“Six heads are better than one. The second reason is that two of us can completely shield our minds. And we can teach you to do the same. It might not work all the time, but it might keep out the weaker mental threats.”
“You can?” Izban’s eyes widened and then moved to Macey’s face, lingering there slightly.
“Yes,” Cam replied. Macey’s gaze flickered to him and noted the bemused smile on his face. She wondered what that was all about, but now wasn’t the time to ask more.
“Okay, fine. But only until we save Amber.”
“You mean Lightning,” Macey blurted, making him scowl.
“You’re going to have to stop with the stupid prophecy.” The hard set of Izban’s eyes told her it was better just to let it drop.
“Fine.” For now, she added in her head.
Izban finally took her hand and gave it a firm shake. About time, too. Her arm felt like it was about to drop off.
“Amber is a nice name,” she said to distract him. It worked and he loosened his grip, allowing her to end the handshake.
“It is,” he grumbled. “She’s a nice girl. Sparring partner, I mean. One of the best. That’s why I need her back.”
Macey had a hard time not commenting on that. It was clear that he was head over heels in love with Lightning. But it was probably best not to tell him that; he didn’t seem to like people telling him the truth. She hoped Amber was going to be more open. True, it had taken her some time to accept the prophecy, and even now she was still not a hundred percent convinced, but logically it all made sense. And logic was one thing she trusted in.
“What do we do now?” Izban asked.
“Now, you explain what kind of spell you were trying to cast,” Cam said calmly, continuing to be the voice of reason. Macey wanted to hug him for being so sensible.
Izban shrugged. “A location spell to help me find her. It only lasts for about a day so I have to recast it regularly. I’m getting closer though, I thought this was the last time. But something blocked the spell and it became a little… hot.”
Macey smirked, having a hard time to keep from blurting out that he’d just admitted that he’d been in trouble. So her water burst had helped him after all. Why couldn’t he just admit that?
“So you think she’s close?” Jared asked and Izban nodded enthusiastically.
“Yes, she can’t be far, maybe a day’s ride from here. I just don’t know in which direction.”
“Ride? Do you have a horse?” Macey asked, imagining him as the knight in shining armour riding away to save his princess. He was so un-princelike that it was hard not to laugh.
“What century do you think we live in? It’s a motorbike.”
“Sharara didn’t mention a bike,” Macey whispered to Cam, cursing herself for using the cù sìth’s name a moment later. Hopefully, cat-man wasn’t listening in.
“I didn’t think you could take one into the Staran either,” Cam whispered back before turning back to Izban who was looking at them curiously. She hoped his hearing was as bad as that of any human. He may be a mage, but his body was human.
“How did you travel to the place where you met the dog-woman?” Cam asked, carefully phrasing his question. It was clear he didn’t want to give too much away.
“A spell I tried, but it didn’t work as planned,” Izban explained. “It brought me to this strange foggy place, then I got attacked and fled, and suddenly I was back where I had started.” He shuddered. “I never want to go there again.”
“Sorry to burst your bubble, but you may have to,” Macey said. It earned her a hard stare from the punk. “I don’t like it much either,” she added and his expression softened a tiny bit. “But it’s the way we travel from A to B, so you better get used to it.”
“Who says I’m going to travel with you? I’ve not decided yet.”
Macey sighed. “Didn’t we go through all of this already? We can help you find Amber. You said yourself that your location spell isn’t working anymore. Maybe we can find a solution together? As much as it pains me to say this, but if the prophecy is true, we’re going to need you. You’re one of us, just like Amber is.”
He frowned. “If we manage to get Amber away from him, I don’t want to commit to anything. It’s her decision, too. If she doesn’t want to stay, we can leave.”
It wasn’t a question. Damn that stubborn man. She was glad he was not one of her guys. Hers were much nicer. Luckily the prophecy didn’t mean that she had to be with all of them. Although... how was she supposed to get his mark without... Eurgh. No, she was not going to sleep with him. He already had a girlfriend... kind of.
“That’s only fair,” she sighed grudgingly. Hopefully Amber was going to be nicer. She was going to have to use all her charm to get Lightning on her side. They were going to need her. It wouldn’t work without all seven of them. Whatever ‘it’ was that they had to do to heal the Staran and stop the worlds from separating.
“Good, so what do we do now?” Izban asked, but before she could answer, a blinding pain shot through her skull.
The Voice was back.
She felt her body drop to the floor, but it was like an echo from far away amidst the pain that was racking her mind. It was so much worse than the times before. It felt as if he was closer, stronger, more brutal.
She clung to her mental barriers, begging them to stay up, but the onslaught was too much for them. There were cracks already, quickly becoming bigger as the Voice was trying to enter her mind.
He threw pain at her and all she could do was endure.
He was almost through.
With her last conscious thought, the pictured her three men. Cam. Flint. Jared. Hopefully, they would do as she’d asked and flee. Be safe. Live a life without her. Maybe still fulfil their quest somehow. And forget her.
“I love you,” she whispered as her barriers exploded into a million stars and Mahaun invaded her thoughts.
HELLO, LITTLE KELPIE. FINALLY, YOU’RE MINE.
Epilogue
Knowing how she was going to die was torture. Having to relive the vision each and every day, even more so. But that’s what Amber had to endure ever since Mahoun had brought her here.
It was her own fault for being too cocky. There’d been a storm brewing, and she’d thought she could try and harness the power from it. She’d always had an affinity for weather magic, and this particular storm had called to her in a way she’d never experienced before. Izban had tried to tell her no. She should have listened. If she’d stayed, maybe he’d finally have acted on the feelings he so clearly had for her.
She hadn’t noticed when they were still at school together; she’d been too focused on her studies to truly notice. Only after she’d been taken had she realised all the signs.
A groan came from the cell around the corner. She’d seen them when they were brought in a few days ago. Two men, probably twins, who’d been screaming something about being royalty. Not that it would help them. It didn’t matter who you were down here, in the end, everybody succumbed to the darkness.
She clutched her head and screamed as pain assailed her. Even when he wasn’t in the room, he was able to manipulate her mind and show her images of how she’d die. At first, she hoped the angry girl whose hair turned green, would never show up. That had been weeks ago. Now, she was praying for her to arrive and release her from her pain.
It always started the same. A new prisoner would be brought to her, a woman close to her own age. She’d be unconscious and Amber would wait for her to wake up. But that didn’t happen, so Amber would go to sleep, only to wake up to being strangled by the woman. There was a lot of angry screaming, glowing eyes and hair changing colour. The girl cursing at her, green hair floating around her head in an eerie way was usually the last thing Amber saw before the vision stopped.
But every night, the green-haired woman would follow her into her dreams. She’d taken on a life of her own. Nightmares were all Amber had nowadays.
Her da
ys were a nightmare, her nights just the same.
She didn’t even know how long she’d been here. It could easily be years.
Years of pain and dread.
She wasn’t going to last much longer. She could already feel her sanity slip away.
She yawned. She wasn’t going to be able to stay up much longer. She’d tried not sleeping, but it wasn’t working. She’d have to face the green-haired woman again.
Maybe this time, she’d be able to kill her rather than being murdered.
Maybe.
* * *
~ FIN ~
Through the Storms
The Original Myth
Described as the largest and most deadly kind of serpent, beithirs live in mountain caves and valleys. When stung by a beithir, the victim much reach the nearest body of water to be cured, before the beithir gets there itself (in which case they would die). Beithir is Scottish Gaelic for a variety of words, including "serpent", "lightning" and "thunderbolt".
Beithir
Chapter 1
They'd stolen her tail! Again. It should have been getting old, but Amber was just as angry as she had been the first time. Stealing a beithir's tail should be a crime. Well, it probably was, but nobody cared to punish those girls. They did whatever they wanted, and if that included bullying one of their fellow students, so be it.
At this school, the teachers swore by the motto to let the pupils fight it out amongst themselves. It was supposed to make them stronger. Well, without her tail, Amber was nothing. She was going to have to grow a new one.
She sighed. Would this drama never end? Yes, it would. Only eight months to go until she'd graduate from Ben Vair College. It couldn't come soon enough.
If only Mrs Battleboard hadn't told the class that story about beithirs. Before, everyone assumed she was a snake shifter, a harmless one at that. They may have seen she had a tail even in her human form, but she usually kept it well hidden under baggy shirts. Luckily, they didn’t have P.E. lessons at college; she would have dreaded changing in front of the other girls. It was normal for her to see her tail sitting just above her bum, but not for the others.
So she’d ignored them, they'd ignored her and she'd been fine with that. Now, they knew differently. They knew she was a relic who could regrow her own tail, just like lizards. And they saw it as a challenge to find out how often she could do it.
She'd grown to hate their transformation classes every Thursday. She'd never seen the point in them either. She'd been born being able to shift, not like some of the others who'd had to learn it. It was second nature to her, no, it was her nature. Nowadays, she spent the entire lesson trying to hide from Tamsin and her friends. They were a wolf pack who had become excellent snake hunters. She'd lost count of how often they'd cornered her and ripped off her tail. If she got it back within a few minutes, she could reattach it, but of course they never let her do that.
If only she had her beithir powers already, but they usually manifested in la beithir’s early twenties, and she'd only just turned eighteen. If she had them... they'd never hurt her again. But for now, she could just as well be a snake shifter - without a tail.
She bumped into something hard and was ripped from her self-pitying thoughts. Something... no, someone blue was looking down at her, obviously displeased she'd not looked where she was going.
It was a man, his hair blue like cornflowers, his ears pierced with dozens of silver rings. He looked so out of place here that she had a hard time not to stare. Ben Vair was a boring, down-to-earth place, if you ignored the fact that all of the students had some kind of supernatural power. There were no punks here. And yet...
"Do I have something on my face?" he asked in annoyance, rubbing his chest where she'd rammed against him.
"No, sorry," she mumbled and turned to leave, hoping he'd forget her. She was in enough trouble already, and not having her tail was making her even less self-confident around others. It also disturbed her sense of balance. It would take at least two days for it to grow back, and even longer to be back to its old length. And for that, she'd need to go down to the secret lab beneath the school to recharge. At least no one else knew about it, and she'd have some peace for a change.
"Bugger off," the man growled and she fled, ignoring the giggles of the other students as she ran through the corridors to her dorm. It was the only good thing about staying at Ben Vair: having a room of her own. Originally, the dorm was meant for six girls, but there weren't enough sixth form students in her year to fill it. The others preferred to squeeze into one room rather than share with her. Amber didn't have a problem with that. She liked her solitude. It gave her space to think.
Right now, she was thinking about the strange blue-haired man she'd bumped into. He looked too old to be a student. But Ben Vair would never employ someone like him as a teacher. The professors here were old and traditional. Even the younger ones behaved as if they were ancient. It seemed to be in the job description that to work here, they needed to be boring. She had no idea where all the good teachers went after their training. There weren't that many supernatural schools out there. She knew of one other in Scotland, and a few more down in England and Wales.
She sat down on her bed, wincing at the reminder that her tail wasn't where it was supposed to be. Such a strange feeling. Did the others ever feel the absence of their tails? Or were they used to it, having been born without one?
For a beithir, a tail was a sign of pride. Amber's mother had hers adorned with rings and colourful tattoos. She herself had had two little rings on hers... before the whole drama started. Now she didn't bother with it. Maybe once she'd left school she could go back to making herself look pretty. Until then, she was going to have to keep her head down and pretend to be invisible.
Which involved not bumping into strangers.
She groaned. She'd made a fool of herself. Again. If she hadn't been one of the college's best students, she'd probably have been expelled a long time ago. Chaos and misfortune followed her, no matter what she did. Maybe it was her beithir heritage. Maybe some of the legends describing her kind as the bringers of doom were true. But her family had made sure to disprove that rumour. Her parents were respected, much-loved pillars of their community, and with Amber's older sister working in the local nursing home, they were all assets rather than a nuisance to their surroundings. But not her.
She lay down and stared at the bare ceiling. When she first moved into the dorm, she'd drawn little stars on it with a white pen. They were almost invisible unless you knew what you were looking for. It was one of her many secrets.
She walked into class with her head down, hoping no one would notice she’d arrived. It was a stupid thing to try, really. There were only ten others in the class, one person entering the room was going to be noticed.
“I see you’ve finally joined us,” an unfamiliar voice said. Amber looked up, surprised to find the blue haired man she’d run into the other day sat at the teacher’s desk.
“Sorry, sir,” she muttered, making her way towards her desk. He’d better get used to her being a few minutes late every lesson. It was her way of at least trying to avoid Tamsin.
She sat down, pulling out her notepad and pens. Now that she was here, she’d be the best student blue-hair had ever had. Not that he looked old enough to have had many. He couldn’t be much older than her. Twenty-four maybe?
“Where’s Professor Shales?” Becky asked. A good question from one of Tamsin’s lackeys there. She guessed miracles did happen on occasion.
“She’s sick,” blue-hair answered. Amber raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. It seemed unlikely that the bear shifter was ill. They were notoriously sturdy creatures.
The class tittered. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one to make that observation. It made sense others would. For all their faults, only the smartest stayed on to study at Ben Vair.
“Alright, calm down,” blue-hair commanded. Hmm. His demeanour had changed completely. Whereas b
efore he’d seemed laid back but unapproachable, now he was actually commanding the attention of the room. It was a little disconcerting, but that pretty much summed up school in general.
“I’m not sure exactly where you’re up to, but I’ve been led to understand you’re about to start studying storm magic. I want you to get into pairs and try the exercise on page three hundred and ninety-four of your textbooks.”
The sound of eleven people opening their books all at once filled the room.
“But, sir?” Tamsin asked, only raising her hand after starting to speak. “We can’t do that exercise in the classroom.” As per usual, Amber noticed Tamsin had only glanced at her book once, and certainly not for long enough to read the large letters saying: to be done outside.
Blue-hair scowled at her. Amber wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told them his name yet. Most of the teachers seemed to enjoy the power trip it brought.
“If you’d read the instructions properly, Miss Garou, you’d know we need to go outside for this particular exercise.”
Amber hated to admit it, but she liked the way he spoke, or maybe she just liked the way he was putting Tamsin in her place.
“But-”
“Get yourself into pairs, and follow me outside.” Blue-hair busied himself with his things, and Amber watched as her classmates paired up. It was the same five pairs as always, then her. Why hadn’t the school offered a place to a twelfth student? Almost all their practical lessons involved splitting into pairs. Which meant Amber was on her own at least twice a day.
The class trailed after blue-hair, all chuntering about going outside in the rain. All except Amber. Even if she had someone to chunter to, she wouldn’t. She loved the rain. It was where she felt strongest. It wouldn’t regrow her tail though. More's the pity.
Her classmates squared off against one another and began to try and cast a storm. She hung back. Not only was she partnerless, but without her beithir powers, there was no chance she’d be able to summon any kind of storm. Therefore, it seemed better to hang back and disappear into the background.
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