Chapter Sixty-Seven DÉJÀ You
I’m freaking out. I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t want to kill him. Jude sees the panic work its way across my face. So he bends down and puts two fingers on the leopard’s neck.
“He still has a pulse,” Jude announces. “You just stunned him. He’ll be fine once he comes to.”
“Kind of wish he was dead,” Ember mumbles.
“Let’s at least get him away from the waves,” Mozart offers, taking one of his arms. Jude takes the other, and they start to drag his rag doll of a body up the beach.
As they do, a wolf crests the ridge by the admin building, running straight toward us. My fight-or-flight mode immediately kicks in, and I raise my paws in defense. At first I’m completely freaked out, but when he comes into view and his silver eyes meet mine, I realize this isn’t just some random wolf.
It’s Luis. And he’s okay. Roughed up, but okay.
For the first time since I washed up on the beach, fear gives way to relief, because Luis is alive. He made it through the portal and the ocean, and he’s right here, in front of me.
He runs straight toward me, shifting and wrapping me in a hug. I try my hardest to keep my tail exactly where it is so I don’t hurt Luis more than he already is.
“How did you get out of the water?” he asks when he finally lets me go.
“Jude found me.” I do my best to keep from blushing. “How about you?”
He lifts a brow. “I’m a wolf, baby. I doggy paddled my ass back to the beach.”
“That’s got to be one hell of a doggy paddle,” I tell him with a huge grin.
“We should probably hurry this reunion up,” a British accent calls as Remy and Izzy come into view. Looks like Remy has recovered from his brush with Izzy’s control issues.
She points to the beach where the leopard Mozart dropped in the ocean has emerged looking like a drowned rat. And he looks pissed.
But right behind him is past, present, and future Simon. He’s got legs, but water is streaming off him in sparkly waves, and his eyes are glowing a deep, rich gold. It’s mesmerizing.
The leopard by Jude’s feet stirs as his waterlogged counterpart realizes fresh meat is right behind him.
“Go!” Simon yells at us as he locks the leopard in his hypnotic gaze.
“The dorm,” Jude declares, and everyone takes off running against the buffeting winds.
It takes longer than it should—running in a hurricane when you’re flat-out exhausted sucks—but eventually we stumble into the middle of the dorm’s common room. Or at least, what I think is the dorm’s common room. Because, from what I’m looking at, it looks like at one point this place was decked out in ornate plaster starfish and glass sea urchins. While in the future, it’s become an arcade, complete with air hockey tables and very high-tech game machines.
One by one, everyone comes bursting in through the doors, drenched and panting for breath. Even Simon, who has miraculously caught up with us. He skids to a stop and slams the doors closed with the force of his whole body.
Everyone has shifted back to their human form, which leaves me the only one not to have done it. It’s not that I don’t want to transform. I just don’t know how. I’m petrified to end up unmeshed all over again.
Ember figures out what the problem is before anyone else, because all three versions of her pull me aside.
“You’re overthinking it. You just need to imagine being in your human form and it’ll work.”
“That’s it?” I ask, highly skeptical.
She snorts. “Well, don’t imagine you’re Zendaya and expect it to happen. But if you picture yourself, it should be a pretty easy transformation.”
I’m not sure I buy it, but I figure what’s one more near-death experience for the day?
“Don’t think about what happened earlier,” Ember advises as I start to close my eyes. “Just picture your human form and will it to happen.”
I do exactly what Ember tells me. I close my eyes, picture myself in my human form, and try to manifest it.
Except…nothing happens.
Ember rolls her eyes and barks, “Concentrate. You have to really believe it’s going to happen or it won’t.”
I spend several seconds thinking specifically about my dark-brown hair, which I’m pretty sure looks like a rat’s nest at this point, courtesy of the monster attack, rain, and seawater.
Then I move on to thinking about my blue eyes and their surprisingly long lashes. And the freckles on my nose. And the small dimple in my chin—
All of a sudden, a bunch of sparks start to go off inside my body. They start at my feet and work their way all the way up to my chest and neck and head. Moments later, I’m back to regular human Clementine.
“See? Told ya it was easy.” Ember looks me over from head to toe, then holds out her hand. “Give me your hand.” She nods to the one the leopard tried to gnaw off.
“What?” I ask, mystified.
It looks better than it did in paw form, but I think that’s because something about the magic in the shift helps heal wounds.
Warily, I do as she asks.
“What you did with those asshole cats earlier,” she says as she holds my hand up to right below her face, “it was pretty badass.”
And then she bats her eyes several times until a number of tears run down her cheek and onto my hand. “I don’t do this very often, but…” She shrugs.
At first I have no idea what she means, but then a weird tingling starts in my hand. At first it’s only where her tears touched, but then it’s all the way to the bone. Instinctively, I pull it back only to watch in astonishment as my skin—and the sinew below it—knits back together without so much as a scratch.
As soon as I’m healed, Ember drops my hand before wiping her damp cheek a little self-consciously.
“I don’t understand,” I tell her, still a little shell-shocked at what just happened.
“Phoenix tears can heal a lot of things,” she answers with a little quirk of her brows. “They can’t bring people back from the dead, and they can’t completely reverse mortal injuries, but they do a pretty good job on everything else.”
“Thank you.”
She turns and heads back to the others, all of whom are standing around trading war stories.
Everybody but Jude and Remy, that is. I start to ask where they went, but before I can, the door to the supply closet bursts open and the two of them pile out, their arms filled with whatever Calder Academy uniforms they could get their hands on.
Hoodies, T-shirts, sweats, athletic shorts, socks—all in a variety of sizes and all in bright cardinal red and black. “Well, at least the rescuers will be able to spot us,” Luis comments as Remy tosses him a red T-shirt and shorts.
“True story,” Simon laughs, clapping him on the back.
Jude hands out clothes to everyone else before walking up to me with a black T-shirt and a pair of red shorts. “There are sweats, too, if you want them.”
“These are good, thanks.”
I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just kind of stands there and watches me. I start to get annoyed, but then I realize I haven’t said anything to him, either. Not because I don’t want to, but because I have absolutely no idea where to start unraveling the jumble of words and emotions spinning around inside me right now.
Maybe it’s the same for Jude.
So instead of reaching for sarcasm like I usually do, I just take the clothes and start to walk away. Hopefully one of us will figure out the right thing to say sometime soon.
But I’ve barely gone a step when Jude’s hand closes lightly over my elbow. The second his fingers brush my skin, my heart speeds up and my head goes a little dizzy. Which is stupid. This is Jude, just Jude. Only…not.
I force myself to calm down—to take a breath—as I turn back to face him.
He looks the way he always does—eyes serious, full lips pressed into a straight line, face blank. Except then everything softens—he softens—and I feel the tight ball inside me, made up of too much emotion and too much loss in too short a time, start to slowly unwind.
Even before the corners of his lips quirk up in that teeny tiny curve that’s as close to a smile as Jude gets and he says, “Whatever happens, I’ve got you, Kumquat.”
I lift a brow and give him a small smile of my own. And answer, “I think you mean, I’ve got you, Sergeant Pepper.”
And then I turn and walk away before I grab him and kiss him the way I’ve been wanting to since we were fourteen years old.