Am I in or out? For being used? Is Erick seriously even asking me that right now?

Judging by his intense stare, he is indeed serious.

“Out.”

As I walk away, I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, but I don’t look back. I can’t believe they would try to use me like that, as bait or a pawn in whatever drama they have going on. We’re literally in a school that teaches magic. And they are acting like this?

As the space between myself and the people I had hoped to call friends increases, I have to admit I’m not entirely surprised by this turn of events. If I learned anything moving from place to place growing up, it was that every school had a popular clique. Kids were either in or they were out. Or they were out and trying to get in, but none of the stupid things they did would ever be enough for the users anyway.

I might not have ever been in a clique myself, but I’d observed enough of them to know how they worked. The feuds always started from something small, like stepping on someone’s foot in the hallway or making eye contact with someone’s girlfriend in the gym. Before long, the whole school would take sides, and there would be a “with us or against us” attitude. For them, the school was their whole life, and every perceived slight was earth shattering. For me, I had real problems to think about, like where I would be sleeping the next day. So I had little time or patience for imagined drama.

One day, they would realize how petty it all was. And while I do appreciate being able to see the big picture from an outsider’s point of view, I wouldn’t exactly call it lucky. Being alone sucks. But I can think of one thing that will suck more: letting people use me.

I step over fallen branches, and kick at loose pieces of stone embedded in the dirt path. No matter how much I try to reassure myself, it still sucks. I’d been naïve to think things would be different here. Maybe I was starting to buy into the fantasy that Professor Silvers was spouting in class about the Fae being a superior race. That the Fae realm would somehow be better than the crazy life I left behind.

Well, now I know better.

And these Fae are crazy if they think I’m going to let them use me.

I’m back in the woods when I hear footsteps behind me.

“Hey, Imogen,” Ella calls. I slow my pace to let her catch up. “Please, let me explain.”

“Explain what?” I snap. She takes a step back, and I sigh. “Sorry, that came out harsher than I meant it to. I’m just really mad right now.”

“I understand, but—”

“Do you, Ella?” I ask. “I mean, how could you? This is your world, your people, your friends. You belong here. I got all caught up in the magic of this place, and thought for a moment that I might belong, but to know you guys were just using me? Do you understand how much that hurts?”

I’m panting now, both from walking so fast and from spewing venom all over Ella. She’s so sweet. Even now, she looks defeated. Guilt tangles itself in the mess of crossed wires in my brain. Ella is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, in the human or Fae realms, and I just unleashed all of my anger onto her.

“You do belong,” she says, cutting right to the core of my hurt. “You are here because you are one of us, no matter where you come from.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’re here,” she says, spreading her hands and indicating everything around us. “This place, this school. It’s special. It’s a place where everyone, regardless of their past, comes to be part of something bigger, something better. And you are a part of that. You make us better.”

Dannika walks up on us, her arms crossed and her eyes downcast. When she reaches us, she rocks back a little on her heels, but still doesn’t look at me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I reply.

“Look, I wanted to apologize.” Now she meets my gaze, eyes earnest. “Ella shouldn’t be taking the fall. You probably blame me for what happened since I brought you out here.”

“I don’t know what to think,” I say. “I just thought that we, the three of us, had a real connection, you know? That I might, for the first time in a really, really long time, be making friends.”

“You are.” Dannika reaches out and takes my hand. “We are friends.”

“Then why am I here, Dannika? A friend wouldn’t do this. Wouldn’t use someone like this.”

She nods, but it doesn’t seem so much as in agreement as in acknowledgment. “I knew we were meeting tonight to discuss this problem, so I asked Erick if I could bring you with me. Obviously, you weren’t involved in the attacks since you just arrived, and I thought it would be better to get you close to us as soon as possible. I had no idea he was going to single you out like that, or make you feel like I only brought you because you could be of use to us.”

“Gods,” I say, dropping my head back as I try to contain my frustration. “Is he for real? Is he trying to break some kind of world record for being a jerk?”

Ella and Dannika laugh.

“What?” I ask. “It’s like it is his life’s mission to make me miserable and humiliate me.”

“Wow, don’t go all boggart on us,” Ella says. She and Dannika are still giggling.

“Go all what?” I ask. “You mean like in Harry Potter?” I’m confused how that makes any sense.

“No, silly,” Dannika says. “You know, like some paranoid brownie Fae high on PCP who gets offended at everything.”

“Oh, right,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Like I would so ‘know’ what a boggart dessert is. I just got here!”

Ella is laughing so hard I think she’s going to fall over.

“And it’s not a food brownie,” Dannika says. “It’s a type of Fae.”

I just stare at her. I’m going to have to look this up later, because she has totally lost me.

“You’re really quite dramatic, aren’t you?” Dannika asks. “I think we’ll have to tap you for the annual dramatic reading of Midsummer.”

I blush. She’s right. Here I was thinking they were the ones being drama queens, but I’m certainly not being much better. Why did I storm off? I should have asked for more information instead of running away.

“First I’m boggart, now I’m dramatic?” I ask Dannika, trying to mask my own shame. “Maybe you’re the one going boggart.”

Ella finally manages to pull herself together, wiping the tears from her eyes. Little wheezes still escape her as she composes herself. “Hey, we all go a little boggart now and then.”

“Look, just ignore Erick,” Dannika urges. “He’s always a bit of an ass. Tonight, he’s being an ass with an extra side of dick.”

“But…you still want me to help, right?”

The girls go silent, and exchange a glance.

“Only if you want to,” Ella says quickly. “Erick was a jerk, but he’s not wrong. And these attacks against my house…they are serious. I’m worried, Imogen. Like really scared. We need to find out what’s going on.”

I shrug. “I don’t think I can be much help. I don’t know anything about this place. Or anyone here, besides you guys.”

Dannika nods. “I understand. Don’t worry about it right now, okay? Besides, we need to get back to the dorm before Mr. Clawfire realizes we are gone.”

Thank gods, because I am dead tired. Which might have had something to do with my reaction. I’m not thinking straight and need to get some sleep. But a moment later, I go from dead tired to wide awake when I realize I recognize that name.

“Clawfire?” I ask. “You mean…Damon?”

“Yeah,” Dannika says. “He’s our house mentor.”

Well, that’s just what I wanted to hear. My mentor’s a disgruntled man whose first impression of me was that I’m foolish and weak.

This year is going to suck.

* * *

The next morning, I feel much more refreshed. As I always do first thing when I wake up, I reach for my phone. It’s dead.

“Hey, Dannika?” I ask.

She pops up from her bed with a gorgeous #Iwokeuplikethis face. “Yeah?”

“Do you know where I can charge my phone?”

“Oh, that won’t work here,” she cheerfully informs me. “We don’t use electricity.”

“What?” I’m flabbergasted. “Why not? How do you power stuff?

“Well, we use a lot less power here than in the human realm.”

I look around, noticing that a lot of the things I take for granted back home don’t seem to exist here. There are no computers or a TV. No coffee machine. No fridge. Not even a light in the ceiling.

The table next to my bed is absent of an alarm clock, too, even though we both woke up at the same time.

“The sky provides all the light we need,” she says. “Bright light during the day, moon and stars at night. We’re much more in tune with our circadian rhythms here. We wake and sleep when we need to. You’ll soon find that your sleep is much more restful, and not just because you’re exhausted.”

“Um, okay, Miss Hippy, but how am I supposed to contact my mom and my friends?”

Dannika shrugs. “Most of us knew we were coming, so we let anybody not here know wouldn’t hear from us for a while.” She sits up and starts brushing her hair, pushing the front of it back and letting the rest poof up behind a beautiful printed headband. “Sorry you didn’t know what you were getting in to.”

I flop back on my pillow. “My mom must be dying to know how my first day went. And I didn’t tell my friend Cassie anything. We kind of fought before I left. She must think I totally ghosted her! I’m going to feel like an idiot trying to explain where I’ve been for a year.”

“Oh, it won’t be a year to her,” Dannika explains. She climbs out of bed, walks over to the mirror above her dresser, and slicks some clear lip gloss over her mauve lips. After smacking her lips together, she adds, “Time moves differently here, like a fourth of the speed. It will seem like a year on this side, but when you leave, you’ll only have been gone for three months.”

“That’s so weird,” I say, sitting up and trying to calculate in my head how old I’ll be in human years when I graduate.

“It can be confusing if you end up being the kind of person who travels between realms a lot,” she says. “But I’m sure your friends won’t forget you in three months.”

I put my dead phone in a drawer. I’m sure Cassie won’t forget me, but she might not forgive me, either. And it still feels weird that I can’t contact my mom. Maybe I’ll have to take up journaling, so I don’t forget the things I want to tell her when I get back.

We get dressed and make our way down to our magic history class, which I’m looking forward to since that was the class I completely missed the day before. As we enter the classroom, though, several of the other students are leaving, and the few who are still there are just standing around talking.

“What’s going on?” Dannika asks Erick.

“No class today,” he says. “Professor Darkshade called in sick.”

“Someone else is sick?” I ask. “Like all those students I saw in the infirmary yesterday?”

“I don’t think it’s related to that,” Erick says. “Adult Fae, people as old and strong as the professors here, they don’t usually get sick without a serious exposure to iron.”

“Iron?” I ask.

“The one weakness we share,” Dannika informs me. “We all have a natural aversion to iron.”

“How did the Fae survive the iron age?” I say as sort of a joke, but Erick and Dannika look at me with all seriousness.

“We nearly didn’t,” Erick says. “The Fae used to inhabit the world of faerie and human equally. But during the Iron Age, many of our kind fled here, and this became our more permanent home.”

I finally ask one of the questions that has been gnawing at me. “Are the Fae immortal?”

“Yes,” Dannika answers. “As are halflings. But we aren’t impervious. We can be killed like anyone else, which makes us a little easier to kill than the full-blooded Fae.”

I can’t tell if my heart is lighter or heavier with this information. What does it mean to me to be immortal? Of course, I’m only eighteen. I haven’t really spent much time thinking about mortality either. I think this is something I’ll need to talk to Mom about.

“Do you think this has anything to do with…” I glance around to make sure no one is listening, and then lower my voice. “What we were talking about last night?”

Erick shakes his head. “There’s no reason to think that. If Professor Darkshade is just ill, or even ill by iron, that doesn’t sound similar to the attacks at Ohdows Hall.”

“It could,” I say. “Maybe with the older Fae, the attacker just needs to be more subtle.”

Erick sighs. “Look, I think I would know—”

“Know what, Erick? Everything? Well, maybe you don’t know everything,” I say. “And would it hurt to investigate? There could be a missing link between the two.”

He rolls his eyes. “When you decide to help us, then I’ll give a damn what you think. Later, Dannika.”

“Later,” she says as he walks away, but then shakes her head. “Damn, that was rude, even for him.”

“I don’t care,” I lie. His coarseness is going from annoying to hurtful. Just because we aren’t friends doesn’t mean we can’t still listen to what the other person has to say. “So, what do we do now?”

“Well, we have an hour to kill before our next class,” she says. “I’ll probably go for a run around the track. Wanna come?”

“Not really,” I hedge, not wanting to hurt her feelings, but me run? Ha! “I’m just going to explore the school a bit more. Try to learn my way around.”

“Okay,” she says. “You remember where our next class is?”

“Yeah, thanks. I think I’ll be okay.”

We say our parting words, but once she’s gone, I decide not to explore the school after all. I know I should, but for some reason, my feet take my back to the dorm instead. I want to find Damon. I have a feeling he might be able to answer some of my questions.

When I get back to the dorm, I find his office on the first floor and knock.

“Come in,” he calls.

When I step in, he’s hunched over some old scrolls, but he quickly rolls them up as I approach his desk.

“Ah, Miss…uh…Flareburn, was it?” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“I thought I would say hi,” I say. “I haven’t seen you since you brought me here.”

He nods, but doesn’t reply.

“Well, that’s not exactly true,” I continue. “I saw a painting of you, down a long hallway. It’s how I learned your last name.”

“That so?” he asks.

“Yeah. So I guess you are the mentor of us fire Fae or something?”

“Something like that.”

“So…” Jeez, why is he making this so awkward? “I just had some questions, and thought you might be able to answer them.” I nervously take a seat in a chair by the door.

He tucks his rolled-up scrolls into his desk drawer, and folds his hands in from of him. “All right. I’ll do my best.”

“Do you think the student illnesses and Professor Darkshade being sick are related?”

Hs expression stills, his face a stony, unreadable mask. “Now, why would you be wondering about that?”

I shrug. “Just seems weird is all. I mean, Fae are supposed to be superior to humans, but they sure seem to get sick easily.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says. “Just some flu going around. Be sure to get plenty of vitamin C.”

“Vitamin C? Really?” I stare him down. I’m not taking his placating suggestions that easily. “Are the illnesses related to the attacks at Ohdows?”

“How do you know about that?” he asks, leaning toward me.

“Some of the other students have expressed concerns,” I say. “I think there might be a connection, but no one will listen to me because I’m new.”

He stands up and opens the door. “And right they are,” he says. “You know nothing of our world. So you’d be better off keeping your nose out of where it doesn’t belong.”

I stand, but don’t move toward the exit. “But my nose does belong here, doesn’t it? I belong here, don’t I?”

“What I meant was—”

“And whose fault is it I don’t know anything, anyway?” I ask, taking a step toward him. “I just got here, and I’m here to learn, right? Whose responsibility is that? You’re my mentor, aren’t you? So shouldn’t you be teaching me?”

Damon waves his hand, motioning me to walk through the door. I do, but I don’t leave his presence.

“That’s what your classes are for,” he says. “So you better get going.”

“I’d be in class now if the professors weren’t dropping like flies,” I snap. “Why won’t you answer my questions?”

“Because you won’t like the answers,” he says.

Then the door slams in my face.