Shadow Rising

To no one’s surprise, I found myself sitting alone at lunch. I’d gotten myself a reputation as a dangerous troublemaker and now everyone was leaving me well alone. Not that I minded. They all seemed like assholes anyway.

I bit into a fry, using my spare hand to scroll through my contacts for Gus’s number. We’d already planned to talk that evening after school, but I was desperate for some support. I’d been obsessing about Nik ever since I’d gone all crazy Mage on his ass.

“Babe!” Gus cried brightly. His familiar voice was as soothing as Grandma Amaryllis’s healing balm. “How’s D-Day at Condom High?”

“It sucks,” I said, jamming a fry into the inadequately small paper tub of ketchup. “The teachers suck. The students suck. The security guards suck.”

“Security guards?”

“Uh, it’s a long story. The short version is they took my bow. I’ll save the gory details for later.”

“Ah. Later. About that…” Gus said.

My chest sank. “Are you canceling on me?”

“Yes. But it’s not my fault! My parents are sending me to camp.”

“Camp?” I echoed, confused. “What kind of camp?”

“Fat camp, I presume. They must be worried about the power of my love handles. I’m leaving tonight. There’s no phone reception there.”

“Gus! This is terrible! How am I meant to cope without you?”

“Never mind you, spare a thought for me,” he replied. “I’m the one who’ll be eating celery for the next month.”

“A month?!” I cried.

This was getting worse and worse.

“Look, T-T, I’ve got to go,” Gus said. “Daisy just knocked Ivy’s lunch tray into her face and now they’re going to fight. Goodbye, I love you, good luck with the assholes.”

“No Gus, wait!”

The call cut out.

My shoulders slumped. I chucked my cell phone onto the table. Gus was my lifeline. My confidant. Who else would listen to me complain?

What I wouldn’t give to be back at Sunny’s right now, watching a brawl between Daisy and Ivy, my Mage magic lying dormant like it used to…

Just then, a figure moved into my line of sight. I looked up. The Fae girl from history and Battle class was peering down at me with dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“I’m Retta,” she announced, dropping into the seat opposite. “My mom’s Henrietta Sugar Plum. The one going against Geiser in the elections.”

My mouth dropped open. So, that explained why she’d glared at me when Sister Celeste outed me as a soon-to-be Geiser. We were technically rivals.

So then why was she sitting with me?

“I figured I should get that out the way straight away,” Retta continued in a rapid voice while smoothing a hand over her short black ’fro.

She retrieved a salad box from her bag, then a squeezy jar of honey. I watched with curiosity as she squeezed honey all over her salad, and forked a piece of honey-drenched lettuce into her mouth.

“Sorry, why are you sitting with me?” I asked.

Retta fluttered her wings. “I liked what you said in history class. And how you flipped Trevor the bird. And how you whooped Nik Storm’s ass. You seem cool.”

“Thanks… I guess.”

It was the kindest anyone had been to me since I’d got here. I decided to make an effort.

“Your mom is Henrietta Sugar Plum?” I asked. “Is that Sugar Plum as in Sugar Plum Fairy?”

Retta winced and held her palm up to my face. “Do not use that word in my presence. It is so rude.”

“What word?” I lowered my voice. “Fairy?”

She frowned. “Yes. That word. It stopped being socially acceptable to use that word like a hundred years ago.”

“Oh. Then how come—”

“You hear Fae people use it all the time? It’s called reappropriation, dummy. As in, I can say it but you can’t.” She forked another piece of honey-drenched lettuce into her mouth and glowered at me while she munched.

I held my hands in truce position. “Got it. No more F-word.”

“Good.” She flapped her wings, which was the Fae equivalent of a nod. Clearly, she wasn’t one to hold a grudge. “So, how are you finding Zenith?”

I wasn’t really sure how to answer her question. Or at least, I wasn’t sure how to answer it diplomatically without descending into cussing.

“It’s different,” I offered.

Retta tipped back her head and barked out a laugh. “That’s politician speak. Give it to me straight, Foxglove. What do you really think?”

“Everyone here seems like a brat.”

She laughed again. It was a musical laugh, like the glissando of bar chimes.

She turned in her seat, her wings protruding through the slits in her uniform, and pointed to a table of boys throwing fries at one another. There were a few Daimons, Mages, a couple of Fae, and Trevor, the Celestial jerk from gym class.

“We have the jocks,” Retta said. “You already know to avoid them.”

She pointed at a table where Emerald’s colorful quetzal was chirruping away to a golden pheasant, while Emerald, Oil Slick and another blond Mage girl chatted animatedly.

“Emerald. Amber. Kyra. The Three Bs. Avoid.”

Next she pointed to a group of serious-looking Celestials.

“The Angel Army. All they do is evangelize. Avoid at all costs.”

Then she craned her head to see who else was around. Her gaze settled on a group of Mages whose familiars were all crows, ravens, rooks, and jays.

“The horny nerds. Avoid like the plague.”

I laughed. “Is anyone safe?”

She pointed at a table filled with sleepy-looking Daimons.

“The stoners are alright.” Then she grinned. “And me, of course.”

For the first time that day, I felt like I might actually stand a chance of making a friend.

Retta leaned her head on her fist and looked at me intently with dark, mischievous eyes. “You know, you’re literally the first Elkie I’ve ever met. Isn’t that terrible? You need to tell me everything about yourself right now this second.”

“Everything?” I repeated. “Where should I start?”

“Start with your bow.”

I thought mournfully of my bow, locked away somewhere out of sight.

“You saw the video, I take it?” I said with a self-conscious groan.

“Of course I did. Everyone saw the video. Nice panties, by the way. So what’s the deal? If someone touches your bow, you go berserk?”

“Yeah. Basically. Our bows are family heirlooms. We pass them down, forging the old wood with new wood from the forest. Mine is forged with my dad’s…”

My voice trailed off.

Retta gave me a look of sympathy. I didn’t have to tell her my dad was dead, she clearly got it. In that one silent gesture, I felt more understood by her than I did my own mother. And since she was giving me space to keep talking, I did.

“Most Elkie keep their bow with them at all times. Apart from my friend Gus who’s just so not into any of that stuff.” I smiled, thinking of my flat-footed friend. “And the reason I went berserk is because if someone touches your bow without asking, it feels kinda icky.”

“Like a tit-grab?” Retta asked.

I paused with consideration. “That’s actually a pretty good analogy.”

Retta nodded, thoughtfully, like she was taking time absorbing everything I’d told her.

“So your bow isn’t a religious thing?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Not really. Spiritual. Cultural? I don’t really know how to explain it.”

She gave her wings a sudden inspired flap.

“Speciesism!” she declared.

I tipped my head to the side. “Huh?”

“The school. Confiscating your bow. It’s a form of speciesism,” she explained, “i.e. discrimination. I.E… we should totally start a campaign.”

I shook my head. “Whoa, no. Thanks for the offer, but I want to fly under the radar for the rest of the day. I don’t want to accidentally electrocute anyone else with my weird-ass orb balls.”

My stomach clenched at the memory of the light ball blasting Nikolas across the gym, and the horrible crunch noise he’d made when he’d landed.

Retta dark-brown eyes widened. “That was an accident?”

“Yes!” I replied. “I’m half Mage, but completely untrained.” I pointed at my shoulder to indicate the complete lack of a bird perched there. “See. No familiar. Now I’m out of the forest, Mom and Geiser want me to develop my inner Mage. They got me a spell book and had me try out a fire incantation. I almost singed off everyone’s eyebrows.”

“With your first spell?”

I nodded. “I don’t know how. Heck, I don’t even know what source my magic is drawn from.”

Retta started to laugh. “Ah well, at least it was only Nik Storm. He deserves it.”

My eyebrow twitched with curiosity. “He does?”

“’Course he does,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “He’s the moon mayor’s son! Storms and Sugar Plums do not get along.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Anyway, he’ll be fine. There’s an Adarna Daimon on permanent staff here.”

“A what?”

“Adarna. You know, a healer. Hey, look.” She nodded her head over my shoulder. “Speak of the devil…”

I turned. Nikolas was entering the dining hall, completely intact, with not a single bruise marring his handsome face. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I really thought I’d done some serious damage.

Just then, a commotion broke out from the other side of the hall. I tore my gaze from Nik and looked over to see a Fae boy take flight. He fluttered across the hall toward the large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.

“The jury reached a verdict in the Vanpari Trials!” he announced as he tuned the TV to the twenty-four-hour news channel.

I caught Retta’s eye. She looked concerned and I knew exactly why. The case was controversial, to say the least. And with things already fraught between the suns and the moons, the outcome of this trial could be a tipping point.

Usually, in serious crime cases where the victims and perpetrators are of different classes, the case is taken on by the defendant’s corresponding court. But in this case, where five Vanpari were being tried for the murder of a Celestial, it was being held in sun court.

On the screen, the twelve jurors filed into their courtroom seats. I quickly counted ten pairs of feathered wings. Ten Celestials. Out of twelve. And the other two? Sun-Mages; both had a bright yellow canary perched on their shoulder.

So not a single juror was from the moon-class at all. That was not a good start.

The extremely wizened judge squinted over at the jury. It was Immortal Sebastian, a pretty famous judge who’d served in sun-court for the last couple of centuries.

He addressed the foreman, a middle-aged, bespectacled Celestial man with crimson-red wings. “To the charges of murder in the first degree, how do you find the defendants?”

“Guilty,” the foreman replied.

Straight away, the students in the dining hall began to clap.

On screen, the four Vanpari boys began weeping, and the ticker tape running across the bottom of the TV screen changed, to read: Breaking News: Jury Finds Vanpari Five Guilty of the Gruesome Slaying of Celestial Woman.

Immortal Sebastian began to speak, and the applause in the dining hall petered out.

“A guilty verdict has been agreed upon for the murder of Carmella Reed,” he said in a slow voice, as raspy as sandpaper. “I find from the gruesome evidence of this trial, that the only appropriate punishment is for you to be transferred to the New York Department of Corrections whereby the sentence of death shall be carried out.”

The dining hall erupted into cheers.

On screen, the Vanpari boys looked like they were about to pass out, or barf, or both. The raw emotion on their faces sent a visceral empathetic pain directly into my chest.

I hunkered down in my seat, stunned. Death? A sun court had ordered the death penalty on five moon-class boys? It was unheard of. Unprecedented. There’d be fallout from this for sure. Something way bigger than the small clusters of protestors I’d seen outside the subway stations on my initial drive into the city.

I caught Retta’s eye. She looked just as disturbed by the outcome—and our braying classmates—as I felt.

Then, among the crowds, I caught a glimpse of Nikolas Storm. He wasn’t cheering. In fact, his jaw was rigid and his hands were clenched into fists. He was opposed to the punishment, like Retta and me. We appeared to be the only three in the whole school who were.

The lawyer for the Vanpari appeared on screen, standing on the steps of the courtroom. She was a Tengu—a type of Daimon with a long, beak-like nose—and the jostling reporters’ microphones kept bumping into it as she spoke.

“We will of course submit an appeal,” she announced, as camera bulbs flashed in her face like strobe lights. “There is not a scrap of evidence to convict my clients. A death sentence would be the biggest miscarriage of justice this country has ever seen.”

“Get off the screen, Vanpari-lover!” someone in the hall shouted.

The students descended into hollering.

I couldn’t quite believe what I was witnessing. They were like a pack of vigilantes out for blood. The only things missing were the flaming torches and pitchforks.

I couldn’t hear the TV anymore through all the noise, but I could still see the images. The four defendants were being led out of the defendant’s box in shackles. They looked so young, so terrified.

Then the picture on the screen changed to show the face of the fifth teenage Vanpari, the escapee on the run.

A bolt of shock struck me.

It was him.

There was no doubt in my mind. The boy I’d seen in Bear Mountain was the fugitive Vanpari. My pulse quickened.

Just then, I saw Nikolas turn and shove his way through the crowd toward the exit. He looked furious. Upset. Even his black owl familiar looked miserable, with its head nestled beneath its wing.

He reached up to comfort it, petting its feathered head. As he did, the sleeve of his black top slipped down, revealing a tattoo on his forearm. But it wasn’t gold like the sun-class mark I’d spotted yesterday on his clavicle. This one was black, and it consisted of a series of intricate twists and twirls, arranged in a manner to form a circle. A moon.

I gasped. Nikolas Storm had a sun mark and a moon mark. I hadn’t even known that was allowed. By the way he hastily tugged his sleeve over his hand and glanced shiftily over his shoulder, maybe it wasn’t.

I was more curious about Nikolas Storm than ever.