by Maria Amor
“You worry entirely too much about your image,” Dylan told her. “Just tell the truth about it, and whatever people decide to believe is on them.” Julia pressed her lips together.
“I want things to be clear between us for us, too,” she said after a moment of attempting to collect herself. “I want to...just...figure out what the hell happened.”
“What happened is that we were fourteen,” Dylan said. “We were both stupid idiots, and we got into a fight, and neither of us wanted to admit we were wrong about anything. We let the time go by and then it was too late for either of us to admit that we’d done anything wrong. And then circumstances put us back together.” Julia stared at him for a moment in shock at the matter-of-fact appraisal.
“So what do we do about it?” Julia brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them tightly. “What do we do about it? Because I don’t think things are going to work out right between us at Sandrine if we stay on the same level we’ve been on all summer.”
As she spoke, she could feel the energy that flowed through her—air energy, the impetus behind the wind, the energy she’d known from so young that she couldn’t even imagine a life without it—beginning to spike. Julia had experienced something like this around the age of ten, when she’d started to more powerfully manifest the symptoms of being an air-aligned Guardian.
She tried to ignore it, to focus on Dylan. “What we do about it is that we try and trust each other a little more,” Dylan said. “We agree that we both screwed things up between us, and we apologize for it, and we start from scratch.”
“We can’t start from scratch, though,” Julia countered. “There’s too much between us. Four years of being friends, and then two years of hating each other.” She trembled as the energy intensified, and saw the quick look flit through Dylan’s eyes as he felt the change in the room as well.
“You hated me?” he looked unspeakably sad, so sad that Julia wanted to cry. “I never hated you, Jules.”
“Sure felt like it,” Julia mumbled. “It felt like you didn’t give a damn about me.”
Dylan sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and Julia didn’t have time to react as he crossed the room to where she sat. “You’re having a spasm right now, aren’t you?” She shook her head, trying to deny it, but the trembling through her body intensified. Julia tried to call up what the lectures at Sandrine had said about the topic, tried to focus down on that instead of feeling the anxious-excited rush that coursed through her.
“As you begin to transition into your full abilities, you’ll receive what we call ‘spasms.’ You’ve probably experienced a mild version of this before you came to school here—but the full-blown version can be frightening.”
“It’s just your body adapting to the energy, remember that,” Dylan told her, only inches away from her but not quite touching her. It felt as if there were electricity crackling through her veins, as if her body had somehow become not quite real. “Don’t try and fight it, Jules,” Dylan said firmly. “Let it pass through you. If you fight it it’ll only last longer.” Julia resisted nonetheless, resenting the spike in elemental energy for interrupting her important conversation with Dylan.
After a few heartbeats, though, she couldn’t fight the surge going through her anymore. The energy took over, crackling through her bones, through her nerves, lighting up every part of her body without any sign of stopping. Julia gave into it almost against her will, letting go of her rigid self-control as the energy began to dominate her mind.
She was aware of Dylan, but at the same time couldn’t pay attention to anything but the curious feeling of power rushing through her. Words crowded in her brain—useless, unconnected, but words in all the languages she knew, and some that she was certain she hadn’t even tried to learn before.
It felt like electricity in her fingertips, in her toes, tingling through her bones, and Julia was torn between feeling it as pain and feeling it almost like a pleasant, warm-tickling sensation that was just a little too intense to actually be enjoyable. Her body—human, even in spite of the power she was taking in didn’t know how to react, didn’t know what was happening to it.
Julia cried out, and then felt Dylan’s arms wrap around her shoulders, felt the hardness of his skinny torso against her. Cool, calming water-aligned energy slid through in the wake of the air-aligned power, making it bearable—making it something that she could stand instead of something that she thought might kill her even as it changed her.
It was somehow like being plunged into an ice bath and being wrapped in a warm blanket at the same time, and Julia shuddered and shivered as she tried to process it, as she tried to make up her mind as to what was happening in her own body.
The spasm began to ease, and Julia came back to herself in inches; it took what seemed like forever for her mind to clear enough for her to truly think. Outside, she heard the wind starting to die down, but along with that she heard the tell-tale pattering of rain against the window. “Tomorrow’s weather news should be interesting,” she said dryly as she pulled back, just a little, from the cold comfort of Dylan’s presence and energy.
“They’ll come up with something, I’m sure,” Dylan said, releasing her and stepping back. “Is that the first bad one you’ve gotten?” Julia nodded.
“I got mini-spasms before I went to Sandrine,” she said. “Nothing like that, though. It felt like it was going to explode out of me, tear me up from the inside out.”
“I flooded my room one time, during the summer after I turned fourteen,” Dylan admitted. “The energy was so intense that it actually manifested all around me.” He grinned. “My parents took out extra insurance.”
“I am not looking forward to that happening all year,” Julia said with a shudder of revulsion. “They get worse, don’t they?” Dylan nodded somberly.
“I have to say, there are probably a lot of people afraid of what it’ll be like at the end,” Dylan told her. Julia frowned in confusion. “If that’s the mildest of your spasms, then you’re going to be damned powerful.”
“That just means that they’ll be after me even more,” Julia said, burying her face against her knees.
“Even more reason for me to hang around, then,” Dylan said. “You’ll get through it. We all do.”
“I just feel like everything is being taken out of my control before I’m even enough of an adult to have any control at all,” Julia explained.
“That sounds about right,” Dylan said. “That was why I abandoned the whole Guardian world. I wanted to make decisions of my own, not have to play allegiances and figure out who I was going to betray.” He shook his head when Julia looked up. “It’s everywhere, not just among our kind.”
“Yeah, but how many people wanted to kill you because you were a successful musician?”
Dylan smiled wryly.
“Not that many people want to kill you,” he told her. “And the ones that do, we’ll keep you away from.”
“This is going to be a long-damned year at school, isn’t it?” Dylan nodded.
“Might as well get some sleep. Tomorrow is when it all starts.” Julia considered arguing, but the spasm had exhausted her. She rose unsteadily to her feet and left Dylan’s room without saying goodnight—without saying anything—and maneuvered herself to her own bed, still able to feel the tingling aftershocks of the spasm that had announced—for anyone paying attention—that she was starting to come into her own power.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dylan woke up to the sound of the dorm-wide alarm, pulled out of a dream. At least in the dorms for the water-aligned Guardians, the alarms had been quieter, building slowly, a resonant sound that inexorably drew a person out of sleep—but not something so jarring as the sharp calls sounding through the eight-person room.
It was the closest room that he was able to get to where Julia was stationed for the year; a door and fifty or sixty steps down a hallway separated them: Julia in the girls’ section of the ai
r-aligned high school-aged dormitories, and Dylan in the boys’ section. Dylan wasn’t sure how Ruth had managed it, but according to their schedules they were together in five out of eight classes on the schedule: the only ones they differed in were the mandatory classes for their alignments—and Dylan wagered that even the Regina Undinae wouldn’t be able to get her granddaughter into water Guardian classes, or get Dylan into air Guardian classes.
Dylan heard the other boys in the dorm room beginning to stir and tried to continue to drift in the semi-aware state between sleeping and wakefulness. It was the first full day back in classes, and Dylan found himself almost resenting the fact that he was in school at all, compared to the private tutoring he’d been receiving for the previous two years. But it wasn’t that bad, he reminded himself. He could get through all the classes easily, and ultimately it wouldn’t matter; he’d be out of school in two years.
The reaction to him at Sandrine had been—to simplify things—complicated. Everyone knew that he had left, and most of them knew why; even down into the elementary school level, with Guardians and other supernaturals just coming into their talents, they knew about Dylan Kelby.
The most common thing that people seemed ready to assume was that he’d come back under disgrace, that he had been reeled back in by the council who had decided that he’d used his freedom in all the wrong ways. The fact that he’d been moved into the air-aligned dormitory seemed only to increase the idea that he was on some kind of punishment detail, housed outside of his element.
Dylan knew that more than a few people wondered why he and Julia were so close, but as they’d discovered when they arrived on campus two days before—on Sunday evening—there were a lot of things that had changed over the course of the summer.
Dean Lilgrace was gone, for one: while Dylan had never had much time for the School of Sandrine in general, the dean had been one of the high points as far as he’d been concerned. The replacement dean was someone he’d never heard of, an earth-aligned Guardian named Terron Dimitrios. The man had been in the middle of the usual Sunday-evening festivities, his energy bringing things down in spite of his apparent interest in meeting as many of the new and returning students as possible.
He was short, as earth-aligned Guardians tended to be, with ochre-tinged skin and oddly golden eyes, dark hair that was starting to retreat from the top of his head, though it was bushy enough on the sides to almost make up for it. The new dean carried himself with the kind of rigid self-control that Dylan had come to expect from powerful—or at least, very politically active—earth-aligned creatures; they seemed all to think that being openly passionate about things was a cardinal sin. But as he shook hands all around, and gave Dylan a brief, hard-eyed glance, Dylan’s opinion of the new dean was that it was going to be a long year.
At Sunday night Orientation, the students had also learned that five different professors had left the school over the summer; it seemed to Dylan that there had to be some kind of scandal going on for so much of the school’s staff to have turned over, but no one knew anything about it. It had happened so quickly, so quietly—no one had even mentioned anything at all about it during any of the events that he and Julia had been to over the course of the summer.
Dylan climbed out of his bed finally, knowing that if he wasn’t on his feet and on the way down the hall to Julia’s room, neither of them would be in the cafeteria in time to get breakfast before classes started. He half-heartedly pulled a wide-toothed comb through his thick, long hair—enough to pass muster for dress code standards—and quickly stripped out of his tee shirt and pajama pants, reaching for the dress shirt, tie, and dress pants that he’d set out the night before.
The School of Sandrine had uniforms that were meant to identify the different groups of supernatural beings at a glance, as well as to make sure that there was some kind of universal standard that could apply even to creatures like selkies or djinn. For human boys, in the high school level, the uniform consisted of a dress shirt, a tie—in the school colors—a pair of dress pants in the colors associated with elemental alignment (dark blue or dark sea green for water-aligned Guardians like Dylan), and a blazer. There were only a few ways in which boys could really express any kind of individuality: shoes, hair, lapel pins—which required approval—and backpacks.
As he finished tying the Windsor knot in his tie, Dylan pushed down the collar on his shirt and looked around for his shoes. He knew that the new dean probably wouldn’t approve, but he was damned if he was going to spend the day in uncomfortable dress shoes instead of the comfortable Chuck Taylors he’d chosen.
He emerged from the last in the line of air-aligned boys’ dorm rooms, and walked down the hall until he spotted Julia waiting for him just outside of her own shared room. Unlike some private schools that students stayed at during the week, there was no huge dormitory with all the girls in one sprawling room and all the boys in another; instead there were about a dozen dorm “rooms” on each floor of the dormitory buildings, representing a year’s worth of students.
Each had between four and eight students in them, with two, three, or four bunk beds and closet space and dresser space sufficient for each student to have four complete uniforms and two sets of “street” clothes, along with pajamas and whatever accessories they wanted and were allowed by grade level and academic standing to have.
Since he and Julia were going into their junior year, they were on the second-to-top level of the air-aligned building, where the rooms were a little bigger. By the next year, they’d both be in top-floor dorms, with only three roommates each.
Julia leaned against the wall, and Dylan smiled slightly to himself at the sight of her, perfectly correct—and yet still managing to be daring—in her uniform: sky-blue jumper with a short-sleeved white dress shirt underneath, and a long cardigan in a soft, butter yellow that somehow managed to make the skirt of her jumper look shorter than it was.
She wore knee-length socks with deeper blue stripes around the tops, and Doc Martens oxfords in a floral print, just distressed enough to be comfortable without being so worn that they would get her a dress code infraction. She’d pinned a peacock brooch to the spot just above the pocket on her dress shirt; it was, Dylan knew, some kind of statement.
“I thought you were going to sleep in and leave me to my own devices,” Julia said, almost playfully, as he approached. “Look at you, all correct in your uniform.”
“Look at you, yourself,” Dylan countered, giving her another quick look. As usual, Julia had pulled her hair back from her face in two braids that ended at her mid-back. She looked both completely like and unlike the girl he’d known her as, when he’d left the school two years before. “Always pushing the envelope.”
“Always,” Julia said airily. She glanced up and down the hall and stood fully, pulling away from the wall. “Breakfast?”
“I could eat,” Dylan confirmed. “We have English first, right?” Julia nodded. It was easier for Dylan to keep track of which classes he didn’t share in common with Julia than the ones he did; he could only hope that nothing unfortunate would happen while he was in Advanced Water Magic, or the language class for the water-aligned students, or Practical Elemental Dynamics.
Each of the elements had its own associated language; Dylan had gained a good bit of mastery over the water-aligned language that Guardians were taught, a language that enabled the few incantations they used, and let them speak to and command the supernatural creatures that owed their allegiance to the element of water. There was a similar class for each of the groups of Guardians, with the material becoming more and more complicated through the years of instruction.
Dylan and Julia entered the cafeteria together, and Dylan looked around the dining area as they both waited in line to get to the serving section; people had already started to leave for their first classes of the day, though it was mostly the over-achieving air and earth-aligned creatures and Guardians that had gone, from what he could tell.
The ca
feteria offered something for everyone—foods that were sufficient and catered to sylphs, undines, djinn, gnomes, elves, fae, and of course the humans of different types. There were a few shifters in the school, a few inherited witches—not as powerful as Guardians, but with abilities of their own.
The School of Sandrine had something for every supernatural creature that attended it—at least, that was the way that it sold itself. Some of the professors were Guardians, some of them were supernatural creatures, a few were just magic workers; but the school kept itself open to as many types of paranormal beings as possible. Dylan shifted his weight from one foot to another and sighed, waiting for the line to move.
They would have English first, which at least was interesting enough first thing in the morning for Dylan to stay awake. He knew that he had his first water-aligned class for the third period, and then another one directly after lunch break, and the third for his last class of the day; but other than that, he wasn’t entirely sure which of the other four classes were which.
The line moved, and Dylan followed behind Julia, grabbing the things that he wanted from the steam table trays and loading up his plate with whatever took his fancy, in small portions and scoops. At the same time, Julia served herself peeled, hard-boiled eggs, toast, a yogurt-fruit-granola parfait, and some coffee and juice. They both wandered out into the dining area, Julia yawning as she found a table with Keegan, Liam, Magda and Ben and sat down at it.
“I’m still not sure I understand what the deal is with you and Dylan,” Magda said, glancing from Julia to Dylan. “Explain it again?”
“He’s working off his penalty by hanging around to make sure no one gets too aggressive in offering to marry me,” Julia said tartly. “My grandmother set it up because she’s paranoid about pretty much everything.” Dylan snorted, sipping his glass of water and starting in on some hash browns.
