Hereditary (15 page)

I didn’t remember moving to the bed, only remember Nareon ordering me to raise my glamor, even as he reached for the dress that Rose had lent me, and ripped it clean down the middle. He stared down at me, and despite the fact that my body was now arching desperately toward him, I managed to gather enough strength to slam the glamor back into place.

“Get out now, little Spitfire. While you still can,” he whispered, his body shaking with the barely-restrained violence of his passion.

Feeling newly invigorated from his energy, it was hard to pay attention to the fear that was trying to break through the haze in my mind, almost as if I were drunkenly impaired or half asleep. But when I saw his hands tightening into fists, I wriggled out from beneath him and clutched my dress closed, backing away from him slowly.

He watched me, unmoving, until I cleared my throat, and then he jolted to his feet and strode into a connecting room, vanishing from my sight for a moment until he came back and handed me a cloak, which I gratefully tugged around my shoulders and buttoned up at the front.

“You can borrow a horse, that way it won’t take you hours to get back.”

“Thank you.” The words left my mouth unbidden, before I could bite them back.

He walked me to the stables, and then, much to my surprise, he ordered two of his guards to accompany me back, barely glancing at me as he strode back inside. I wasn’t even sure if he was angry with me, or himself.

Despite our deal, my inability to control myself during the last encounter with Nareon had me pushing the limits of my own restraint. During the next week, I threw myself into Academy work and my afternoon sessions with Hazen and Cale with a narrow-minded determination. I was determined to find out all that I could about my own powers, as well as anything that might help me with the situation in Nareon’s kingdom, while unsuccessfully dodging Hazen, Cale, and even Rose’s questions. It was unsuccessful, because despite my refusal to involve them, Hazen found out my secret the very next day, and the others managed to get it out of him in turn.

None of them liked the idea of me helping Nareon, but with the deal I got in return, they were all at a loss for better suggestions. Every one of them knew how important it was for me to keep myself from hurting anyone, and as the dark moods steadily increased day by day, even they were urging me to go back to Nareon.

On the eighth day, after a sleepless night of looming nightmares that I was sure the darkness was to blame for, I trudged to the Academy in one of my plain, shapeless dresses, with my hair pulled into a severe braid behind my head—though none of it really did anything to make me look any less appealing. I had even taken to avoiding the forest path, at the risk of running into Nareon accidentally, and by the time I arrived at the Academy and sat down to listen to Carron lecture on the drawbacks of the water elemental, I was ready to burst.

“You can’t go on any longer,” Hazen whispered.

I turned to him, sitting in the auditorium beside me, and was seized by a sudden urge to throttle him. He quirked one of his eyebrows and I scowled, shouting in my mind for him to
get the hell out
. Just then, however, the bell rang and everyone surged from their seats, eager to escape Carron’s monotone monologue. I didn’t budge, and neither did Hazen. As the last person walked out, and the door fell closed behind them, I suddenly rounded on him.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a thing called
privacy
?”

“It’s been too long, Bea. You need to go back to Nareon.”

“I don’t want to!” I yelled, throwing up my hands.

Unbidden, the memory flashed through my mind, and I saw him looming over me, such vicious heat in his eyes as he rended my dress clean down the middle. Hazen blinked, his eyes widening, because, so far, I had very carefully guarded this memory.

“I see,” he muttered.

I tried to punch him then, but he caught my hand almost lazily, his eyes suddenly pinning me to the seat, warning me not to flip out. But
flip out
is exactly what I wanted to do, and, with a growl of frustration, I lashed out with my other hand. He caught that one too, and abruptly stood, wrenching me to my feet.

“Bea, cut it out, you’re acting like a child.”

I realised that he was right, and I felt a frustrated, embarrassed flush spread over my face.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “Everything is just such a mess. Nareon is right, I might be considered powerful in this world, but in
his
world, I’m just a bug, a bug that any one of them could squash if they wanted to. And I’m supposed to be taking on a
group
of them? A group of people with my inheritance power, except that they all know how to use
it, and I don’t!”

He was still holding my fists, but when I finally let my fingers uncurl, he relaxed his grip, and his thumbs brushed across the backs of my hands, the touch calming enough to make me wonder if he was manually altering my mood from within. He was definitely draining some of the darkness; enough that it didn’t feel like it would explode in my head. He had done that for me a lot lately, but it always came back a few hours later, and Cale had told me that if he took too much, it had the potential to backfire and cause him a lot of pain.

“You won’t be alone, Nareon won’t let anybody hurt you, and I’ll make sure that you don’t go in unprepared. There is only so much that the Academy is allowed to teach you, but I know someone else who might be able to help.”

“Who?”

“A retired Professor. Cale should be here at any second, and then we’ll take you.”

“You called Cale?” I felt another spark of anger rising, and I stubbornly pushed it back, knowing that I was being unreasonable.

“He has a very calming effect on you.”

The person in question burst through the door of the auditorium then, followed by a breathless Rose. They both paused, looking almost astonished, and I realised that Hazen was still holding my hands. Pulling out of his grasp, perhaps a little too hastily, I bent to retrieve my fallen books, and we walked to where the other two stood waiting.

“Are you okay?” Rose asked me, placing a comforting hand against my arm. “Cale made it sound like an emergency.”

From her expression, I assumed that they had all been waiting for me to blow up, probably for days now.

“I’m fine,” I said, before Hazen could answer. “But…” I looked away for a moment, to Cale, unable to help the imploring expression that must have fallen over my face as I beseeched those familiar, russet-brown eyes, and Hazen’s words echoed about my mind.

He has a very calming effect on you
.

“I think I’d like someone to come with me tonight, to Nareon,” I said.

Cale arched a brow, apparently not expecting this, and then he gave a short nod.

“Of course, Little Synfee. It isn’t my usual Saturday, walking into a kingdom of life-force-suckers. Even so… I don’t think I could refuse you a thing, especially when you look at me all helpless like that.”

I rolled my eyes at him, glad that he wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, and relieved, too, that he didn’t seem afraid at the prospect. I gave Rose’s hand a squeeze, but she looked unconvinced, and as we left the empty auditorium, she linked her arm through mine, her grip a little too tight. We followed Hazen out of the building and across to the north-eastern corner of the Academy, a tense silence hanging over all of us, until we reached the giant stone watchtower that stood at the very edge of the Academy grounds. It looked out over the walls of the kingdom, and to the northern forest beyond. Until now, I had thought it abandoned. I noticed Rose staring up at it in apprehension then, and I followed her eyes, my brow furrowing.

“Who exactly is this retired professor?”

“His name is Joseph Harbringer.”

I paused, my hand twitching back from the rough texture of the abraded outer walls.

“What? Like
the
Joseph Harbringer?”

Cale smirked, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“We went to see him when we were your age, me and Hazen. Fair warning, he’s completely bonkers.”

“Why are we here then?”

“Because you’re completely bonkers as well,” came Hazen’s dry reply.

I turned to him, my mouth falling open. “Did you just make a joke, your High Tacitness?”

He narrowed his eyes a little, and didn’t even crack a smile, but Rose snorted in an almost uncharacteristic loss of composure. Ignoring us both, Hazen moved around to the other side of the watchtower, and pushed aside a heavy coating of vines to get to the door beneath. He tried the handle to no avail, and then placed his hand against the door, his expression as blank as ever, even when there was a rusty groan, followed by a click, and the door opened on his next try. Cale and Rose didn’t appear surprised, and stepped through into the darkness first, Rose pulling me along behind her.

“How did you do that?” I asked Hazen as I passed him.

“I have a mind bending ability, remember? It’s not all that different.”

“So you read the door’s mind?”

“No, smartarse, I triggered the pulse in the mechanism that unlocked the door. It’s just like diving into your mind and activating a false brainwave to cause your leg to jump.”

“Yeah, sounds awfully similar.”

He ignored my sarcastic remark and brushed past me, as the other two had stopped at the base of the wooden staircase leading up to the top of the tower. He took the lead, apparently not disliking the task as much as the others, and we followed, passing a number of unmarked doors, all closed and probably locked, and having to even jump over a few missing steps. When we reached the top, I was faced with one of the strangest sights I had ever seen. A large wooden door was set into the wall right before us, except that the level we were on seemed to be some kind of greenhouse, with a musty roof of glass tiles arching above us, minus a few missing panes. There was a ladder going up one more level, ending in a trapdoor set into the ceiling, and some of the vines had almost completely overgrown it.

All around us flew little, mechanical birds, the likes of which I had seen all of the professors use to carry messages around to each other. Except that these birds all seemed to have something wrong with them. Chipped bronze armour, a missing scroll-case, or—in the case of one lopsided creature flopping about—only one wing. They twitched and jerked, some struggling around on the ground, getting tangled up in the foliage completely covering the floor, some accidentally flying into the glass roof in their bids for freedom.

“Completely bonkers,” Cale muttered again, staring at the door.

Chapter Eleven

Monster of a Different Sort

The door that we had all crowded around was painted blue, with a large, garish red stripe running straight down the middle. On top of that was an awkwardly oversized nautical steering helm, battered and weatherworn, with a few notches missing, attached to the door at eye-level.

Hazen strode right up to the door, nudging a little bird out of his way, and knocked sharply. The reply was instant, and the voice nothing like I had expected. It sounded as if it were coming through the helm before us, and when I narrowed my eyes on the centre of it, I could make-out a tiny peephole. He had probably been watching us since he heard us on the stairs.

“Go away.”

The retired professor was indeed a man, though he didn’t sound anywhere near old enough to be retired. There was a pleasant cadence to the way the two spoken words had rolled into each other, and his accent was a little stuffy, but not all unpleasant. The person behind the door sounded like a younger version of my uppity history professor, Barlow. Perhaps Harbringer had been brought up in one of the Tiered or River cities.

“We need to talk to you.”

Silence met Hazen’s words, but then a few moments later the door swung inwards, and I found my mouth dropping open a little. He was huge, a little older than Cale and Hazen, and a fair bit older than me, but still, he was barely old enough to be considered a seasoned teacher let alone a retired professor. His hair was messy and too long, hanging about his shoulders in silky disarray, the colour a shade similar to the rich burgundy that my mother’s had been. Perhaps too similar. His eyes were cold and dark, inky black and set into a viciously beautiful face, and the large frame that now crowded the open doorway was almost vibrating with power, the sinewy twist of muscle evident beneath his plain clothing.

“You’re a
synfee
,” I spluttered rudely, sensing no fae shimmer to his skin, nothing else that could explain the physical pull of his savage beauty.

His gaze swung to mine, and narrowed. I could sense his surprise and annoyance, but then his eyes touched upon my own features and he fell back a step.

“This isn’t funny,” he said, turning back to Hazen and fixing him with a stare that sent chills down my spine, making me glad that he had looked away and spared me the direct contact of that frigid displeasure.

“I’m not a damn Academy councillor. Whatever problem she has, I can’t do anything for her.”

“Give her some credit,” Hazen replied, apparently unfazed. “She’s lasted this long without anyone coddling her. This is about something else. She needs to learn to fight.”

The annoyance melted out of his face, and I got the feeling that people didn’t often manage to shock him. He turned his stare on Cale and Rose, examining them slowly, and then finally looked back to me before holding his door wider and stepping back.

“Come on in, don’t mind the mess.”

The others went first, and Rose had to pull me along again, because in that moment, I was undergoing a serious re-evaluation of everything that I knew of my mother’s race.

Did I really know so little? Had every conclusion that I had ever come to concerning the synfee population been coloured by years of myth, fear and prejudice?

Joseph Harbringer. It was a name that I had grown very familiar with in my childhood, a name that I had known even better than the names of the current royal family. Over a decade ago, during the biggest revolt that the Tainted Creatures had ever staged, Joseph Harbringer had been the one to rise up and send them into exile. His powers were supposed to be legendary, though, looking around his circular room of broken machinery, I was struggling to see any evidence of it. There were more plants crowding beneath the few scattered windows, vines scattered with purple flowers sneaking up to escape the pushed-open panes and breathe the air beyond.