Chapter 10

10

Idecided to use my limited free time wisely and search the sister school for more half-shifters. Okay, maybe it wasn’t so wise and I should have been using my time to practice for the Trials. Yet there I was before my regular meeting with Juno, walking the paths, trailing my hands along the stones and sending my magic senses out in a wide net.

I’d found, through trial and error, I had the ability to use my inherent power—cognitive manipulation—to scan people’s energies. To reach out with my magic and touch their minds, to see their energy and, yeah, manipulate them.

I tried not to think about the manipulate word. Even though it was my own innate power, it felt unethical somehow. Unethical to cause someone to experience something that wasn’t real, merely on my whim alone. But this felt different. If anything, in this case I was doing something good. I was trying to get a baseline energy signature for any other half-shifters in the area, ones even the Claw & Fang might not know about. They hadn’t known about that threatening boy when I told Selene and Buzz the story. At least, they acted like they didn’t know. Maybe they did and I was being kept in the dark for a reason.

I didn’t want to think about that either.

At any rate, as long as I didn’t impose my will, I saw no harm in what I considered reconnaissance. So I sent my power out to search the halls for anyone with the shifter energy signature. We were distinctly different from full-blood Fae or elf or troll. Different from chimeras or griffons or any other creatures we’d learned about in class. I always thought it was because shifters were tied to the moon. We carried a certain something in our blood and energy that other creatures did not. I latched on to those differences now—and found way more than I’d thought I would.

Holy shit. I stopped suddenly, shocked and wishing my senses were betraying me.

Standing outside of Juno’s office with my eyes closed, I found the furious boy who’d threatened me, as well as several more shifters scattered throughout the school, presences I hadn’t felt before. None of them were familiar to me, and definitely none I’d seen at a Claw & Fang meeting. There were at least five hiding in plain sight! Though I didn’t see their faces, I saw their natures, and knew they wouldn’t be able to hide from me anymore. Not just wolves, either. I also saw a were-dingo, a were-fox, a were-bird, and something reptilian I didn’t really understand.

I shook my head and swiftly drew my energy back to me, half afraid of what else I might discover if I kept at it.

My memory went back to my time at the Fae Academy for Halflings in the mortal realm. The shifter brothers who had been on the search for the Imperium had slaughtered their way to the artifact, and then I’d seen more of them during the graduation ceremony before crossing the portal into Faerie for the first time.

Which led me to question whether the students I sensed here were working with the ones I’d left behind at the mortal academy. Or were these new shifters, souls who’d found themselves in extraordinary circumstances and went out of their way to hide their shifter natures from the rest of the world?

Was Dorian Jade the puppeteer behind all of this?

I needed to find out, although I had a bad feeling that the more I dug up, the more questions I would find instead of the answers I wanted.

The only thing I knew for certain was this: Dorian Jade was a pure-blood Fae no matter what the rumors said. He considered the royal family and any governing bodies under King Tywin his enemies. It only made sense for him to ally himself with others who saw the royal family the same way.

What if these latest murders were done in his name? And if they were, then I needed to find out how to stop them, to keep the people I cared about safe.

I saw red for a minute thinking about Mike in danger.

“Tavi! I know you’re out there.” Juno’s voice came through the stone walls clearly, as though she stood next to me instead of a room away. “It doesn’t matter how you try to delay the inevitable. We have a lesson today and you can’t get out of it. Better to come on in and get this over with.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes. Of course she would know about my stalling. The woman seemed to have an extra set of eyes in the walls as well as the back of her head.

Time to get this miserable situation over with and maybe, just maybe I’d get into bed before twenty-four bells tonight. Trying to fall asleep at midnight only to wake up at six…an entirely new world for me and one I entirely hated.

I pushed into the office and saw Juno waiting for me, her butter-yellow hair glowing like a candle flame. How did she manage to look this chipper every day? I didn’t get it. Even on my best day I would never look as happy or enthusiastic as Professor Ians.

“There you are,” she teased with a wagging finger. “Thought you could wait outside the door and waste time?”

I shook my head and took off my school blazer, hooking it on the standing coat rack to my left. “No, definitely not. Just thinking deep thoughts.”

“I expect nothing less. Except those thoughts better be about the Trials and not about something trivial. Have you looked over the spell I left with you?”

I thought about my humiliating defeat yesterday and finally told her, “No. I didn’t have time. Between work and homework last night, I barely got to sleep.”

Her expression went sour and she paused halfway through pouring herself a cup of tea. “Better you make the time now than die. All right, then.” She finished pouring and then downed the steaming cup in one gulp. “We’ll go over a few of the basics before we get started. Consider them a warm-up.”

A warm-up. More like the first step down a road to a bleak ending. I didn’t have faith in my magic, not really, not when it came down to the wire. We went through a few introductory spells to get my magic bubbling and brewing before Juno went in for the kill.

Her test today? Not one of bravery, like my first day. No, this one would try my resilience. How long would it take me to call down the light from the sun and how long could I hold it between my hands, like I was some god who had control over the stars and the heavens.

How did they expect school-aged people to handle this level of magic? I didn’t know. And those kinds of questions wouldn’t help me succeed, either.

“Tavi, I’m serious now,” Juno called out, sounding far away. “You need to master this spell. You’re only able to call down the barest flicker of light.”

I cradled the swirling sphere of yellow–orange that looked like fire but no heat came from it. It had taken me close to twenty minutes to get the wording correct, not to mention pushing my power into an unfamiliar direction. When I finally managed to call down the light, it didn’t want to stay and extinguished almost immediately.

My latest attempt I’d been able to hold for about ten minutes but I felt my strength flagging. “I’m trying!” I insisted, shifting from foot to foot. “I’m not sure if it’s the words I can’t get or—”

“It’s your internal fortitude.” Juno speared me with a look. “You are doubting yourself and it’s not allowing your magic to manifest to its fullest potential. How are you going to be able to hold the heat of the sun for hours like this? You can’t!”

“I don’t understand why this is important, anyway,” I grumbled. Throwing more and more of myself into maintaining the magic connection to the land and coming up short every time. The ball of light in my palm began to flicker.

My energy dipped to a dangerously low level and I gritted my teeth, bearing down. Whoever came up with this stupid test, anyway? And what possible use could there be in calling down the sun? It wasn’t like I was actually strong enough—no one was!—to manifest a piece of the literal sun. It was just a fancy name for an extremely bright, hot, dense ball of light held on the physical plane.

Yet Juno seemed to think it was life and death.

“What is the point?” I asked, frustration spilling out.

Juno ignored the question. “I need you to put your everything into this because it’s really only an exaggerated spell for light. This is something you should have been able to master in the first fifteen minutes, tops. The other students at your level in the academy are doing the same thing. They have to.”

“Yes, but they’re full-bloods,” I argued.

Her brows came together in a hard line. “I refuse to let you use your halfling status as an excuse. I’ve felt the level of power inside of you. This is not the time for excuses nor is it the time to doubt yourself. You have as much power as any of the students you go to school with, no matter what you think to the contrary. Now focus.”

Sweat dripped down from my brow line. “I’m trying—”

“You’re not trying hard enough!” Juno walked in a circle around me, scrutinizing my every move. Adjusting my posture this way or prodding my muscles that way so I’d shift my stance. When she spoke again, her voice was strained. “It’s imperative we work our way through the list of past trials. You’ll never be able to get through this year unless you can show some sort of base foundation.”

“I was at the top of my class at the mortal halfling academy. I made it to Faerie.”

“Then prove yourself,” Juno snapped. “I’m done listening to the oh poor me refrain.”

Was that what she thought I did? Constantly felt sorry for myself? No matter what I said, she would see it as another pathetic attempt at an excuse. No matter what I did, I messed up, and the more time I spent failing these past Trials, the more urgent Juno became for me to succeed. To win.

“Frankly, I’m not sure what the king saw in you.”

Her words instantly had a swell of blind panic welling up inside of me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you would have a hard time making it through this school, let alone the Elite Academy,” she said plainly. She took a seat behind her desk and in an instant had another pot of scalding hot tea in front of her. She poured out two cups, waiting for me to come and claim mine, though I understood her unspoken demand. She wanted me to drink the tea while maintaining the ball of light.

I shifted my thoughts, trying to balance the two acts. Before I could wallow in another round of self-pity about being tired and tell her to just keep the tea, she shook her head.

“My goodness, Tavi. I see your thoughts clearly. You’re not sure you can multitask, and at this point I’d say you are right. I don’t understand how you’ve made it this far, I really don’t. Based on what I’m seeing from you now, you should not have survived the first round of culling, let alone made it to Faerie.”

I grimaced. “Stop it.”

She hesitated for only a moment. “No, I will not stop it. You need to hear this. Whatever barriers you have blocking your power, you need to find the source and surmount them, yesterday. Let me make it very clear for you. There is no way for you to get out of participating in these Trials, but when you compete, you will not finish. Do you understand what that means?”

She spoke to me like I was a child, and her gaze sent flashes of burning pain through me. I hated the mirror she held up. What I saw there was everything I wanted to run from. “We’re on day two and you cannot divide your attention between holding a spell and taking a drink. It’s unacceptable, quite frankly. I’m going to need you to—”

“Stop it,” I cried out. “Stop it right now!”

“It’s unacceptable,” she said again, harshly, “and I’m not going to stand for it. Do you want to know the real reason why I am helping you? Because everyone else said no. They didn’t think you were worth the trouble.”

Desperation and devastation swirled inside of me and the light I held fizzled to nothing. I needed her to stop talking. I needed her to stop throwing my failures in my face. Did she not see how often I thought the same thing? How many times a day I wondered why I was at the Elite Academy when I clearly couldn’t hack it?

I scrunched my eyes closed, fists at my sides. “I’m sorry that in your eyes I’m not worthy of being here. I’m doing the best I can but it never seems to be good enough. Every day I get up, and I work hard, and it still isn’t enough. I might die during the Trials. I get it. At least I’ll go out knowing I did everything I could to get through.”

Seconds of silence ticked by until I realized Juno wasn’t responding. When I opened my eyes, I saw her staring at me. Her face had gone pale, the blood rushing from her cheeks and her gaze focused on my arms.

“What is it?” I barked out.

It didn’t take long for me to understand, for when I looked down I saw how my hands had transformed into claws. I saw lethal talons instead of fingernails, and feathers growing longer by the second.

Oh no.

No!

Whatever internal desperation I’d been struggling with had manifested using my transfiguration power. That I wasn’t supposed to have.

And now Juno knew my secret.