“Holy shit,” Ben wheezed. Then he took two hits from his rescue inhaler, because there was probably a thousand things in our place for him to be allergic to.
Poor guy.
Liadan drew up short behind me and blinked. Flowering vines with starlight primrose crawled up our living room curtains, and fragrant spider moss climbed the fireplace brick.
“It looks like a dryad went hog wild in here,” Ben said.
It took some maneuvering to make our way to the couch. A golden planter overflowing with crimson blossoms took up the entire end table.
Pilar hurried over and squealed. “This is beautiful! It’s like he knew exactly what I would want from Tir na Nog. Oh, I love ribbon lilies.”
I plucked a card from a flowering bush and read the flowing script. It glittered. “Hold up a second. This card says the flowers are for Lia.”
Lia blinked. “What?”
When Pilar’s shoulders dropped and her smile deflated, I sighed. “Sorry, Pilar.”
“No, it is okay. Lia deserves flowers too.”
“I don’t know why anyone would send me flowers. Especially this many.”
Ben rubbed his chin. “Must be another faerie lord, or—er, lady who noticed you at the party.”
I grinned. Lia must have finally shared her preferences with Ben. “The handwriting is definitely different from the last one, so we have King Oberon and some other majestic dude hitting on Lia and Pilar.”
Ben glanced at me. “Nobody after you yet?”
“No flowers for me, only tough love.” Which was fine by me. There was only one guy I wanted flowers from.
And he hadn’t even sent me one.
With that sour thought in mind, I slung my backpack onto the couch and dragged out the magical history textbook we’d be studying, prepared to sulk through studies until I recalled one critical fact—keeping our relationship on the down-low had been my idea, not Gabriel’s, and no one but me was responsible for how much it sucked keeping the secret.
16
Flight School
A casual weekend of studying passed, and then a new week of fresh magical torments and training began. Dain had nothing good or bad to say about our group performance Monday afternoon. We’d met at the usual time outside on the quad, but he held me over for an hour while Liadan and Pilar received lessons in defensive magic.
Both resenting the hour of lost sleep and appreciating the time he gifted us, I hung behind after the other two left to fetch pizza and soda to ask him a question.
“Why are you doing this for us? I get that the school asked you to teach me, but no one said you had to help my friends too.”
He shrugged and broke eye contact. “It costs only an additional hour of my time, and time is rather fluid when one has the potential to live forever.” A subtle buzz filled the air, accompanied by the scent of ozone.
I glanced skyward toward the darkening clouds on the horizon. “If more students asked, would you teach them too?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shifted his stance, gaze flicking back to me. “You’re inquisitive today.”
“Only trying to understand what’s happening.”
“Worry not for what is happening, and place your concern on what will happen. Good day, Lady Skylar. Practice well for our next lesson. I will see you Wednesday.”
“Dain—”
A lightning bolt fell from the sky and lit the area where my faerie mentor stood. He vanished in that split-second of blinding light and left nothing but a scorched glyph behind in the grass. Even that faded away seconds later as little seedlings pushed through the earth and blossomed soon after.
Too exhausted to question the faerie lord’s weird antics, I returned to the townhouse—thankful to find no more flowers—and shoveled down half a pizza. Afterward, I slept the sleep of the dead until my martial arts class that night with Antonin.
There, we were learning Combat Sambo, which was a fancy name for a stupidly difficult Russian art dedicated to brutal takedowns and complicated grappling.
Our prior classes had been all about learning proper form, repetition, and building the muscle to pull off those moves, because we were sheltered babies and Antonin didn’t want to break us… too badly. He made our class practice the throws with 150-pound dummies that I couldn’t lift at the start of the semester.
Two months later, I heaved the six-foot-tall, human-shaped decoy over my shoulder onto the floor from a standing position without pulling every muscle from my neck to my hip. The vampires and larger shifters had received 250-pound decoys to start, but the sole raven shifter girl and I had been shown pity.
“Ah!” Antonin clapped his big hands together and crossed the floor. “Excellent throw, Skylar. I see you are ready to practice now with your fellow classmates as well.”
Elation zipped through me. The rest of the class had moved on to training with each other two weeks ago, while I lagged behind to strength train and master the basics. I hadn’t minded, because Antonin worked with me one-on-one, teaching me proper form so I didn’t injure myself. “For real?”
“Yes. A dummy does not fight back. In this class, students learn to handle and incapacitate real attackers.” He turned and raised his voice. “Holly, you are up.”
My friend popped up from the mat where she’d been taking a quick water break. In the time it took me to blink, she’d crossed the room. Damn, how was I supposed to take on someone who could move that fast?
“Holly will be the attacker, and it is your task to take her down,” Anton directed. “I expect you both to give your best effort.”
We both nodded. “Of course,” I said.
“Excellent. Begin.”
Antonin stepped back as Holly darted in, taking advantage of my unbalanced posture and catching me off guard. I barely managed to twist aside and evade her attempt to grab me.
So that was how it was gonna be.
Game. On.
If I couldn’t compete with her speed, then I’d have to be clever, and since we were able to use all talents at our disposal, I sidestepped into the Twilight. Holly breezed past me, catching nothing but empty air.
I stepped out again behind her and grabbed her left arm. Or, at least, I tried to. She sped around me faster than a snake and aimed a strike for my chin. Hard hours of training with Gabriel resulted in my arm automatically coming up in a block, deflecting her intended strike away from my face. Pain exploded in my forearm, because vampire strength was still a bitch.
We both backed away and faced off across the mat. Since Antonin had placed her in the role of attacker and me as the defender, I bounced lightly on the balls of my feet and mentally prepared for whatever she threw at me. She assessed my stance, watching me with calculating blue eyes. Then she dashed in. Fast. What Holly lacked in skill, she made up for by moving at what seemed to be the speed of light, her fists delivering hard blows that bruised to defend against them. Thanks to Gabriel’s hard work all last year, she couldn’t break through my defense even when she resorted to snap kicks.
Was I as fast as her, or was I just reading her right?
No time to think. Muscle memory and reflex guided me, apparently successful substitutes for vampiric speed. Slipping into the Twilight, I spun around behind her and kicked the back of her knee before attempting a throw. She flipped out of it, coming back with a vengeance.
Damn.
Sweat dripped into my eyes, but she kept my hands too busy to mop it with the back of my wrist. In my peripheral vision, I saw Gabriel and Antonin spectating the fight side by side. Then Holly lunged toward me—a literal blur of black and red athletic gear. Instinct took over, and instead of blocking the strike, I bent down and used her momentum against her, because if there was one thing I’d noticed about Holly’s new gifts, it was that she couldn’t yet put the brakes on her super speed.
Holly sailed over my shoulder and hit the mat with a grunt. For a moment, her wheezes and my heavy breaths were the only
sound, and then the room erupted in applause. At some point during our spar, it looked like everyone had gathered around the edge of the mats to watch.
“Well done.” Antonin helped Holly up from the floor. “You both did excellent. And now the rest of you know why a faerie can be a formidable opponent.”
“Bad ass,” Felicia the wereraven said.
A few of my fellow classmates echoed her praise, but my gaze went straight to Gabriel. He grinned at me, and the pride shining in his eyes filled my chest with little butterfly flutters.
“Good job,” Holly said when she could breathe again. “I thought I had you for sure.”
“You almost did a few times.”
We laughed and left the floor together, taking seats on the side to enjoy a well-deserved break. Antonin dismissed the entire class a few minutes early.
“Race you to the field?” Holly challenged.
“My wings are no match for vampire speed.”
“And my vampire speed still requires navigating ground level traffic. It’s super awkward when you crash into a bear shifter and end up face-to-groin with him.”
I grimaced. “For the sake of your face, let’s just walk it.”
“Fine. Spoilsport.”
* * *
Tuesday evening, Gabriel sent me a text to meet him elsewhere, so after I crossed the quad, I found him in an enormous tree-littered field with dozens of orange markers in treetops and bushes. There were walls, ledges, rails, slides, and trampolines spread throughout like someone had decided to grow a park in the middle of a parkour training yard.
I found him leaning against a tree, watching my approach. “About time you made it.”
“You should have warned me you were changing our usual place. Is this a—”
“Airborne obstacle course. Yep.”
“What’s with all the stuff? Why are there walls breaking the line of sight between some of the targets?”
He grinned then shrank to his raven form. “Welcome to flight conditioning and endurance training, babe. Dain and I had a talk about it. If I focus on flying, he can benefit y’all in other ways during your training hour, like building up your sylph talents.”
“When the hell did you talk to Dain?”
“This morning. He showed up out of nowhere when I was heading back to my room after class and asked to speak with me.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“Wasn’t need to know information.”
“Oh my God, I could just kick your ass.”
“But you won’t, because I’m adorable. Anyway, there are thirty markers spread across this training yard. Us ravens use this place usually to hone our transition and flight skills, which means it should work for you too. The walls break your line of sight so you can shadowstride through them while in flight.”
“What the hell, dude? It’s called a shadowstride for a reason.”
“Yeah, well.” He stretched out one wing then the other, like a runner preparing for a distance sprint. He was missing three or four feathers from the center of both. “You’re going to learn to shadowdive before this semester ends if it kills you.”
“It just might! Gabe, what if I crash into the wall?”
“You won’t, Sky. Take it slow. I don’t expect you to fly this thing full speed.” He cocked his head and watched me through one eye. “Do you think I’d ask you to do anything that could hurt you? Anything at all?”
Feeling silly, I glanced away first. “No.”
“Then trust me.”
“Okay. How do you want me to start this?”
Becoming a man again first, Gabriel led me to a long white tape stretched over the ground. He tapped it with his foot. “This is our starting line. When we race each other, we have to touch the markers with a wing or our beak in passing for it to count. You can use fingers.”
I nodded. “Are you flying it with me?”
“Do you want me to?”
“The first lap at least.”
“Sure.” Gabriel took his position on the line. I flexed both wings forward and focused on the closest orange banner. “On one.”
He counted back from five, giving me time to mentally prepare for hurling myself at solid walls, and at the end, he took off like a bolt. I lunged forward and thrust my wings back, putting enough power into the movement to match his running speed. I had an honest shot at keeping up with him until he transformed midstride to his raven form, the transition so smooth, so damned flawless, I was helpless to do anything but admire him for a few beats until I got my head back in the game.
The initial obstacles were straightforward, hurdles too high for me to jump on foot, but low enough that I elongated my body and soared above them with ease. My legs no longer mattered. It was about flight and becoming as natural in the air as I was walking on the ground.
Learning to fly had really built my core muscle strength, because as useless as my legs were while I was airborne, I still had to support them. My abs were going to be amazing.
We reached a hoop dangling from a tree branch with an orange marker taped in its center. Gabriel was seconds ahead of me. He dove through it with his wings pressed against his ebony body, so I followed his example, stretched in a perfect swimmer’s form with my wings tucked close. I emerged on the other end to the sound of his raven voice whooping and cheering.
“You got this! Wall up ahead!”
A wooden, military-style climbing wall stretched toward the sky ahead of us. Three ropes dangled on this side, but I ignored them and prayed to any deities listening that I didn’t splinch myself like a Harry Potter character and leave half of my body behind on the other side.
Arms outstretched before me, I parted the Veil with both hands and left the mortal realm behind. The vibrant colors of the spiritual realm shone all around me. As the Twilight and mortal realm were mirroring, identical planes, solid objects continued to exist in both worlds—which was how ghosts and vengeful spirits affected real-life objects all the time.
When a fae used their shadowstride, they bent reality around them and fused through solid objects, displacing matter and moving through it.
I’d never done it in flight before.
“You can do it, Sky!” Gabriel’s voice reached me through the miasma separating the realms. “You did it to both of us in a car. This is a piece of cake.”
Damned right I could. Even though I was sweating bullets, even though I was petrified of crashing headfirst into a solid wall at speeds probably approaching a hundred miles an hour, I applied the same method of shadowstriding to flight while coasting through the air. My body turned incorporeal and formless, thin as smoke, crossing distance, flying through substance, remolding, shaping, and emerging again on the other end in less than a split second.
I entered the real world again about twenty yards ahead of where I meant to emerge with the breath squeezed from my lungs.
Success. Sorta.
“Holy shit. You did it!”
Then I landed on the grass in a crumpled heap, rolling a few times before lying in a sprawl, my chest heaving. Gabriel landed next to me and came out of his raven form in a crouch, concerned brown eyes on my face.
“You okay? Dude, you did it.”
“Ugh, yeah, I’m fine. Slamming back into the real world caught me by surprise.”
“What does it feel like flying across the Veil?”
“You know how when you’re diving into a pool, the water is ice cold and frigid, and it kind of slaps you?”
He nodded.
“It’s like that. Haven’t you been in the Twilight before?”
“A few times for Subterfuge and Surveillance last year, but I don’t think stepping through at a mage’s leisure is the same as crashing across on your own.”
“It’s definitely not. I didn’t dislike it though.”
Gabriel rose first and offered me a hand. It swallowed my smaller fingers, his grip rough and calloused, a reassuring warmth I didn’t release even though we were b
oth standing. “You did good. Next time, don’t wait so long to thrust out with the wings and swoop them down. Slow it down evenly on both sides so you don’t come out of it and eat dirt, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ready to try again?”
I stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “Now I am.”
“All right. Let’s start from the top.”
Despite the ache in my shoulders and tension in my back from my tumble across the grass, I loped back to the starting line. Gabriel paced himself beside me, leading me from one obstacle to the next.
He landed on a rail beside me as a bird, and then completed his vault over it in human shape. He made it an artform, moving in and out of one body into the other without ever missing a wing beat or losing stride.
Each time I passed through a wall, I came out on the other side closer than I had the previous shadowstride. Like fighting, it was about muscle memory.
Gabriel landed first, though I thought I had enough energy to make at least two more laps. “Good job, Sky.”
After landing, I stretched both arms over my head. My back ached a little, but the mental fatigue wasn’t there. The pleasant buzz of a runner’s high raced through my veins, because somehow I’d completed the obstacle course from hell and wasn’t lying on the grass in a sweaty heap.
He cocked his head, watching me. “How do you feel? Tired this time?”
“Not really. I guess flying isn’t as draining as it felt before.”
His beak parted a bit, almost like a grin. “Good. It means you’re becoming stronger. Was I too hard on you?”
“No. Sorry for giving you a hard time at first. That was… actually fun.” Not as easy as our visit to Tir na Nog, but he’d pushed me harder then, not because he was a hard-ass who wanted me to suffer, but because he wanted me to succeed.
I scooped Gabe from the grass and cradled him in the crook of my elbow. He had a few white pin feathers sticking out from his cheeks, reminding me of his stubbled, unshaven human face. I scratched them until the sheaths broke apart and freed the new feathers. I did the same for a couple on his back that must have been a bitch for him to reach, aware of his keen eyes studying me.
The Scary Godmother: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 2 Page 16
