Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
I woke the next morning, feeling a lot more optimistic about everything.
Miki-Leopard’s joy the day before, both from discovering we had a mate and from playing with Shadow, made everything seem less dire.
I realized how blessed I truly was.
I’d been kidnapped into the shadows and tortured there, but because of that terror and pain, Miki- Leopard was born. Without such trauma, I may never have known the joy of having a leopard, let alone a shadow-one.
It was like Jasmine said, after all. The hardship and pain were worth what I’d gained.
I had to believe the same of my mate.
He’d made my leopard so happy just by existing. How much happier might we both be if I stopped worrying so much and just gave Elliot a chance?
Before I could do that, though, I was going to have to survive my first Extreme Sports Ed class.
Ugh.
Jasmine would say at least Elliot would be there.
For me, though, that almost made it worse, for it meant that my fated mate was about to see how completely incompetent and hopeless I was when it came to any type of physical activity.
Joy.
However bad I anticipated a course named Extreme Sports could be, trust me when I say that it was much worse than even I could anticipate.
First, there was the giant, intimidating circle drawn on the floor right in the middle of the gymnasium. I saw a circle like that and instantly thought horrible things like demon summoning and human sacrifice.
I know circles of power are also used for good, but when I’m walking into a classroom that I associate with exercise, a demonic evil I wish were banished from my life, I can’t help but make negative connections rather than positive ones .
Besides, I’d also heard about the battle ring and I had a terrible feeling that was what this circle was for: trapping students together to battle it out until one was left standing.
This was definitely not the class for me.
If I weren’t already sure of that, the drill sergeant masquerading as a professor would have convinced me.
With an unfortunate name like Professor Puddlemoan, I suppose I couldn’t blame the man for getting his joy wherever he could, but for goddess sake, what kind of maniac came up with this curriculum?
Unlike my classes the previous day, Puddlemoan didn’t ease us into the course by talking about safety or setting boundaries or rules.
No. He just barked out orders and sent students by the droves diving out small doors in the far wall that led somewhere not fun I was sure, though, hopefully not to their deaths. I wasn’t entirely convinced, though, considering we were on the second floor of the castle and I was pretty sure those doors wouldn’t lead anywhere but outside.
“Well, Mitchell?” He barked at me.
“What?”
“Get your ass in gear! This course isn’t for lollygaggers.”
“Yes, but where exactly do those doorways lead?”
“To the obstacle course. Now get going.”
Great. That’d been on my list for Elliot, but he’d distracted me with all his mate talk and now I was completely unprepared!
More students went hustling out the doors, which were in sets of two like French doors, but were about half their typical height. That’s when I saw Elliot. He and Jahrdran were standing against the back wall, between two sets of doors, watching me.
Ignoring Professor Puddlemoan, who continued barking at me, I walked across the floor to join Elliot.
When I got close, Jahrdran pushed away from the wall, said, “See you out there, Markham,” and disappeared through one set of doors.
“Hey.” I came to a stop in front of Elliot.
“Hey.”
Sexy Bad-Dragon. Miki-Leopard had been sleeping all morning, clearly exhausted from her play date the night before, but predictably, she perked up the moment she heard Elliot’s voice.
“I’m sorry about yesterday.” I stared up into his gorgeous, brown eyes and found myself drowning in them. Sexy, indeed. “I was just taken off-guard. My leopard didn’t warn me, I guess because she didn’t know either, so you know, I reacted poorly.”
He just looked at me for a moment. “Finding your mate’s supposed to be a good thing.”
I nodded. “I know. I just have a lot of—” I shrugged. “Anxiety, I guess, around pretty much everything right now.”
“I’m the one who should be apologizing. I shouldn’t have dumped that on you when you’re dealing with so much else.”
“No, Elliot, I’m glad you told me. I-I just want some time to get to know you first. Is that okay?”
“Of course, it is, Mikaela.” He slid his hand around my neck beneath my braid and leaned down as I lifted up.
“Are you serious right now?” Professor Puddlemoan bellowed the words not two inches from our ears.
As if we’d been in sync our entire lives, Elliot and I very slowly turned our heads toward the professor and stared at him. Other than that one slow movement, nothing else changed about our posture. We were still leaning into each other. Elliot’s hand was still cradling my neck and we were still standing so close, I could feel the heat emanating from his body.
Yummy. I assume Miki-Leopard was referring to Elliot and not Puddlemoan, who stood glaring at us, his face mere inches from our own.
When we just continued to stand there, staring back at him, he finally let out a loud, “Harrumph,” took a couple steps back and snarled, “Well, hurry it up. The obstacle course is waiting.”
He stormed off and Elliot and I grinned at each other.
“He kind of ruined the moment, huh?” Elliot asked.
“If he didn’t, his breath surely did.”
Elliot and I made a face at the same time.
Bad-Breath.
Definitely Bad-Breath .
“Come on,” Elliott said. “Let’s get through this course.” He turned and tossed open a set of the doors, revealing nothing but sky.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“We’re supposed to figure out a way down so that we can enter that Obstacle Course there.” He pointed down toward the lawns behind the castle and I saw something so terrifying, I wanted to cry.
I shook my head. “No way, Elliot. I’ll never make it through all that.”
He grinned. “Don’t worry about it. Most of us don’t the first ninety-six tries or so. There’s no pressure except what we put on ourselves.”
“What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?” Puddlemoan shouted.
“No pressure, huh?”
“You just gotta ignore him. The rest of us do. Come on.” With that, he pulled me through the doors to stand on a small ledge outside, which was quite frankly terrifying.
“Elliot! What the hell?” I hissed, grabbing hold of the door jamb behind us, but yelped when the doors started to close. I barely got my fingers out of the way in time.
“Sorry about that,” Elliot said. “Should have warned you. If we’d stayed much longer in front of the open doors like that, they would have thrown us out.”
“Literally thrown us out?”
“Literally.”
“This school is ridiculous sometimes.”
He grinned. “True, but doesn’t it also make you feel unbelievably alive?”
I had to think about that for a moment .
Did it?
I was a little chagrined to realize it kind of did.
How demoralizing to realize all that education and evolution and we were still just base animals, rooted in instincts, at our core.
Elliot grinned. “You ready to enter the obstacle course?”
“What? No! But I am ready to get off this ledge. How about you just fly us down?”
He snickered. “That’d be too easy, don’t you think? First, I’m not allowed to use my wings to get me down to the obstacle course. That would give those of us with wings an unfair advantage, so we’re required to pretend they’ve been injured and we can’t fly while going through the course.”
“That’s total bullshit!”
“Of course it is, but it’s also the reason your powers were stripped from you the minute you went through those doors.”
“What? That can’t be right.” I reached for my magic, but literally nothing came at my call.
Miki-Leopard?
I still here.
“My leopard’s still there.”
“So’s my dragon. We just won’t be able to shift while in the obstacle course, but we can still draw on their strengths. So that’s your first lesson of the day, Mikaela. Just because you’re in human form doesn’t mean you don’t carry with you right now all your leopard’s strengths. You talked about not being athletic. Well, you have a powerful leopard, who I guarantee, is very athletic. You just have to learn how to tap into her natural athleticism—her sense of balance, her strength, her agility and her speed—to power you past your own human limitations.”
“I can do that?”
“With practice, yes. So that’s the plan for today. We’re going to run that obstacle course and your leopard’s going to help you do it.”
I sighed. “Fine. So how do we get down there?”
“Depends. The way down isn’t always easy to figure out.” He leaned forward, looked over the ledge and nodded. “Today’s method is pretty straightforward, though.” He pulled a couple pairs of gloves from his hoodie pocket and handed one set to me. “Make sure you bring those to class every time because Puddlemoan won’t give you a pass just because you might burn your hands.”
“You do know that fire can’t burn me, right?” I pulled on the gloves anyway, just in case.
“Not that kind of burn.” Elliot said, flexing his now gloved hands. “Today we get down by climbing a rope.” With that, he spun so he faced the building, then stepped back off the ledge.
“Elliot!”
“There’s a rope right beneath your feet,” he called up. “You just have to reach it and use it to climb down.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” I carefully lowered myself to my knees and peeked over the ledge. Oh, goddess. What the fuck ?
What the fuckety, fuckety-fuck?
He was hanging from a rope, arms wrapped around it, foot somehow looped in it and he just looked so calm hanging there, about a hundred feet from the ground.
“We’re only on the second floor,” I shouted to him. “Why are we so high off the ground?”
“This is Blackthorn Academy. Do you really expect everything to make sense around here?” he called back.
Damn. That was a good point, but it didn’t change the facts. “I can’t do this, Elliot. I have zero upper body strength.”
“Mikaela, take a breath. Hold it.”
I did what he said.
“Good. Now exhale. Take another breath. And exhale.”
I sat there on the ledge, breathing while Elliot just hung mid-air as if he had all the time in the world to talk me through breathing.
“Now reach for your leopard and ask her to help you grab the rope.”
Rope!
Without giving me a chance to respond, Miki somehow rolled our body off the ledge and managed to catch the rope as we swung down.
She moved us with such force, we slammed into the building, but we managed to hang onto the rope.
“Wow.” Elliot stared at me wide-eyed.
I shook my head. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t even get a chance to ask, she just took over.” I glanced down. “And this is really far up.”
“Okay, don’t look down. Just keep looking at me and do what I do. ”
For the next several minutes, Elliot talked me down the side of the building, hand over hand. He initially tried to teach me how to lean back and somehow just slide down the rope, but I kept panicking, so the slow way it was.
Eventually, we reached the ground and all I wanted to do was collapse, but Elliot took my hand and led me to a freaking wall that we were supposed to climb.
“We just climbed down a damn wall! What kind of sadistic obstacle course is this?”
He just chuckled and led the way up the wall. He gave me a hand at the top, then spotted me on the way down the other side.
I can honestly say that without Elliot there to talk me through my moments of panic, I never would have even made it off that ledge, but without Miki-Leopard lending me her strength, I would have been a dark smear on the ground the first time I had to hang from a rope using just my upper body strength.
And without her agility, I never would have been able to climb that second wall, which involved leaping from one handhold to the next.
Unfortunately, the obstacle course just got worse from there.
After the wall, we had to crawl through a bunch of tunnels and swing across a pool of lava. There was a cave—an actual freaking cave—at some point and the deeper we went, the tinier the space until we were belly crawling our way through.
When it finally opened up to a larger space, we were attacked by a bunch of bats.
I’m proud to report that I wasn’t the one screaming like a girl as we escaped that part of the course.
Somewhere in the middle of the course, when we kept getting zapped by sparks of electricity every step we took, I lost my temper.
“This is bullshit,” I snapped, glaring at the cavernous room we found ourselves in. I was standing on a block of stone, Elliott was one stone slightly to the left and ahead of me and we were surrounded by quicksand. We had no choice but to use the stones to move through this room, but every time we did, we got shocked.
It was a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t kind of situation and it was pissing me off.
“Let’s try to make it to that boulder over there.” I pointed to the left of where we were, a trip that would require using four more stones for Elliot and five more for me.
“You realize the boulder will probably shock us even worse than these steps have,” Elliot said.
“Who cares? My plan is to climb on top of that boulder and not move again until class is over.”
Elliot grinned. “I like the way you think. Let’s do it.”
Five increasingly painful shocks later, I was one jump away from that damn boulder.
Elliot had let out a shout when he’d landed, which was enough to let me know that it wasn’t going to be fun, but I was committed now.
“You just make the jump,” Elliot said. “I’ll make sure you don’t fall in.”
It was only after I’d made the leap, in the split second before landing, that I wondered if Elliot would get shocked again since he was still on the boulder.
The answer was yes, but he still managed to catch me in his arms.
We both fell and slid a little, coming perilously close to the quicksand that surrounded us, but Elliott caught a handhold at the last minute. With one arm wrapped tight around me, he dragged us both to the top of the boulder.
When we reached it, we collapsed and just lay there, breathing.
“How is this idiotic obstacle course supposed to help me survive Zowen?” I demanded.
“What are you talking about?” Elliot sat up and looked down at me.
I just waved my right hand as if that would somehow dismiss what I was about to say. “It’s a theory Kasi and Jasmine have, that the professors are making me take all these courses to get me ready for when Zowen comes back for me.”
“Hold on a minute.” Elliot sat up straighter. “You think he’s going to come back for you?”
“Of course, he’s going to come back for me, Elliot. That was never even a question. He told Kasi in their confrontation that he’d be coming for me and for her.”
Elliot looked furious. “No one told me that. No one told me he’d threatened you!”
“He tortured me, Elliot. I think he did a hell of a lot more than just threatened me.”
“What the fuck do you mean he tortured you?” He roared. “You were only in the Shadow Realm for thirteen minutes! How could he even have had time?”
“Time’s different in the Shadow Realm. It stretches a little at the edges, with every minute feeling like—I don’t know.” A hundred years, a tiny voice whispered in my head. “An hour maybe.”
“Son of a bitch,” Elliot muttered. “I was right there. All along. I was in the Academy, taking classes, not even aware that my mate was in another year, taking classes nearby. Not a clue she’d been taken or tortured, was lying in a coma. I mean, I knew what happened, of course, but we’d never met, so I didn’t know we were mates.”
I sat up. “It’s not your fault, Elliot. I didn’t know either. Maybe we weren’t supposed to know. Because you know what? I wouldn’t change a thing about what happened.”
He gave me an incredulous look.
“No, really. I just realized the other day that I wouldn’t have my leopard if?—”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. I’ve known since I was sixteen that I wasn’t born with a leopard. Maybe when she first came to me, I deluded myself into thinking she was a regular shifter-leopard, but now I know the truth. She’s not. Or at least she’s not one hundred percent shifter. She’s a shadow-leopard, Elliot, and if I hadn’t been taken into the Shadow Realm, she never would have been born and I can’t imagine her not being part of my life now. So I wouldn’t change anything, except maybe it would have been nice to have met you sooner.”
“Mikaela,” he murmured, then leaned over and kissed me.
The feel of his lips on mine, finally, sent heat surging through me.
I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him back, trying to ignore the sound of Miki-Leopard cheering in the back of my mind.
Elliot rolled us so that he was lying on the hard rock and I was stretched out on top of him, both of us struggling to get closer, when he stiffened beneath me and a second later, a bolt of electricity, the strongest one yet, zapped me, making me cry out and shudder.
When it finally passed, I found Elliot’s arms were clasped around me tight.
“Are you okay?” He asked hoarsely.
“Yeah. But I am so done with this place.” I struggled to my feet, reached deep inside and found Miki-Leopard and a fucking ocean of power waiting for me there.
Elliot bounded up to stand beside me. “What do you want to do?”
“I want the fuck OUT!” I roared the last word and it came out sounding suspiciously like a leopard’s roar, deep and raspy.
It wasn’t the sound of the roar that startled us both, though. Instead, it was the fire that boiled from my mouth and barreled across the cavernous room.
Fire with lightning bolts of ice at its center.
The flames crackled all around us, touching every stepping stone and smothering the electrical sparks that resulted.
The lightning at the center of the flames sent bolts into the quicksand and froze it solid.
A few moments later, the flames died out and everything went dead silent.
A moment after that, the artificial lighting in the room went out and our powers came back online.
We used a simple lighting spell to make our way across the frozen quicksand, jumping from one dormant stone to the next (neither one of us wanted to test our abilities to skate across the frozen quicksand) and the moment we were free of the room, Elliot transformed into his dragon, tossed me onto his back and took to the skies.
As we flew over the castle, it became apparent the power outage went much further than the one room we’d been trapped in.
Either I’d blown a very large fuse or I’d taken down the entire electrical grid of the island.
And so ended my first Extreme Sports Ed class.