by Lan Chan
I had assumed that one day I would learn to eat like someone wasn’t going to take it away from me at any second. It never even occurred to me that there was something very unladylike about shovelling food into my mouth until I caught him watching me.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
If it was one of the boys, right now they’d make a comment about my ability to put away food like it was air. They said stuff like that to me all the time. I always shrugged it off because, well, boys are dumb. But Kai wasn’t just a boy. The way he was looking at me made the sandwich clog in my throat.
I set my plate down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his brows suddenly arched. I considered brushing it off but going from eating-competition speed to not eating at all was bound to raise some alarm bell. “I bet Chanelle hardly eats, huh?”
He didn’t answer and then, “I love you.”
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I loved him too. So much it terrified me sometimes.
“Blue?”
How long had my brain seized for? “Pardon?”
“You heard me.” There was a distinct sharpness to his tone. His expression was tight.
“Why are you angry?” Please don’t take it back.
He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, they were hard. “I’m not angry,” he said. I didn’t want to have an argument right now.
Suddenly, there was a dinner roll in my left hand. And then there was a dinner roll sailing through the air at him. We were both stunned when it actually hit him in the chest. To be fair, it was a pretty big target. This was followed by a pickle and then a block of cheddar. He drew the line when I picked up the butter knife.
I found myself being yanked forward. I let out a sharp shriek as Kai grabbed me and deposited me between his bent legs. He held me in place in front of him, his face thunderous.
“What the heck are you doing?” he shouted.
I wanted to cover my ears and hum a tune to block out what was happening like I did when I was a kid. “Take me home, please.”
“I...” he was at a loss for words. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to have an argument right now and we’re incapable of spending five minutes together without getting into a screaming match.”
“Alright, calm down.”
It was like he had never had a normal conversation before. “Don’t tell me to calm down! All I did was space out a little and suddenly you’re angry?”
I’d never seen his eyes bulge like that. He wasn’t exactly the poster boy for laid-back but there was always something precise about the way he reacted. Right now, it seemed like he was losing control. He funnelled it into a scary kind of pretend-calm.
“Suddenly?” he said, like I was too stupid to understand what words meant. “Suddenly? I tell you I love you and you don’t speak for five whole minutes and now I’m the one being yelled at.”
“What are you talking about? I did say something.”
He did that no-talking eyes-closed meditation thing again. “No, you did not.”
I tried to recall what had happened right after he spoke. It was all fuzzy and scattered. I thought I’d said something, but there was the off chance I had just filed it away in my brain-vault with the things I wanted to remember forever.
“I...” My throat clogged. There would be no going back. His eyes peeled open. He watched me like a predator, and I didn’t shrink back. Spoken or unspoken, it wouldn’t change the way I felt.
“I love you, too.”
I waited for someone to jump out at us from the bushes and yell “just joking.” Or to wake up from this dream. A wide grin broke out on his face. He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me.
“Was that so hard?” he asked, with that arrogant glint in his eyes.
“Yes,” I said with all of the walls stripped down. He crushed me against his chest.
“It’ll get easier,” he said. “Once the Council realises I’m not going to change my mind, they’ll have to get with the program.”
“What if they don’t?”
“They have to.” Spoken like a true prince. He never even considered the alternative which would result in various shades of awful for me. Like him cheating on me with Chanelle whether he wanted to or not.
I shivered at the prospect. He took off his outer shirt and wrapped me in it. Without streetlights to disrupt them, the stars and moon were out in profusion. There was enough light to see the soft smile on his face.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked him.
“How do you know I wasn’t thinking about you?”
“For one, you’re not scowling.”
He hugged me closer. His palm splayed on my shoulder blade. Right below where my heart was situated. “I don’t know if it’ll help.”
“Let’s just see if it does,” I suggested. “If not, you can stop at any time.”
So we sat there for half the night while he told me about his family. When the cold started to make me shiver, he used his angelfire to warm me. It was a strange sensation I’d never felt before. It wasn’t unpleasant, but I could feel my magic reacting oddly. Like it was trying to decide whether it wanted to allow this intrusion. I wriggled a little in his hold.
“Too much?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “What kind of magic is that?”
“The same kind as always. Maybe you’re just tired.”
I had been drifting off a little. But I didn’t want this night to end.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
“But –”
“It’s okay. This isn’t the last night we’ll ever have.”
“Maybe for just a second.”
I fell asleep in a heartbeat.
My magic was no longer fighting his. Angelfire seeped into my skin, blanketing my senses in a feeling of warm euphoria. I wasn’t sure how I ended up in my bed, but I turned my face to the wall.
The dream materialised all around me. My whole body tensed. I had been conditioned to expect awful things to try and reach me here. Instead, I watched Kai step out onto the ground of the Academy. Dawn was breaking through the early-morning sky. He had on sweats. He was just about to lift off when his head turned towards a figure approaching from the direction of Pantheon.
And here came the nightmare. I knew it couldn’t last.
Chanelle picked her way across the damp grass in a long black trench coat and bare legs. She wasn’t even wearing shoes. I wasn’t sure why, but I was suddenly hit with a notion that she might be nude under the coat.
Kai turned as though he might pretend he didn’t see her. I felt his consternation as if it were my own. She called out his name.
He stood stock still. She reached him. If she were anyone else, he might have met her on the grass so she didn’t hurt her feet on the stone path. I felt his temper fraying at the edges.
“You were gone all day,” she said. “I was hoping to see you for your birthday.”
It was a far cry from what she’d said to him on the last birthday they’d spent together. He smirked as he remembered she’d also tried to throw something at him. But it wasn’t out of sheer passionate anger the way I had. It was because he’d forgotten he’d agreed to go to some party she had thrown for him. And her anger was rooted in a sense of shame. Like he wasn’t any good unless he was her perfect Malachi Pendragon.
Guilt was the only thing that kept him where he was. “Did you need something?” he asked in a bored tone.
She smiled up at him. I could feel his jaw clamping. Chanelle gathered her long mane of perfectly shiny hair over her shoulder. She braided it absentmindedly.
“I know it’s not the big day anymore, but I can skip some classes if you want to...hang out.”
“I’ve already told you why that’s not happening.”
She reached out and clutched the hem of his Academy T-shirt. He swiped her hand a
way and stepped back to create distance between them.
“How can you be so awful to me after everything?” she said. Here came the waterworks. I knew he hated it when women cried. It was a stupid macho alpha thing, but it was hard not to be endeared by it sometimes. Once he’d found Sophie shedding crocodile tears over a failed potion in the lab. He’d stood there for fully thirty minutes trying to coach her through it even though he had no idea what he was talking about.
At the moment, he really wanted to walk away. “I don’t know what more I can say to get you to understand,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have to understand!” she shouted. He bristled.
“Lower your voice.”
Her eyes grew wide and then narrowed into vile little slits. Even I was shocked by the coldness in his tone. “You think that human is going to be able to hold her place in the Council?” she said. “She’ll break in a second.”
“Whether she does or not isn’t any of your business,” he said. “And if she does, then she’ll do it with me beside her.”
I thought the tears were real this time. Misguided, but real all the same. “She can’t give you what you need.”
He smiled. It was sad but there was something wistful about it too. “Maybe she won’t be able to give me what you all want for me,” he said. “But she’s given me something I never thought I would feel again. Hope.”
Chanelle snorted. It was annoying that she managed to do it so delicately. When I did it, I sounded like a choking cat. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that was exactly what Kai was thinking. For some reason, it made him chuckle to himself.
“It’s just a silly infatuation,” Chanelle said. “She’s new and brash. You’ll figure out soon enough that she can’t last.”
“If that’s the case then you have nothing to worry about.”
“She won’t make it through the games. Save yourself the heartache and end things now.”
He gave her a smile. It was serpentine. A flash of his thoughts rose to the surface of the dream. He would make sure I won. Even if it meant taking out the main contenders one by one before the games began so that the only people left were ones I could easily handle. Chanelle saw his conviction and withered.
He turned away from her, satisfied that the thing he saw in her eyes was beyond worry. It was honest-to-goodness fear. What made Kai relieved was that he truly didn’t care. Just before he was about to spread his wings, Kai turned back to her.
“I’ve been more than patient,” he said. “The next time you do something to hurt her, don’t expect me to look the other way.”
He flew off before she could answer. The image started to dissipate. I slipped into a dreamless sleep surrounded by the green glow of Kai’s angelfire.
30
Sophie stood over me when I woke. “Do you have anything to tell me?” she asked with a big grin on her face.
“Umm...I can see up your nostrils?” I tried to turn over, but she wedged me in when she scooted onto the bed.
“Don’t try and change the subject! You were out all night.”
I pulled the covers under my chin and squinted at her. “Nothing happened.”
She looked at me like she didn’t believe me. Her bottom lip stuck out in a pout. “Are you trying to tell me that you went missing from school for a whole day and almost half the night and nothing at all happened?”
I went over everything in my mind. I got up to the point where he told me he loved me and sat bolt upright in bed. “Lex?”
“I...” It seemed too intimate a thing to just blurt out. But if I couldn’t tell Sophie, I couldn’t tell anybody. She went perfectly still after I said it. And then she shrieked so loudly I thought she might have busted my eardrum.
Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was definitely a ringing in there. “Soph,” I said. “I can’t bloody hear.”
She took a couple of long, deep breaths. “Tell me everything.”
“Can I get a shower first?”
“No!” She thought about it. “Okay, but be quick.”
I should have told her before. When I came back from the bathroom, she’d roped Diana in as well.
“Spill.”
They sat with rapt attention while I told them everything. I was still reeling from the strange dream I’d had last night. It left me feeling both light-headed and ravenous. Like I’d used up a good portion of my magic even though I’d just been asleep.
By the time the girls let me off the hook, I barely had time to go to the Grove and get breakfast. I was due to meet Giselle for yet another session of getting my butt kicked. Since it was a Saturday, the Evil Three joined us.
Giselle paired me up with Harlow for some drills. We were supposed to be practicing evading each other while we phased in and out. I kept getting distracted by green light that appeared and disappeared across my vision. It was because of this that Harlow kicked me in the gut so hard I almost threw up.
“Sorry,” she said. She helped me up.
“Do not apologise,” Giselle barked.
Harlow shuddered at the sound of her voice. “I don’t miss this,” she said. “I have nightmares that start out just like this.”
“You trained with her before?”
Harlow made a disgusted face. “Before she got posted to the prison. Imagine this as an eleven-year-old. We learned fast or we suffered.”
Clearly, none of us thrived on the tough-love method. Or tough hate in my case. At six, Matilda blew a whistle and announced that we all had to go and get ready for the party with the Human League. Giselle seemed ready to scratch Matilda’s eyes out.
I made a mental note to introduce her to Andrei the next time he annoyed me. She’d take his head off without a second thought.
I wasn’t sure why, but I was slightly apprehensive at the thought of seeing Kai again. The entire human student body of Bloodline had been invited to this event. We were all instructed to congregate at the portal field.
Diana came to help Sophie and me get ready. I stood in front of her shaking the skirt as it remained a pretty but plain ethereal black colour. “Why isn’t it transforming?” Diana asked.
“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe it’s broken?”
“It can’t be broken!” Sophie exclaimed. My jaw dropped at the shimmer in her dress and the way it picked up the warm pigments in her dark skin tone. We were both going with natural hair tonight. Hers had grown long enough that it sat just below her shoulders. “You look so beautiful,” I breathed. “Max is going to just die.”
Diana cackled. “You should have heard what he said to her yesterday about the pointlessness of clothing.”
“He did not!” I said.
Sophie went even redder than her dress. “Can we please deal with the issue at hand?” she said. She stepped closer and bent down to inspect my dress. “I’m sure it’s fine. Celine has never steered us wrong before.”
Astrid came to get us when it was time to go. In contrast to us, she wore her hair in a tight braid. Her dress was a sensible black number that skimmed her calves. She could put on a potato sack and look stunning. But I was slightly concerned. “I’ve never seen you in black before,” I said.
“It’s a reflection of how I feel right now,” she said. I wasn’t sure what that meant until we reached the portal field and saw the figure waiting beside the portal. The cluster of minions around Chanelle had to actually stand a metre away. The circumference of her gown was that wide. It was a blinding sapphire green with a sweetheart neckline.
“Somebody needs to rethink all this grass,” Sophie said.
“Tell me about it,” Wanda said as she joined us. “My heels are getting stuck in the dirt.”
“Actually,” I said, “your heels are compacting the dirt and this poor grass is going to have to reshoot to patch up where we’re making diverts.”
They all groaned at me. “I really don’t need a Herbology lesson right now,” Wanda said. I wanted to tell them Herbology wasn’t just a le
sson. It was a way of life. But I didn’t think it would go down very well. Just to placate them, I sent a sliver of hedge magic into the earth. It caused the roots of the grass to thicken and extract the water making the ground harder. We no longer sank into the dirt wherever we stepped.
“Ooh,” Alison said, “now you’re talking.”
The use of my hedge magic seemed to trigger something in the dress. Or maybe it was because we were approaching Chanelle. That wave of soft magic cascaded over me. The first strands of gold burst forth against my shoulders. This time instead of vines with golden leaves, they trailed and curled like the long canes of a rambling rose. Their thorns lanced out in all directions. As the canes scrambled past the bodice, golden roses blossomed all over the dress.
“Son of a bitch,” Harlow hissed. “I’ll never get used to seeing that.” Her eyes bugged out of her head.
“Way to make an entrance, Lex,” I heard Max say. But when I turned in the direction of his voice, he faded into the periphery. Kai stood there in his black tuxedo, the look on his face inscrutable. He swept his gaze over me and I felt heat blossoming in my veins.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He took three short steps towards me. I got a flash of something carnal that had goosebumps mottling my skin. He leaned down and placed his lips close to my ear. “It’s not safe to guess what I’m thinking right now,” he whispered. What suddenly frightened me was that I didn’t think I had to guess. Every molecule in me was suddenly blindly aware of how close he was standing, how hot his breath was against my skin, how hard every muscle in his body had become.
Alarm bells clanged in my mind. I took an involuntary step back and rubbed at my ear. “Did you put a spell on me last night or something?” I said.
“If I did it serves you right for whatever you’ve done to me since we met, Blue.”
Somebody cleared their throat. I turned to find Sean at the centre of a huddle with the Evil Three. He scowled at me. It made Kai reach out and curl his fingers around the nape of my neck. He leaned down once more.
