Shade of Deception (Two)

One - SoD

One:

Dreams of the haunt filled nights burst from me, as I woke to the thumping sound of a massive dictionary on my desk. I was lucky that I remembered not to sear the teacher with silver flames or blast her back with an instinctive expressive thought.

“Jeeze, what century is this again?”

I marveled at the ancient-looking dictionary.

“You do know there are apps for that now, right?”

I asked my teacher in a sassy tone. She and I had not gotten on at all since we met this year.

“Miss. Graves, how you have managed to become a senior this year truly amazes me. You’re always late and you cannot seem to stay present during class when you are finally here!”

Mrs. Gonzalez summarized a short list of my common infractions. I managed to hide the smirk on my lips—mostly. I wasn’t sure if the laughs that bubbled up were for me or against me, but I managed to unabashedly preen before my crowd.

While I had once been a sort of It-chick, my days of juvenile popularity were behind me. After I discovered I was a shade, in the wake of my one and only girlfriend’s death, I was the unfortunate scapegoat for all that ales the town of Doylestown. Humans love to play pin the blame. Though, what I have learned of the larger immortal community, I could say it was not much different.

The community of expressionist species I have encountered to date are generally susceptible to the exact same emotional polarities as mortals. However, when mortals fight, you don’t end up with cataclysmic world-reshaping as a result.

Word is the final hours of the Endless War on earth had been what reformed the continents. The human speculation about Pangaea were not unfounded. In fact, it was said to have been my father’s people who sundered the super landmass. They obliterated a massive portion of the Architect’s forces.

I am what you get when you combine a genocidal species with a unwitting human female victim. My mom had died giving birth to me, even now that I know the story, I am not certain why she held out so long. Why she prolonged the madness gripping her in carrying a powerful half-ethereal child to term. My kind are called shades. We have our very own humanoid body, which apparently is not the case with our paternal race. We have all the powers, and we have a meatsuit. Essentially, some of existence’s most monstrous and vicious megalomaniacs have been shades.

Whoever coined the old phrase, “You don’t pick your family,” couldn’t have been more accurate. While I was a shade, I was the first female shade to ever be born. Many did not believe s*x would matter. To this world, I was a very visible timebomb waiting to detonate and oppress or murder entire swaths of reality.

(So, no pressure to be a good girl, right?!)

“What can I say, I’ve got a great memory. So, did you have a question, or did you merely stop your pittance of a lecture to rouse me from my blissful slumber?”

I asked in a snide tone. I was not incredibly good at being the constant target for nearly two years concurrently. I used to believe I was more evolved than to be bitchy. To be honest, I feel as if this is letting everyone off easy, however, it is still extremely bitchy at the end of the day.

Again, my class laughed, and I could tell it was mainly at me rather than with me. That annoyed me, but I have learned to ignore the people my age. It was the nosey and obnoxious adults who bothered me. Personally, I am not sure what they believe their own brand of hazing is going to accomplish with me. They might as well pull me into the town square and tar and feather me like we are in the eighteen-hundreds—or whenever that was a thing!

“I tell you what, answer the current question correct and I will overlook this latest outburst.”

Mrs. Gonzalez challenged me. I could hear her thoughts swimming to the surface fully now.

‘She’s not even worth the damn paperwork to give her detention. I wish they would just cart her back off to prison again.’

I picked through her mind, and I replayed her lecture through her own eyes, her own memory. I arrived at her question as she looked down on me with disdain. Without any preamble, I rose, and I walked to the board and IK picked up the yellow chalk and began to write out my very own short-essay on the dysfunctional romance that never was, between Ophelia and Hamlet.

“Ok, ok, that is quite enough!”

Mrs. Gonzalez exclaimed, and she followed up with, “Now return to your seat.”

‘It’s like a steel-trap, that girl’s mind. If only she were not so bent on destruction.’

I spared her a small expression of profound pity. She could not begin to fathom what my world would look like if I were expressing even a modicum of my potential power in chaotic fashion. I was not merely the whirlwind; I was the big bang that shaped the cosmos. My life energy had been enough to extinguish even a baby Leviathan as it was hatching itself into my reality—and hence why I was blamed for what the town believed to be drug induced hallucinations. I was not certain how or why this all fell on me, but it appeared the only somewhat plausible excuse that Hawker and Senna had been able to express the humans of Doylestown into believing.

In my more paranoid moments, I contemplate the possibility of Senna sowing this discord to encourage me to move on. However, she has been very neutral with me even though I spend more of my time in her people’s community outside Doylestown, than I do anywhere else.

Senna’s youngest child, Sky, is the future leader of her people, the Nix. Sky is what you can call a dragoness. Only the apex male and female can manifest to a full dragon shape. So, in short, I lived in a town where three deadly dragon leaders roamed freely prowling the nights. If humans were aware of the true scope of their reality, they might never sleep a single wink again! Hell, I have trouble and one of those dragons is now my best female friend.

“Yo, could you back the f**k off a bit! You’re practically breathing fire all over her!”

My other bestie whisper-yelled to me form across the row. Clarke was the only human anyone knew of currently who straddled both worlds completely. He was human evolution’s next destination in the flesh. He could express power and transmute alchemical properties as well as any magus. I had not known what a magus even was, until Clarke came home stary-eyed about meeting one on envoy from the City of Hidden. A city that neither of us was currently permitted to visit because I was an undesirable.

I spared my now eighteen-year-old bestie a look. His super curly raven hair was still puffy in what could almost be described as a mini afro. His rich chocolate eyes were hot blanketing me with the warmth of brotherly love and compassion. I could feel the emotions pouring from Clarke. He knew I was deeply empathic, as well as telepathic, and many other very annoying powerful things.

Clarke seemed to infuse and fortify my emotions multiple times a day. Every time I felt close to truly snapping, I could feel him there supporting and loving me. I might never, ever desire a man sexually, but I eternally desire the camaraderie that I have with Clarke.

He had gone through another growth spirt and was not about six-four. Which left me in the dust completely, having grown another inch-and-a-half over the last year-and a-half. Clarke was still a starting member of the basketball squad. I watched him off to the side on game nights. He could be the town hero, except for his unfortunate friendship with me. Clarke was also the only one who knew the truth about the night of the Leviathan attack.

Apparently, a dead reaper—sort-of like a commanding officer of the Architect’s deadly kill-squad troops, began to try to re-manifest himself. He fed off the latent expression in the town and gathered up the energy of all the living masses and through a mixture of dark expressive thought force and sheer brutal force of power, he was reborn a Leviathan.

Clarke and I, along with the help of a young sassy dragon, and a deadly but sexy reaper commander, stopped an apocalyptic event from unleashing itself fully upon the surrounding county. From all I have learned in the aftermath, Leviathans should not be able to manifest on this world any longer. Something about it being closed too tightly after the Architects basically kicked everyone else out and proceeded to rule the world for over a thousand years.

My cheeks still ran hot at the mere thought of Nadia Patterson. She was the very embodiment of every teen angst cliché. She was the bad girl who literally had a hand in many terrible acts through her lifetime. She was also something very unique, a Homunculus. I have yet to pry loose much in the way of information on what type of expressive alchemy had created the being now known as Nadia. I merely knew that she was a tool of the Architects, a tool which had somehow managed to cover for us in the wake of the Leviathan incident. She could have handed Sky and me over on a silver platter, but even nearly two years after, and she was keeping mum on our location.

Sky was already a very infamous character in the immortal community. Even now as she was nearing her fifteenth birthday, she held all the hopes and dreams of entire species form many dimensions of several universal existences on her fragile-looking shoulders.

I could write some very amusing scifi novels off all the craziness that was in my life! That gest had not been nearly as amusing when Senna heard it, but I could still see the possibilities.

“Thanks, bro.”

I murmured in a slightly bashful tone to Clarke. He knew I did not like overt displays of sibling-like affection. We were in that awkward young-adult phase, where we seemed hyper-0aware of everyone around us, and we were completely naked before their gawking gazes. My self-conscious side seemed worried people would again get the wrong idea about Clarke and me. Hell, half the girls he has tried to date over the past year-and-a-half have ended things due in no small part to our proximity.

Look at it from my viewpoint. I sacrificed everything I had going for me, just so the ungrateful and vengeful mortals could keep breathing. I was not going to give up my anchor of sanity for some fleeting fling. We knew after all, no human could last long enough to truly be compatible with either of us. Clarke, Sky, and me would never age a day beyond eighteen. Eighteen, the date of my birth felt like an ominous cloud hanging close on the horizon. It was not merely my birthday. It was also the date which my only love had been possessed by the then weakened diffused spectral wrath=pre-leviathan.

“School’s almost done.”

Clarke added lamely and I rolled my eyes and pretended to care about Mrs. Gonzalez’s lecture.