“What? Like a date?” It slipped before she could stop it. With her face flushing, Avery mentally cursed herself for being so tactless. “I don’t think we can date staff.” She said immediately in the best joking tone she could. Whether or not he bought it, she couldn’t tell. His face hadn’t changed much from the same placid stare.
“Just like a walk. We won’t get caught. You won’t get in trouble being out after curfew.” He said.
Her face still hot, she nodded. A walk with a staff member, cute or not, couldn’t hurt.
“Okay, just uh gimme one minute.” She stuck a single finger in the air until he backed up to clear the doorway. As soon as she closed it for him, she rushed for her phone. Ripping her sheets apart, she snatched up the blue device from its hiding spot.
Leela was on speed dial and the phone started to ring before Avery even brought it to her ear. With her free hand, she dug through her duffle bag. With advanced notice, she would have laid out something alluring, but with thirty seconds or less, she had to settle for her nice dark jeans and a black tank top.
“Stupid girl, answer your phone.” She hissed a second before Leela’s voicemail came on. Something this cool never happened to Avery, and Leela would pick this moment not to pick up. Giving up, she tossed it back on the bed.
Stripping off her pajamas, she changed and threw her hair up in a messy bun. Most days, she’d have stared at the mirror for an hour trying to cover up the freckles on her cheeks. Today, she embraced them reluctantly and focused on framing them with her bangs.
He had posted himself up against the opposite wall when she came out. From here, he looked even lankier with his legs stretched out and folded. She did a quick check of the hallway before announcing her presence. This late at night, the corridors were empty and only the staff would eventually meander through the halls. Morrison always wore thick heels that would clack on the carpeted floor so that any student would have to be stupid to not hear her coming. Idly thinking, Avery began to wonder if Mason would be the same. So far, he wasn’t scolding students but inviting them out to wander around.
“Hey.” He greeted catching sight of her.
“Where’d you have in mind?” She prompted him as he began to walk.
“Just around.” He strolled towards the left. “So, I hear you went to California this past month.”
“Yea, you and everyone else.” She rolled her eyes over dramatically. “I can’t have been the only person outside of Alaska before.”
The first official day hadn’t even started yet and she was already sick of talking about it.
“No, I’ve been to California too. In fact, I was there this very summer.”
“Seriously? That’s awesome… Wait.” She paused, distracted, before they reached the end of the hall. In front of them was the fire escape door. The hot red letters adorned on it reminded everyone it couldn’t be used except in emergencies.
“We can’t go out this way.” She told him.
While the door wasn’t hooked up to an alarm, no one would ever sneak out this way. Outside were steep blocky stairs that led down straight into the forest. From there, the campus was a good twenty minute walk back after having to twist up the hill through the woods first. This exit never had any lights either. At night, the path was pitch black and treacherous.
“You want to get caught?”
“I’d sooner get caught than die.” Her voice broke and she turned away. An ugly feeling crept up her spine and she watched the empty hallway. Avery wasn’t afraid of the dark but there was also no way she’d take a creepy trip out at night either.
“I’ll make sure nothing gets you. Come on.” He said but his voice sounded anything but reassuring. In fact, he bit off the words harshly. Muscles drawing together tightly, his entire posture changed. The transition happened in a heartbeat. Avery never got a chance to properly react.
He abruptly lashed out and caught her shoulder. Spinning her, he whirled her towards the exit and with a sharp push, knocked her forward. She stumbled into the door and it tipped open from her weight.
“I had to follow you all the way to this bloody place, you stupid thief. You understand how much time this cost me!” He roared.
“Stop it!” She hollered when he pushed her again.
Outside, her heel slipped on the first blocky step and sent her sprawling. No railing to brace herself, Avery landed on her elbows hard. She struggled to stand, panic making her clumsy. Her thoughts were minimized to two simple sentences: Bad situation and must get out.
“Where is it?” He demanded. “I’ll tear apart your whole room if I have to. Where is it?”
Somewhere in his rage, he stopped paying attention. She got her balance, stood up, and bolted down the stairs. Gravity and momentum helped. By the time he began to pursue, she’d reached the last step and ran into the forest. The thick roots threatened to knock her over again but adrenaline kept her on her feet. His footsteps finally thundered down the same path but he didn’t follow her into the forest.
“You can’t run. Hear me out.”
The absolute firmness of his words made her slow. She slipped behind a tree and slammed her back up against the rough bark. The moonlight didn’t shine through the thick canopy and the visibility where she stood dropped to zero. Unsure if she should even take her chances with Alaskan wilderness over him, she gave it a minute. Common sense telling her that he would get her to talk to locate her position, Avery stayed quiet. He waited a moment before speaking again while indicating he’d probably thought of the same thing.
“This is about when you were in California. I told you before. I was at the very same beach, the very same night. The fourth of July.”
At first, Avery spit out a confused “what?” before she thought about it. She had been in California all summer, not just Fourth of July, but she couldn’t deny that night had been particularly strange. That was the night she was on the beach and collecting sea shells. One specific shell had caught her eye as it washed up on the foamy waves during high tide. Driven by an unusual impulse, she’d snatched it up. Once the odd looking shell touched her palm, it’d stung. She’d dropped it quickly only to find that it’d injured her right hand and left a bizarre bruise. It was the same bizarre bruise she still had. Other than the sole instance, nothing else about the night stood out. She didn’t meet anyone, she didn’t see anything, and she definitely didn’t take part in something strange.
“So what?” She asked, at least giving him her full attention again.
“That night my boss dropped a pendant. It was a shiny black pendant off the coast. This pendant has a particular way to be found again. I tracked it to the where it washed up in the surf and then I tracked it to Seward, Alaska. I tracked it back to you.”
Her mind processing slowly, she took a minute before she drew her hand up to her face. The bandage had partially unwrapped to reveal her palm. Before Avery even considered the possibly, she curled her hand back into her chest.
“I need it back, and I won’t be the only person looking for it. I’ll take it from you nicely but these other people will hurt you for it.” Mason had kept talking.
She didn’t believe her own ears. It sounded like a line from the movies after she just stumbled upon the mob boss’s family brooch and now became a mark. The seriousness of the statement didn’t escape her either. She let out a deep breath.
“I don’t have it. Even if I picked it up I don’t have it. I left everything at the beach.” She wouldn’t be above begging him to believe it.
He didn’t answer. Only the quiet rustling of the forest filled up the silence. The wind picked up off the water and blew through the trees. Growing cold, Avery wrapped her arms around herself. She listened for the crunching of leaves or the snapping of twigs. While she’d picked a disadvantaged point of view from which she could only stare in front of her, she could hear him if he got closer.
“Then come out of the woods and prove it. I’m not going to hurt you.” He said after a te
nse moment.
“No way.” She said promptly. She may have been naïve, but she was not insane.
“If you just give me what I want, then I’ll leave. Believe me. If I wanted to do anything, I could have done it before.”
The rational part of her brain held out on believing him, but then she also knew it’d be a nightmare staying in the forest. If she had any intention of crawling out back towards the school, she’d be doing it in the dark. Opting to cooperate, at least temporarily, she called out.
“I’d help you if I could. But I don’t have it.”
“Then show me. And I’ll leave. Or are you planning to rot to death in there?”
She struggled to draw her shaken nerves together. “Okay.” She announced at last. “At least talk to me so I can find my way out of this forest.”
Brushing her fingertips over the tree, she stepped carefully to avoid protruding roots. In her last kicks of summer, she’d opted to wear a pair of thong sandals. Knowing she just needed one misstep and a firm knock into a rock to be in serious pain, she moved slowly.
“You have my word, I won’t hurt you. I just have…temper problems.” He admitted the last part as an afterthought.
Avery could have hysterically laughed. Temper problems? Is that what they called psychotic rages now days?
“In fact, my only intention here is to get what I’ve come for and leave you in peace.” He kept talking and she focused on following his voice.
The moon came out again, and it lit up the clearing in front of her. Mason stood in the center and behind him was the steps back up into the dormitory and back home. Happy to see it, she rushed forward but only managed to catch a root and stagger. Hands flailing in the darkness, she threw herself off balance. Hitting the ground, she kissed the dirt. Avery couldn’t get up quick enough. Only she, in the presence of a psychotic raving man, would still be clumsy.
A shadow fell over the ground. Glancing up, she saw him towering above her. With deliberately slow and gentle movements, he offered a hand.
“Uh hi.” She greeted him meekly. Already too close to him to escape again, she didn’t fight it.
Crawling to her knees, she nearly handed him her right hand—her dominant hand—before realization made her switch it out. Lightning fast, he snatched her right wrist mid-motion before she could properly offer him her left hand. Wrapping his long fingers around her right wrist, he yanked her up in one swift effective movement. The quick motion jarring, old adrenaline spiked again and she pulled away from him. He held her wrist with a steel grip.
“Wait. What happened to you?” He demanded to know.
The bandage had already come loose from her rough fall and the black bruise peeked out from beneath. The moonlight made it glow. She gave a stubborn yank on her wrist.
“Lemme go. Lemme go or I won’t show you.” She hissed, still attempting to tear away from him.
Frowning, he released her but beckoned her to keep her hand up. After giving him a sufficient suspicious glare, she unraveled the bandage in a few quick rotations. To her surprise, the mark had grown worse over the daytime. Instead of the charred black that covered the side of her palm, the black had turned purpleish and reached from her heel to her thumb. She grew sick looking at it. Mason didn’t shy away from it. Tentatively reaching out, he brushed his thumb over the mark. Something under her skin abruptly pulsed in response. Jolted by the sensation, she yanked her hand back into her chest.
“How did that happen? How’d you get that?” He asked again before she could get a word out.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I just went picking up shells on the beach and a crab bit me.”
He eyed her, disbelieving, and then he asked her something strange.
“What did the shell look like?”
“It was...” She fell silent, listening to her thoughts before she voiced them. Then she admitted it. “It was shiny and black.”
He must have expected it, urging her on immediately.
“And where is it now?”
She gave him a helpless look.
“It broke when I picked it up, turned to dust. You don’t think... you don’t think it was the pendant that I picked up, do you?”
Mason’s face paled considerably and mouth open, he said nothing. When he finally spoke, his words came out quiet and short.
“This is not good.”
Three
“Look, I’m sorry if I picked it up, and I’m sorry if I broke it. But believe me, I don’t have it anymore.” Avery said.
She might as well have been talking to herself. Mason wasn’t listening. Shortly after his cryptic declaration, he’d fallen into a silent thought train that left his green eyes staring at nothing and his hands wringing. Worry seeped off of his taunt body but none of his agitation was directed toward Avery any longer.
Even though the situation had calmed remarkably, Avery still didn’t trust it. She trekked back towards the stone stairway and created a berth between them. The clearing just outside the building’s emergency exit was far from being in the wilderness, but she was beginning to feel the effects of being outside too long. Without a jacket, it was getting cold and without real shoes to traverse the rough ground, she’d beaten her toes bloody.
“I know you don’t have the actual pendant.” Mason said suddenly, earning her full attention once again.
“You believe me?” She double took, surprised.
“I believe you don’t actually have the glass pendant. But you don’t understand.” He marched a few steps forward, and closer now, he lowered his voice as if someone in the woods could hear them. “That pendant was an amulet, and that amulet was very special. It was filled with magic.”
She stared at him blankly, waiting for the punch line. When it never came, she shook her head and stepped back.
“Are you nuts?” She asked carefully. She eyed her exit, one quick sprint up steep stairs and though it was dangerous, she certainly wasn’t going for the woods again. He didn’t make any quick movements so neither did Avery.
Instead, he slowly raked his hands through his mop of brown hair and let out a frustrated growl. “It makes sense doesn’t it? The amulet broke from the fall and when you picked it up then that magic inside of it then jumped straight into you. How else do you think I tracked you all the way to this god-forsaken place sixty miles north of nowhere? The magic in your body left me a trail.”
She let the words process for a full minute. His expression didn’t waver once while waiting for her reply. Humoring herself, she reasoned it aloud.
“You still lost me at the magic part. I mean...magic. Do you really believe that?” She spoke delicately too, waiting for him to flip out again anytime.
Instead, Mason just said, “Don’t patronize me. You’re the stupid human.”
The venom in his words didn’t strike her. Instead, she replayed what else he’d conveyed.
“Human?”She repeated. “I’m a human?”
Mason gave her a long look and then in a sudden flurry of motion, he tugged his oversized parka off. The fabric dropped to the floor, forming a puddle at his feet, and then she was able to see something white twitch behind him. That something white spread out on either side of his body in the next second. She’d known his coat was unusually heavy for late fall, but now she understood that it had been hiding something. Wide angel wings, made up from thousands of short feathers, now surrounded him.
“Uh. Bird?” She pointed dumbly, unable to form a single coherent thought more.
“Harpie.” He gave her a glare that could have killed. “You don’t need to understand. You need to come with me.”
Still in shock, she forgot about her getaway plan, and walked towards him. Avery then circled around him needing to see the entire phenomenon in detail. He twisted to face her a few times until he let her behind him, groaning from deep in his throat.
“This is… unreal.” The whisper left her before she realized it. The moonlight cast a hearty blue glow on them both
and let her see clearly.
Hands tentatively reaching out, she lightly brushed her fingertips over the feathers. Stiffer than they looked, they were still soft. She could feel the hardness of bone over the arch of his wing. He wore a shirt so she couldn’t see how they were directly attached to his skin, but Avery didn’t need any more convincing. His wings were hot, twitching, and very very real.
Curling her hand back to her chest, she whispered, “This is…”
“Unreal?” He offered.
Airborne Page 2
