Chapter Four A Fae Worse Than Death
Lightning flashes outside the room’s lone Queen Anne–style window, slicing through the sudden, unnatural darkness of the early afternoon sky.
As if to underscore the seriousness of the upcoming storm—not to mention the current atmosphere in this classroom—thunder booms seconds later. It’s loud enough to rattle that same window and shake the ground around us. Half the class gasps as the lights flicker, but instead of breaking the tension in the room, Mother Nature’s temper tantrum only ratchets it up higher.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and lightning will strike a Jean-Jerk. Right now, fae flambé really doesn’t sound so bad.
Ms. Aguilar glances uneasily out the window. “With all this lightning, I certainly hope someone remembered to check the fire extinguishers.”
Thunder booms again, and more students shift uneasily. Normally the threat of a September storm wouldn’t so much as get a second look. They’re a way of life here on this Gulf Coast island—especially during hurricane season.
But this one didn’t grow and build the way they usually do. It pretty much came out of nowhere, and its intensity seems to mimic the explosive energy in the room even before Jean-Paul and his band of not-so-merry losers shift forward in their desks like they’ve been waiting for this moment their whole lives.
My stomach tightens, and I slide my legs out from beneath my desktop, preparing for the worst.
“Don’t even think about getting in the middle of that,” the new girl behind me—Izzy, I think her name is—hisses. “I’ve been waiting for them to get their asses kicked from the first day. Yours, not so much.”
“Thanks?” I whisper back even as I tell myself to listen to her.
But before Izzy can say anything else, Jean-Luc half coughs, half laughs as he runs a hand through his long blond hair. “You got a problem, Abernathy-Lee?”
Jude doesn’t answer, just raises one dark, slashing brow as he continues to stare Jean-Luc and the others down. Jean-Luc doesn’t look away, but there’s a sudden glimmer of doubt in his eyes.
The glimmer grows into a whole lot of concern as Jude continues to watch them, the unease in the room becoming so palpable it hangs in the air along with the humidity. But Jean-Jacques must be too self-absorbed to notice as he sneers, “Yeah, that’s what we thought. You’re fucking wi—”
He breaks off as—out of nowhere—Jean-Luc’s hand flashes out, slamming into the back of Jean-Jacques’s head and shoving his face straight into his desk before he can spew any more vitriol.
“What did you do that for?” Jean-Jacques whines as he wipes one dark hand across the small trickle of blood now coming from his nose.
“Shut the fuck up,” Jean-Luc snarls back, but his eyes continue to stay locked on Jude, who still hasn’t moved more than that one, lone eyebrow. But his stillness doesn’t seem to matter to Jean-Luc, at least not judging by the belligerent look on his face. “We were just fucking around, man. We don’t have a problem here.”
Jude’s second brow goes up, as if to query, Don’t we?
When no one else answers—or so much as breathes, to be fair—his gaze shifts from Jean-Luc to Jean-Claude, who is squirming uneasily in his seat. The moment their eyes meet, Jean-Claude suddenly develops a deep and abiding fascination with his phone—one the other three Jean-Jerks mimic with their own phones in short order.
Suddenly, none of them will look Jude in the eye.
And just like that, the danger passes, tension leaking out of the air like helium from an old balloon. At least for now.
Ms. Aguilar must sense it, too, because she lets out a relieved puff of air before pointing to the flowery quote she wrote across the board in bright-pink Expo marker. “‘The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing.’” Her voice rises and falls with the words, like she’s singing a song. She then gestures to the line written below it in teal blue. “‘To let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.’”
Looks like we’re just skipping straight over the elephant-sized fae problem in the room and going with a quote from a dead white guy. Then again, at the moment I don’t actually hate that decision.
After she’s given what I assume must be a dramatic pause, Ms. Aguilar continues. “That, my friends, is a quote from my favorite Romantic poet. Can any of you hazard a guess who it is?”
No one immediately volunteers the answer. In fact, we all just kind of sit there, staring at her in a combination of disbelief and surprise.
Her face falls as she looks around the room. “No one even has a guess?”
Still no response.
When she lets out a heartbroken sigh, one of the witches in the second to last row ventures, “Lord Byron?” in a tentative voice.
“Byron?” Somehow Ms. Aguilar looks even more disappointed. “Certainly not. He’s much more wicked, Veronica.
“Still no guesses?” She shakes her head sadly. “I suppose I could give another quote.”
She taps one cotton candy–colored fingernail against her chin. “Now, which one should I use? Maybe…”
“For fuck’s sake,” Izzy bursts out from behind me. “It’s John fucking Keats.”
Ms. Aguilar jerks back in surprise, but it quickly turns to joy. “You know him!” she crows, clapping her hands.
“Of course I bloody well know him. I’m from bloody Britain, aren’t I?” Izzy snaps.
“That. Is. Wonderful!” Ms. Aguilar practically dances over to her desk to retrieve a pile of packets. “I’m so glad you’ve read him before! Isn’t he just divine? ‘Heard melodies are—’”
“He’s an egotistical blowhard,” Izzy interrupts before the teacher can once again flit from one end of the room to the other. “Just like the rest of the Romantic poets.”
Ms. Aguilar pauses mid-flounder in horror. “Isadora! John Keats is one of the most brilliant poets—nay, one of the most brilliant people—to ever walk the face of the Earth, which I am sure you will all come to understand as we study him for our next unit.”
Oh, sure. Him she stands up for. Maybe if the Jean-Jerks threw Skittles at the pictures of the poets she has up all over the walls, she could actually talk back to them, too.
She walks over to me and dumps the stack of packets on my desk. “Clementine, be a darling and pass these out for me, will you?”
I say, “Sure,” even though my abused body would much rather go with, “Hell, no.”
The Jean-Jerks barely look up when I toss a packet on each of their desks. I expect Jude to do the same when I get to him—but instead he looks straight at me.
The moment our gazes collide, it’s as if everything inside me freezes and burns all at the same time. My heart speeds up, my brain slows down, and my lungs tighten until it hurts to breathe.
It’s the first time he’s looked directly at me—the first time we’ve looked at each other—since freshman year, and I don’t know what to do…or how to feel.
But then his disgustingly gorgeous face goes dark right in front of me.
His razor-sharp jaw tightens.
His light-brown skin pulls taut over slashing cheekbones.
And his eyes—one so brown it’s nearly black and the other a swirling, silvery green—go completely blank.
I’ve spent three years building a wall inside me just for this very moment, and one glance from him takes a stick of dynamite to it. I’ve never felt more pathetic in my life.
Determined to get away as fast as possible, I all but throw his packet at him.
The rest of the class passes in a blur as I beat myself up, furious that I wasn’t the one to shut it down first. That, even after everything that happened between us, he was the one who got to ice me out instead of the other way around.
But as the bell is about to ring and we all start packing up, Ms. Aguilar claps her hands to get our attention. “There’s never enough time, is there?” she laments. “But to combat that problem for next class, I’m going to assign your partners now.”
“Partners?” one of the dragon shifters calls out. “For what?”
“For your Keats project, silly. I’ll assign each of you a partner today, and when you come into class tomorrow, you can start on your projects right away.”
Instead of going down a pre-planned list based on proximity or even alphabetical order like a normal teacher would, she starts looking around the room and pairing people up according to “the vibe she’s currently feeling from them.”
I don’t know what kind of vibe I’m giving off, and honestly, I couldn’t care less. Now that the adrenaline from the chrickler cage has worn off, the pain is kicking in. Add that to the weird shit that just went down with Jude, and I just want to get through my next class so I can head to the dorm to take some painkillers.
Not to mention a hot shower.
I tune Ms. Aguilar out and spend the next couple of minutes daydreaming about copious amounts of hot water, but I jerk back to attention the moment she calls out my name…followed by Jude’s.
Oh, fuck no.