by Everly Frost
“Did he offer you a weapon?”
Her forehead crinkles. “He put an apple on the table and left it there. He didn’t talk about it or anything. I don’t get it. He didn’t hurt me. There must be something going on.”
I force a laugh. “So we should freak out because he didn’t hurt you.”
She bumps my shoulder as we hurry to gym class. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” Before Raptor arrived, Striker told me that the teachers were going easy on us, but he didn’t know why. We received the gift of Raptor at the end of that lull. The quietness within the Academy halls feels the same now—the teachers are waiting for something.
“It’s too quiet,” I say.
Lucinda pushes on the back door and I follow her into the sunlight. “We should make the most of it. If we get cleaning duties, let’s go to the library this afternoon.”
“Good idea.” I pull up short before I run into Striker, who’s coming from the opposite direction. We’ve successfully avoided each other for the last few days, ignoring each other in class when we’re forced to sit next to each other. The swelling around his eye is going down and his lip has healed.
The next day, Bree tells me that Raptor put a glass of water on the table while he questioned her. He asked her the same types of questions about her childhood that he asked Lucinda.
“I kept expecting him to throw the cup at me, but he didn’t,” she says.
Raptor’s motivation is baffling, except for one thing that niggles at the back of my mind. Lucinda got an apple. Bree got a cup of water. Both of those objects are marginally connected to the nature of their power. I’m not sure what it says that I got a dagger.
Each of the other girls has their lesson with Raptor that week, followed by each of the guys. I don’t hear much from the guys, but I hear stories that there was some new object on the table for each of the girls—never a weapon—and Raptor didn’t hurt or threaten them.
I take advantage of the quiet to go the library whenever I can—mostly only when we have cleaning duties. Finding out as much as we can about our powers is the key not only to our survival, but also to our ability to fight back. We have the chance to return to the library three more times, stopping our cleaning for longer periods to study the books, a dusting cloth ready in our hands in case we’re ordered back to work. At first, I’m worried that the compliance officers will take action, but they seem more bored than anything else. I guess reading books is hardly rebellion in their eyes. They’d probably be more interested if we started tearing out pages.
Our visits to the library reveal all sorts of rare and unusual supernaturals who have a somewhat humanoid form—creatures like the draugr, which is an undead warrior with blue skin that was feared by the Vikings in ancient times, and the wendigo, which are flesh-eating monsters who roam forests. Also in the flesh-eating, but not-so-humanoid, category are the so-called Mares of Diomedes—horses that like to snack on humans. And in the weird and wonderful category is the enenra—a Japanese monster made of smoke and darkness, although it’s unclear yet how it hurts anyone.
When my next lesson with Raptor arrives at the end of the week, I’m prepared for anything. He chose me for his special treatment and I’m already building protective layers around my mind, even if I can’t protect my body.
I remind myself that he got the upper hand over me because the memories from his dagger overwhelmed me. Well, that, and he hit my head against the wall hard enough to make me pass out. I won’t allow that to happen again.
As soon as I step into the room, I seek the table and whatever new object lies on it.
A thick, black rope rests coiled on the wooden surface, frayed at one end, a handle at the other, dotted with silver spikes.
It’s a whip.
Great. Now we’re into sex toys.
Raptor leans his elbows on his knees as he lounges in the chair. “Welcome back, Peyton.”
I step up to the wall at the side of the room and press my back against it. It probably looks like a coward’s move but this way he won’t be able to circle around me.
He doesn’t waste time inclining his head at the table. “Pick it up.”
I laugh. “As if.”
He lifts his hands into the air in a gesture of submission. “I promise I’ll stay right here.”
“Your promises aren’t worth a thing, Professor.”
“Oh, come on, Peyton. I haven’t touched a single student this week. Why would I break my pattern with you?”
“Because I’m the beginning and end of the pattern. Starts with violence. Ends with violence.”
“Maybe. But what can I do with a whip?”
Again, I laugh. “Strangle me. Lash me. Scare me.”
His lips pull down as he nods in agreement. “True, if you crack a whip just right, it’s pleasantly startling.” He rises from his seat and closes the door, pressing his back against it, studying me from beneath the strands of his blond hair. “I really do want to see you crack it.”
There’s an air of expectancy around him that makes me shudder as he takes a step toward me. “What will it take to convince you to pick it up?”
It’s hard to tell from this distance, but the whip looks like a serious weapon. Sharp silver tips catch the light as I shift to the side. I enunciate my words carefully. “There is no way in hell—”
“I’ll do anything you want.”
I blink at him in surprise. “What?”
“Anything that I can do right now in this room.”
I narrow my eyes. “Can you go to hell?”
“One day. Not right now.” His blithe response falls into the silence.
Fear creeps up my spine. I’ve kept him talking, but I’ll run out of sass soon. He can keep me here as long as he likes and one way or another, he’ll get what he wants. If I take him up on his offer, I can at least hope for some illusion of safety.
I point to the farthest corner of the room from the table. “Pull the chair to that corner of the room and sit in it. Don’t get up until I put the whip down.”
Wow, that sounded so wrong. I nearly expect him to reply with, “Yes, madam.”
He gives me a snide smile but does what I ask, sitting his butt into the chair, folding his arms, and propping his legs out front in a casual position.
I calculate the steps to the table, assessing all the angles he can attack me from. I’ll have a better chance if I grab the weapon fully prepared to fight with it. I approach from the end of the table so I don’t stand with my back to him, keeping him in my sights at all times.
Several steps toward it, I pause to check his movements.
He arches an eyebrow at me. So far, he’s stayed put, but I don’t trust him at all.
Close up, I get a better look at the whip, taking glances at it while I try to keep an eye on Raptor. The weapon looks ancient. Hundreds of years old at least. It could be as long as six feet from handle to tips, but the rope part of it is made from a substance I don’t recognize until I peer closer.
I quickly recoil.
It’s hair.
But whose?
I shake myself. Just because it’s hair doesn’t mean the person the hair belonged to died. People cut their hair all the time. It could even be horse hair for all I know. It certainly looks like the strands are thick and course enough.
Sharp, silver points jut out all along the body of the whip, not just the lashes at the end—of which I count three. The handle is long and slender and made of silver metal. It looks light, but I won’t know for sure until I pick it up.
Raptor leans forward as my hand hovers over the weapon, a gleam of anticipation entering his eyes. “It took me all week to procure this whip. The cost was astronomical. It had better be worth it.”
The threat in his voice is clear: I’d better not disappoint him.
“So that’s what you were doing all week,” I say. “Waiting for this?”
No wonder he went easy on everyone. I’ve got to give it
to him. He focuses his energy wisely. But if he was waiting for this moment, then that means he has something riding on it…
Something he wants.
The creeping fear in the back of my mind intensifies. I test the weapon by touching my finger to it, prepared to absorb whatever memories are attached to it.
An image fills my mind: a cabin in a forest with a shallow porch.
I take a quick breath before I sink into the memory…
I’m standing in the cabin door while the firelight from a warm fireplace spills around me. Lamps light the porch, their light glowing in an arc across the clearing around the cabin. I glide down the front steps as two stealthy figures emerge from the shadows of the surrounding trees—a man and a woman wearing black clothing that conforms to their muscles. The woman carries a katana and the man holds two gleaming daggers. Whomever’s eyes I’m seeing this through, these newcomers are not my friends.
They are both liars.
“Vulture Woman…” I whisper, addressing the woman holding the katana in a voice that is not my own. “Why have you darkened my door this night?”
With a gasp, I wrench my finger from the whip and step away from it, jolting back to the present at the same time. I take deep breaths as the image disappears. I can’t be sure if I spoke aloud or only in my mind, but the connection with the owner of this whip is so strong…
Raptor leans so far forward that he nearly falls out of his chair. “Take it, Peyton. Pick it up.”
I don’t trust his motives. Not at all. But I need to know what happened to the woman this weapon belonged to…
My hand slips around the whip, grasping its silver handle. I was right, it’s light but sturdy, the perfect weight.
The contact sucks me into the memory again.
The memory repeats and I hear myself ask, “Why have you darkened my door?”
The woman approaching the cabin holds her sword at an angle that tells me she knows how to use it, her footsteps light in the undergrowth. Her green eyes are rimmed in silver. She doesn’t have an aura but her power simmers beneath the surface, stronger than any I’ve ever felt before.
The man walking beside her is as large as Striker and just as chiseled. He carries his daggers with the confidence of someone who has killed many times before. His eyes are slightly wideset, a crisp and piercing blue, his expression unforgiving.
When the woman speaks again, pain strikes through my mind. I can’t tell if it’s her pain or mine. “You have something we want,” she says.
My mouth opens and I whisper a response to her, forcing sound despite my agony. “What could you possibly want from me? I have nothing to give but pain and torment.”
It only makes the silver-eyed woman smile. “Perhaps that’s what we want.”
Too many lies!
Agony explodes behind my eyes. I have to force the memory down, take control, or my mind is going to break. Terrified that my claws will show, I grip the handle hard, clench my teeth, and concentrate on my fingers, curling my fingernails inward. My claws draw blood, but it eases the pain in my mind and the image quickly recedes.
With a flicker of movement, Raptor is suddenly beside me, gripping my arm in his big hand so hard, he’ll leave bruises.
I raise my eyes to his with a barely human growl. “How did I know you wouldn’t keep your word?”
He snarls. “Did you see them?”
I narrow my eyes at his hand. He hasn’t made a grab for the whip yet, but it’s only a matter of seconds.
“See who?” I ask.
“Don’t play games with me, Peyton. Did you see the assassins?”
Assassins. Of course, it makes sense, the way the man and woman moved, the way they held their weapons, their focus pinpoint and remaining only on their target. But why does Raptor care? Why does he need to know?
Raptor shakes me. “Tell me what they look like! Did she have silver rings around her eyes?”
My jaw drops a little. I have no idea why the silver rings around the woman’s eyes are important, but the urgency in his voice tells me he really wants to know the answer. In fact, he needs to know.
Hell, I’m not going to give him anything.
Except a little smile.
I say, “Do what you will.”
His face darkens with anger a second before his fist arcs toward my face. I duck, the whip still gripped in my hand. His punch sails through empty air. I dance away from the table into clear space. He’ll only beat me if he gets in close and pins me like he did before.
He spins to follow my movements as I back away. Not wasting a moment, he comes after me with deadly intent.
I leap back to narrowly avoid a punch to my stomach as well as his follow up kick. As my arms fly wide, the whip unfurls, lashing through the air, the momentum of my movement flicking it back and then forward.
It wails as it moves, a soft scream in the air.
The deadly tips lick forward, spreading out as they fly. The lowest tip bites his cheek, slicing cleanly through his face from his cheekbone to his ear. He’s lucky all three didn’t strike him at once.
With a loud curse, he stumbles away from me, grabbing at the bleeding cut, bumping into the table’s edge.
I stare in amazement at the weapon.
Oh, this whip. It’s like an extension of my arm, effortless, streamlined, deadly.
I’ve never held a whip before, but it feels… perfect.
His eyes widen as I swing my arm, testing the weapon’s weight and speed. It curves above my head with a spine-chilling whoosh once, then twice before I extend my aim, crouching a little as I flick it forward. The three tips scream through the air, a fierce shriek as they speed toward his head and torso fast enough to rip the flesh from his bones.
He ducks and rolls at the last moment. The tips tear through the surface of the table and the air cracks so loudly it sounds like gunshots. Wood splinters fly through the air behind him as Raptor dodges the shards.
To my horror, a smile breaks out across his face as he keeps moving, arcing around the room. “Well, at least I got one thing I wanted.”
“What’s that, Professor?”
He grins, wide and gleaming, a devilish glint in his eyes. “Confirmation.”
Confirmation of what?
Sharp footsteps sound along the corridor. I grip the whip harder, my hand suddenly shaking. The self-satisfied way he stares at me is making me more afraid than if he’d threatened to beat me.
Headmistress Osprey rushes into the room, her fuchsia lacquered nails a garish contrast to the darkness of her curved wand. “Constrain!”
Her fashion sense might be off, but her magic is strong. Osprey’s spell thuds into my body all the way from my toes to my head, propelling me back through the air and thumping me hard up against the wall. I grip the whip in my outstretched hand, the only part of me that’s still free, before the weapon succumbs to the spell too. Osprey jumps out of the way just in time as its tips slice through the air with a whispered scream. The rope and tips thud into the wood, spraying paint chips as it plasters against the wall like some sort of deadly decoration immobilized beside me.
Ignoring me, Osprey strides to Raptor. “Well? Did Peyton see the Fury’s final memory?”
He runs his fingertips across his bleeding cheek, checking the blood on them. “I believe so, but she won’t tell me what she saw.”
Osprey practically stomps her foot. “Then make her! We need to know what we’re dealing with before we can fight back.”
Raptor laughs, flicking his hair out of his eyes. “Sure, but it won’t be pretty. How badly do you want to keep Peyton alive?”
She throws her face into his, her permed curls flicking out of place with the sharp movement. “I am the Headmistress of this institution. Do whatever you need to do.”
I’m struggling to make sense of their conversation. Raptor suspected that I have psychic abilities after I told him I knew that he killed innocent people. Now, he’s given me this whip, which apparently be
longed to a Fury. It sounds like he was hoping I’d see her final memory of assassins who, judging by the way Osprey speaks about the Fury in the past tense, must have killed the Fury.
I don’t know much about Furies, but I didn’t think they could be killed. That either makes those two assassins incredibly powerful, or Osprey is mistaken. The only other thing I know about Furies is that, like gorgons, there are always three of them.
If this whip belonged to a Fury, then that would explain why it looks ancient. Its owner must be hundreds of years old. Or was, depending on whether I believe Osprey.
But what I don’t understand is why Osprey and Raptor are so desperate to identify the female assassin. Why are they so afraid of her? Unless they think she’s coming after them for some reason.
Now that doesn’t surprise me. Now that I have this whip in my hands, I’d go after them too.
If I could.
If I wasn’t pinned to this wall.
Osprey spins to me, looking me up and down as I glare back at her. A faint crease appears in her forehead. She jumps when Raptor sidles up behind her, a full head taller than her. Funny how she always looks so tall around everyone else. Except Striker, that is.
“Magnificent, isn’t she?” Raptor whispers, his gaze raking up and down my body. “It makes me sad to cut her up.”
“Best to do it now,” Osprey says. “Her physical strength increases every day. Other than the visions, has she shown any other signs of power? Do you have any idea what she is?”
Raptor is standing just behind Osprey so she doesn’t see the sudden look of ridicule he gives her.
A cold chill runs down my spine.
The way he’s looking at me… his constant glances at the Fury’s whip…
It’s like he thinks it’s obvious what I am.
If I weren’t immobilized, I would shudder.
Does he believe that I’m a Fury?
I don’t know enough about them to understand whether it’s possible. I struggle against Osprey’s magic, suddenly desperate for answers.
Raptor’s expression becomes perfectly blank when Osprey turns to him with annoyance. “Well?”
He gives her a shrug. “My guess at this stage is some sort of mage with clairvoyant abilities. A powerful fortuneteller, perhaps.”
