“Oooh, no.” I give him a look. “Come on, Gunn, don’t be like that. If I’m not a keeper, then what am I?”
He takes a deep breath, and I notice that the muscles in his arms are straining. Actually, his entire body is tense, as if he physically has to fight himself to get the words out. “You are the last direct female descendant of a… special group… that once consisted of ten great bloodlines. Within the Order we refer to those magical ancestries simply as ‘the Ten’.” He talks slowly, carefully weighing each word. “Those who, like you, are directly descendant from the Ten, body to body, blood to blood, are called … trueborn.” His face is losing color and he’s starting to sweat lightly. “There is only one remaining trueborn daughter left on this world. You.”
When he finishes speaking his breath is racing, as if he’s just run a couple of sprints.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He nods. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Okay,” I say, uncertain. “But, like, what does all that mean? How is my magic different from other people’s?”
He clears his throat again, swallows hard. “There are many theories, but the most obvious difference is that the trueborn have the ability to do all kinds of magic, instead of just one.” He takes a couple of deep breaths. “What’s more, in order to draw power from the physical world, they don’t need to cast spells the way keepers do.”
I frown. “Then where does the magic come from?”
A couple more deep breaths. “It comes from you, Jess. From your mind and your veins and your sinews. It… flows in your blood… a part of you in the same way that you are a part of this earth—of the plants and the animals, the earth and the sky and the stars.”
And then he smiles at me, as if I’m something special.
I don’t smile back. “Gunn? Why do I feel that for everything you’re telling me, there are about a million things you’re not saying?”
I expect him to argue, but his eyes dim as that muscle in his cheek resumes its jumping. “Because it’s true.”
He’s silent for a long time. To avoid my questioning eyes, he tears at the tufts of grass between us: a restless, frustrated action.
“When I was younger, fifteen to be exact, I… Well, I made a mistake. At the time I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world, and I was so goddamn sure of myself, and so convinced of all my wrong-headed, blind beliefs that I made a promise I should never have made.”
I watch while he plucks the exact blade of grass I’ve been staring at for forty-five minutes and crushes it between his strong fingers. “Since then I’ve regretted that promise almost every day. But what’s done is done. I can’t go back, no matter how much I would like to.”
“I don’t get it,” I say crossly, impatient with his evasiveness. “What promise are you talking about?”
“I swore an oath—a Blood Oath, to be exact—not to tell you anything about your magic until your eighteenth birthday.”
I frown at him, uncomprehending. “So… what? You keep that oath for years, only to break it, like, three months before my birthday?”
He shakes his head slowly. “If I could’ve broken my promise so easily, I would’ve done it years ago. But I freely gave of my own blood to swear that oath, which means I am under such a strong compulsion that will alone is not enough to break it.”
I’m about to ask him what it does take when the implications of his words hit me.
I sit up straighter. “When you were fifteen, I was nine years old.”
“Yes.”
“So how could you have made the promise then?” I ask warily, a sudden heavy feeling in my gut. “I mean, how did you even know about me? That was years before my mom got sick; we were still living in Australia and everything was fine…” My words dry up when I see the look on his face.
“Every keeper in the world knows about you, Jess. I told you: you are the last trueborn daughter of the Ten. I’ve known about you since the moment you were born.”
I frown deeper, not liking this at all. “So you knew that my mom and I would come to live with Ingrid?”
“Yes. We suspected it might happen.”
“Who’s we?”
He looks down, starts tugging at the grass again. “Earlier I told you that the Order consists of four large clans. And that’s true, but it’s not the whole story.”
With his head bent like this, the sun catches his hair in a way that makes it gleam, and I’m suddenly, painfully, reminded of that first time I saw him through the upstairs window.
“There is a fifth clan—the Black Clan—whose sole purpose has always been to keep the magic of the direct female descendants of the Ten.” When he looks up again, his eyes are darker than usual, vulnerable, almost pleading. “In times past, the Black Clan was the very heart of the Order, but today there are only two members left: me and Ingrid.”
The heavy feeling inside me intensifies, until it feels as if I can hardly breathe.
“What does you and Ingrid belonging to the Black Clan have to do with me?”
“Essentially, it implies a certain stewardship—”
“In plain English please.”
I watch as that tiny muscle in his face starts leaping like crazy. “It’s the duty of the Black Clan to… look after… girls like you. To guard your physical person as well as the unique magic inside you.”
Oh dear God.
There’s a terrible shift, a wrench in my reality, as a dozen tiny things suddenly fall into place.
“Oh,” I say quietly. “So that’s why Ingrid took me in.”
He nods, his eyes now almost black with emotion.
“And you.” I put my hands over my mouth. “That’s why you always came here over weekends. Not to keep an eye on Ingrid, but to keep an eye on me.”
“My family has been looking after yours since the time of the Crusades,” he says, his voice so gentle it makes me want to weep. “I’ve always known it is my destiny to keep you one day.”
I tear my eyes from his and stare at the patch of grass between us. The heaviness inside me is now an actual physical ache.
“That’s why you taught me those classes every weekend?”
“No, of course not. I was worried about you after that incident with Ty…” His voice slowly peters out. Then he sighs. “Partly, maybe. Yes.”
“Because it was, like… your job?”
“It’s not a job, Jess. It’s a sacred duty. Something I’ve prepared for my whole life.”
“Oh.”
For some reason, the fact that I’ve completely misunderstood the entire basis of our relationship for so long is more shocking to me than anything else he’s told me. And although he spends the next couple of hours talking about clans and types of magic and bloodlines and wars and truces, I barely hear another word he says.
Chapter 11
I am wandering around town, lost.
I’m trying to find my way to the town pool, even though I know that something terrible is waiting for me there. My mother is pulling at my arm, begging me not to go, but I don’t listen to her.
My mother is not my mother.
My mother is a snake in the body of a woman, and I do not love her anymore.
By the time I finally get to the pool, I’ve managed to shake the glittering, poisonous coils of my mother’s serpentine arms from my body. She shouts my true name, begging me to wait, but I run from her, faster and faster. I long to get away from all her lies, and I ache for the soothing relief of the water.
When I finally dive into the pool, the water has gone.
I am standing on dry land, dusty as withered bone.
There is a woman in front of me. She is old and tired and frightened, clothed entirely in white. Her hair is white too. And her eyes. Her skin.
The woman is very afraid of me, so afraid that she has filled her body with a terrible kind of power. This power is slowly destroying her from the inside, but it is the only weapon she can use against me.
&
nbsp; She is a very brave woman, willing to die for what she believes, and it makes me unbearably sad to look at her.
“There is still time,” she tells me, her voice like broken glass. “But only if you kill yourself right now!”
“I don’t want to die,” I say.
“You must! It’s the only way!”
“I’m scared.”
“There is no time for your childish fears! If you kill yourself now, you can still prevent the apocalypse! Do it now, while the power is still slumbering; do it now, before the horror awakes and—
*
When I wake up, I’m sweaty and tired and trembling.
I look up at the ceiling, wait for my heartbeat to slow. But there’s something about those snakes eating their own tails that freaks me out this morning, so after a restless few minutes, I decide to go for a swim. I always feel better after a couple dozen hard laps.
I swallow down some coffee and a piece of toast, change into my swimsuit and sweats and get into my car. For some weird reason, however, the idea of going to the town pool fills me with dread, so when I get to the end of our road, I turn in the opposite direction and head to school instead.
Thing is, our school has a fantastic pool— clear blue water, sparkling tiles, neat swimming lanes and lovely warm showers—but normally I can’t use it because the coach (horrible Mrs. Hector) keeps banning me from the pool for no good reason. It’s a new school year though, I decide, which hopefully means I can start again with a clean slate, especially as the swimming squad only starts training in about an hour’s time. With a bit of luck, I’ll be in and out before Mrs. Hector even arrives.
I park my car in my usual spot and head straight for the pool. But on the way something catches my eye: a big guy running laps around the athletics track.
Ty Sampson. That pig.
I turn on my heel and head straight for the track, fuming.
Now, the bad blood between me and Ty started in my first year of high school, just after we moved to this town. Looking back, I must have been an obvious target for bullies: up until then, I’d lived my life in tiny, forgotten, foreign desert places where nobody could care less how you dressed or what brands you bought or how many followers you had, and I was absolutely freaking clueless. Also, I was sad and miserable because my mom was so sick, and although I knew I stood out, I just couldn’t find it in me to imitate all the perky, bubbly girls I saw around me every day.
Could that be the reason why Ty began to pick on me? Did my inability to be all sunny and girly perhaps threaten his masculinity in some mysterious way, like Jeffrey explained yesterday? Are boys seriously that weird?
Well, whatever the reason, it happened. He began to single me out soon after I arrived, constantly tormenting me with his stupid names and his stupid jokes and his endless teasing, until one fateful day when I got up from the lunch table and beat him up so badly that I bloodied his nose, blackened his eye and cracked one of his ribs.
So there. That’s it. The entire basis for my reputation as a tough-as-nails psycho bitch: in our freshman year, I once got so angry that I beat up the biggest and baddest boy in school in front of everybody, injured him quite badly, and earned my first (but sadly not my last) suspension.
What I learned that day was that violence worked. Nobody ever openly picked a fight with me again.
What I also learned is that violence doesn’t work. Yes, the obvious bullying stopped, but I was still the target of endless anonymous practical “jokes,” and my reputation for violence made me even more of an outsider—a freak, really. (Oh, and just a tip, after you’ve beaten up the biggest boy in school, nobody will ask you on a date again. Ever.)
But anyway.
In time, things began to mellow between me and Ty, and as the years passed my original loathing weakened to disgust, and then to dislike, and then to a kind of eye-rolling irritation. Sure, he still annoyed me, but as an enemy he was known and understood: a dumb, insensitive football jock who probably doesn’t know any better. Maybe I even began to think some of the jokes he pulled on me were kind of funny.
Which is why I feel so betrayed right now that I storm onto the track like a baited bear, so angry it feels as if there’s smoke coming out of my ears.
“Ty!” I yell, waving at his back. “You’ve got some explaining to do!”
But he’s wearing earphones so he doesn’t even slow down.
“Ty!”
This time I yell loud enough that he turns his head. “Hey, Applehead! Looking good!” He gives me a little wave, laughing and shaking his head, then continues his run.
Oh, for God’s sake.
I run after him, grab him by the arm, force him to a stop.
As he pulls out his earphones, he gives me a puzzled look. “Damn, girl. I never knew you could run like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like, fast.”
“Whatever.” I roll my eyes, annoyed by his clumsy attempt to distract me. “What do you think—”
“I’m serious! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl run that fast in my life. You want to train with me maybe?”
“With you? Are you insane?”
“Aw, don’t be like that. Why can’t you just play along sometimes?”
“Play along…?” I look up into his laughing, completely guiltless face, so furious I’m literally spluttering. “You think humiliating me in front of the whole school is a game? In front of the whole world? You think it’s funny?”
“Jeez, Applehead, calm down. I never humiliated you.” He looks almost hurt. “We just kidded around some. You know that.”
“How’s showing people naked photos of me ‘just kidding around’?”
“Yeah, okay. That was outta line. But I said I was sorry. I never meant for things to spiral out of control like that.”
“Outta line? Don’t you understand that what you’re doing is a sexual offence? To look at someone’s naked body without their permission is wrong, okay? There’s no difference between that and hiding in the bushes, peering through their curtains. You’re basically a creeper—you make me sick!”
“What? I never looked at your naked body.” Ty scratches his head, looking confused rather than guilty. “I told you, I was just trying out that new app.”
“And the other girls’ photos? Those are real, and you know it.”
A blank stare. “What other girls?”
“Oh, come on! Your plan for the homecoming dance? Principal Sweeney’s speech? I know all about it, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly.”
“No, I don’t.”
And the thing, I realize as I stare at his mystified expression, is that Ty simply isn’t that good of an actor. He honestly doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.
Which means we have a whole different kind of problem on our hands.
I get into the empty pool feeling strangely uneasy but, as usual, the water soon makes me feel better. For the first half an hour or so I relax into a leisurely front crawl—up and down, up and down—just enjoying the feeling of being submerged in a different element. But as my mind begins to quieten, my thoughts slowly dissolving in this blurry, watery world, I realize that I need the release of real exercise and I kick up the pace until I feel that familiar pleasurable warmth in my muscles, that slight burning in my lungs, that wonderful rhythmic sound of breath and body and water.
The relief of swimming as fast as I can is like a gift, a kind of miracle. Everything seems so simple; you can’t help but feel that you’re safe, isolated in a glorious little bubble. Out in the world, everything is complicated and messy and confusing, but in the water everything is simple and straightforward, the goals almost ridiculously clear: To keep moving. To keep breathing. To lose yourself in the rhythm and the motion and the feeling of the water around you.
For the first time in weeks, all thoughts of secrets and magic and betrayal fade away like phantoms in the dim watery depths. I stop
thinking about my problems, reveling instead in the sheer animal joy of being alive, and young, and breathing, and strong. And then I stop thinking completely.
I let go. Allow the water to carry me.
Water is the primal element. It is from water we first came; it is water we’re mostly made of; it is water that supports and nourishes all life on earth. From space, they say, our planet is a blue planet, the water covering most of its surface being the most remarkable thing about this lonely piece of rock we call home. Water is this planet’s miracle, the source of all life on our world. There is no living thing that can survive without it, nothing alive that does not yearn for its lush and generous—
What the hell?
I’m jolted out of my pleasant, watery dream by someone grabbing my arm as I make my next turn at the shallow end of the pool. I come to an awkward halt and yank the goggles from my face to see what’s going on.
“Jesus, Sarkany. Control yourself!”
Jonathan Pendragon is standing next to me in the water, his face livid. His grip on my arm is painfully tight and his strange green eyes are glittering dangerously.
“Let me go!” I try to pull away my arm, but I don’t sound very convincing, even to my own ears. With him standing so close, I’m uncomfortably aware of his muscled, near-naked body looming over mine. Of the beauty of it. The strength and the heat.
I swallow hard, trying to ignore the unexpected flame of desire that flares through my veins. “What’s your problem?” I say, glaring at him.
“My problem?” For a moment I’m convinced he’s going to hit me.
“Let me go!”
He tightens his grip instead, really hurting me now. “Do you want to draw attention to yourself? Because you couldn’t be making more of a scene if you tried.”
I look around to see the entire swimming squad staring at me, their faces horrorstruck.
“What’s going on?”
“Just get out of the pool,” he says between gritted teeth. “I can probably fix this, but you need to leave immediately.”
“Fix what?” I ask, confused.
Jonathan glowers at me, his face tight with fury. But then his gaze softens into something resembling incomprehension. And then shock.
Ordinary Girl (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 1) Page 11
