Chapter Forty-Three
Mimi Tanniym watched in stunned and rather traumatized fascination from where she knelt behind the school’s recycling bins just outside the cafeteria doors. She had a clear view of the happenings from her location, but she was pretty sure no one could see her, which was lucky since everyone they could see was being held in some sort of force field spell.
She wasn’t supposed to be there. But when the seer man had come to Eva’s home, Mimi had heard everything. She had good hearing. All dragons did. And she’d just desperately wanted to see Eva in action. She wasn’t kidding when she’d told Eva that she couldn’t tell what kind of dragon she was, but that was only the half of it. Eva seemed different in other ways too. She felt like walking power. What was she?
Mimi had hoped following her to the school would give her more of a clue. So she’d used the transportation spell Calidum had taught her and even traced Eva’s signature when she’d used it, though that wasn’t nearly as hard as she’d expected it to be. Eva gave off a powerful signature, and it was different from other dragons. It was different from other everything.
But now there was a part of her that wished she hadn’t made the decision to follow. She wondered if she would ever be able to un-see what she’d just seen. So many thoughts traveled like a hurricane through her head. Who was the girl with the gun? What had happened to make her do what she’d done? Who was the old man who had told Rodney Stokes to come find Eva in the first place? How had that old man known that Eva had healing powers? What kind of dragon had healing powers? She couldn’t think of any except the legendary Great White – and he’d been dead for thousands of years. If he was ever even alive to begin with.
These questions raced through Mimi’s mind as she watched the demon guy turn back into a human and the others talk. Eventually, the group of people down the hall broke up. They were going to “erase memories,” according to Roman D’Angelo, whom Mimi knew through Calidum. Now that Calidum was going to be the new Dragon King, he was privy to information about the group called the Thirteen Kings, and Roman was one of them. He was a vampire. And a warlock. Apparently, they went hand-in-hand sometimes.
The mages who’d cast the magic had to hold the stasis spell around everyone until memories were sufficiently erased and the mess was taken care of. Magic users dispersed, their tasks clear. The girl who’d done the shooting was gently escorted in one direction by a group of supernaturals and Evangeline, while a bunch of others went another way.
Mimi licked her lips and considered her options. The stasis spell would end soon and everyone would be conscious and moving again. She totally wasn’t supposed to be there in that school. Should she make herself known now and come clean with Eva? Or should she just leave and hope no one noticed?
“What do we have here?”
Mimi turned around and stood up.
C-rap, she thought wordlessly. The man in front of her looked exactly like the man who had turned into a big, bad demon-looking thing next to Evangeline. Nicholas, she reminded herself. Hot as hell, big and strong, pulsing with magic. Except this guy’s eyes were green. And he was dressed differently.
He smelled like major power – and major danger.
She took a step back. “Who are you?” she asked, getting ready to shift into her dragon form the way she’d been taught to do, all at once so there was no moment of weakness.
“My name is Nero,” he said politely, and with a beautiful smile that she didn’t believe at all. “And you must be Mimi,” he said, cocking his head to one side to consider her carefully.
She narrowed her gaze at him and took another step back, coming flush with the wall. And just like that, she realized who he really was. The human skin didn’t fool her at all. The feeling coming off him was like unpleasant static, and Eva had told Mimi enough about her boss that Mimi recognized the son-of-a-bitch now. “You’re the Entity.”
The man who called himself Nero blinked in surprise.
“I have a message for you,” she went on, putting on the bravest front she’d ever put on. “Eva quits. She doesn’t want to work for you any longer. Turns out you’re not the employer she thought you were.”
Nero went very still. “You’re very protective of your friends, aren’t you, Mimi?”
Mimi felt something cold uncurl in her guts. The energy pulsing around the man was making her feel strange. Her magic seemed a little further away than it had before. Just out of reach. But she wouldn’t let him see her sweat. So she lifted her chin and glared at him.
“It would seem everything I’ve heard about you is true, little dragon.”
Her thoughts hiccupped. The Entity had heard about her? Mimi felt stunned. Should she be impressed or scared?
Then Nero’s smile was back. And she realized she should be scared.
*****
Rachel Reyes was fifteen years old, and until a few minutes ago, she’d been ready to die. There was something about her that had always been different, painfully so. It wasn’t the obvious, physical difference that elicited sympathy or pity. It was invisible. And Rachel had spent the last five years of her life learning good and hard that it was this invisibility that made all the difference.
Her mother was a teacher in the district. For this reason, some felt she expected to be treated differently. It was this unspoken and unverified assumption that automatically made them treat her just the opposite. “You think you’re special ‘cuz your mom’s a teacher? You’re no better than anyone. You’re not even as good as anyone else.”
She was a quiet girl. She was a frightened girl. Crowds, especially filled with peers, always made her nervous. She faced that kind of crowd every day at school. She internalized her stress and fear, and as a result, she always had a headache. She always had a stomach ache. When she would touch her stomach, they would ask her if she was pregnant. They would sneer. They always sneered.
She had allergies that made her walk around with a tissue all the time. Rolled up toilet paper. Napkins from the cafeteria. She used whatever she could find and wondered at the people around her who never had to blow their noses. Ever.
Her mother wanted her to be social. “Try out for track. Why don’t you run for school council president? Why don’t you join a few clubs like other girls?”
But she was not a social creature. Colors became cacophonous to her. Letters and numbers had flavors and shades. Sound got inside her veins and began to boil like a pot on the stove. Once when she was very little, the auditorium crowd had begun cheering loudly at an assembly. She’d placed her hands over her ears and screamed. No reason. She didn’t even realize she was doing it. It was just that sound….
She had dreams at night so vivid, so lucid, Rachel woke up exhausted. She was always tired. Always. So tired that she’d dreamt while awake before, too. At first, she’d thought her imagination was just running away with her. But the experiences were again too vivid, and when she came out of them, she often had to remind herself of where she was.
Rachel was different.
She had been verbally abused for this difference for the better part of her adolescence. She’d been taunted, tortured, stalked. She’d been raped. Her bullies had told one of their cousins to do it. And when he was finished, he’d apparently joked with them that they should have paid him.
That was what they told her. Right before they’d asked her if it had taken the stuck-up bitch down a few pegs.
She’d covered up her bruises with long sleeves, and made sure she wore overnight pads to stop the bleeding. They bulged a little in her jeans, so she borrowed her mother’s jeans. Bagginess made all the difference. No one was the wiser, not even her mother, though that wasn’t saying much. Her mom was so busy teaching, she never noticed anything about Rachel.
No one knew what had happened but the boy who’d done it, and the girls who’d made sure it was done in the first place.
But they would. She’d written a note. She’d told the world what happened to her. Not just the rape – all of it. The putrid shit they’d left on her locker handle more than once, the theft of her books and notebooks, the verbal taunts and threats, the dirty looks, the stalking. She’d written it down, poured out her heart, and then gone to her father’s closet to get the gun. She’d had a lot of practice with that particular gun. She’d been taught to shoot from a very young age, and her aim was dead on.
She wasn’t going to miss. This one last thing, she was going to do right. No one would be able to tease her for this. Not this. Finally.
And then she’d been in the school, and she’d come out of the bathroom, knowing exactly who would be in that part of the hall at that time. But she’d been wrong. There was someone else there this time too. She came out of the symphony of colors a second too late, moving like lightning into the line of fire.
The bullet hadn’t jerked her body the way it did in movies. Bullets were too clean, too powerful. They simply went straight through skin and muscle, and sometimes bone. And the person fell.
Rachel watched the stranger fall, and everything came crashing in around her.
Everything changed in that moment. But not the way she’d thought it would.
Now – as Minnaea and Adelaide walked her down the hall toward the school exit with a group of others – Rachel’s head spun. This day had been fateful after all. And though she was confused and scared and shaken up right now, the women walking on either side of her felt safe. They had talked with her. They’d let her talk. They’d understood.
She felt protected with them there. They weren’t cops. They weren’t principals or teachers. They weren’t psychiatrists or loony-bin wardens. They weren’t going to lock her up or make her take horrible medicines that made her worse. They told her she had a gift. They told her she was a seer.
And they were going to help her develop that gift.
And no one was ever going to hurt her again.