My roomie sat there scowling at the back of Marcy’s chair. Not giving him the satisfaction of her gaze. “You heard me.”
“You think she’s got something I don’t?” He sat back in his seat and scoffed. “You forget who my family is? Then I’ll show you. As soon as we get there, I’ll show you.”
Great. Just freaking great. Now he had to impose some showing-off contest when all I wanted to do was keep the longma away from arrows and Bateson.
I ignored him and let him think whatever he wanted. His bullying and stupid one-up-manship was a waste of my breath. If he had any powers that I needed to worry about…well, I had backup. I had friends who’d stand by me. And Merlin.
Before Ren could launch into any more bullying, we landed. Perhaps it was the apprehension of what might happen at the North Stand that made the time fly by too quickly. We were there, exiting the plane, lining up to enter a bus, and then riding along a bumpy track of rutted dirt into the forest. For a simple school bus type of vehicle, it did a fine job of driving us higher up the mountainside. Verdant evergreens and conifers claimed most of the territory where there was brown earth instead of gray rocks. Soon, the trees thinned out as the terrain shifted predominantly to the stone of the mountain.
“Remember, I want you to stay in double lines until the path narrows,” Bateson ordered as we filed off the bus.
Marcy, Wolf, and Merlin stood and headed down the aisle before us, and Bateson opted to sneer at Wolf instead of flirt with him this time. “Can he stay on the bus?”
“He comes with me.”
Merlin edged closer to his master as the words were spoken.
“He’ll interfere with the bobcats coming near,” Bateson argued.
“He comes with me,” Wolf repeated. The man and dog stepped off the bus.
Outside, we paired up in our lines. Flynn was at my side, and behind us, Paige stood next to Sabine—who wore sturdy boots, not platform sandals, to my surprise. Ren and his crony were in front of us.
While Bateson strolled back and forth along us, like a sergeant sizing up her minions, I scanned the skies for my buddy.
“Worried something’s going to fall on you?” Ren mumbled to me.
I set my lips together and tuned him out. Or I tried to.
“Because I’d watch your head if I were you.”
Flynn rolled his eyes. “Shut up already.”
“Don’t tell me—”
The lines had started to move forward but Ren wasn’t facing the right direction. “Please, come along, Mr. Andeas. Follow the others.” Bateson gestured for him to catch up.
As we walked, I took stock of the sounds in the sky. Wings flapping in the distance. Beaks pecking at tree trunks. I didn’t pay a single second of attention to Bateson. When we’d pause and turn to whatever our teacher was pointing out, I ignored Ren’s smug smiles.
A half-hour into our trek through the forest, when rocky boulders stacked one another and seemed to grow upward, it started. Pesky, annoying gnats flittering around my head. Not flittering. Swarming. Like I was wearing a helmet of teeny, humming bugs. There were so many of them that their noise accumulated loud enough to distract me from listening to the others, for my longma flying close, anything. This was no swat-at-a-couple-and-dodge-past-the-mob. They stuck to me, hovered around only me.
Buzz off. The idea came through my head as an annoying afterthought. Too focused on keeping an eye out for the longma, so close to one of its purported favorite nesting sites, I lacked the direct concentration to channel my energy into getting rid of these things.
Ren chuckled, and through the hazy blur of gnats obscuring my vision, I caught sight of his cocky grin as we were standing in a semi-circle at the moment, examining a pawprint left in now-dried mud.
You jerk. I clenched my teeth, my irritation ticking hotter. This is what you’ve got? Some bigshot of traditional avian powers and all you can do is summon a horde of dinky gnats?
“Layla,” I heard Wolf’s voice behind me. Why he was calling out to me, I didn’t care. I needed these darn bugs gone so I could concentrate.
Get away. They stuck to my head. Blinking as a few got too close to my eyes, I held back a growl of frustration. Something else had to be nearby to lend me a hand. Get them. Get them away.
Dark objects immediately darted low and close to my head. Bats. Five of them swooped toward my face, their thin wings nearly feathering at my skin. The gnats fled and two of the bats moved over to Ren, flying over his head like missile striking too close to miss.
“What the—” He swatted at his head and his friend cried out and ducked.
“Layla…” Wolf again, likely warning me.
What? Jesus. Yes, yes. Check myself. Be aware of my energy. I was, I did, and I used it. Problem solved. Now unless Ren decided he wanted to preen and show me what other insignificant flying creatures he could dictate to—
“Oh, my God…”
Bateson’s low, brogue-ish murmur was distinctly different from her pedantic tone she used for lecturing that I snapped my face up to see what had her in awe. Her gaze was pointed over my head. I lifted my face to the sky, but I felt the coolness of the large shadow blocking the warmth of the sunlight for a second. Heard the angry growl of…
You’re here!
“Everyone get back—” Marcy called out to the students who started to talk over one another. As the loud flaps of the wings beat harder, closer, louder, my classmates freaked out. It had to be frightening, not seeing what was landing but knowing it wasn’t a small thing. Like a flashback to what happened at Otis’s stables in gym class.
“Layla!” Wolf that time.
“He’s coming for you,” Flynn said at my side. He’d taken hold of my forearm as the panic spread through the class. Bateson still stared at the swirling, mobile shape of my longma circling through the sky and cawing his cry. Marcy glanced up and ordered the class to retreat, getting them back, under the canopy of a copse of spruces nearby.
With thuds of his hooves, my longma landed. He still beat his huge wings like boards of black metal plates, his scales shifting reflections of light in the filtered sunshine of the forest. Growling, he paced, those sleek, muscular limbs bunching and flexing as he paced back and forth over the rocky space he’d found us at.
Buddy! You’re back. You’re alive. There was no cuff on his neck and no chain hanging. He was free.
A sharp click of radio transmittance drew my attention as I walked toward the longma, separating me from my class. Bateson had pulled a cell phone-looking device to her mouth. Not a phone, a high-tech walkie-talkie. Her mouth moved and fear catapulted through me. I ran to my longma.
“You need to go. Get away.” They’re coming for you. It’s not safe. Go! I put my hand out and he nudged his massive head into my touch, like how Merlin sought attention from Wolf.
“Holy crap on a cracker.” Sabine’s utterance came from my left. “Shit, Layla. You really are able to see monsters. You’re…petting something.”
Never mind her awe or finally realizing I was a Pure. She had overcome her disbelief that longmas were extinct.
“What is that thing? Layla? Flynn?” Lorcan yelled out among the still clashing clamor of students talking over one another. All they could see was the effects of winds lashing out from the longma’s wings, me reaching out to pet him. Marcy’s stern orders to get under cover had to have them terrified of invisible dangers.
“You need to go.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat, staring into the longma’s intense gaze as he watched me. Every other panted breath, I had to scan the air, the surrounding trees. Any second, Stu could show up, summoned, likely, by Bateson’s damn call.
“Go!” I pleaded with it but he circled around me, his tail curling at my side like a hook. I missed him too, but I couldn’t let myself be a bait. “They’re going to try to hurt you. Please, go. We’ll meet—”
He rammed his head into my stomach, like a huge cat insisting on affection. A grunt escaped my lips a
t the air forced from me. He was like a pet. A massive, strong one, yet he wasn’t acting aggressive. Desperate, but not mean. I was too short to withstand being knocked over and I stumbled back a step, bending forward to grip on to him before falling on my ass.
He purred another growl, a noise I couldn’t decipher. My hand landed on the back of his neck, slick scales cool and smooth to touch. As he moved toward me, I let my forearm lay all the way, almost beginning to hug his neck. Just the touch of him, reassuring me that he was here and alive, warm and strong…like a reunion with a family member.
Then he dipped, and I really did hang on to him. Because before I could gulp in a breath of astonishment, he rose. My feet lost the earth and I reacted, strapping my other arm around him, staying with him as he went airborne. His wings beat faster and harder, the joint of appendage digging into my ribcage as I hugged his neck.
And he shot to the sky, with my arms wrapped around his neck. Wind rushed at me, fanning my clothes to my skin and whipping my hair away from my eyes.
Oh, my God.
I glanced down. My classmates’ heads were reduced to dots, and before I was flown further away, I heard Wolf’s bellow.
“Merlin, follow her!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I squeezed my arms around the longma’s scaled, muscled neck and held on for dear life. Fear choked me.
Please don’t drop me.
It didn’t cease or slow its pace of flapping its giant wings, each upstroke jabbing into my side. This was only my third time flying and this one didn’t come with seatbelts. Or a takeoff lecture.
“Missed you, too, buddy, but you gotta get out of here.”
Without me.
He’d obeyed me, leaving the site where my classmates and Bateson were having their so-called tracking exercise as part of the final exam. Yet I hadn’t anticipated I’d be going along for the ride.
Tears burned at my eyes from the velocity of wind rushing at my face. I relaxed my grip enough to turn my head, to glance at the tipped tops of trees and the upper craggy ledges of the mountainside. Everything seemed so distant, so far below. I was—we were—too exposed. Flying up here in the cloudless sky, with nothing at all to prevent us from a clear shot for Stu. Stu and his unique arrows he’d been sequestering away.
Arrows. I flashed back to the last sight I’d had of my longma. Blood glistening in the dawning sky. The smear had shown on his right side, where I was plastering myself to his soaring body. Nothing stuck to me, no gluey slickness of a recovering wound on his side. I knew plenty about my buddy, but I lacked knowledge of its immune system. Could he heal quickly? Because as I tightened my grip again, threading my fingers together to hang on securely, it seemed that he hadn’t even been injured at all. Perhaps it had been a play of light, and from so far away…
A sharp sting lanced me, stealing my breath. Something pierced me as I hung on to this flying dragonish horse beast. I cried out and nearly loosened my arm. Sharp zings of pain speared up from the back of my thigh. I twisted, clenching my teeth, to see what the hell happened.
Low growls rumbled between my arms as I held on and tried to see my injury. From my angle, I witnessed blood dripped down my leg, bared from below my skirt. A steady trail of red snaked down to stain my sock.
“Dammit…” I wheezed in a breath from the agony and pulsing throb. I couldn’t move to inspect what had wounded me. I couldn’t even crane my neck to see anything behind me.
The longma began to descend through the air, and I focused on breathing and biting through the pain. Trees blurred past as we flew lower and lower, rushing past trunks of gnarly pine bark and dead branches jutting out like stiff scarecrow arms. He missed it all, not one obstacle slowed his descent all the way to the mountainside.
With an impact-jarring thud, he landed, and I slid off. My arms trembled from the exertion of holding on to him through the air and I couldn’t even catch myself from tumbling roughly to the rocky, cool surface. Coldness helped the burning throb in my thigh, and now that I was on land, I twisted at my hip to see.
“Are you kidding me?” I seethed through clenched teeth at the remnant of the familiar shaft of metal. I was hit. Or maybe Stu had been aiming for the longma’s neck or chest and I’d been in the way. Whatever the target had been, I was the recipient of a freaking arrow. Practically on my butt. I groaned and closed my eyes tight as I struggled to my knees. I must have snapped the arrow when I’d fallen from the longma, shoving the point further into my leg. As I shifted, the metal dug into my muscle and bone, causing me to cry out and fall. On my stomach, I grunted and exhaled hard, disturbing the dust on the ledge to puff up and into my eyes.
I wasn’t the only one in distress. My longma growled a noise that faded to a whimper, and I lifted my face from the ground. He paced, his long black tail whipping side to side in a manner that reminded me of Suthering’s cat-osaur Bella. Then to the opposite, another sound. A zap, the hum of a machine, and then a low, keening cry.
I pushed up on to my hands and one knee, letting my injured leg hang down, and turned to my right. Three feet from my nose was another longma.
Holy… There were two of them. This one was shorter, sleeker in size, and slightly lighter in color. Not black, but not gray either. As it circled in a tight curl, I saw the blood still oozing from its recovering side.
This was the longma Flynn and I saw that morning. Not my longma.
“Hey,” I said.
Hey…what? Nice to meet you? I know how you feel, being shot with a damn arrow. Where’ve you been hiding? Why are you coiling around like that?
“Let me help you.”
I didn’t know how, but I wanted to at least state I was willing to. I struggled to get upright on my knee, dragging my other leg along, and I shuffled toward it. Her. She had little room to walk, but I saw she lacked a boy’s anatomy.
“What’s this, girlie?” I muttered, breathing hard around the words. Twice, I fell forward, tripping over a hefty dead branch that had fallen on the rocky ledge. A light-blue dome covered and trapped her to the ground. Bright yet translucent space surrounded her and once I followed the sloped wall of illumination to the rocks she walked on, I understood.
An electric fence. Or forcefield of some kind.
“Of course.” Because nothing about today is going to be easy. I wiped at the sweat and dirt blurring my vision and heaved a deep breath.
My longma still paced behind me and growled again.
“Yeah, yeah. I get it now.”
He wasn’t obeying my order to get away from my class and Bateson. He’d been bringing me to his lady, probably hoping I could help. If I wasn’t shot and an expert electrician, I might have been his superwoman. Not today, though.
Merlin burst through the woods, his barks more like a warning call than a howling alert to Wolf that he’d found me. My longma growled deeper and lowered his forelegs, readying for defense.
“No. Stop.” He’s not an enemy.
Merlin still rushed forth, barreling straight for me. “Wait. Merlin. Stop!”
He was running too fast, his tongue flapping out of his mouth as he tore from the treeline toward these rocky, tiered ledges where I was with the longmas. Then he must have realized the electric dome was too close. Skidding, he slowed his legs. It was too late, though, because he slammed into the tree branch I’d struggled crawling over, shoving the thing sideways.
“Merlin—”
I couldn’t even ask him why he was acting so frantic because my longma rose up into the air and roared.
“What—” I blinked hard and swallowed the lump in my throat that choked me. Now what—
Fierce growls and more of my longma’s roars filled the air. Merlin had been running like hell, not only under Wolf’s direct order to follow me, but because he was also fleeing from three large tigers chasing him.
“Oh, my God.”
Merlin rolled and scrambled to me as the trio of humongous tigers dashed at him. My longma dipped down from the air
and snapped at the one closest to us. He caught him around the tiger’s neck and forced him to the side. Yet the second tiger opened its mouth and rushed for me and Merlin.
“Stop!” I held my hand up and it shook its head, still charging for me.
It was an ancient. It had to be. Not only were tigers not native to the Canadian Rockies, this thing was a monster no one would even believe existed. Maybe back in the Ice Age, but not now. Instead of black stripes on an orange fur, it was reversed, orange stripes on inkiness. At their heads were two mohawks of gangly, coarse black hair, like a severely parted mane.
And to the best of my knowledge, sabre-toothed carnivores had died out long ago. Especially any that had metallic teeth and bodies the size of mini elephants.
Ancient or not, I was a Pure. It could sense my energy and obey.
“Stop!” I tried again. Merlin stood between us, shaking, but determined to try to defend me.
Still, the striped beast raced toward us.
“Stop!” I screamed it, and as it slowed, but still ran, it shook its head. Light-colored metal glinted from a collar around its neck. Not a simple solid band of a cuff like I’d seen on my longma, but something fatter, with a lit-up screen attached.
A tracker? A zap collar?
“Stop!” Sweat ran down my back and I hunched over Merlin, hugging him to me, preparing to be chewed alive. My longma still fought with the one it had attacked.
Then another roar thundered through the air. Behind me. The wounded female flapped her wings and lowered as though to launch. Blue hazy light was nowhere to be seen, and I dropped my gaze to the perimeter of where the electric beams had been emitting the forcefield over her.
Merlin. He’d stumbled into that fallen branch, a log of wood the thickness of my thigh, and had shoved it through the beams and busted a sensor. She was free.
“Oh, thank God. Please, a little help and then I’ll help you.” I hugged Merlin as she took flight over us, to fend off the ancient species on a train wreck course toward us.
“Layla!”
Wolf.
Discovery: Olde Earth Academy: Year Two Page 19
