The Hidden Court

by Vivienne Savage

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, there’s a second page here.” I smoothed out the parchment square and frowned at the swirling fae script.

  “Well? What’s it say?”

  “It reads like a poem. ‘Born from the sculptor of cinder’s fame, the Light Bringer will ignite the Eternal Flame.’ There’s another line but it’s smudged too badly for me to make it out.”

  Gabriel’s brows drew together. “No idea, but it doesn’t sound useful. Put that report back and let’s get outta here. We don’t wanna push our luck any further than we have.”

  18

  His Baby Hates Me

  Classes resumed two days later, but the sentinel presence on campus remained high. It didn’t take long for rumors to spread, and by the end of the week everyone knew Professor Gaspar had been accused of committing Dedrik’s murder and fled capture. There were a hundred sentinels searching the Chicago area, and even more spreading out across the region.

  She’d be staked on sight.

  Since the first day of class, Professor Gaspar had been a source of stern but friendly encouragement. When I asked Gabriel during our afternoon training session, he shrugged and said, “Sometimes people change, Sky.”

  We walked alongside each other toward the quad, the sun bright and golden against a serene blue sky. Since we’d officially been paired together, he claimed no one would think twice about him working with me at the gym during daylight too. I’d bundled up in a woolen scarf, gloves, and a royal purple knitted cap over my multi-hued hair. The piles of snow and biting wind called for boots and a heavy coat. He ambled down the path beside me in his usual leather jacket over black jeans decorated with a crimson dragon stitched into the side of each leg. Most shifters underdressed for the weather, more tolerant than the rest of us.

  “I dunno, dude. That’s a big change.”

  “Look, I don’t want to believe it any more than you do, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Maybe she got tired of blood bags. Maybe so many years of being feared by the students and treated poorly finally took a toll.”

  “Being called Ghastly, you mean.”

  He looked away, as guilty as the others who used the atrocious name. “Yeah. It’s like I told you before, a lot of people figure if they’re going to be viewed as monsters and beasts, they may as well act like them. Now, are we going to keep talking about this or did you want to train?”

  “What’s the lesson?”

  “After your performance the other night, I thought we’d try some illusion work. You need to learn how to tell what’s real from what’s not.”

  “I thought the whole point of your spells was to fool people into seeing things that aren’t there.”

  “Sentinels are trained to break illusions. It wouldn’t have worked on Sebastian or Simon, but that kind of shit is good for a janitor. You ever wondered what happened to people who do well enough not to become Talentless, but weren’t badass enough to get a job?”

  “You mean the janitor is…”

  “A vampire, yeah. They won’t strip your powers for sucking or being a weakling. They reserve that for the dropouts and quitters. Technically, you can’t even flunk out at PNRU unless you’re really lazy or stupid, and if you’re too dumb to maintain a passing but crappy D average, your gifts need to be sealed away.”

  “So the school is one big screening test for talent.”

  “Pretty much. And if you aren’t talented, if you don’t excel, you’re stuck out there flipping burgers or taking up a trade if you can get into one. Well, we are. Not you fae and mages.” He paused, a thoughtful look on his face. “Back before I dumped Jada, Dad would have just hired me to stand around looking tough with a gun for his clients. I’m not so sure about that now.”

  I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking or serious, but he didn’t crack so much as a hint of a smile. “What about the fae and mages who barely pass?”

  He shrugged. “Office work, I hear. Or they go back home to their rich mommies and daddies.”

  “Says the guy who has a horse stable out behind his huge house.”

  He blinked at me. “How’d you know that?”

  “Uh… Pictures,” I mumbled.

  “Were you Facebook stalking me?”

  “It isn’t stalking if your human friend does it to be nosy.”

  Crossing his arms and adjusting his stance, he stared me down as amusement tugged one corner of his mouth into a smirk. “Uh-huh. Did you see the pool too?”

  “Anyway, what’s today’s lesson?”

  “Hide-and-seek. I hide, you find me.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “You look for what’s wrong. Each time I hide, I’ll leave one clue behind that’ll set me apart from what you’re looking at. If you find me three times, I’ll throw in a special surprise afterward.”

  “Special surprise?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at me, tilting his head in a way reminiscent to his avian self. “Something I think you’ll enjoy.”

  “Fine, challenge accepted. What’s the playing field?”

  His grin widened. “The entire campus, but to be fair, I’ll stick to the quad for this one. Wait three minutes then come find me.”

  Before I had a chance to protest, he shifted and flew off.

  Pristine snow crunched beneath my boots as I stepped from the path. I couldn’t wait for spring to arrive and blanket the entire grounds with flowers and green grass instead.

  “Gabriel?” Wandering the quad, I searched beneath benches and felt up tree trunks, wondering what the hell kind of disguise he’d donned this time. A passing pair of mages gave me funny looks, and heat surged to my face. “Hide-and-seek,” I explained as if they’d asked me.

  Groping bushes and even statues during my search, I started to think this was a useless exercise. There were to many places he could be.

  Okay, think, Skylar. What’s out of place? What’s different?

  I didn’t remember a commemorative plaque at the fountain. I frowned and touched the granite pillar, but instead of hard stone, my palm brushed leather and abs. It shimmered away and revealed Gabriel.

  “Hey. Not bad. How’d you know it was me?”

  “There wasn’t a podium here before. I’ve sat at this fountain a hundred times with Lia.”

  “Good memory. That’s part of what screws up a lot of illusionists. They count on your memory being crap, and sometimes they throw shit up in a hurry without realizing they’re remembering it wrong.” He glanced down at my hand. I hadn’t lifted it away yet.

  “Oh!” I jerked my fingers back and cleared my throat. “So I found you once. Next?”

  The second time he posed as a trash can outside the cafeteria with the wrong university name, and the third, he masqueraded as an extra tractor tire at the obstacle course.

  “C’mon, that last one was easy. In fact, I’m kinda insulted at the cop-out you took there. I’ve run that course so many times I know exactly how many tires there are.”

  He barked out a quiet laugh and pulled me along toward his residential building. “You’re right. I did take the easy way out that time. I was a light pole for five minutes while you wandered by me over and over. It’s cold and I want to get inside, but technically you won.”

  “So what’s my special prize?”

  “Come with me and find out.”

  Gabriel rented an apartment on the other side of the campus in the Wyvern Quarters, a section of paid residential housing for students who could afford to throw cash at the university for privacy. He and Rodrigo shared a unit, and it was huge. They probably didn’t even have to share a bathroom like our free unit, and every balcony outside had a personal grill.

  The living room had a spacious L-shaped leather sectional before a television that rivaled a theater screen. Piles of video games had been stacked beside it, and DVDs filled the cabinets from wall to wall.

  Along with guns. Lots of guns. I hadn’t seen so m
any since stepping into a Cabela’s with my maternal grandfather in Georgia.

  Before I could ask about it, something shrieked from the far wall. I jerked around and realized I’d overlooked a cage beside the window. Inside, there was a colorful, gold, orange, and red parrot clinging to the bars.

  Gabriel wandered up to the cage and stroked the bird’s tangerine tummy. “Hey, buddy. How you doing today?”

  “You have a bird?”

  “Yeah. This is Amaterasu—Ama for short. She’ll be fourteen on her next hatch day this summer.”

  “Wow, that’s a long time.” Curious about his pretty, feathered friend, I wandered closer. “Does she talk?”

  He popped open the cage and let her onto his hand. “Sometimes. Not as clear as me, but I can make out most of what she says. Her species isn’t the best for talking.” Ama leaned out from his finger, mantling her wings, and snapped her beak at me. “Ama, no biting.” He sounded like a stern father reprimanding a naughty child.

  “Um. Guess she only loves her daddy, huh?”

  “Actually, she’s normally not like this. She loves meeting new people and hangs out with Rodrigo as much as me.”

  I didn’t dare ask how she treated Jada. She probably loved her.

  He kissed Ama on her dark beak and set her on the cage’s play stand before moving to the closet. He dragged a duffel bag out. “Ever shoot a gun before?”

  I looked away from the staring bird. Ama didn’t take her beady gaze off me. “My dad owns one but never bothers with it. I think it was a gift from a human relative on my mom’s side.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  He pulled down two handguns from a cabinet near the door then crossed the room and grabbed a shotgun from a shelf over the couch. He hesitated in front of a display bearing an assault rifle, picking it up then setting it down again, reminding me of my mom when she tried to decide which carton of eggs was freshest.

  “Are we going to war?” I asked.

  “No, we’re going to the range. I trust you not to shoot yourself in the foot or make me look bad. Please don’t let me down.”

  A tingling thrill zipped down my spine. Even though it wasn’t off-limits, the shooting range was one of those buildings the administration discouraged us fae from visiting. While Gabriel packed up the guns, I waited and tried not to bounce on my toes like an eager child. I swear it was like he knew, because he took his sweet time.

  He kissed Ama again on her feathered head before he returned her to the cage, and for the first time in my life, I envied a bird.

  We didn’t have far to walk. He scanned in with a keycard and led me down a long gray corridor. We passed through two heavy steel doors before we reached the actual range. It looked pretty much like I’d seen in any number of cops shows, a long room with multiple lanes separated at our end by transparent dividers. Gabriel steered me to the last aisle.

  “Okay, forget all that shit you see in movies. I’m not going to treat you like a five-year-old and give you the obvious spiel about guns being dangerous, but here’s the basics. Treat it like it’s always loaded, even if you’re positive you saw me take out every round. Even if you think you emptied it. Never aim it at a target or a person unless you’re ready to pull the trigger.”

  “Got it.”

  He rattled out more rules, made me repeat them, then finally placed a pair of safety glasses on my face, tucking the black frames over my ears with careful hands. The personal gesture and his tender touch set off more butterflies in my stomach than the promise of firing a gun. “Don’t close one eye. That limits your field of vision, and if you’re in a firefight, you want to see everything around you. Learn to sight down the barrel with both open.”

  “How do I do that?”

  He sighed, exasperated. “I’m going to teach you, impatient ass.”

  And he did after he sized me for a couple holsters. Despite having magical ability, I’d never felt as powerful as I did with a shotgun strapped to my back and a handgun on my hip. I’d grown up around magic—this was new, a piece of the forbidden world of being a sentinel in training.

  “You’re aiming for center mass. It’s the big circle in the center of the silhouette.”

  Once he placed enormous earmuffs on my head and showed me how to find my dominant eye, I peered down the sight and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked, bucked in my hands, and a round hole appeared in the silhouette’s left shoulder.

  “You’re not awful,” Gabriel said in a thoughtful tone, his voice dampened by my ear protection. “Here, brace yourself like this and don’t squeeze so hard. You want a firm grip, but not a death hold.”

  Handling a gun psyched me up too much to care about his confident hands guiding my arms. With his help, the next shot hit the big center mass circle.

  “Are you sure you should be letting her play with those? She might chip a nail.” Jada’s voice popped my joyous mood in an instant.

  Gabriel took the gun from my hand and set it on the counter. Then he glanced over toward his ex-girlfriend. “It’s poor etiquette to come in here running your mouth, Jada. You know that.”

  Her steps paused near the entrance when he chastised her. The female raven sniffed and claimed a lane two up from ours.

  I raised the left muff from my ear and whispered, “Should we just go?”

  “Ignore her. C’mon, try a few more rounds. Then we’ll switch to the shotgun.”

  “Only a few?”

  Jada’s first shot blew a hole in the center of the silhouette’s head. If she aimed, it was done in the span of a blink. My shoulders sank, genuine elation dimmed.

  “Or a lot,” Gabriel said. His gaze darted left to Jada. Her next shot fell in the second ring just outside of center mass. “Shoot as much as you want. I have bullets to spare.”

  “Are you going to shoot with me?”

  “If you want.”

  He moved into the lane between Jada and me. Instead of seeing her smug face and fancy gun, I was gifted with Gabriel’s profile. His aiming stance showed off the lean musculature in his arms.

  This is supposed to be a treat. A reward for me. I’m not gonna let her spoil it.

  “There’s accuracy and there’s precision. You want to learn to have both,” Gabriel explained when he fired the first round. He squeezed off six more afterward, three landing within millimeters of the first shot in center mass. Two overlapped. The rest went into the head. “Accuracy is your aim. Precision is being able to peg the same area more than once.”

  “Like you did.”

  “Right. Doesn’t matter if you can hit a target once,” he said, though I began to wonder if he was talking to me or Jada, “if you can’t reproduce it over and over.”

  “I’ll never be able to do that.”

  “You could one day. What you see are precise, accurate holes. What you don’t see are years of training and practice, Sky. I’ve been shooting since I learned to stand.”

  Right. While my parents took me to play dates and taught me to color with crayons, his dad was probably teaching him martial arts.

  After I emptied the pistol, he taught me to reload on my own by demonstrating on the handgun he’d brought for himself. The larger spread of bullets didn’t resemble his concise cluster of holes, but the success satisfied me.

  “If you ever do end up in a gunfight, don’t try to get fancy. In a real fight, your opponent isn’t going to just stand there and wait for you to hit them. Aim for the center because it’s the biggest target and easiest to hit. Only sharpshooters try to blow out kneecaps or strike between the eyes.”

  Jada made another sound in the back of her throat and put three rounds in her target’s head. Then she looked over at me and flipped her hair.

  And bimbos, I thought.

  “Let’s try the shotgun now.” Gabriel unloaded the pistols, set them aside, and showed me how to draw the larger weapon from the back holster. The unwieldy shotgun was heavy in my hands, awkward to hold with one arm, and more intimidating once I was ho
lding it. Gabriel chuckled and placed my hands where they needed to be.

  “It’s not a baseball bat, Sky. Support it here with your nondominant hand. Keep it pointed toward the floor until you’re ready to fire.”

  “Simon’s gun wasn’t this long,” I grumbled.

  “He carries a short-barreled version for backup, but it’s better to learn with a standard model.”

  Once he taught me to operate the unloaded shotgun, the shells came into play. Gabriel wasn’t satisfied until I removed them all manually instead of ejecting them.

  “Sweet. You haven’t even broken a nail yet,” he said.

  “Fancy that.”

  When Gabriel hit a button, a track on the ceiling slid a new silhouette into place and brought it closer. Holding the shotgun pulsed a new wave of adrenaline through my bloodstream.

  “You ready for this?”

  “I’m totally ready for this.”

  “You wanna tuck this against this pocket here in your shoulder, see? Lean into it and hold it firm, or you’ll be on your ass.”

  While his warning helped, the shotgun’s stock still punched me in the shoulder. I leaned into the blow and stood my ground, but it was a close call. Gabriel’s fingers had settled on my hips.

  “Again?”

  “Go for it. I’m not catching you this time though.”

  His ex faded from my mind completely as I took another shot. There was something exhilarating about learning to use a gun. Not that I ever wanted to be put in a position where I had to use one, but if the time ever came, at least I’d know what to do.

  At some point, Jada had left, and I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Not bad for your first time at the range. I’d give you a solid… C.”

  “What?” My voice pitched upward.

  His grin widened. “Fine, a B-minus.”

  “So is this all you have to do to pass the weapons part of your training? Shoot at the range, I mean.”

  “To graduate next year and get my sentinel license, I’ll have to run a special test and pass with three different weapons and moving, enchanted targets,” he explained. “If you thought the obstacle course outside was rough…” He whistled. “Anyway, I’m still working on it, if that gives you any clue about how difficult it is. I’m always about thirty, forty seconds too slow.”