Fire & Flood (Mythverse #1)

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

The next day in flight class I’m doing everything I can to show Ocypete I’m ready. That’s not easy when I’m still rattled by everything that went down last night. At least the news went out this morning that Fern is healing from her burns. Slowly but surely. Themis said by the end of the week she’d be all better and ready to attend the Spring Fling.

Ready to fly; ready for the truth. Unfortunately doing everything I can mostly amounts to getting about five feet off the ground. But it’s five more than last week, and I’m sweating when I glide back down to the grass.

“I flew!” I say triumphantly.

“You jumped really high,” she corrects me, but she’s smiling. Progress is progress. “Now try again. This time once you’re in the air I want you to listen to your wings. You can pump all you want, but to fly you’ve got to find the currents in the air. Your wings will be sensitive to them, if you learn how to interpret what they’re trying to tell you.”

Listen to my wings? Be one with the air currents? A couple months ago I would’ve laughed at this speech. Today, I’m nodding intently.

“Okay,” I say, and take a running leap. I spread out my wings, which are a shiny silver at the moment, and try to feel what they’re feeling. Instead of thinking about the fact that I have wings—which is what I’ve been doing—I try to think of them as something separate from me, something with abilities of their own. And desires of their own, too. The wings want to fly. I need to get out of their way.

Sure enough, I feel a downdraft, small and subtle. I turn into it, opening my wings fully. With a whoosh, I’m pulled into the air way faster than I expected, the wings taking full advantage of what I let them do.

“s**t,” I say, breathless as I look down at the ground, thirty feet below me.

“You’re alright,” Ocypete’s voice is in my ear as she hovers beside me, her own wings supple and sure. Meanwhile I’m pumping away like a crazy person. “Relax,” she says.

I do, and the feeling returns again, each inch of my scaly wings responding to something different in the air. Problem is, my eyes are still on the ground, and I’m completely freaked out.

I plummet. Strong arms encircle my waist at the last moment. Ocypete and I roll together across the grass, me swearing with each bump and her swearing at me.

“You were so close, Edith!” She’s yelling at me as she comes to her feet, not with excitement either. “You had it, kid!”

“I know, I just…got frightened.” I am embarrassed. And frustrated. This feels like when I kept failing my driving test. Except worse. This is like having a car strapped to my back and being told it’s staying there regardless of whether I can figure out how to make it work.

“You’re afraid of heights!?” Pity screeches at me. “What kind of flying creature is scared of heights?”

“I’m not scared of heights,” I tell her, rubbing my elbow, my wings a crumpled mess around me, and now a dark brown. “I’m scared of falling from them.”

Ocypete’s wings snap shut behind her and she folds her arms. “Very funny. You’re dismissed for the day. Go to the infirmary; that cut above your eye looks pretty nasty.”

She turns her back on me and I shout after her, “I think I almost shifted.” She pauses. “The night of the fire,” I continue. “I…I had scales on my hands.”

Her back stiffens so I know she heard me, but she takes flight and I know better than to chase after her; with Pity it’s all or nothing. Either I fly and she tells me everything, or I fall and get nothing.

I brush myself off, wiping at a trail of blood coming from above my eye. “Awesome,” I say, looking at the red on my fingers. I’m enough of a target for the vamps already, without smelling like dinner.

And one vamp in particular is targeting me. This morning at breakfast, Val showed up and slid onto the bench beside me. Greg went batty—literally—as Val slung an arm around my shoulders and tugged me close.

“So glad we don’t have to be secretive anymore, my little wingading,” he’d purred as he leaned in for a kiss.

I stuck an elbow in his throat. “It is a relief, my little leech. But remember I told you how much I hate PDA?”

We might’ve glared at each other for the rest of lunch period, if Cassie hadn’t screeched, “Oh wow, you guys make such a cute couple!”

“Screw it,” I say under my breath, shaking the memory of breakfast from my mind, and head for the infirmary. Cassie meets me at the head of the path, holding her wrist.

“What happened?” I ask.

“A baby hydra bit me in Monster Identification,” she says, and shows me the two fang marks on the inside of her arm. “What’s with your eye?”

“Crash and burn,” I say, and immediately regret using the word burn when a couple of vamps hiss at me as they walk past. So I guess my fake relationship hasn’t cleared my name with the vamps. Here’s hoping the healers are feeling more warmly toward me.

“What are you going to do about the dance?” Cassie asks. “Everyone kind of…”

“Hates me?” I can’t help but sigh.

I’d been hoping we were done with this subject of conversation. The dance is the last thing on my mind. When I got back to the room last night the first thing she said was, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were dating Val! Why are you going to the dance with Greg? Is it because of the interspecies taboo?”

I swallowed the urge to tell her the truth. Even Cassie admitted she was not to be trusted with secrets. Instead, I just shrugged and said it was still new and I was afraid Val would dump me and humiliate me in front of the whole school. It was not actually that far from the truth. Then, before Cassie could ask any more questions, I crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head.

Now she picks right up from last night, her hydra bite not sufficient enough to distract her from the idea of interspecies love. “It’s like Twilight. You have to choose between a hot shifter and an even hotter vampire.”

“Okay, first of all, how do you know about Twilight?”

“One of the greatest pieces of literature in the modern age?” Cassie shakes her head in disbelief. “How could I not know about it?”

I nod. “Right, of course. But second of all…Greg is not a hot shifter. Most of the time he’s Greg and the rest of the time he’s a bat. So…”

“Okay, you have a point,” Cassie concedes. And I think that’s the end of it, but then she turns to me with a look of despair, “So does that mean our double-date is not happening?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t know anything.”

And to my relief she drops it. For now at least.