by Maria Amor
“You handled yourself well, at least there’s that,” Dylan said.
“Only because I’ll be damned if I let someone make snarky remarks about me,” Julia said, her hazel-tinged eyes gleaming with anger. She took a quick breath and Dylan ventured to exert a calming influence on her energies once more; he could hear the wind rustling outside, and the last thing that her first outing amongst the power players in the world of Guardians needed was a show that she was too volatile and too powerful to be left to her own devices.
Dylan knew—as Julia didn’t—that if the councillors thought that she was too volatile, on top of being highly powerful, they would exert pressure on her parents to find her a suitable “mate” as quickly as possible. After all, the precarious state of affairs, with most of the paranormal creatures of the world being considered mere myths and urban legends, was hard to maintain if one of the people responsible for being an intermediary between the different worlds wasn’t able to contain herself.
If Julia couldn’t control herself well enough, it would be the kind of thing that would let a fire Guardian, or an earth-aligned Guardian, to press a suit to force her to marry as soon as she was old enough.
As if his bleak thoughts had been a cue, Dylan saw one of the younger members of a highly-ranked earth-aligned family approaching them. Nathan had, Dylan knew, started school in Europe, at one of the paranormal schools there, around the same age that Julia had begun attending Sandrine. “Julia,” Nathan said as he approached them. Dylan wondered whether she would rather he pull his arm free of hers or not; but for a moment he couldn’t decide. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
“Another person who’s heard about me that I’ve never met? How charming,” Julia said, smiling the same charming smile.
“Your grandmother is very well-known, and has been friends with my grandmother in the past,” Nathan said, inclining his head towards her in the suggestion of a bow. “I know it’s probably overwhelming to be around a bunch of people trying to get a rise out of you, see how you’ll react.”
“I’ve accepted that I’m the unwilling belle of the ball,” Julia said, tension rising slightly in her shoulders.
“I wanted to introduce myself to you,” Nathan told her. “My name is Nathan Goode; obviously, by now you already know that I’m an earth-aligned Guardian, but we’re not all boring.” Julia glanced at Dylan, and Dylan half-shrugged as imperceptibly as possible. He didn’t—technically—know anything bad about Nathan; he’d just always found the rich kid annoying. All the most annoying things about earth-aligned Guardians isn’t that they’re boring.
He was, Dylan knew, smart but not an overachiever; wealthier than Ruth herself, from generations of alignment with an element that lent itself to wealth. Nathan probably wouldn’t represent any harm to Julia, but it was obvious to Dylan at least that he fell under the category of Guardians interested in attaching her to his family.
He just wants her so that there’s a bond with his family and hers, so maybe he’ll get some of Ruth’s wealth when she eventually dies. That fact alone was enough to turn Dylan off to the idea of being more than just polite to the other teenager, but he would have to let Julia come to her own conclusions.
“I don’t know that it’ll be a pleasure to meet you, but I accept your introduction either way,” Julia said, and Dylan once more had to suppress the urge to snicker at her tart comment. Nathan took it in stride, accepting her hand and bowing over it—not quite kissing the back of it, but feeling her energy.
“You are everything my mother said you were,” Nathan said. “I’m glad you came out tonight.”
“I didn’t exactly have a choice,” Julia said, though there wasn’t much bitterness in the comment. “Of course, now that I’m here I might as well enjoy myself as best as I can, right?”
“Hopefully later you’ll do me the favor of dancing with me for a song?” Nathan raised an eyebrow, and Dylan wondered if the guy actually thought he was being charming. The dark-haired, dark-eyed seventeen-year-old let go of Julia’s hand and smiled in a simpering, pathetic way.
“If there’s dancing, I’ll look for you,” Julia told him. “I think there’s someone else who wants to talk to me, though.”
“Of course,” Nathan said, glancing briefly at Dylan. “I’d never think of tying you down to one place all night.” Smooth, Dylan thought wryly. Of course, what Nathan wanted from a prospective mate would be very different from what his earthy sensibilities would want in an actual mate—he would want someone calm, cool, collected. He’d be better off to go sniffing around one of Ruth’s water-aligned granddaughters.
Dylan had known for many years that there were a few different theories on the best method for successfully mating another Guardian; earth-aligned Guardians tended to prefer their own, or on the outside a water-aligned Guardian, since the relationship tended to be calmer. Very rarely, the fire-aligned chose a water-aligned Guardian to mate with, but more often they paired up with air-aligned women and men to bolster and strengthen their abilities, or fellow fire-aligned Guardians to deepen their reserves of power and keep the family lines purer.
Water Guardians and air guardians were not so discriminating; being the two more flexible of the four element alignments, they understood that it was best to combine and recombine in interesting ways. Of course, this meant that—for example—Ruth had had children who were aligned with water, with air, and with fire, and grandchildren of the same varying alignments and of varying strengths in those alignments. But there was something to be said about the result, even if Julia’s mother had turned into something of a mess.
Dylan stood back slightly as more and more people came to Julia, making their way over from other parts of the room. He’d been through that particular ringer himself; while his parents were not nearly as powerful as Julia’s grandmother, their alliance with Ruth was something that set them apart from some of the other water-aligned Guardians. He wasn’t as in-demand as a potential partner for other Guardians, but he’d had to meet people, encounter the members of the council, and more.
He watched as Julia fell into the best impulses of her ability, toeing the line between charming and insulting with ease. Even her meanest comments were spoken with a kind of smile that Dylan knew that Ruth would recognize in a moment. If anyone ever tells her how much she’s like her grandmother, she’d gut them, Dylan thought with amusement.
He steered her towards the refreshment table at one point as some awkward fellow teenager tried to match Julia’s charm, and smiled privately to himself at the thought of how much it was going to annoy Julia over time, to have to deal with suitors who were clearly only really interested in the power that she brought to the relationship.
Not a bit of romance in any of them, Dylan thought, eavesdropping slightly as he got some punch for Julia. He was tempted to grab some of the adult’s punch for them both, but he knew that people were watching closely—they’d never get away with it, and it would just cause a scandal.
“I’d really like to get to know you better, Julia,” a water elemental named Wyatt was saying. “I think we could get along really well.”
“I don’t know how you would think that if you don’t even know me,” Julia countered. Dylan suppressed a snicker.
After a while, they finally had a break; the dancing started, and Julia—instead of honoring Nathan’s invitation for a dance—hid to avoid the seeking boy. “I figured you’d be all over the chance to be around other people and away from me,” Dylan said, glancing out onto the dance floor from the semi-hidden position they’d taken.
“I need a break from people sniffing at me to figure out if I’m interested in getting married in a year,” Julia said irritably. “I swear the adults are even worse than the kids.” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that, looking at her. “Have you been paying attention at all?”
“I didn’t notice any adults propositioning you,” he said.
“They’re not, obviously—that would be creepy,” Julia pointed
out, rolling her eyes. “But it’s obvious that the kids coming up to us are put up to it by their parents. The adults coming up to me to talk about my ‘blossoming’ to come have this...this look.” She shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest.
“They just want to know which way you’ll go when you do come into your full abilities,” Dylan told her. “But yeah, I kind of—at least a little—know how it feels.”
“How much longer do we have to stay here? I was excited to go to a glamorous event like this, but I’m already tired, and this dress is pinching me at the ribs.”
“Let’s sit down for a bit,” Dylan suggested. “And give it like—another hour, maybe? And then we can head back and no one can blame us.” He turned away to make sure no one had found them and smiled to himself again. He wasn’t under any illusions that things would suddenly get better between them, but it was good to see some flicker, some brief little reminder of Julia’s personality other than the haughty, airy, confident and resentful person she’d started turning into.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Julia tossed and turned in her bed, feeling the energy surging through her. She and Dylan would be going back to Sandrine the next day, and she knew that she needed sleep—her parents had harped on it enough during the day when she’d been packing—but every cell in her body seemed to be restless.
Summer is over, and you’re going back to school. Julia frowned, feeling discontented. She’d done a few things that were fun over the course of the summer, but not nearly as much as she had planned before she found out about her grandmother’s demand on her.
Julia flopped over onto her other side, facing the wall, and thought about Dylan in the next room. Was he sleeping? It seemed hard to imagine. Julia muttered wordlessly to herself, tugging the blankets on her bed more comfortably around her. “He got to get away from his parents for the summer, and half the council likes him at least a little bit again, and what did I get out of this?”
She’d had someone to stand by her while she’d turned down the awkward and impressive members of important Guardian families, and she’d had company when she wanted to go down to Chinatown and browse the shops, or when she took the train out to Brooklyn to meet with her friends. She’d managed to have a few good afternoons at museums—and even, thankfully, made it up to the Cloisters just on the edge of the city proper—but still she felt dissatisfied with how her summer had gone.
Dylan had said that the events her grandmother had made her go to were par for the course for a powerful Guardian from a well-known family, and based on all the people of her own age at them, Julia had to concede that he might have a point; but the last thing she’d wanted to do—at least after the first event she’d gone to—was spend an evening in an expensive dress, her styled hair giving her a steady headache from the pins or just the tightness of it, talking to people who either tried to imply threats to her, or tried to convince her that she should come and visit them out in the countryside to “get a break” from the city.
On one or two occasions, Dylan had managed to sneak her some wine, or some spiked punch, which of course was exactly what people did at those things—even underage teenagers—but for the most part, Julia had approached the evenings with the feeling of someone going into a minor battle.
It just didn’t seem fair, and even as she tried to lull herself to sleep, Julia couldn’t help but make a face at her own thought. “What’s fair have to do with it?” That had been the thing her grandmother had told her, more than once, when she complained about some injustice, major or minor. “It’s what is. You either deal with it, or it deals with you.” So, her summer hadn’t gone the way that she’d wanted it to, and as she went back to school, she would still have Dylan as a tag-along. She would have to deal with that, whether or not it was fair.
Agitated, Julia could hear the wind rattling at the window to her bedroom, making a slight howling noise outside. She wanted—somehow—more than anything to be outside, to get out onto the fire escape and let the wind bathe her, even if it was choked with soot and exhaust from the city’s cars.
Even if it was dirty wind, she wanted to feel it. She climbed out of her bed and walked to her window. The upper east side street her parents’ apartment stood on was so far away as to be little more than an impression, a whisper. If she opened her windows, of course, the sound would come in: even after midnight, Manhattan was still Manhattan.
She could—barely—hear music on the other side of the wall, from Dylan’s room. Julia’s restlessness found a focus point. She needed to talk to him: to really, actually have a conversation with him about what their life at school would be like, and what their relationship to each other, tenuous as it was, would be.
She didn’t even know if he was awake or if he’d fallen asleep to the music he’d been listening to. Do it anyway. He’s supposed to be your bodyguard. Julia crept out of her room, not wanting to alert her parents on the other side of the apartment, and pushed the door almost closed behind her, before taking the few steps to Dylan’s bedroom next door.
It felt like and unlike all the times she’d sneaked into the dorms at Sandrine, intent on mischief with her friend. It felt like, and unlike, the way things had been before he’d abandoned her, before he’d sought fame and fortune rather than her friendship. That thought made her even more irritable, and she could hear the whistling of the wind outside against the different crevices of the building in reaction to her mood.
It was getting stronger, that response—it was a sign, her parents had said, that her blossoming was beginning.
Julia didn’t knock on Dylan’s door. Instead she very carefully, very quietly, turned the knob, listening for any hint that would suggest that he was doing something she didn’t want to interrupt. She opened the door slowly, peering into the gloomy light of the bedroom, and as her eyes adjusted, Julia saw Dylan. He was on the bed, half-reclining against the headboard, writing something down in a leather-bound journal. He couldn’t be more of a stereotype of the sensitive singer-songwriter if he tried, she thought with a mixture of resentment, amusement, and annoyance.
Dylan looked up at her as she came into the room, and Julia almost stopped in her tracks at the look of his eyes; they were always bright enough to be arresting, but in the yellow-orange gloom from the desk lamp, they almost seemed to glow. She absently closed the door behind her and crossed the room to the desk chair that Dylan had abandoned in favor of his bed, and sat down.
“You can’t sleep either,” Julia surmised.
“I’ve been listening to the wind,” Dylan told her, his lips curving slightly in a little grin. “I started out waiting to know that you were asleep, and then just sort of decided to scribble for a bit.”
“You used to let me read your journal,” Julia commented. “Before…” she shrugged.
“Before things changed between us, yeah,” Dylan said. “But we’re not friends anymore, remember? So, no—you can’t read what I’m writing.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” Julia told him tartly. “I was just remembering it.”
“Better times for both of us,” Dylan said quietly. He turned the music off altogether, and looked at her for a long moment. “So, tell me whatever you came to tell me.”
“I didn’t come to tell you anything,” Julia said. “I came to just...talk.”
“Talk?” Dylan raised a wheat-colored eyebrow at that. “You haven’t really wanted to talk to me all summer.”
“Yeah, well; we’re going to be back in school tomorrow, and that makes things more complicated.”
“Does it?” Dylan set his journal aside and brought his knees up to his chest. He’d gone to bed in a tee shirt and loose, comfortable-looking pajama pants, and Julia felt the tug of old memories, of times when they’d bent and broken the rules before. Her parents would not at all approve of her being in a boy’s room—even Dylan’s room—in the middle of the night, but at the moment her parents were both asleep, and Julia didn’t much care what they did or didn�
��t approve of.
“You’ve been away from Sandrine for two years,” Julia said. “And now you’re coming back, and more than that—you’re hanging out with me all the time. There’s going to be gossip.”
“Since when do you care about gossip, anyway?” Dylan smiled slightly. “Apart from spreading the juiciest of it?” Julia rolled her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest. The air-aligned members of the Sandrine student body were always—always—considered the cause of rumors. The fact that they tended to be more chatty, that they tended to hear everything that was going on in the school, led constantly to them being considered the ones who made everything happen—who fomented rumors and came up with the social pecking order of the day.
“I don’t spread gossip,” Julia told him tartly. “And anyway, it’s not like you left quietly. They’re not going to just let you come back with nothing said, especially since you’ve packed practically a whole career into two years away.”
“You’re worried that people will think we’re dating,” Dylan said.
“I’m worried that people will come up with their own conclusions about why we’re always around each other,” Julia countered.
“So just tell them that Ruth pulled strings to give you a support system at school and get me out of trouble because my family is one of the few ones she actually likes,” Dylan suggested.
“The truth is never going to fly,” Julia told him. Dylan laughed out loud, shaking his head.
“You sound so incredibly like every air Guardian ever right now,” he said. “Don’t tell the truth if it makes you look bad—tell a convenient lie that gets more complicated the more people question it!”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Julia said, her cheeks burning with a blush. “What I’m saying is that we need to work out what there is between us, because if we’re like this when we go back tomorrow, the whole student body is going to eat us alive.”
