My heart squeezed a little. Adrian and I had just started talking. Stupid, stupid weather.
“Should I get you a ladder or something?” I looked around for some platform Adrian could have used to get all the way up there, but I found nothing.
“No need,” he assured me. He moved toward the edge of the ledge and prepped himself for the drop.
“Don’t,” I gasped apprehensively. “You’ll break an ankle.”
Adrian grinned devilishly. My concern seemed to amuse him. “Want to bet?”
I didn’t think he would seriously jump until I saw him falling. Contrary to my expectations, he hit the ground lightly on his feet, completely unscathed.
I shook my head at him. “Boys,” I muttered to myself. “Are you sure you aren’t hurt, because maybe I should s-” I stopped abruptly.
Adrian was staring intensely into my eyes, just as he had done when he saw my necklace.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. They look strange,” I admitted reluctantly. Adrian remained silent. He looked shaken.
In one quick flash of movement, he grabbed my wrist and began to pull me toward his house. “Come with me,” he insisted urgently.
I struggled to break my wrist free of his iron grip. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Where are we going?” I dragged my feet against the cement in protest.
“Come on, Amber, walk. You don’t have time for this.”
The raw desperation in his voice made me tense. Adrian never sounded desperate. I followed him compliantly. When he reached his gate, he removed something indiscernible from his pocket, unlocked the gate, and led me inside. He repeated the process at his front door, but this time I froze at the threshold.
Adrian shot me an agitated look.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said in justification. “I have no idea what you’re doing.”
“Amber, please, I’ll explain,” he implored. “You have to trust me. But you can’t stay out here.”
I sighed. He seemed markedly perturbed. I stepped inside with him and he shut the door behind us. I was such a pushover.
The house’s interior was a complete contradiction to its exterior. Based solely on the inside, I could have thought it brand new. From the paint to the furniture, it looked like a replica of the house I lived in. But what surprised me most was how tightly all the shutters had been drawn on every window, allowing no light to pass through. All the light in the house was artificial, provided by lamps and chandeliers.
“Aris!” Adrian bellowed into the house. “Arisella!” The name echoed through the house, provoking no response. “By the gods,” he muttered under his breath. “Come with me.”
He led me to the back of the house and deposited me in the living room. He opened the sliding door to the backyard and stuck his head out. “Arisella, get in here!” he growled.
“What is it?” an out-of-breath feminine voice replied. A slender, yet muscular girl scantily clad in a tank top and shorts languidly stepped through the door. The grace and fluidity with which she moved, with which she held herself, were almost feline.
Her short, disheveled hair bounced at her shoulders as she made her way toward Adrian. Then she noticed me. “Adrian, what were you th-” She stopped abruptly. Then she looked at me, really looked at me. “On our mother’s grave,” she whispered.
“She’s an Irisbourn,” Adrian murmured.
I was confused.
“I thought you said she was human,” Arisella accused. She roughly put her finger under my chin and tilted my face to hers. Her hair and eyes were the exact same shades as Adrian’s, yet her face was also distinctly different. She had larger eyes and a rounder face, giving her a naturally innocent appearance.
“She was a human, but now she’s not.” Adrian kept gazing at me perplexedly as if I were some one-of-a-kind phenomenon that never occurred in nature. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around their conversation.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, raising my hand.
“Quiet,” Arisella shushed with an air of authority. So much for her innocent appearance. “She could have changed the color artificially. You.” She directed her attention squarely toward me. “Did you do anything to your eyes recently?”
I shook my head. “What does that have to do with anything?”
They ignored me.
“She’s not a human anymore,” Adrian insisted.
Arisella scowled and crossed her arms. “I’m not convinced.”
“What do you expect her to do? She doesn’t even know what she is; it’s not like she can prove it.” Adrian looked exasperated.
All of a sudden Arisella broke into a diabolical smile. “Really?”
The next thing I knew, she was forcing me forward through the door she had just entered. Even though I was two inches taller than her, she had no trouble overpowering me. Within seconds I found myself in the backyard. The bark of the closest tree had been deeply impaled with metal blades, and even more knives were strewn along the grass. I gulped.
“Arisella, stop!” Adrian yelled, livid. “Don’t do this.”
“Blade please,” Arisella requested. She held out her hand to Adrian expectantly, but Adrian only looked at her in disbelief. “Fine,” she shrugged, and bent over to pick up one of the razor-sharp knives on the ground.
“You could kill her!” Adrian exclaimed. “It’s not worth it.”
Arisella turned on Adrian. “I’ll kill you if you don’t stay out of my way.” Her voice sent shivers down my spine, but Adrian just rolled his eyes. She redirected her attention back to me. “Girl.”
“Amber,” Adrian corrected, as if it mattered.
“Fine, Amber,” Arisella grumbled. She transitioned into a low, savage crouch and held her blade confidently at her side. “Let’s play.”
She leapt at me, blade in the air. It took me a moment to get over the initial suddenness of her attack. At the last second, I gathered enough sense to dart to the side to avoid the blow. She lunged at me again, and again I dodged her blade by a hairs length. Before she could take another swing at me, I sprinted toward the tree with the knives jutting out of it and pulled one out. I attempted to climb the tree, but Arisella fastened her hands to my ankles and yanked me back to the ground. My head spun from the impact.
“A coward,” she muttered in disappointment.
She gave me enough time to get back on my feet before she shifted into another crouch. I held my blade in front of me, with the ridiculous idea that I might be able to deflect anything that might fly toward me. In one practiced movement, Arisella sent her blade sailing through the air toward mine, effectively knocking it out of my hand and slicing through the skin on the back of my wrist. I gripped my injured hand tightly with my left, as hot, sticky wetness seeped from the cut. Like the one I had sustained in the woods, this wound seemed superficial, so I wasn’t too worried about stopping the bleeding. I was far more worried about the sadistic girl in front of me.
“Arisella,’ Adrian hissed from the sidelines. I was suddenly enraged with him for leading me into a deathtrap with this psychopathic killer.
With a bored expression, Arisella watched the red fall from my hand. “A bleeder,” she announced discontentedly.
She charged at me again, this time trapping me against the wall of the house. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the grisly pain, but all I felt was the dull edge of a knife pressed up against my neck. I opened my eyes.
“Vulnerable,” she sneered.
She dropped the blade from my aching neck, and I fell to the ground, coughing. I tried to crawl sideways to the door as she stepped back. Her eyes were wild.
“Adrian, I think you may have made a grave mistake.”
“I’m not wrong.”
Arisella dropped her knife and ran her hands through her hair. For a second I thought she was done, that she had accomplished what she wanted by injuring me. But my relief disappeared when she said, “I think we should raise the stakes then, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for A
drian’s response.
She bent over and began to shudder uncontrollably, so much so that for a second I actually wondered if I should help her. Adrian watched her stiffly, making no movement. It wasn’t until her body was contorting and stretching that I realized something was seriously wrong. Needle-sharp hairs like metal threads emerged from her skin, as her body shifted into an unrecognizable feline shape. She fell to the ground on her hands, which now resembled paws. Her nails extended into claws as sharp and long as the blades in the grass. I watched her, dumbstruck, while her body was replaced with that of a monstrous silver cat unlike any I had ever seen. Its quick silvery tail was shaped more like that of a fox’s than a cat’s, and its ears were so large on its head they were practically drooping.
The sinister feline lifted its head and glared at me with red, catlike eyes. My fear of Arisella paled in comparison with my terror of this creature. A warning snarl slipped through its incisors, and I gulped, defenseless. It charged toward me, claws out, and left me no opening to escape. This animal was going to slaughter me.
With that realization, my body began to burn, just as it had in the woods. I screamed and knelt to the ground in so much pain that I didn’t even realize that the blow from the cat had never come.
When I could summon enough strength to look up, Arisella had taken the cat’s place, her savage demeanor replaced with one of awe. I wanted to wipe that wonder-struck look off her face.
I knew that I would have to attack her when she was distracted. I darted toward her faster than I thought was possible. Her eyes widened in fear, and an exultant guttural noise rose from my throat. But before I could come close enough to her to strike, a shooting pain paralyzed my side, and I collapsed on the ground, helpless. The world grew dark around me, and my body drowned in pain.
As I slowly lost consciousness, I could hear Arisella victoriously remark, “We have a winner.”
Chapter Thirteen
“We need to wake her up. She looks like a corpse; it’s making me uncomfortable.”
“In case you don’t remember, you did this to her.” I recognized Adrian’s voice. He sounded pissed.
I opened my eyes and found myself in a large bed. The only light illuminating the room was coming from a small lamp on the wall, so my eyes had to take some time to adjust before I noticed Arisella and Adrian beside me.
“She’s back from the dead,” I heard Arisella whisper.
“Here.” Adrian handed me a glass of water that had been sitting on the nightstand. “You must be exhausted.”
I took the water but eyed it suspiciously.
Adrian sighed. “Amber, relax. We’re not going to poison you.”
“How do I know that? She tried to kill me.” I glared at Arisella. I had to restrain myself from throwing my glass at her.
Arisella held up a finger in rectification. “Help, not kill. It may not seem that way right now, but you’ll thank me later.”
Her superior tone made my blood boil. “Why you delusional, murderous-” I was so irate, I couldn’t even finish.
“Stay calm,” Adrian murmured sympathetically. “Aris, I think you should leave.” Arisella stared at Adrian in disbelief. “Now,” he emphasized.
She stalked out of the room without another word and closed the door behind her.
“You’ll have to excuse my sister,” Adrian said gently. “She can be quite… unpleasant at times.”
“You’re related to that witch?” My glass of water shook in my hand. “And you! You led me here so she could kill me,” I remembered. An intense feeling of betrayal rose within me. Water spilled over the side of the cup and onto my shorts. Hold on, those weren’t my shorts. I closed my eyes. “Why am I wearing different clothes that I came in with?” I whispered.
“Your clothes, er, were kind of ruined during the fight. Don’t worry, Aris switched them with new ones,” Adrian added quickly.
I tried to remember any time during the fight when my clothes could have been damaged beyond repair, but my memory of the altercation was murky. It had all taken place so quickly. Had Arisella turned into some sort of cat? I shook my head to clear my mind, only to jostle memories of last night’s shredded wardrobe. Had my clothes somehow become like that? I blushed in mortification of the idea, which Adrian, of course, noticed.
“If it makes you feel any better, I left before I saw anything,” Adrian said awkwardly. Even more blood rushed to my flaming face. His words insinuated that there must have been something to see.
I rushed to change the topic. “I take it my torturer bandaged my hand as well?” I held up my right hand and wriggled my fingers.
“Actually, that was me,” Adrian admitted. “I didn’t know she would be so rough with you. We were honestly both trying to help you. It’s all very complicated.” Adrian’s eyes were pleading.
“Actually, it’s all very crazy, and I would really like to go home.” I swept my legs over the side of the bed so I could get up.
“You can’t,” Adrian asserted.
I stared at him in incredulity. My pulse sped up. Did his family consist of insane murderers who intended to keep and kill me?
“At least, not right now,” Adrian clarified. “You will be able to go home, I promise. But first you need to hear some things.” I grew slightly calmer.
“Like what?” I couldn’t imagine anything he said would be so important that I couldn’t go home.
“You’re not human,” Adrian said seriously and waited for my reaction.
I stared back blankly. I half expected him to burst out in laughter and yell “psyche!” but he didn’t.
“Okay, I need to go home,” I repeated.
“You don’t believe me,” Adrian breathed disappointedly.
I shrugged. “Can you blame me?”
“I’m telling the truth.”
I eyed the door warily. Even if I could manage to reach it ahead of Adrian, Arisella would no doubt catch me before I even hit the stairs. I decided I might as well play along with Adrian if it would help me get out of the house faster.
“Okay, let’s say I’m not human. That must mean you and your sister aren’t either, right?”
“Yes, we’re Divinbloods, just like you. We’re not of this world, but of another called Fallyre.”
I furrowed my brow at his strange words.
Adrian seemed upset by my resistance to the idea. “Okay, well, have you recently been seeing things others cannot, things you can’t understand?”
My eyes widened in surprise. I had been seeing creatures that definitely should not have existed on this earth, but everyone else had just dismissed them as panic attacks. But that didn’t necessarily mean Adrian’s outlandish assumptions were right, did it?
“No,” I muttered in response.
Adrian smiled at me slyly. “You’re lying.”
I grimaced in defeat.
“We’re different from humans. We can do things they can’t. Do you remember when Aris changed forms in the backyard?”
So I hadn’t imagined that. She really had changed into a giant sort of cat. “Yes,” I admitted slowly. “What was that?”
“A grimalkin. They’re native to our world. Our animals are different from yours, just like our people.”
“And your world, what’s it like?” I was fascinated by the possibility of the existence of another reality beyond ours, something greater to this life than I already knew.
Adrian’s eyes darkened. “Our world is dying,” he said gravely. “Collapsing from the inside out. Not literally imploding, though,” Adrian clarified when he noticed my shocked expression. “We as a people are destroying ourselves. It’s a very long, complicated story.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere,” I pointed out, as I crossed my legs atop the bed.
“No, it doesn’t.” Adrian’s mouth twitched up. “We were all told the stories of old as children, just like the way humans are read fairytales before bed. The only difference is, however, that our tales ar
e true.” He sat down on the flat surface of the mahogany nightstand beside me and closed his eyes. He looked lost in his memory, as if he were trying to capture a dream that had been slowly slipping away from him with every daylight hour.
Chapter Fourteen
“According to the early stories, when the gods created our world, they filled it with their wildest fantasies, from bloodthirsty dragons to wood sprites.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted, raising my hand as if I were in class. “You have dragons? Are we talking little snake-like dragons or big dinosaurs with wings?”
Adrian shot me a weary look. “Both.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Now please try to be patient, Amber. The story’s just getting started.”
“Sorry, sorry.” I motioned for Adrian to continue.
“To the gods, Fallyre was an empty canvas on which they could project their imagination without paying any regard to rhyme or reason.
“Amongst the ancient creations, the first people to inhabit Fallyre were not Divinbloods, but humans. But from their conception, the first men were too weak, cowardly, and defenseless to survive in a world of instinctive killers.”
I produced a loud, intentional cough, disrupting Adrian’s train of thought. I couldn’t help feeling insulted; until ten minutes ago, I had considered myself a human.
Adrian smirked and continued.
“Due to the gods’ inattention to practicality, Fallyre’s food chain was highly flawed. As the native animals of Fallyre facilely overpowered and slaughtered the first men, the rapidly declining human population prayed to the gods for an opportunity to escape their disastrous fate.
“It is said that the gods felt pity for the people they had created, and blessed them with unique abilities so that they might exhibit greater chances of survival. The men of Fallyre then declared themselves the ‘Divinbloods’—”
“That’s us,” I realized. Adrian’s story was actually starting to make sense now.
“Yes.” Adrian looked pleased. “So they declared themselves the ‘Divinbloods’ to accept their abandonment of their weaker bodies. Based on their god-given gifts, the people identified with one of four groups: the Strongbourn, the Beastbourn, the Bloodbourn, and the Spellbourn.
Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) Page 8
