Only, when I saw his face, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me because he liked me or because he hated me.
And that feeling made my stomach twist up in knots.
“Hey,” Ariel said, tapping my shoulder. “Line’s moving, darling.”
She followed my gaze to see where I was looking, and then she nodded and lowered her voice.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But trust me, he’s bad news, Jessica.”
Somehow, I thought she was right.
Chapter 6
When I got back to my room after dinner, Wolf was still working hard on her homework. The door to her and Stacy’s bedroom was shut, but my bedroom door was open, and Belle wasn’t there.
“Have you seen Belle?” I asked.
“Beauty? Oh, I think she’s still on her date,” Wolf shrugged. “You know how these things go. She probably won’t be back until later.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, but I really didn’t know. The truth was that I was kind of a late bloomer when it came to stuff like dating and relationships. I mean, I didn’t think that made me weird, per say, but it definitely made me a little unusual, especially compared to everyone else at Enchanted Academy. It seemed like a lot of students had partners or lovers and there I was, just trying to figure out where my next class was.
It was a little ridiculous.
Wolf seemed like she had a ton of studying to do, so I went into my bedroom, closed the door, and changed into my pajamas. I sat at the little table in my room for awhile and finished all of the reading I had to do for my classes. Then I went out and brushed my teeth. I looked at myself in the mirror for a few seconds. I wasn’t trying to be vain. Nope. I was just thinking about how even though the day had been really rough, it was still better than where I’d come from.
I went back into my room, climbed into my hammock, and went to sleep.
I woke up to screaming.
“The building is on fire!”
The yelling was enough to wake the dead, and I basically fell out of my hammock in surprise. I landed on my bottom, managed to get up despite the pain, and shoved my feet into my slippers. Then I went out into the living room. Both Wolf and Stacy were there, but Belle wasn’t.
“Where’s Belle?” I asked.
“She didn’t come back,” Wolf said.
I grabbed a pocket watch off the table and saw that it was nearly three in the morning. She wasn’t back yet. Why not? Beauty didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would stay out all night without letting anyone know. Then again, I didn’t really know her all that well. I guessed anything was possible.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“There’s a fire on the third floor,” Wolf said.
“We’re going to have to take a fire exit,” I said. The normal stairs went right through the third floor. There wasn’t exactly a way to avoid any problems. I thought about all of the fire drills I’d had in my life and I thought about the entire “stop, drop, and roll” thing people had impressed upon me. Well, I didn’t think those skills were going to come in handy at Enchanted Academy, but maybe I was wrong.
“There’s no fire exit,” Stacy looked at me like I was crazy.
“What are you talking about? Of course, there’s a fire exit.”
“It’s a magical school, Jess. There’s no fire exit. There’s just ropes.”
“Ropes?”
“Ropes,” Stacy said.
I looked toward the door that led to the hallway. I could hear yelling and running around outside. I wanted to open the door, but I also didn’t want to risk filling our room with smoke. I could hear the alarms in the building going off – they sounded like birds chirping – and when I looked at the bottom of our bedroom door, I saw that smoke was slowly starting to seep inside.
Yeah, it was time to get the hell out of here.
No matter how.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do?”
Wolf and Stacy exchanged looks.
“You tell her,” Stacy said.
“I’m scared of heights,” Wolf said. “I’m going to be sick.”
She actually did look sick, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she was scared or if it was because she was overtired from studying so much. I had the feeling, based on the dark circles under her eyes, that she simply hadn’t gone to bed at all last night, and I wished there was something I could do about that. It wasn’t fair that she had a teacher who was giving her a hard time. Wolf was a cool girl. She deserved to have some fun. She didn’t need to be treated like she didn’t matter.
“Let’s do it, ladies,” I said. I looked anxiously toward the door. I wasn’t sure how fires worked in the world of magical people, but in my world, they weren’t something to mess with.
We walked over to the window wall. The windows took up the entire wall. They were floor-to-ceiling and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t a way to open them.
Stacy proved me wrong. She went over to a little lock panel like the one on our suite door, and she waved her necklace charm on it. Instantly, the window started to lower. It simply went down. It moved until it was about waist-high, and then it stopped.
“Um, what now?”
“Ropes,” Stacy repeated.
“Ropes!” Wolf cried.
“Chill out.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“You have to calm down,” Stacy said. “You’re being dramatic.”
“The building is on fire! I think I have a good excuse. Don’t you?”
“Not really,” Stacy sighed. She tapped her finger against the locking pad three times. “Bippity bop,” she said, and then there were ropes. So many ropes. They shot out from the ceiling of our living room. At least ten ropes appeared in different colors and sizes, and after a second, I could see that they weren’t just regular ropes.
These were...
“Magic rope chairs?”
“Just pretend you’re going to an amusement park,” Stacy said. “And there’s a swing ride you really, really want to go on. Then climb in.”
Wolf started to shake as she managed to climb into one of the swings. As soon as she was in place, it moved out of the window and lowered her automatically down. Stacy waited, though, to make sure I could get into my swing. It was weird and awkward, but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as I thought it was going to be. After a minute, I managed to get in.
“Hang on, okay?” Stacy said.
The swing started to move.
“I said, hang on!”
Instantly, I grabbed the ropes as the swing moved out of the building. All around me, other students were following suit. They were being lowered by these weird, magical chairs out of the building and dropped to safety on the ground outside. As the ropes lowered me, I could see that the building was, most definitely, on fire. I was only a few feet out from the walls and as I got lower outside of the building, I could feel the heat radiating from the fires on the lower floors. I reached the ground, climbed out of the rope chair, and then the ropes automatically returned up to the bedrooms.
“Are you okay?” A teacher asked, walking by. She was my Potions 1 instructor.
“I’m okay, Miss Fate,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“And you?” Miss Fate looked at Wolf, who was curled up with her knees pulled to her chest, she was rocking back and forth, and I had no idea what to do. She was panicking. She was freaking out, actually, and I had no idea how to help her calm down.
“I...I...ropes.”
What the hell was with Wolf and ropes?
Apparently, something had happened to her involving ropes at some point. I didn’t know what it was, and I turned back to Miss Fate and just shrugged.
Miss Fate, fortunately, seemed to know exactly what to do. My teacher, dressed to the nines despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, dropped to her knees, pulled Wolf into her arms, and just hugged her.
“Hey,” she murmure
d. “It’s going to be okay.”
Instantly, I could see Wolf relax, and I appreciated what the teacher was doing. This was a weird and scary thing to happen. I didn’t think any of us had really been expecting something like that. I mean, we were students at a magical academy. We didn’t think we’d be dealing with stupid things like fires.
“Do they know what happened?” Stacy asked as she arrived. She climbed out of her ropes and they went back up into the building. I was really curious as to how they managed to enchant the ropes like that. It seemed really convenient. Was that something they could pass on to the non-magical world, I wondered? An invention like that could change lives. I mean, it would be something that regular people could use in their daily lives.
It would never happen, though.
Non-magical people knew that magic existed, and they didn’t care. In fact, a lot of people wanted magic outlawed and banned entirely. I didn’t think that could really happen, but you never knew, and I wasn’t about to suggest something like this the next time I was in normal human land.
Nope.
Nu-uh.
No thanks.
Magic users had enough of a hard time without trying to share their inventions with the world. It was no wonder to me that magical kids liked to go off to magical boarding schools where they could be alone and not be bothered.
Well, except for a time like this.
“What happened?” Miss Fate said. She looked up at the building. Already, there were witches and warlocks gathered who were attempting to put out the fire. She shook her head. “Nobody knows yet. It’s much too early to say. The headmistress will be here presently, if she isn’t already. I assume she’ll make a statement. In the meantime,” she pointed to a group of students gathered a bit of a distance from the dorms. “Head over there,” she said. “And wait.”
We shrugged. There wasn’t really anywhere else we could go or anything we could do. We went and sat with the other students. Both girls and boys had gathered around to watch the building burning, and so far, nothing seemed to stop it. The teachers were trying to cast enchantments on the fire, as though that was going to make it disappear, but then the headmistress came, and everyone who had been talking fell silent.
She strode in, and it was obvious who she was. I hadn’t met her yet, but I’d heard about her.
Helena Hex.
She was the most powerful witch the world had ever heard of, but more than that, she was a shifter, too. She wasn’t human at all. Not like most of us. Nope. Helena could change her entire body. She could morph into another creature. She could literally become something else.
A dragon.
Helena Hex was a dragon shifter.
“Fate!” She yelled, and tossed Miss Fate her robe. Once Miss Fate had the robe in her hand, Helena started to change. Her body morphed, getting bigger and bigger. Scales appeared where her skin was, and her hair all disappeared, and she kept getting bigger and longer. I was scared, suddenly, because I’d never seen anything like it before.
“It’s fine,” Stacy said, and I wondered if she was tired of helping me and Wolf calm down all day.
“It’s actually okay,” Wolf said, and somehow, her words were more powerful than Stacy’s at that moment.
“What’s happening?” I asked, even though I knew.
Helena’s clothing tore and ripped and kind of just went everywhere as she shifted into a giant dragon. She had to be more than twenty feet long, and her scales were a pale, light blue. She was big, and she flapped her wings as she assessed the building.
“She’s in her dragon form,” Stacy said, like it was obvious.
“But what’s she going to do? Breathe fire on a fire?”
“Shut up and watch,” Stacy said, and I clamped my mouth shut so I could see what was going on. All of the students were suddenly totally silent. We were all watching to see what the teacher would do. The building was burning. There was no question about that. Flames were licking at the old, historic bricks that made up the exterior walls of the building. Even if they managed to save it, I had the feeling that it would take a lot of rebuilding to get Enchanted’s female dormitory back into play.
Helena flapped her wings and jumped into the air.
She hovered close to the third floor, which was where the fire seemed to primarily be, and then she opened her big dragon mouth. It didn’t make any sense at all to me. All of the witches were standing back, as though this was just part of the job. They didn’t seem to think there was anything weird with the fact that they had a dragon for a headmistress who was about to fire blaze an even bigger fire.
But then Helena blew.
And it wasn’t fire that came from her mouth.
It was ice.
And suddenly, it all made sense.
“She’s an ice dragon,” I said.
“Yeah,” Stacy nodded. “Last of her kind, too.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“That’s because there’s only one,” Wolf said. “And she’s very old, and very strong, and she doesn’t shift often. Only when she has to.”
It was the most beautiful and incredible thing I’d ever seen. The ice flew from her mouth in a beautiful pattern of blues and whites and even golds. The ice covered the fire, essentially killing it. Soon only shards of glass remained in the building, and the heat vanished entirely. The smoke dissipated and the building stopped burning.
She had done it.
She had saved everything.
Helena encircled the building to make sure everything was okay. She looked around and every so often, she’d blow a little more ice around. Once she was satisfied that she’d finished putting the fire out, she went around the opposite end of the building and shifted back to her human form. Miss Fate provided the robe to the headmistress, and once she was dressed again, she came back to the students.
By now, the entire school, and all of the dormitories, and all of the creatures who lived on campus, had gathered around.
“Students,” she said. “That’ll be it for tonight. Boys, please return to your dorms. Girls,” she looked back behind herself at the female dorms. I could see in her eyes that she had questions, too. She wanted to know what had happened just as much as we did.
Was she going to let us back in the building, though?
What was going to happen next?
“We’ll assess the damage to the property in the morning. For tonight, head into the main building,” she said. “We’re going to rustle up some blankets.”
Everyone groaned. Sleeping in the main building didn’t sound like fun, but who knew? Maybe it would be like a big, giant slumber party.
Chapter 7
Sleeping in a room with the other students was not like a giant slumber party.
In fact, it didn’t even come close.
The teachers set us up in a gymnasium and an auditorium. They provided hammocks, which somehow had ropes long enough to stretch from the ceilings. Seriously, what was with this place and ropes? It was a little weird, to be honest, and it was more than a little strange. Once everyone was settled, more or less, the teachers left and then we were just...in hammocks in the castle.
“Where’s Belle?” Stacy asked, looking around. “Seriously, I don’t see her at all.”
“Yeah, I figured she’d be back by now,” Wolf said. “Especially after the fire.”
“They didn’t do any sort of head count,” I pointed out. “I don’t even think the teachers noticed she was missing.”
“Things were a little hectic tonight,” Wolf said. “They probably won’t do a head count until tomorrow.”
“It might be too late by then,” I said, suddenly wound up and nervous for my roommate. I’d known her all of a day, but it didn’t seem like her. It wasn’t like her to just up and disappear. Not when everyone cared about her and was worried about her.
“Too late for what?” Wolf shook her head. “I’m sure she’s fine, and honestly, she
’s probably around here somewhere. She told me she was going to stay on the grounds.”
“Who was she going out with, anyway?” I asked. If the guy was around, maybe he could give us a heads-up as to where she had gone. They probably didn’t try to sneak off of campus, so why wouldn’t they have come back?
Stacy and Wolf exchanged knowing looks that made me think maybe they knew something that I didn’t.
“What?”
“Look,” Wolf finally said. It was after some deliberation. “Beauty didn’t go on a date tonight.”
“She didn’t?”
“No,” Stacy said. “She’s working on a project.”
“What kind of project?”
“The kind where she goes out at night to practice her magic when no one is around.”
“She’s a witchmaster student,” Wolf said.
“A what?”
“It’s kind of like,” Wolf paused. “I’m trying to think of the non-magical equivalent,” she said to Stacy. “Help me out here.”
“Like an honors student,” Stacy said.
“Exactly.”
“So, she’s smart.”
“Really smart,” Wolf said. “Smarter than basically anyone else at school.”
“So that’s why you aren’t worried,” I said. “You think she’s just out studying somewhere.”
“Belle has a habit of falling asleep in the library,” Wolf said. “It wouldn’t have been the first time she went out and lost track of time, or fell asleep because she worked too hard.”
“Then why the secrecy?” I asked. “Why not just say she went out to study?”
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but then again, so many things didn’t.
Like why had a fire started?
Why on that particular floor?
Why was there a weird, locked door on our floor?
Why were there levels of the dormitory that were completely forbidden?
And why, oh why, was Snow White looking at me?
I looked over and saw her watching us. She looked at us angrily and narrowed her gaze. What was with her? I hadn’t really spoken to her very much at all, so it didn’t make sense that she would dislike me, or any of us, really.
The Beauty Page 5
