Shadow Rising Page 4

  I smirked. Clearly Oil Slick wasn’t smart enough to know that Elkies were blessed with super-sensitive hearing and that I could easily hear her taunt with my said ‘gross pointy ears.’

  I shot her a death glare as I passed. She gulped.

  As I turned down the corridor, I made the decision to keep my hearing on high alert so I could pick up any low volume whispers. Yes, Elkies can control their hearing. And no, I’m not a sadistic glutton for bullying. I was genuinely curious as to how I’d be received. Clearly Elkie were rare in these parts.

  The reception desk came into view ahead of me, a white marble monstrosity covered in glass vases filled with pungent lilies. I took my last gulp of fresh air before striding over to it.

  Just as I reached the desk, Nikolas passed me, going the other way. He gave me one of his expressionless looks. In other words, he ignored me completely.

  The receptionist was a chubby Fae with messy blond hair and red lipstick. Her wings showed all the telltale signs of being badly surgically neatened. According to one of Gus’s beauty magazines, a lot of Fae chose to undertake the cosmetic procedure these days to stop their wings from getting raggedy as they aged. I personally thought there was nothing wrong with growing old gracefully, but I might change my mind about that once my pointy ears start heading south.

  “Yes?” the receptionist asked abruptly.

  “Theia Foxglove,” I told her, drumming my fingers on the countertop. “New student. First day.”

  The woman said nothing as she tapped my name into her computer. Then she turned and marched away, leaving a swirl of sparkles in her wake.

  I could only assume she’d gone to fetch me a welcome pack or something, so I rocked on my heels and glanced around the waiting area.

  There was a poster on the wall that looked very much like a map of the school campus. All the colors were in black and dark blue and there was a little cartoon owl in the left corner. At the top, it said the word Eclipse.

  The receptionist reappeared behind her desk and handed me a bulging envelope. “Map. Lanyard. Locker key. Schedule.”

  I tucked the envelope under my arm. “What’s that a map of?” My gaze roved back to the poster.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “This is a shared building. During the daylight it’s Zenith. At night, the golden sun statue in the belltower turns into a moon and the school becomes Eclipse.”

  Huh. Interesting.

  I realized then why Nikolas had been so frosty earlier. He must have attended Eclipse before he switched from moon to sun-class. It would have been his first time seeing the school in its daytime incarnation. It must have been weird for him.

  Still, that wasn’t an excuse to be a dick to me.

  “What else changes at night?” I asked the receptionist with curiosity.

  A frown appeared between her eyebrows. “I dunno, kid. Why are you asking me? I work the day shift.”

  Whoa. Talk about typical New Yorker.

  “Righto. You have yourself a good day, then.”

  I turned and walked away.

  As I headed down the gleaming white hallways, I rummaged inside the envelope for my schedule. Zenith didn’t teach two of the classes I’d been taking at Sunny High, so it was out with Runes and Potion Making and in with Business Studies and Computer Technology. Along with that I had history, languages and, of course, the compulsory Battle Class.

  As part of the 1885 peace treaty, both moon and sun-class had to demilitarize. To get around it, every school kid nationwide took something called Battle Class. It meant that, should a war between moons and suns ever break out again, there was an instant army ready to fight. You had to be over 18 to be called into the insta-army, but everyone knew it would never come to that. Battle Class was just a leftover relic from the days when war was a possibility.

  It was also my favorite subject. Go figure.

  I fished out the directions for my locker and headed off down the corridor in search of it. When I located it, I discovered that it didn’t have a trusty old padlock and key system but a state of the art digital thumbprint recognition device. There was that word again: opulent.

  I worked through the instructions to set it up and the electric-powered door swung opened. I was just about to dump my stuff inside when a hairy, hoof-like hand jutted out from behind the locker door and grasped hold of my bow.

  A visceral sensation went straight through me. Disgust. Revulsion. A general feeling of wrongness.

  My instinctive Elkie fight mode took over. I reacted without thinking.

  In less than a split second, I’d grabbed the bow and wrenched it sideways, dragging whomever was clasping it into the space directly in front of me. Then I jutted out with the heel of my palm and slammed it into the throat of my attacker.

  They let go of the bow and staggered backward into the opposite wall.

  My cheeks burned with anger. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s rude to touch an Elkie’s bow?” I cried.

  Only then did I get a chance to see the brazen perpetrator.

  It was a school security guard.

  Oh crap.

  As the feeling of immediate danger ebbed from my body, I became very aware of everyone around me. They were all craning their necks to get a good look at the violent Elkie who’d lashed out at a school security guard.

  His back was still pressed against the wall as he tried to recover his breath. Then his head snapped up.

  I recoiled. He had the goatlike face and long horns of a Baphomet. Baphomets were a type of Demonborn well known for having bad tempers and poor verbal reasoning skills. In other words, they were fighters, not talkers. This wasn’t going to go well.

  The guard glared at me, his nostrils flaring. I took up a defensive stance. If we were going to resolve this situation through hand-to-hand combat, then I’d better be ready.

  “Hand it over,” he demanded, taking a heavy step toward me.

  “No way. I’m Elkie. No one touches my bow.”

  “You don’t have a choice. No weapons in school.”

  What wasn’t this asshole understanding?

  “I said no,” I told him firmly.

  He reached me and glared down his goatlike nose. Then, suddenly, he slammed his cloven-fist into my locker door.

  I jumped in shock. The blow had been hard enough to leave a dent.

  “Don’t make me mad, girl,” he growled.

  I stared him in the eyes. I wasn’t about to be cowed.

  “Don’t call me girl,” I replied through my teeth. “Look. I’m locking it away.” I spoke as if I was talking to a child. “In here. This is my locker.”

  I should’ve left it there. But I couldn’t help myself. The sarcasm came bubbling up through me like a tsunami.

  “The one you’ve so nicely dented for me.”

  That was it. My sass was the last straw. The Baphomet guard snapped.

  He growled and, baring his teeth, made another grasp for my bow.

  Big mistake. My Elkie protective instinct was unleashed once more.

  I kicked out. My foot hit his soft belly.

  He staggered back with a grunt. He took a second to gather his wits, then charged me.

  But I had already anticipated his lumbering movements. My Elkie senses were way ahead of him. It wasn’t a fair fight. Not that I minded...

  I grabbed his arm and used the momentum of his movement to swing him in a wide circle. I slammed him head-first into the lockers. His horns pierced the metal and went all the way in.

  The guard tried to pull himself back out. But his long horns had gotten stuck. He couldn’t get free.

  As the audience of students started laughing at the sight of the guard head-deep in the lockers, I took my chance. I ran for it.

  Up ahead, I saw two uniformed guards coming down the staircase. They clocked the Baphomet flailing with his head in the locker, then saw me, floundering in the middle of the corridor. My guilty expression gave me away.

  “Hey! Stop!�
� one of them shouted.

  I doubled back on myself, heading in the direction of the exit. If I had to run out of this goddamn school to keep hold of my bow then I would.

  I raced around the corner, my sneakers squeaking on the marble, and shoved past a group of Mages.

  “Watch it,” someone snapped.

  Their parrot familiar began to squawk, “Watch it. Watch it.”

  From behind, I heard the hurrying footsteps of all the students who’d been watching the fight. They wanted to see the finale of this drama.

  The glass entryway doors appeared ahead of me. I ran as fast as my Elkie speed would allow, my mind focused on freedom.

  Suddenly, a huge, hulking body stepped into the space between me and the exit. It was so big it blocked out all the light.

  I skidded to a halt and looked up into the face of a Giantess.

  Oh crap.

  I’d never seen a Giantess in real life, and boy was this one big. I was awestruck by her presence.

  She was wearing the same uniform as the guards. Instead of grabbing me, she just folded her arms and gave me a stern look.

  Then the two security guards slammed into me from behind and tackled me to the ground.

  The breath was knocked right out of me as one of them yanked my arms behind me. The other wrestled my bow away and ripped my quiver from my shoulder. All the while, the Giantess stared down at me.

  Suddenly, the pressure came off my back. I could breathe again. The guards had gotten what they wanted. My bow had been confiscated.

  I rolled onto my back, winded and gasping for breath.

  The Giantess loomed over me. “No weapons in school.”

  “Got it,” I squeaked.

  I lay there, panting, feeling the absence of my bow as keenly as the pain of grief.

  Then I sat up and saw a million cell phones pointed at me.

  5

  By the time I walked into history class for first period, the footage of me being tackled by the security staff must’ve been shared with every single Zenith student. Among the whispers about my pointy ears, I also heard discussion of Giants, Baphomets and the color of my panties — pink, if you were curious — which I’d evidently flashed during the scuffle. Talk about first impressions.

  I took the only spare seat — the oh-so-conspicuous center desk of a five-by-five grid — and tried to put my bow out of my mind. My schedule had told me that History was taught by Sister Celeste, so I braced myself to see my first-ever nun.

  In hobbled a tiny, wizened woman in a gray robe. She had a wrinkled face like a raisin. I couldn’t see any distinguishing facial features — no horns, no fangs — which could only mean she was an Immortal.

  Immortals were rare. Theirs was an exclusive club. Only the best and brightest got to become Immortal. The rituals surrounding the process were shrouded in secrecy. All anyone knew was that to join the club, you had to forgo your powers entirely.

  Immortals often held positions of authority and seemed fixated on whatever aspect of the past had served them the best, always looking back to simpler times, bemoaning whatever technology the “youth” were using today, and complaining about what they perceived to be the “pornification of society.” Yawn. And yet for some reason, people seemed to revere them, like they were shamans full of wisdom. As far as I saw it, they were more like senile backseat drivers.

  I personally didn’t understand why anyone would want to become Immortal. The fucked-up psychology of knowing you’ll never die is surely worse than the fucked-up psychology of knowing that you will. Besides, losing my Elkie powers would be worse than death anyway.

  Just then, I noticed Sister Celeste was peering over her glasses at me.

  “Are you the new girl?” she asked in the accent of a moneyed aristocrat.

  I cleared my throat. “Yup.”

  “Oh, good. I’m delighted to have you in our class. I’m a huge supporter of William Geiser. Class, this is Theia Foxglove, William Geiser’s step-daughter.”

  Of course, everyone already knew who I was. I was the pink-pantied Elkie with a penchant for violence. What was news to them — I realized from the eruption of excited whispers — was the Geiser connection.

  A Fae girl sitting in the desk ahead of mine whipped her head over her shoulder and glared at me. She had dark brown skin and amazingly pouty lips. She’d styled her tight black curls into a pixie cut. Her stony glare pinned me to my seat.

  She must’ve assumed that because of my Geiser connection, I supported him. From her glower, I deduced that she did not.

  She “hmff’d” at me, then turned back to the front fluttering her shimmery wings in the Fae equivalent of a hair flip.

  “He’s my mom’s fiancé,” I clarified. “We’re not close or anything.”

  “Either way, we’re huge fans at Zenith,” Sister Celeste said. “It’s about time we policed that dreadful Twilight Curfew properly. Or got rid of all this sharing nonsense altogether. In my time, suns stayed above ground, and moons stayed below. It made much more sense.”

  I clenched my jaw. What an ignorant opinion. Immortals weren’t supposed to show any affiliation to moon-class or sun-class but by harking back to the olden days, they were naturally prejudiced against the moons. Saying things were better when the moons were forced underground was basically like saying half the population didn’t deserve fresh air.

  Sister Celeste began her class, explaining that over the semester we’d be covering the first world war and all the changes that had come about because of it, from the carving up of Germany to the rise of communism in the East.

  “Of course, it can all be traced back to the 1885 peace treaty,” Sister Celeste added. “Forcing collaboration between the moon-class and sun-class despite thousands of years of evidence showing such a thing couldn’t work was bound to cause conflict.” She let a scoff out from the back of her throat. “Not to mention all the sacrifices we made for the so called ‘rights’ of the moon class!”

  My eyes widened with disbelief. Sister Celeste’s words echoed something William had been whining about over breakfast. He’d been complaining about the ceremony he’d have to go through to be initiated as governor. Everyone in power had to take it, even the sun and moon presidents. It involved weakening their powers for the duration of their term, so that whenever they met with leaders of the other class, no one had the upper hand. It was another one of those peace treaty laws that mostly affected the Vanpari, suppressing their power of persuasion because of the obvious potential for abuse. As a Mage, the ritual would only slightly weaken William’s ability to cast spells, but he still dramatically referred to it as “magical castration.”

  I’d just thought he was being theatrical. But to hear a similar sentiment from my teacher really was baffling. What were they talking about? Everyone had made sacrifices during the peace treaty, not just the sun-class.

  I couldn’t let this slide.

  “The moon-class made sacrifices too,” I said, interrupting Sister Celeste’s tirade.

  Everyone turned to look at me. The Fae who’d glared at me before swiveled in her chair. This time, her face wore a completely different expression. Instead of a glower, she looked curious.

  “Is that so?” Sister Celeste said. “Do you have any examples?”

  “Vanpari,” I said. “They had to stop drinking human blood. I read that 90 percent of the Vanpari population are anemic now.”

  Sister Celeste scoffed. “Would you prefer a society where a Vanpari’s right to blood infringes upon your right to not be pounced upon, bitten and suckled via the neck?”

  My classmates began to titter.

  “The whole Vanpari population could easily be sustained through blood donation banks,” I contested. “I know I’d happily donate a little blood if meant others didn’t have to suffer.”

  “A noble yet ludicrous suggestion,” Sister Celeste replied in a condescending tone that made my every nerve tense. “Blood banks were rejected by the Vanpari themselves. The veg
an approach was entirely their choice. If they suffer from anemia as a result, they only have themselves to blame.”

  My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not only was Sister Celeste bewilderingly narrow-minded, but what she was saying was completely inaccurate. The Vanpari had been forced into giving up human blood because every other option they’d brought to the table had been rejected. Either they agreed to getting their sole nourishment from demon-beast blood or they lived underground like worms. It was hardly a fair choice.

  “You’re twisting the truth,” I contested.

  Sister Celeste glared at me. “Remind me, girl, where did you receive your education before your transfer to Zenith?”

  I folded my arms. I knew where this was going. She was getting personal. “Sunset High in Harriman.”

  “A public school, I presume?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then I rest my case.”

  Behind me, people started to laugh. Even a few Mage familiars started chirping. They were such teachers’ pets. At Sunny’s, no one would be seen dead agreeing with a teacher, yet the stuck-up kids of Zenith were practically falling over themselves to express solidarity with a shriveled-up old nun.

  I slumped back in my seat, frustrated. Just because my education hadn’t been paid for didn’t mean it was less valid. Sister Celeste’s opinions were so biased and inaccurate it made me furious she was even allowed to teach in a school.

  As irritation crackled in my veins, I noticed the Fae girl was looking at me again. But this time, when she caught my eye, she began to slowly smile. She must’ve realized from my outburst that there was no way in hell I was a Geiser supporter.

  Maybe there was one person at Zenith who wasn’t an asshole, after all.

  It was a relief when the bell rang and History ended. I’d had about as much of Sister Celeste’s bullshit as I could handle.

  I headed into the locker room to change for Battle Class, looking forward to my favorite subject. Until I saw Emerald.

  My chest sank. I’d really been hoping I wouldn’t have to share any classes with her. Sharing a home was proving hard enough and we’d barely done that for a day.