The Nightmare Affair (7 page)

I laughed, half-tempted to point out that at least he was a
hot
library aide. And he definitely didn’t get those bulging muscles in his forearms by shelving books. “Could be worse. You could be a hall monitor.”

His grin broadened. “I’m Paul.”

“Dusty.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You do?”

He brushed the hair back from his eyes. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“Oh, I get it. Your parents went to school with my mom, right? And they’ve warned you that any daughter of hers must be a real
nightmare
.”

Paul chuckled. “Well, you don’t look scary to me. Just the opposite.”

A warm flutter passed through my stomach. The air felt charged with electricity, like in those rare moments when you know the person looking at you thinks you’re attractive, and the even rarer moments when the feeling is mutual. Now at a complete loss for what to say, I was both saved and foiled by the warning bell.

“I guess you’d better go,” Paul said, putting his hands on the library cart.

I smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“See you around.” He walked away, disappearing behind a row of books.

I took a moment to catch my breath, then headed off for my psionics class. In the excitement of my brief interlude with Paul, I’d almost forgotten about Eli until I spotted him sitting in the top right-hand row beside Lance. The classroom had an auditorium setup that was more common in colleges than high schools. I took my usual seat in the left-hand side of the second row, determined not to let his presence unnerve me.

Our teacher, Mr. Ankil, arrived a few minutes late as usual, announcing a pop quiz as he came through the door. The whole class groaned.

Ankil put his hands on his hips and pretended to be disappointed. “Come on, guys. We have a new addition to our illustrious ranks, and the last thing we want to do is make Elijah think we don’t have a blast in here. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Lance said, giving him the finger-gun salute and doing a perfect imitation of Ankil’s flamboyant, over-the-top style.

Mr. Ankil grinned. He was one of those teachers always trying to act like your friend rather than an authority figure. For the most part, he pulled it off. It didn’t hurt that he wore his hair long and unkempt and favored the jeans-and-sandals look. He also sported multiple piercings in both ears, and he wore rings on all his fingers, including his thumbs.

Most of his success, though, could be attributed to his ability to influence our emotions with his empathic abilities. Ankil was a psychic, extremely gifted in all types of mind-magic—telepathy, telekinesis, and so on. Perfect for psionics, the study of mind-magic.

I wasn’t very happy about the quiz. Psionics was my best magic-based subject, but it required a calm, focused state of being, something I sorely lacked today.

“Now, all you have to do is place your tennis balls inside the basket with
no hands
.” Ankil motioned toward the storage closet on the other side of the room, and the door opened at once. At least twenty bright yellow Wilson balls flew out from it and began distributing themselves to all the students. Then Mr. Ankil summoned his wastebasket from beside his desk and placed it in the center of the room in front of us.

As pop quizzes went, this one was absurdly easy and well below even
my
skill level, but it was typical Ankil. He liked any excuse to give everybody a passing grade.

Easy or not, I still managed to bomb it.

I started off okay, lifting the ball into the air just by thinking about it, but then I heard Lance whisper loudly, “Be careful, Eli. There’s no telling
where
this thing might go.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” Eli said. “I’ve seen her in action.”

Mortified, my concentration broke as memories of my disastrous encounter with him two nights ago flashed in my brain. I lost control of the ball, spiking it upward. It zoomed across the room like a yellow missile and smacked Lance in the forehead. I sunk down in my seat as several people laughed at my unintentional bull’s eye.

His face flushed in anger, Lance picked up his tennis ball and winged it at me. There wasn’t time to catch it, but I managed to swat it away with the back of my hand. It went flying again, and this time struck Mr. Ankil square in the chest.

Mr. Ankil shrugged it off like it was no big deal, but he summoned Lance’s ball with his telekinesis and sent it sailing across the room where he set it on the desk in front of Lance.

“Since you seem so keen on throwing the ball,” Mr. Ankil said, “why don’t you try and make it into the basket using just your hands and
no
mind-magic.”

Everybody recognized the challenge in the task and the chatter of voices from my classmates reacting to the scene died away, leaving an almost breathless silence. For me, I couldn’t help but feel a swell of affection for Mr. Ankil. I knew as well as he did that Lance would miss. Magickind—wizards and witches in particular—weren’t very skilled at hand-eye coordination.

Lance flubbed it. I mean, that sucker wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as the wastebasket. I grinned in triumph at Lance.

Beside him, Eli picked up another tennis ball, and then with a casual gesture sent it soaring across the room and right into the basket as easily as if he
had
used magic.

Show-off
. Go figure that the new guy, the I-can’t-even-do-magic guy, would pass the quiz when I didn’t.

After class, Mr. Ankil asked me to stay behind. I waited near his desk while the other students left, trying not to look nervous about whatever I must’ve done to warrant an after-class lecture.

Mr. Ankil said, “Lance picks on you a lot, doesn’t he?”

I blinked at him, surprised. “Well, yeah, but Lance picks on everybody.”

“So I’ve noticed. I went to school with guys like him. Wizards have a tendency to be full of themselves, arrogant to the point of stupid.”

I grinned in total agreement.

Ankil grinned back. “How ’bout I show you a little trick you can use on the trickster?”

“Okay.”

He turned and walked to the closet, pulling out one of the head-and-hand dummies. The dummy was a mannequin of a man’s head and upper body that we sometimes used to practice more difficult skills. Ankil set the dummy on his desk and wedged a pencil into one of its hands.

“I was picked on a lot when I was a kid,” Ankil said. “Shocking, I know, considering how
cool
I am now.” He winked. “But seriously, psychics are often regarded as lower on the food chain than other witchkind.”

I nodded. There were all kinds of tiers and levels among magickind based on their obsession with perceived power.

Ankil said, “The attitude stems from the belief that because mind-magic must obey the laws of physics, it is somehow weaker than spells that only obey the laws of the spell itself and nothing else.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yep, and utter nonsense. Mind-magic simply requires more practice, and a basic understanding of physics. When you’ve got that, you can do lots of things with it that spells can’t. For example, you can use what I like to call the ‘snatch-and-smack.’”

He faced the dummy then flicked his wrist. The pencil flew out of its hand, spun like a boomerang, and hit the dummy in the forehead.

“Did you see what I did there?” Ankil asked.

“Not really.”

“Aha, but that’s why it’s so effective. As you well know, The Will wouldn’t let you use magic to perform any act of violence against someone else. The Will can anticipate nearly all of our actions, both physical and magical. But if you break up the action, The Will can’t guess your next move or prevent the laws of physics from doing their part. What I did was yank the pencil out but not hold on to it. As soon as it started to fall, I struck the tip of it, causing it to spin and then
wham
!”

He demonstrated the move again.

I watched more closely this time, catching on. “So it’s like serving the ball in tennis or volleyball.”

“A little, I suppose. But it’s very tricky. You have to learn the right amount of force to get the object to move how you want it to when you hit it. Very effective if done right. Especially if the object in question is, say, a wizard’s
wand
.”

“Oh,” I said, brightening. “Are you’re saying I can use this on Lance the next time he does something crappy?”

Ankil smiled. “I’m not giving you permission to do anything. I’m simply pointing out that it
can
be done. And trust me, nothing unnerves a wizard more than losing his wand. Or being attacked by it.”

I laughed at the mental image of Lance being chased down the hallway with his wand pelting him repeatedly from behind.

“So,” Mr. Ankil said, “I want you to practice this technique for me as extra credit. Master it and you’ll have a guaranteed B minimum for the quarter. Deal?”

“Deal.”

I left Ankil’s class a moment later. He was the coolest teacher ever.

But once again, my joy was only temporary as Eli was in my math class and then in alchemy after that. I was going to have to see him every day, all day long. Not to mention the thrice-weekly dream-sessions.

By the time I reached the girls’ locker room before gym, I was feeling completely dejected. “Why are they doing this to me?” I asked Selene as we changed into our gym clothes.

“Who?”

“The school administrators, the Magi Senate, the powers that be.” I threw up my hands. “Everyone.”

Selene sighed sympathetically. “Maybe it has something to do with the way the dream-seer stuff works. Maybe you’ve got to spend a lot of time with the person to get a feel for it.”

“Sure, like spending my nights with the guy won’t be enough.” That sounded dirtier than I intended, and Selene grinned as she pulled her blue-and-gray Arkwell T-shirt over her head. The image of our school mascot, Hank the Hydra, smiled at me with all seven heads from the emblem on the center of the shirt.

“You could always ask your Nightmare trainer,” Selene said.

“I suppose so.”

Not that it would change anything.

I finished tying the knot on my sneaker and stood up. “What I don’t get is why they have him taking magic-based courses. He’s not capable of doing any magic, right?”

Selene tugged on the front of her T-shirt, making sure it wasn’t too tight. “Well, it’s not that uncommon. There are halfkinds at this school that can’t do magic, either, but they’re still required to take the same courses. They just have to do a lot more textbook work and written exams than the rest of us, and all practical examinations are simulated. I think the idea is there’s some value in learning the theory of magic even if you’ll never use it.”

“Huh,” I said, seeing her point. The only reason I hadn’t been forced to go here from day one was because my dad was an ordinary. Everybody figured I was completely ordinary, too, until I came into my powers. Just why they’d shown up so late, nobody knew. Or at least they hadn’t told me. Halfkinds were rare, and a part-ordinary halfkind even rarer. I was probably the only one of my generation.

For once, gym was uneventful. Instead of war games, we played basketball, which gave me the chance not to look like an idiot. With the class as large as it was, Coach Fritz split us up into four random teams, and we played two half-court games at the same time. I got a double shot of luck as Eli ended up on a different team and a different court altogether.

After class, I had just enough time to take a shower before heading off to Jupiter Hall to meet Bethany Grey. Only when I came through the door into the classroom, it wasn’t Bethany waiting for me but my
mother
.

The sight of her made my legs feel as if someone had replaced the muscles with jelly and the bones with wet noodles. What was she doing here? Not once in my life had her unexpected appearance signified anything good. I glanced around, half-expecting a police force to come bursting in to arrest us.

Moira was pacing back and forth across the room, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. For a moment, she didn’t know I was there.
Run away now while you still can!
a voice shouted in my head.

I would’ve, too, except Mom was muttering to herself, “How can they do this? She’s just a child. They’ve no idea what they’re asking. The sheer arrogance.”

She spotted me and stopped. “Destiny.” From her, my name sounded like a curse.

“Hi, Mom.”

Moira strode over, the spiked heels of her tall black boots striking the tiled floor like tiny hammers. She was wearing a fitted black jacket over a short skirt—she must’ve been at the office earlier. Mom owned a highly successful therapy practice, famous across the region for its unique, ahem,
dream
therapy techniques.

She grabbed me by the shoulders. “Finally. We’ve no time to lose. We need to get you packed.”

I blinked at her, a bit alarmed at her panicked state. My mom was usually the definition of calm and cool, like a female James Bond. “What for?”

“You and I are running away.
Now
.”

5

Basic Training

“Say what?”

“We’re running away,” Moira repeated.

“Come again?”

She rolled her eyes. “Honestly, you’d think I never taught you English. What part of running away don’t you understand? You, me, Mexico.” She nodded to herself, as if this plan was news to her, too. “Yes, that’s it. We’ll wait it out with sun and cocktails until this thing with Rosemary is over.”

I glared at her, furious at her audacity in thinking she could swoop into my life whenever she felt like it and start dictating. She gave up that parental right when she abandoned me and Dad a long time ago. Sure, she’d been coming around more often now that I’d inherited my Nightmare powers, but fair-weather mothering didn’t count. And we weren’t “girlfriends” or BFFs, either.
Cocktails indeed
.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Besides, I’m not old enough to drink.”

Moira put her hands on her hips, assuming her “I’m the boss” stance. “You
are
coming with me. You’re not getting involved in this murder business. It’s too dangerous, and you’re too young.”