Mooncalf

A/N: Hello, my lovelies! I rather struggled with this chapter, so let me know what you think, okay?




Chapter Ten


“What have you done?” I heard as if from a distance. I became aware of someone standing near me, someone apart from the small crowd of humans swarming away from the street on their feet and in their cars. I hissed and mentally swatted at them. Despite all the energy I was using to maintain the storm illusion and encourage the people’s fear, it was very easy to focus a small bit of that energy on convincing whoever dared speak to me to shove off. They would have felt a hard shove in their middle and stumbled back a few steps.

When the hand fell heavy and comforting on my shoulder, I clawed at it. My fingernails scraped hard and I could suddenly smell blood ripe in the air. Someone had the nerve to touch me now, when power and glee suffused me. That made them a perfect, specific target for my anger. Why settle for merely frightening a crowd when I could really hurt someone? Surely they deserved it. I’d never met a human or demon that didn’t deserve pain and punishment.

The hand tightened, spinning me around as its mate settled on my other shoulder. I slammed my fists into the chest before me, spitting and kicking when the arms pulled me close and encircled me. I howled in rage and struggled harder. The storm illusion faded from the street. The tornado siren ceased, so I took up its wail. The arms held on, a solid band separating me from the chaos calming beyond me. Finally, I shut up and stopped struggling.

I smelled salt from the damp shirt crushed to my face, fine cologne, and just the tiniest whiff of sulfur and decay. The chin my head was tucked under and the arms around me belonged to my father, then.

“Sorry I scratched you,” I muttered. He pressed his lips into my hair. And then he stepped back, hands still on my shoulders.

“What the hell were trying to achieve with that stunt, young lady?”

I was saved from having to answer by Jane, who stood a few feet away, looking at me with guarded eyes.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” she said carefully. Police sirens were screaming closer, and a fire truck careened around a corner some ways down the street to take care of the light post, I presumed.

Pops nodded his agreement. I thought he would turn the location to smoke and move us back to campus, the way he does sometimes, but instead he turned up a side street, clearly intending to walk. It seemed a much longer trip this time. The uncomfortable silence didn’t really help.

“How did you know?” I asked Pops finally.

“Your friend,” he answered carefully, “called me.”

My eyes shot to Jane. “Thank you,” I said, mostly sincere. I had been completely out of control. And it had felt amazing. Adrenaline still pumped like a drug through my bloodstream, and I already wanted more. No wonder everyone I met was instinctively afraid of me.

“Not me,” Jane stated. “Stick. I imagine they’ve taken him to the infirmary by now,” she added for my father’s benefit.

He saw my alarmed look and explained, “I was a bit upset that he hadn’t kept you in check. But I think I only dislocated his shoulder. I don’t think his ribs are broken after all.”

Oh. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I started walking faster. My bender hadn’t been Jack’s problem; he hadn’t needed to call Pops, though it had been pretty nice of him. Completely ill-advised and generally dumb, but nice. I felt sort of not good about him getting hurt on my behalf. I’d have to have a chat with him to ensure that he didn’t try interfering the next time. For now I knew, there would be a next time. I was done sitting on my ass letting the Guardians and their (okay, well-intentioned, I admit) flunkies control my life. I was going to find this Nail-Knocker and beat his head in. If the Guardians had a problem with that, well, what did I care? Like they had been so much help, protecting me from this Nail-Knocker person, and the demon who attacked me, and convincing me I was evil and soulless when I wasn’t. And now this Mary said that they had already judged me, and how did I know she wasn’t telling the truth? She seemed to know more about the rules in whatever screwed up game this was than I did.

That was going to change. Now we would play by my rules.

My father stopped abruptly outside the infirmary. “I have to go, sweetheart,” he said, eyeballing the door of the small building warily. I nodded. The Guardians, or at least one of them, must be inside. I squeezed his hand and passed over my room key so he could go back to hell before my dear Guardians tried to kill him. Jane returned to the girls’ dorm with him. I gave her a tentative smile, but she turned before she saw it. Yeah, I may have to do some patching up with her. Again.

I found Cardinal Federico and no less than four of his cronies in the waiting room of the infirmary. Freddie conversed in whispers with Nurse Karen while another Guardian paced and muttered about the “strange beast,” a reference to me via The Tempest. William Shakespeare just had to go and ruin my life, I thought dully. The three remaining Guardians were squashed onto the small sofa shoved beneath the window—clearly an attempt to make the room feel cozy instead of cramped. I don’t think the poor sods relegated to the couch would have said the attempt was successful. Then again, they might have. Their sort did seem to put tact before brutal honesty—yet another human weakness.

Everyone stopped abruptly when they saw me enter, and the silence was so complete I may as well have brought a vacuum in with me. As one, all six adults turned to look at me.

“I don’t see you in here often,” Nurse Karen noted, a crease forming between her brows and above her smile. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said, distracted. “Is Jack here? Can I see him?”

“Yes, but he’s resting now, so if you would come back later, in the morning—“

I probably should have listened to her. Instead, I pushed past the door leading to the hallway off which Nurse Karen’s office and the sick rooms opened. Finding Jack was easy, because his room was the only one with the door closed. I locked it behind me, because the Guardians have absolutely no respect for privacy. And they’d probably be pissed that I’d just totally ignored them.

Jack was awake. “You’re back,” he said.

“Yeah. You look like crap.” He did, too: pasty-faced with dark shadows beneath his eyes, and his right arm in a sling. He had a sort of glazed look about him, making me wonder what exactly Nurse Karen had given him for the pain. If it was dulling the edge of the anger that he would surely be feeling toward me, though, I was all for it. Something felt tight in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if Nurse Karen would have something for that, too.

“I did warn you that my dad would hurt you if you told him anything happened to me,” I groused after a too-long minute of silence.

Jack shrugged with his left shoulder. “Just doing my job.”

“Yeah. About that. You’re going to have to stop. Not that I don’t appreciate it, because sometimes I sort of do, but there’s no point in getting you in any more trouble with the Guardians or Pops. And I definitely plan on rocking the boat. I’m going to find this Nail-Knocker and I’m going to beat his face in, for starters.”

“Don’t be a moron, Cam,” Jack said with disgust. “You know perfectly well that I can get you through this Trial.”

“I know,” I said, even though he was talking about a much smaller picture than I was. If it were just my soul at stake, then whatever. My soul was always on pretty shaky ground. But now, there was more involved.

Someone knocked heavily on the door. Nurse Karen would have been quieter, I imagine, out of respect for Jack’s injury. Which meant it was one of the Guardians. Or all five of them. Clearly Freddie was taking my latest transgression seriously if he’d called in so many reinforcements.

“Open the door, Cam,” Jack urged. “Let me talk to them, do a bit of damage control.”

“You think Nurse Karen has a key?” I asked. Jack nodded, so I opened the window, punched out the screen, and shimmied through. I even closed the window behind me as well as I could, so Jack didn’t freeze to death. Also so I didn’t have to put up with his yelling at me as I left.

I figured I had at least five minutes before the Guardians realized I’d left the infirmary, and I had a lot to do. In my dorm room, I quickly threw some clean clothes and some toiletries into a duffle, grabbed Grigori’s bowl, and departed. My destination? The one place no one would ever think to look for me—Marabell’s room, six doors down and across the hall.

I could have knocked, but that would have given her the wrong impression—namely, that she had any choice in this matter. Instead I pulled a well-worn deck of cards from my backpack, easily convincing a passing sophomore that she saw me leaving by the front door. In less than a minute I had worked my playing card magic and had Marabell’s door open. Another girl saw me, convinced I was hanging around nervously by the fire escape, my bags at my feet. For good measure, I ensured that the girl in the room next to mine later would remember hearing me cry for another twenty minutes or so before my window slammed shut. The last one, my neighbor, was actually a bit hard. It had been a long day for me, and I’d already used my talents in an unusually big way. I was tired. And that girl was a total skeptic, the kind you can hardly convince that the sky is blue, if they’ve decided otherwise.

My escape hidden by such conflicting information, and with no other witnesses to confuse, I slipped inside Marabell’s room. And promptly gagged. Marabell screeched, and she and her boyfriend set to putting their clothes to rights. At least they were still wearing most of them. I clapped my hands over my eyes and desperately wished I could convince myself I hadn’t seen anything. Unfortunately, my talents didn’t work on myself or other demons, like when I’d tried to push my father away and it didn’t deter him a bit. (That happened on page 103, if you twits reading this have forgotten.) As it was, I was going to have that image of Marabell and her boyfriend—what was his name, anyway?—burned into my skull for the rest of eternity. I seriously entertained the idea of giving myself up to the Nail-Knocker right then. What was hell compared to the memory of a half-naked Marabell?

When the rustling of clothes stopped, I carefully peeled my hands away from my eyes. Happily, Marabell now had all her clothes on. And her boyfriend had disappeared from the room entirely. And since I was standing by the door, I knew there had to be another way out of the room. I sighed. Well, at least that nightmare of a situation had offered that bit of useful information as a consolation prize.

“What are you doing here?!” Marabell howled. Actually, I’m paraphrasing because what she really said had too many four-letter words for publication.

“I’m scarred. My eyes are wrecked for life. I think I want to cry,” I muttered, shoving her backpack from the center of the floor and nabbing one of the pillows from her bed. Settling myself on the floor, hugging the pillow, I willfully shoved the images to a dark place in the back of my brain that I never visited. Marabell repeated her question, at a slightly lower decibel.

“I’m your new roommate,” I said.

“Bull. Get out.”

I smirked. This might actually turn out to be fun, as well as traumatic.

“Now, now, Marabell. Do you really want to kick me out? I mean, before you ensure that I’m not liable to forget and accidentally mention to a teacher that you had a boy in your room?” I thought this was really rather helpful of me.

She hissed, “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, but I’m worried for your safety, my friend. I’ve only got your best interests in mind.” I smiled, as sweet as the gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

Rather than responding to my comment, Marabell skewered me with a look. “Why can’t you stay in your own freaking room?”

“None of your business,” I snapped.

“Hey. You might be able to blackmail me into letting you stay here,” she gritted out, looking chagrined, “but I think I at least deserve to know why I’ve got to tolerate your perfectly intolerable company.”

“I don’t have to tell you that, you ugly cow.”

Now she grinned at me. “Ah, well. It’s not like you have proof that J.D. was here, anyway.”

“But I’m very convincing,” I assured her. I could have, of course, simply convinced her to let me stay and to keep her mouth shut about it. But, you know, I was pretty tired from my outburst downtown.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of. And I’m not going to be able to go to class for a few days. It’ll be better if everyone thinks I’ve left campus.”

Marabell’s eyebrows knitted. “What kind of stuff?”

I spoke without thinking. “The kind that put Jack in the infirmary with a dislocated shoulder.”

Her eyes went wide. “It’s the mafia, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Marabell, that’s exactly it. So you’d better cooperate with me, or you’ll find yourself at the bottom of Lake Michigan showing off your new cement shoes to the fishes.”

At least she was smart enough to figure out that I was making fun of her. “Well,” she huffed, but couldn’t think of anything to follow that up with. I pulled a blanket off the foot of her bed and scooched down until I was curled up the floor, glad Marabell had covered the hardwood with a fluffy rug, even if it was a particularly putrid shade of purple. I pulled a black zip-up hoodie out of my duffel and draped it over the white pillow. I might be on the lam, but that was no reason to put up with hives. It was barely eight o’clock, but I was suddenly exhausted. Turns out, battling the forces of good and evil takes a lot out of a girl.

I wondered if the Guardians would penalize my Trial score for this. I wondered if that was Mary’s intention when she said I’d already been judged. Tomorrow I’d find out who that stupid girl was, and then I’d break her fingers. I thought there was a good chance she was the Nail-Knocker, too. So maybe I’d break her toes, too. Then this would all be over, and I could reschedule my volunteer time at the Humane Society and make up with Jane again for scaring the bejeezus out of her with my bender today.

I sat up suddenly, startling Marabell, who was IMing with her boyfriend.

“What is your problem, you goth freak?” she said.

“How did J.D. get in and out of here?” I asked.

“None of your business.”

She was right, but I didn’t care to hear that. I glared at her, and she showed me how her window conveniently overlooked the little foyer by the back door of the dorm. From there, if I stretched enough, I could just touch the handrail of the steps with my toes. I hurried back to the infirmary. The windows were dark, and I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. Silently, I picked the lock and tiptoed down to Jack’s room. Pausing outside the door, I listened. His breathing was deep and slow. He was sleeping.

I opened the door just a crack and squinted. He shifted with a grunt, his shoulder clearly hurting. A thought sent his way had his face relaxing as he forgot his pain. It wouldn’t last long, I knew. A couple of hours, at most. But it was the best I could do.

I slipped out of the infirmary, hauled myself up into Marabell’s room, and fell gratefully asleep.