both covered in bruises and appeared to have been through a war. Eli could have used a little bit of leeway, but neither Oliver nor Graham were likely to give it to him.
That’s just not what brothers did.
They didn’t even make it to their first class before the new principal, a woman named Gloria Dais, called them down to her office. Principal Dais was a petite woman of at least sixty. She had white, short, curly hair that stuck to her head as though glued in place. She wore neat, trim suits and always had on black, thin glasses that did nothing to hide her warm, brown eyes. Her eyes were the only part of her that made Eli think she might just have a sense of humor. The rest of her spoke of rules followed precisely and lips always set in a firm line. Her eyes, though, twinkled. It was as though the whole school was part of a private joke, and she was the one holding the punchline.
Eli hobbled in to her office with Ivy right behind him to find the chief of police waiting for them behind Mrs. Dais’ desk. He froze, unsure of what to make of this. Eli’s father, Pablo, was a police officer, but he’d told Eli that they weren’t going to be questioned.
“Sit, please,” Chief Warwick commanded in his deep voice. His brows were dark, almost touching as though he only had one. He sported a thick, dark mustache, but no beard. Eli took a seat and Ivy joined him. He glanced back to find Principal Dais leaving, closing the door behind her.
“I have a few questions for you,” the chief said, drawing Eli’s attention back to him. “Your father explained the situation, but I have found a few holes. For one, I do not understand how two teenagers who were unarmed were able to defend themselves against a pack of wolves, if indeed it was wolves that attacked you.”
Eli’s mind raced as he stared at the man, trying to figure out what to say.
Ivy shifted in her seat. “I don’t understand. Who could have attacked us if it wasn’t wolves? I have bite marks that are clearly from a wolf.”
“But how did you survive?” Chief Warwick pressed them, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “We didn’t find the body of the dead wolf.”
“Maybe it was eaten by scavengers?” Eli suggested, scrambling to think up any excuse. He felt trapped, cornered. “My dad said it was okay. What happened?”
“What happened,” the man said as he focused his dark eyes on Eli, “was that I found it suspicious that two small teenagers managed to fight off a pack of wolves.”
“Maybe they were starving,” Eli pointed out as he tried not to wince while shifting in his seat. “They’ve never attacked us before, and we go running up there a lot.”
Ivy nodded, “Maybe they were driven crazy with hunger and weren’t up to a fight.”
“But how did you fight them off with your bare hands?” Chief Warwick asked them, a harsh edge in his voice. “That I don’t get.”
“I used a branch, actually,” Eli lied quickly. “I… I think I did.” He turned to Ivy, trying to fake being confused. “I think I grabbed a branch from the ground.”
“You might have,” Ivy shrugged helplessly, catching on to his game. “It’s a bit of a blur to me, actually. I was so scared.”
“Let me see your hands.”
They two teens turned back to the police chief. “Sir?” Eli asked, unsure why that mattered.
“Your hands,” Warwick repeated more firmly. “If you were using a stick, you likely have injuries to your hands from holding it so tightly.”
Eli held out his hands which were scraped raw; just not from a branch. He’d fought the creatures off with his bare hands, and fell to the ground at least once.
His hands looked bad.
“You?” Warwick turned to Ivy, his expression thoughtful and mistrusting. “What did you do?”
“I…” Ivy hesitated for a long moment as she gazed into her lap. For a stunned moment, Eli thought she might be weeping, but when she flicked her eyes up, they were dry. “I don’t really remember. It happened really quickly. We saw the first, and I think Eli grabbed a stick to hit it. Another one jumped us. It was over in less than a minute, and all I could think about was how much I was hurting. We barely survived, but for some reason most of the wolves ran away from us.”
Warwick didn’t appear satisfied, but he let it go. “Fine, you may go to class.”
They stood and hobbled off towards their first period.
All day, Ivy was on edge. Eli didn’t figure out why until he heard a group of girls giggling and pointing at them, commenting on how bad Ivy looked.
“This is stupid,” Ivy hissed as they made their way in for lunch. “Everyone’s saying how you look dashing and handsome, whereas I simply look like crap.”
“It does seem a little unfair,” Graham agreed as he came over to join them. He didn’t normally sit with them, but at Eli’s questioning glance, he shrugged. “It’s solidarity, bro. You two need the backup.”
Oliver sat down next to Ivy a moment later, and said, “Have you heard what they’re saying about you?”
“I really don’t care,” Eli assured him honestly. He felt an itch on the back of his neck, as though there were a lot of eyes on him, and turned too quickly, making his back seize up painfully. Groaning, he glanced around, but didn’t see anything. The few kids that had been pointing at him, jumped and pretended as though they hadn’t been staring.
“No soccer for a week,” Graham sighed regretfully.
That was also a major drawback to being injured. Eli wouldn’t be able to play sports, exercise, or train until the worst of the bruising was healed up.
“It could be worse, though,” Ivy sighed as she picked at her sandwich. “We could have been dead. I can’t believe we were questioned. That’s not good, Eli.”
“No,” he agreed, coming back to the conversation. He met her green eyes head on and silently urged her not to bring it up here at school. Eli didn’t know why, but he couldn’t get over the fact that he felt like they were being observed.
Ivy stayed late at their house that night, mostly to discuss their session with Chief Warwick, but also because Ivy didn’t want to go back to her foster family.
She dragged out the book that Coral’s mother had given them in San Antonio and convinced Eli to go sit out on the porch in the rocking chairs.
“We can barely see,” Eli complained as he leaned back in his seat so he could stare up at the glittering stars above them.
�
�I can see enough to read,” Ivy promised as she flicked through the pages from her seat to his right. “We should have read this before, you know.”
“I started to a couple of times,” he told her with a stifled yawn, “but it’s really dull. The writer seemed to be aiming to put people to sleep.”
Ivy didn’t reply.
Eli turned to see her startled expression as she stared down at a page halfway through the book. “What?”
“It…” she swallowed visibly, clearly shaken, “it talks about diviners, people like me.”
“Really?” Eli sat up and peered over her shoulder to try to catch the words in the almost non-existent light. As far as Eli knew, there were only a few diviners in their world. Ivy’s ability to tell not only what a person’s magical power was, but also how powerful they were, was basically unheard of. No one else had that power, at least as far as Eli knew, except for an old lady in Boston.
“Let me read,” Ivy said nervously, holding the book up close to her face so she could see it.
When she didn’t read out loud, Eli huffed and prodded her shoulder.
Ivy twitched him away as though he were an annoying fly. “Just a second.”
He turned away and waited, trying to be patient as the minutes clipped by. After almost five minutes of silence, save for the turning of pages, he grunted out, “Well?”
“Wait,” Ivy said.
Another minute went by. Then two.
“Ivy…” Eli protested.
“You’re acting like you’re three, you know that, right?” Ivy said conversationally, still not looking away from the book.
He tried not to be annoyed, but it was difficult. His fingers tapped on the wooden armrest of the rocking chair, picking up in cadence and force until the wood beneath his fingers cracked from the pressure.
Eli stared down at it in horror and sprang to his feet, which didn’t help his injured body feel any better.
Maia was going to kill him for breaking her chair. Then she’d make him fix it.
Sighing, he began to pace, trying to keep his temper in check while Ivy finished what was clearly an entire chapter on diviners.
He really shouldn’t be so churlish about it, since it was about her. He could imagine it would be fascinating, since she’d never met another one like herself. Ivy didn’t know anything about that side of her family, but they had to assume that somewhere back she was related to the Overseer of Boston, since it was his mother that was the diviner.
“Okay,” Ivy said slowly as she set the book in her lap.
Eli stopped pacing to stare at her. She looked stunned, or maybe dazed. “What?”
“I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “The first diviner is the mother of the current Overseer of Boston.”
“I knew that,” Eli agreed.
“She wrote this book!” Ivy exclaimed, pointing to the book. “She says she was from out west, but never answered where she was from. She could tell people were magical, though, so the Overseer of Boston ended up taking her for a bride. They had two sons, Samuel and Simon. Samuel is the current Overseer, but his brother has vanished. Apparently only Samuel had power. Their mother’s gift wasn’t passed on.”
“Then how did you get it?” Eli wondered as he took the book from her to squint down at the page. “You have to fit in there somewhere.”
Ivy shook her head. “Maybe it was like healing, which doesn’t have to be a bloodline thing. Maybe it just showed up in me.”
“Maybe,” Eli said as he handed the book back to her. He was too tired to read it anyway. “It seems like a lot of the magical people just showed up. There aren’t a lot of ancient history books, but from what I can tell, magic wasn’t here when everything was divided up by states and not zones.”
Ivy rose unsteadily to her feet. “I should get home.”
“I’ll walk you,” he said as he always did. For once she didn’t protest. Apart they were beaten up and useless, but together they’d likely stand a chance if someone attacked. At least, Eli hoped so.
The rest of that school week was an annoying blur of tests on subjects he didn’t care about, people talking about him, and that nagging feeling that he was being watched. The only bright spot was that both he and Ivy were over the worst of their injuries.
“I want to be a mechanic,” Eli protested to Pablo Friday night after dinner. He wasn’t failing, exactly, but Eli knew he’d been distracted, and his teachers had warned him he needed to refocus on his education. He’d told Pablo, mostly because he’d always told him that sort of thing. It hadn’t gone well. “I don’t care about most of this stuff!”
“You need it if you’re ever going to—” Pablo began, but Eli didn’t let him finish.
“I don’t care!” he raged at his foster father, shouting and getting into Pablo’s face. Despite Eli’s growth spurts, he was still significantly shorter than Pablo, which only made Eli more furious. “I don’t want to do this anymore! These stupid people keep talking about me, and I’m wasting my time with these classes.”
Pablo held up his hands for peace, and his expression never wavered. “I know that’s what you want, Eli, and if you finish high school, you will still be able to become a mechanic. You don’t have to go on to college, but hear me out. If something happens, you might end up as the Overseer of Chicago. If that happens,” he pitched his voice up so that Eli wouldn’t start shouting again in frustration. “If that happens, you need a basic education.”
“It doesn’t help my father any,” Eli reminded him bitterly. “He went to college and he’s still doing a terrible job.”
“I know,” Pablo told him placating, “but you still need—”
“I am not going to be the Overseer!” Eli hissed out as his anger built again. He enunciated every single word, sharply, so his dad would get the point. “I want one of my sisters to do it! I don’t want the job, and I don’t want the responsibility.”
Pablo crossed his arms, his own expression finally shifting into temper. “You’re going to take the easy way out, Eli? You’re going to stick your sisters with this difficult job rather than do the work yourself? Are you really that lazy?”
Stung, Eli took a step back. “No…”
Was he?
“No,” Eli said again, clearing his throat as he felt himself shrink a bit under Pablo’s steady gaze. “I can’t do it, Dad.”
He didn’t mean to sound pitiful, but it came out that way all the same.
Pablo sighed heavily and pulled him in for a quick hug. “You can do it, Eli. I am sure your sisters both feel the same way, you know. I doubt either of them wants the job. You have to hear me, though,” he said as he held Eli at arm’s length so Eli could see his eyes. “We don’t push off messes on other people. That’s not what we do. We’re not lazy or selfish. We’re not self-serving, because that’s the road to greed, arrogance, and abuse. If you think the world owes you, you stop working for yourself. You take from others more than you give. I can’t have you doing that, Eli. You have to step up and be the kind of man that will never push the problem off on someone else, just so you can do whatever you feel like. People’s lives are at stake here. Your sisters may want the job, and if so, great, but if they don’t…”
Eli understood and it left him feeling a lot older than his sixteen years. “If they don’t, but I refuse, they have no choice in the matter.”
“Exactly,” Pablo nodded sadly. “You have no definitive reason not to be the Overseer. Any obstacle, you can overcome. Don’t slam the door shut just yet.”
Before he could respond, Maia hurried into the room. Her face was pinched in concern. “There’s a problem.”
CHAPTER 9
THE REAL TEST BEGINS
“What’s the matter?” Pablo asked quickly.
Eli studied her pretty face, which he noted was pale. She looked distracted, as well. “Is anyone hurt?”
She flicked blue eyes to his momentarily, before turning back to Pablo. “The boy has gone missing. He h
asn’t checked in in over a week.”
Pablo swore silently as he took the note that Maia held and scanned it quickly.
“Who?” Eli demanded, stepping towards them.
“The other pursuer,” Pablo told him as he finished reading the note. “Maybe I should go.”
“Go where?” Eli wanted to know, even as Maia and Pablo ignored him in that way they did sometimes when they wanted to talk around him and not to him. It was ridiculously frustrating.
