The Unfavorable Heroes

Chapter 2

Charlie didn’t like the bus. She didn’t like sitting in a seat by herself with no one to talk to while everyone whispered about how much of a loner she was. So instead, she walked to school. It was cloudy in Montgomery. Rain was sprinkling down, unable to decide whether it wanted to be rain or if it wanted to be snow. Charlie kept her clear umbrella overhead, forcing herself to push thoughts of her annoying family out of her mind, and instead, she replaced them with thoughts of the Quintet group.

“I don’t need them,” she mumbled to herself. “I’ll defeat Rezin all on my own if I have to.” Wherever he may be. “I’m plenty used to being on my own. It’s probably better this way, anyway.” It didn’t matter that Albus—the strange man who had created a hologram of himself to show up on Earth while he was back in his realm, which was also called Albus—and Kire’s book, Halo, had told the Quintets that they needed to work as a team. Charlie thought she was strong enough. She also felt brave enough to handle it. The rest of the Quintet team could pretend like what happened at the end of last semester never occurred, but Charlie could hardly sleep at night knowing that Rezin was still out there somewhere and that Earth was still in danger. Sure, Charlie and the others had successfully destroyed the Djigi—the portal from Yash’s realm to Earth set up by two mirrors facing each other no matter how far of a distance away. Yash still had one of the mirrors, but Charlie and the others had destroyed the one here on Earth, making it impossible for him to get over—or so it was rumored to believe. Charlie knew that nothing was impossible, though. If there was another way for Yash to get to Earth, he was going to try and find it.

* * *

Charlie went to the greenhouse when she arrived on campus. It was deserted like usual, but she wondered if that was only simply because she had gotten here so early. She wondered if, in just a few minutes, the rest of the g**g would show up like they had been doing in this spot frequently last semester.

While Charlie waited to find out, she decided to test out her magical ability from the Pendantix to see if she still had it. She focused on some plants grouped together in one of the corners, and right before her eyes, she made the wilting ones green again. Smiling because her gift truly had returned, she then made slow-growing plants get taller. Then she had a thick green vine snake its way off the wall and place a flower behind Charlie’s ear. She had a tree branch’s arms grow long and wide, and she made them pick up pots and gardening tools, twisting their branches tightly around the items to grip them. This was more like it. She couldn’t mess around with the plants in her house like this with her family home all the time. It felt nice for Charlie to finally be somewhere where she could be alone with them.

Charlie thought everything was going great. But then something strange started happening. The branches suddenly dropped what they were holding; a couple of flowerpots fell to the ground with a loud shatter, and hand rakes and shovels clanged together as they, too, hit the ceramic flooring. The world around Charlie started swaying, and her body felt drained as if she were about to faint. She sank to her knees; that way, in case she did faint, she wouldn’t be as in danger of hitting her head on her way down.

She dizzily looked around the greenhouse. All of the plants had returned to exactly the way they were before she started messing with them. Charlie found this infuriating. Sure, she had taken a little break from the Pendantix, but she should still be able to do all this stuff easily by now.

Fairly quickly, Charlie started to feel better, though. Another thing that came with being the owner of the Quintet Gifts was that she got super healing powers—immortality from disease and old age until the gifts had done what they needed to. Or until Charlie and the others perished. Before the five of them had received the gifts, many others had tried protecting the earth with them as well, but they had all ended up dying at the hands of Jago and Heno.

Once Charlie was no longer dizzy, she got back to her feet. Something dripped on the ground in front of her white sneakers. She looked down and realized it was a drop of blood. Quickly, she wiped underneath her nose with the back of her hand.

The blood was coming from her.