Hereditary (25 page)

“Stay right there, I’ll fetch you a proper crutch.”

He disappeared into the barracks, and I felt my apprehension grow. The stranger had put a glamor over me, which meant that he might just be powerful enough to keep tabs on me, and know if I said anything to anyone. And then a more pressing problem occurred to me. If I was supposed to stay away from Nareon, then how would I survive past the next week?

Rendal returned then, handing me a wooden crutch, and I forced a smile, thanking him. Walking to the Academy was awkward and painful, but the stairs to Harbringer’s watchtower would have been impossible. I planned to slide my paper beneath the door and leave to seek out the others, but once I got there, I found that I couldn’t go any further, and lying down for a sleep seemed the most logical course of action to take.

I woke again, with Harbringer’s face hanging over me, wavering in and out of focus.

“I’ve sent a bird to your friends, they should be here soon,” was all he said as he hunkered down to pick me up.

His hand slipped beneath my injured thigh and I screamed, batting him away. He let go instantly and stepped back, staring at his arm, now covered in blood.

“What the hell?” Cale arrived first, eyes wide.

Hazen was next, and he narrowed his eyes on my face, but whatever was in my mind, I gathered that he was blocked somehow from it, as his face creased in frustration. Rose was the last to arrive, and she turned a frightening shade of white, eyes flicking from Harbringer’s arm to my crumpled and—as far as they could tell—uninjured form.

I opened my mouth to say that it was a glamor, but no words came out.

“I can’t—” I tried again, but still nothing came, and soon tears of anger were mixing with those of pain. “I can’t say.”

Harbringer knelt down beside me again. “We’ll just figure it out another way then.”

He placed his hand against my ankle, and I wondered why everyone thought my ankle was the problem, perhaps it was part of the glamor. He brought his hand away, checked it, and then moved to the other ankle. It took him a few attempts before he reached the wound, and both Cale and Hazen stepped forward, looking as if they would object to where Harbringer’s touch had moved. They paused when I let out a low moan of pain, and Harbringer’s hand came away bloodied again.

“Alright Harrow, hold tight. Cale, I think she’s wearing another glamor, see what you can do.”

Cale jumped forward, knelt on my other side, and focused on me as Hazen moved in behind him, probably to intervene should Cale fall into another one of his strange seizures. Several long minutes later, everyone gasped, and Harbringer manoeuvred me back into his arms again, this time ignoring my weak cry of pain.

“Rose, go and get the Academy nurse, we need to bind this up properly before she bleeds out; whoever tied this up did a terrible job.”

I should have been insulted, but I was fairly sure that I was slipping into unconsciousness again.

Chapter Eighteen

Shifting Fellowship

The next time I opened my eyes, I was in Harbringer’s room, and the Professor himself was reading my paper, which I had managed to smear with blood. When he noticed that I was awake, he cleared his throat and sat up, placing the paper aside and moving to sit in a chair that had been placed beside his bed.

“I sent the others back to class; I needed space to work on your mind.”

“Someone shot me,” I said, more to test my ability to say the words than to actually inform him.

I looked down at the wound, and saw a fresh bandage laced about my thigh, peeking out from beneath the bloodied hem of my dress. I couldn’t feel it at all. In fact, I felt wonderful.

Harbringer smirked. “Yes, I gathered that.”

“You got the memory?”

“I did.”

“You’re good at that.”

His smiled disappeared, and I felt a shudder pass through me, but thankfully it stopped there.

“I’m so sorry, Beatrice.”

“Just Bea.”

“I had to be sure that you had no conscious recollection of killing him.”

“I wish I did.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if he hated me, or if he was disgusted, or disappointed—

“If he wasn’t already dead, I might have killed him myself.” He broke through my thoughts.

My head snapped up. “Why?”

He shrugged, a careless gesture that looked out-of-place, coming from him.

“He deserved it. I think most people would have wanted to kill him, and not just because he was a worthless, despicable excuse for a human being. I believe it’s also the effect you have on people. Once you get past the whole synfee thing, there’s a vulnerability in you that seems to call to people.”

Without waiting for an answer to that bizarre statement, he turned and grabbed my paper, tossing it onto my stomach.

“This is terrible.” His mouth twisted into a sardonic frown. “You can’t see yourself that way.”

“It’s fiction, Harb—er, Professor.”

He laughed then, and once again, I was reminded of his synfee beauty, the flash of brilliant white teeth, the perfect mouth pulling back in compelling mirth and those black eyes flashing with something that wasn’t cold and frightening for once.

“How old are you?” I heard myself asking, though I was immediately swamped by embarrassment, realising that I sounded just like Kaylee or Kai.

“Twenty-eight.”

“That’s absurd. You may look it, but there’s no way you really are.”

“Oh? How do you come to that conclusion?” His eyes were amused again, and I had to draw my focus away from them to make the mental calculations.

“I was only four when the Tainted Creatures revolted. If you’re twenty eight, then you would have had to have been fourteen when you supposedly won the war.”

One of his dark, winged brows arched over now-guarded eyes, and I found my mouth falling open.

“You were fourteen,” I said, numb.

“I wasn’t the only fourteen-year-old in the war, Harrow. Some of the boys were as young as eleven. They held the King’s standard as we marched on the Tainted Creatures, or came as squires for the older knights. Besides, I was only a low-entry soldier. It was toward the end of the war. We had lost so many people that they just wanted to fill up the ranks again, and they didn’t really care who they used.”

“Is there another war coming? Is that why your class was started up again?”

He folded his arms, considering me.

“We’ve had disturbing reports of movement from the mountains, where the vampire clans are in hiding, and several renegade parties have been sighted by scouts, travelling between the known synfee border and the mountains. When you came and told us about Nareon, I passed the word on to one of the King’s advisors, and he ordered the class reinstated.”

Something about that didn’t sit right with me, but I decided to keep it to myself for now, and carefully constructed a wall around my mind. Harbringer, who had turned to look out of a window, jerked his head back to me, but I faked naivety, and continued our conversation.

“Do you think whoever shot me this morning knows that I spoke?”

“No, there was no other presence in your mind. A glamor that powerful could only have been synfee-made. I’d say they’ve finally heard of your involvement in helping Nareon track down the Force-users. If they were synfee, they wouldn’t have stuck around. It’s rare enough for them to cross their own border, let alone come this close to the kingdom.”

“Nareon does it.”

“He
what
?”

“He doesn’t hurt anyone, he only came when I was going through my transition. And a few other times, to speak with me.”

Harbringer looked very disturbed by this news, and so I again found myself speaking to get him off the subject.

“What do I do now? I can’t stay away from Nareon, I need his energy.”

And if I don’t go back to him, he will come to me
.

“I think this is getting too messy for you to handle on your own. The King wants to become involved, and if he gave you a guard, you’d be able to go back to Nareon safely.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Beatrice—”

“Bea.”

“Right. Look, we both know that you’re no criminal, but you’ve killed in both worlds now, you regularly visit the synfee king,
on his own land
, you’re in no position to refuse the King if he wants to get involved.”

“I don’t understand, are you saying that he’ll label me as some sort of traitor if I don’t do what he wants?”

Harbringer’s face became cold again, and I found myself tumbling right into the unending, unlit depths of a gaze fraught with warning.

Be careful, foolish little girl
, it seemed to say.

I gasped and drew in too much air—it all seemed to freeze in my throat, causing me to splutter clumsily and put a hand to the flighty thud of my heart. He softened a little, and passed a hand over his face, the gesture uneasy.

“The King is not Hazen,” he muttered, his voice low as if people might be listening behind his door. “You cannot judge the man by his son. Do you understand what I’m saying, Bea?”

I nodded, still unable to speak, and struggled to a sitting position, the movement finally bringing a twinge of pain from my otherwise-numb leg.

“After class, you’ll be moved to the Academy infirmary. We didn’t want to do it while there were still students around.”

I nodded again.

“And tomorrow I will take you to the King.”

I didn’t nod this time, and his face moved closer, his hands falling to his knees as he leant into me. I was torn between breathlessness at the raw savageness of his synfee beauty, and fear of the too-intense, frightening shimmer in his black eyes. I found my heart thudding against my ribs again, and forced down the absurd urge to climb onto the windowsill behind me. A trickle of compulsion reached my mind, and one of his hands settled over the bandage on my thigh, as if to remind me of its presence.

“You have too many enemies already. You’re not synfee, you’re not human, you’re a threat to anyone and everyone. Your power is feared and admired, people will want you for it, just as people will hate you for it, how long did you really think you’d last without him noticing?”

“Forever,” I muttered.

He laughed, the sound—while appealing—possessed no humour, and I shuddered, but he released another trickle of compulsion, easing the fear away.

“How do you do that,” I wondered aloud, “with your glamor up?”

“I don’t wear a glamor.”

“Oh.”

His hand was still on my thigh, and I flicked my eyes to it, trying to find a hint of the golden shimmer that covered my own skin without my glamor in place, but I couldn’t see it. And then I realised something else. His hand was still on my leg.

“Do you feed off desire, like the rest of us?”

“No.”

“Do you—” I started to ask him if he had the
other
synfee appetite, but he cut across me.

“No, Beatrice.”

“So you get all the benefits, and none of the downfalls?”

“I still have the push.”

“Right, the push. I suppose it’s as bad as mine. Do people die when you lose control?”

The question had been scathing, full of jealousy and bitterness for this beautiful, powerful man who didn’t fear tearing the Academy apart with his storms, or killing other people with his black moods. But he smiled when I asked it.

“My strongest power is the transfer of other people’s power. Once, I lost control, and things started to happen all around me. Things that only the people around me should have been able to do.”

I narrowed my eyes on his hand again.

“Wouldn’t you already have had their powers?”

“No. I used to wear gloves to block it, but in time I managed to control it. I can touch people now with no fear that they will give me their abilities. But the push sucks whatever power is around, and passes it through me. If we lost control at the same time, I imagine the consequences would be catastrophic.”

I realised why he had had been smiling then, and despite myself, I began to smile too.

“I know why Nareon didn’t kill me.”

“Oh?”

“He loved my mother.”

I looked up at him, and saw that his eyebrows had shot up.

“Nareon? Love?” He was stunned.

“I know he’s evil. I’ve seen it. But when he found out what had happened… what you saw in my head—” I swallowed over the lump that had formed in my throat, and looked back to his hand, needing to avoid the eyes that had forced the scene into my head in the first place.

“…He lost it. He killed a man. He loves me as well, because he loved her.”

He fell back, and his hand slid from my leg. It was so casual a movement, I began to wonder if he had not even realised that it had been there to begin with.

“God. You feel sorry for him, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “I told you, I know he’s evil.”

“But you need him.”

I sighed, looking away from him again, and staring glumly out the window to the forest beyond.

“I need a lot of people, apparently. I need Hazen to make sure I don’t kill everyone. I need you to make sure I don’t kill myself. I need Nareon, I need the King, I need…”

I trailed off, because he was laughing. I shot him a quelling look, and even managed to hold it as he finished and held up his hands.

“Easy, Harrow. I get the picture.”

“Bea,” I reminded him again, vaguely.

Rose knocked on the door then, and Harbringer motioned the door with a lazy wave of his hand. It swung open.

“Cool,” said Rose, skipping into the room. “Can you teach me that?”

“Not unless you have a wind ability, a mind-bender ability, and a crazy-abnormal amount of control,” Cale answered, following her into the room.

Harbringer looked amused at that, and together, he and Cale manoeuvred me out of the bed. There was a sharp sort of ache that had begun to pulse in my thigh, and my foot had pins and needles, but I suspected that whatever I had been given would hold until we reached the infirmary. Hazen cleared the top of the stairs as the others helped me to hop to the door, then he took Harbringer’s place at my other side with his usual quiet stoniness.