A Faerie's Secret (Creepy Hollow Book 4) (12 page)

“Welcome,” Gemma says, raising her smoothie glass, then sipping the brownish-green liquid. “I mean, not that you’re an outcast,” she adds after swallowing. “You definitely look like you could be one of the cool people, so I didn’t mean to imply that you’re—”

“Oh, no, I’m an outcast. Attending seven different schools by the age of fourteen will do that to a person.”

“
Seven?
” Gemma says, pulling her head back in surprise.

“Uh … yeah.” I guess that story hasn’t reached the Guild yet. “Um, four different junior schools, then healer school, then cooking school, then art school …” I trail off as I realize I probably shouldn’t have shared all that. Now they’ll want to know
why
I went to so many schools. “Anyway,” I rush on, “why do you guys qualify as outcasts?” I pick up the cinnamon twist and take a large bite before anyone can ask me a question.

“Oh, well Ned’s scared of girls,” Perry says, “and I’m a super nerd. So that counts us out of the cool crowd.”

“Thanks a lot, man,” Ned mutters.

“What? Calla’s part of our group now. She needs to know these things.”

“And what about you?” I say to Gemma, hoping to draw attention away from Ned so he can have a chance to recover from his embarrassment.

Gemma finishes the last of her smoothie and says, “My mom’s an admin and my dad’s a florist. So, you know, I don’t have the cool guardian heritage that almost everyone else here has. And I often get accused of being a halfling because apparently I’m not two-toned. Hello.” She points at her head. “Brown plus black equals two colors, and the brown matches my eyes, so I’m
all faerie
, thank you very much.” She hesitates, then rushes to add, “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a halfling.”

Perry shakes his head, then looks at me. “My sister’s a halfling. Half-faerie, half-human. Gem likes to make fun of her.”

“I do not!”

“A halfling? Does …” I look around, then lower my voice. “Does the Guild know?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s on their registry. No point, though, since she doesn’t have any magic. She lives in the human realm with her mom. I visit her sometimes. It’s cool to hang out there with all the human tech instead of using magic all the time.”

“When he says ‘human tech,’ he means movies,” Gemma tells me. “All he ever talks about when he comes back from visits is what movies he watched.”

“Movies are amazing,” Perry says. “The fae world doesn’t know what it’s missing out on.”

The light in the dining hall dims for a moment, then brightens again. “Does that mean something?” I ask, licking cinnamon and powdered sugar off my fingers.

“Time for class,” Ned says with a sigh.

“My mentor’s taking today’s lesson,” Gemma says. She taps her tray twice with her stylus, and it vanishes. Perry and Ned do the same. “Potions are her specialty,” Gemma adds. “I think we’re doing sleeping potions today.”

“Oh, that’s great,” I say as we stand. “I know all about those.”

Perry raises an eyebrow. “Drugging your boyfriends?”

Gemma smacks his arm while I laugh. “No, my mom has sleeping issues. She’s been concocting sleeping potions for as long as I can remember. She’d flip her lid if I got a tattoo or started dating a fifty-year-old, but she’s totally fine with me learning the art of illicit potion-making in our kitchen.”

“Ah, she likes the strong stuff, does she?” Perry says, nodding as if he knows all about strong potions.

“She won’t let you get a tattoo?” Gemma asks before I can laugh at Perry. “But you were with that tattoo artist last night. I thought you guys must be friends since he was helping you fight off that other guy. Unless … was it the other way around?”

“Oh, is he a tattoo artist?” I picture the guy whose house I broke into. I wonder if the dark shapes marking his arms are his own work. “No, I don’t know him. I only met him last—”

“Excuse me.” Saskia steps in front of me. “You’ve got something that belongs to me. My tracker band.”

The tracker band hiding next to the bangle in my drawer. The tracker band I plan to burn when I get home this afternoon. “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that,” I say in my best I-don’t-give-a-pixie’s-ass tone of voice. “I lost it.”

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

“Sword! Scimitar! Bow and arrow!” Olive barks out, snapping her fingers between each command. “Calla, you’re not keeping up. Dagger!” Finger snap. “Chakram!” Finger snap. “Whip!” Finger snap. “I don’t see a whip, Calla.”

I try to block out her harsh voice and impatient glare and concentrate instead on the feel of the whip in my hand. Eventually, it appears within my grip. I bring it swiftly through the air, watch the end wrap around a low-hanging branch, and tug it hard. The branch cracks and breaks and sails through the air. The whip vanishes as I let go, but the branch keeps coming. I dodge so I don’t get myself knocked out.

We’re outside at the old Guild ruins, an area that’s apparently used quite often for training. It’s large enough to accommodate plenty of trainees and their mentors without anyone having to interfere with anyone else. I’m here with Olive and her other fifth-year trainee, a petite girl named Ling who hasn’t said a word to me. We used part of the ruins as an obstacle course to warm up, then practiced a few single combat moves Olive decided we needed to perfect—most of which ended with, “Not good enough. Do it again.”—before moving on to weapons control. It’s a simple exercise in which we have to make the required weapon appear instantly before moving to the next. It’s an exercise I suck at.

“Ridiculous,” Olive says after the broken branch lands somewhere behind me. “How exactly did you make it through four years of training if you can’t even control your own weapons? Oh, that’s right. You didn’t get through four years of training.”

The afternoon has been full of gibes like that one, and I’ve held my tongue every time. But we’ve been out here for almost three hours now, and I’m tired of being mocked. “You’re right,” I say to her. “This
is
ridiculous. When am I ever going to be in a situation where my opponent recites a list of weapons for me to produce instantly, one after the other?”

Olive marches across the overgrown ruins and stops with her face inches from mine. “I have ninety-three years of guardian experience, so you’d damn well better believe me when I tell you that this exercise is crucial. When you’re in a combat situation and forces are coming at you from all sides, you need to be able to adapt in a second.” She snaps her fingers once more, right beside my ear. “Now you are
not
leaving here until I’m satisfied with your performance. Ling, you can go home. Calla, start again.”

The weapon names keep flying at me, and I keep trying to match Olive’s pace. I don’t seem to be getting better, though. If anything, I’m getting worse. “Useless,” she says after a further half hour. “Useless! I give up. I’ve got more important things to do than waste my time on this, Calla.”

She heads back to the Guild through a faerie paths doorway as angry tears blot out my vision. I blink them away before they can fall. I press my lips together and stare at the ground, wondering for the first time if Olive and Saskia and all the other people who think I should have started at the bottom might have been right. I thought I was good enough for this level of training, but I haven’t managed to get a single thing right this afternoon, and it’s only my third day at the Guild. Things will only get tougher from here onwards.

“You’re trying too hard,” a male voice says behind me.

I spin around, surprised to find a glittering knife in each of my hands by the time I’m facing him.

“See?” the tattoo artist says. “It happens easily when you’re not thinking about it.”

My grip on the knives tightens as I watch him carefully. “What do you know? You’re not a guardian.”

“I know what I’ve seen. I know it’s supposed to be effortless. Automatic. As easy for you as breathing.”

As easy for me as breathing? If only. “How did you find me?” I ask. I need to keep him talking while I come up with an illusion good enough to distract him.

“I have ways of tracking people down, Calla.”

“Okaaay, stalker. I hope you realize how creepy that sounds.”

“Coming from the girl who broke into my house to look at my art.”

“I was curious. That doesn’t make me creepy. Definitely not as creepy as you, old man.”

“Old man?”

“I saw your Stone Age furniture. If you were alive when that stuff was made, then you definitely qualify for the ‘old man’ label.”

“Oh, the furniture,” he says with a nod. “That isn’t mine.”

“Did you steal it? Like you stole the bangle?”

He sighs. “Fine. Yes, I stole the bangle, but not from the Guild. I stole it from the man you saw in the tunnel last night. He’s dangerous, and I need to keep the bangle’s power away from him.”

“Well, he won’t be getting it from me, so you can relax.”

The artist frowns and takes a step toward me. “Please tell me you haven’t given it back to the Guild yet.”

Instead of answering, I release the barriers around my mind and picture an ogre stomping across the ruins. It stops in front of the tattoo artist, balls its fists, and lets out a bellow.

“Don’t bother with your mind tricks,” the tattoo artist says, staring straight through the ogre. “They won’t work on me. I wasn’t aware last night that I needed to shield my mind from you, but I am now.” He starts moving toward me, walking right through the ogre.

He can’t see it.
He can’t see it.

Shocked, I stumble backward, abandoning the ogre illusion. “How—how do you know I’m doing it if you can’t see—”

“I can see your concentration.”

My concentration? No one’s ever noticed that before. The artist quickens his steps, and I throw up a shield between us before he can reach me.

“Really?” he says. “We went through this last night. Your shields mean nothing to me.”

“Do all the guardians nearby mean anything to you?”

His eyes dart across the ruins, and I take advantage of his momentary distraction. I throw sparks into the air, as bright as I can make them, and in the blinding flash that follows, I release the knives, grab my stylus from my belt, and write a doorway beside my feet. A gust of power blows my hair back and knocks me onto my side. He’s broken through my shield. I roll into the opening darkness of the faerie paths, but something snaps around my wrist and yanks hard. I hang there, half in darkness, looking up at the vine wrapped around my arm and the artist at the other end, raising me from the faerie paths with a sweep of his hand through the air.

I slice wildly across the vine with my stylus. It breaks. I fall.

And the darkness closes above me.

* * *

The faerie paths dump me in the spare room at Ryn’s house, because that must have been the first place I thought of. I immediately open another doorway and hurry through it to my bedroom at home. I sit on the edge of the bed and breathe slowly as I run through what just happened. The tattoo artist couldn’t see my illusion. That’s
never
happened before. Does that mean he’s far more powerful than the average faerie, or is it simply that other people have never been aware of the need to protect their minds from me?

I shake my head and cross the room to the chest of drawers. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. The important thing now is to return the bangle to the Guild before anyone else gets hold of it. I open my sock drawer and stare at the dangerous piece of jewelry. Aside from the continually shifting shades of green in the stones, there’s no hint of the power it contains. I pick it up carefully, afraid I might vanish in an instant and reappear somewhere in the past. Nothing happens, though. As far as I know, it only works when I put it on, and I certainly won’t be doing that again.

“Cal, is that you?” Dad calls from downstairs. He must have heard me exit the faerie paths.

“Yes,” I shout back. I lean out of my doorway and add, “I’m just going back to the Guild quickly. I forgot some stuff there.” It isn’t a lie. I
did
forget to return to the Guild to fetch my books in my haste to get away from the tattoo artist.

“Okay, but could you come down here for a moment?”

I run down the stairs and find Dad sitting at the dining room table surrounded by papers. Dad used to save lives for a living. Now he manages the business side of a private security company so that other people can save lives and Mom doesn’t have to worry about him getting hurt. I think he probably wishes he was still a guardian. He probably wishes many things. Not having a daughter with a Griffin Ability is no doubt near the top of the list.

The words I heard him say to Ryn replay in my mind as I cross the room toward him.
All I’m asking is that you make sure there’s no record of the bribes anywhere.
It’s a shock to know that my father would even consider something like that, let alone carry it out. But I have to remind myself to be grateful for whatever he’s done rather than morally indignant. After all, his actions have kept me off the Griffin List.