Seven Wardens: Books 1-4

Chapter 1-1

CHAPTER 1

They'd stolen her tail! Again. It should have been getting old, but Amber was just as angry as she had been the first time. Stealing a beithir's tail should be a crime. Well, it probably was, but nobody cared to punish those girls. They did whatever they wanted, and if that included bullying one of their fellow students, so be it.

At this school, the teachers swore by the motto to let the pupils fight it out amongst themselves. It was supposed to make them stronger. Well, without her tail, Amber was nothing. She was going to have to grow a new one.

She sighed. Would this drama never end? Yes, it would. Only eight months to go until she'd graduate from Ben Vair College. It couldn't come soon enough.

If only Mrs Battleboard hadn't told the class that story about beithirs. Before, everyone assumed she was a snake shifter, a harmless one at that. They may have seen she had a tail even in her human form, but she usually kept it well hidden under baggy shirts. Luckily, they didn’t have P.E. lessons at college; she would have dreaded changing in front of the other girls. It was normal for her to see her tail sitting just above her bum, but not for the others.

So she’d ignored them, they'd ignored her and she'd been fine with that. Now, they knew differently. They knew she was a relic who could regrow her own tail, just like lizards. And they saw it as a challenge to find out how often she could do it.

She'd grown to hate their transformation classes every Thursday. She'd never seen the point in them either. She'd been born being able to shift, not like some of the others who'd had to learn it. It was second nature to her, no, it was her nature. Nowadays, she spent the entire lesson trying to hide from Tamsin and her friends. They were a wolf pack who had become excellent snake hunters. She'd lost count of how often they'd cornered her and ripped off her tail. If she got it back within a few minutes, she could reattach it, but of course they never let her do that.

If only she had her beithir powers already, but they usually manifested in la beithir’s early twenties, and she'd only just turned eighteen. If she had them... they'd never hurt her again. But for now, she could just as well be a snake shifter - without a tail.

She bumped into something hard and was ripped from her self-pitying thoughts. Something... no, someone blue was looking down at her, obviously displeased she'd not looked where she was going.

It was a man, his hair blue like cornflowers, his ears pierced with dozens of silver rings. He looked so out of place here that she had a hard time not to stare. Ben Vair was a boring, down-to-earth place, if you ignored the fact that all of the students had some kind of supernatural power. There were no punks here. And yet...

"Do I have something on my face?" he asked in annoyance, rubbing his chest where she'd rammed against him.

"No, sorry," she mumbled and turned to leave, hoping he'd forget her. She was in enough trouble already, and not having her tail was making her even less self-confident around others. It also disturbed her sense of balance. It would take at least two days for it to grow back, and even longer to be back to its old length. And for that, she'd need to go down to the secret lab beneath the school to recharge. At least no one else knew about it, and she'd have some peace for a change.

"Bugger off," the man growled and she fled, ignoring the giggles of the other students as she ran through the corridors to her dorm. It was the only good thing about staying at Ben Vair: having a room of her own. Originally, the dorm was meant for six girls, but there weren't enough sixth form students in her year to fill it. The others preferred to squeeze into one room rather than share with her. Amber didn't have a problem with that. She liked her solitude. It gave her space to think.

Right now, she was thinking about the strange blue-haired man she'd bumped into. He looked too old to be a student. But Ben Vair would never employ someone like him as a teacher. The professors here were old and traditional. Even the younger ones behaved as if they were ancient. It seemed to be in the job description that to work here, they needed to be boring. She had no idea where all the good teachers went after their training. There weren't that many supernatural schools out there. She knew of one other in Scotland, and a few more down in England and Wales.

She sat down on her bed, wincing at the reminder that her tail wasn't where it was supposed to be. Such a strange feeling. Did the others ever feel the absence of their tails? Or were they used to it, having been born without one?

For a beithir, a tail was a sign of pride. Amber's mother had hers adorned with rings and colourful tattoos. She herself had had two little rings on hers... before the whole drama started. Now she didn't bother with it. Maybe once she'd left school she could go back to making herself look pretty. Until then, she was going to have to keep her head down and pretend to be invisible.

Which involved not bumping into strangers.

She groaned. She'd made a fool of herself. Again. If she hadn't been one of the college's best students, she'd probably have been expelled a long time ago. Chaos and misfortune followed her, no matter what she did. Maybe it was her beithir heritage. Maybe some of the legends describing her kind as the bringers of doom were true. But her family had made sure to disprove that rumour. Her parents were respected, much-loved pillars of their community, and with Amber's older sister working in the local nursing home, they were all assets rather than a nuisance to their surroundings. But not her.

She lay down and stared at the bare ceiling. When she first moved into the dorm, she'd drawn little stars on it with a white pen. They were almost invisible unless you knew what you were looking for. It was one of her many secrets.