Nathan
Christine appeared in the kitchen with her mother in her arms. She lost her grip, and Lydia tumbled to the floor, splattering blood all over the tile.
Mr. Gavin and Sophia ran into the kitchen. I’d called them as soon as Chris had disappeared. They carried Lydia to her room, and Chris clutched me in a bloody hug.
“I’m sorry, Nate.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I would’ve found you. Go see about your mom.”
She took my hand and forced me to follow her to her parents’ room. Sophia and Mr. Gavin had taken Lydia into the bathroom. As water beat into the tub, Chris joined her family, and I stayed in the bedroom alone.
“How did you get to her?” Mr. Gavin asked.
“I saw the attack happen in my head, and I went to her office.”
“Why are your powers on?” Sophia asked.
“Really, Sophia?” Chris snapped. “Mom is unconscious and that’s what you want to know?”
“Yes, that’s what I want to know.”
I listened to Lydia’s faint heartbeat over the sound of their argument. Thump. Christine ranted about men in gas masks, and Sophia reprimanded her for putting herself in danger. Thump. Mr. Gavin tried and failed to defuse the argument, and someone finally turned off the faucet in the tub. My own heart stopped as I waited for Lydia’s heart to…
Thump.
I finally took a breath. We couldn’t lose Lydia Shaw. For one, I didn’t want Christine to know what it felt like to really lose a mother. My mother wasn’t even my actual mother, but I’d still felt it. It was an unnatural and painful feeling for the person who was responsible for your existence to suddenly not exist anymore. The thought of Christine feeling that kept my ears glued to her mother’s heart.
“They had black candles and black powder,” Chris said. “Her attackers weren’t human.”
Panic rose in my chest. It felt like the beginnings of nausea or the start of a shift. I couldn’t tell, but the thought of magical beings attacking Lydia scared the hell out of me.
“Christine,” Sophia said. “This is none of your business. I promise you that I will check it out, but you will stay out of it now.”
“Stop treating me like that!”
Lydia’s heart took too long to thud again and stole my attention. Christine was fighting for her independence, and her mother was fighting for her life. And that life meant so much to the world. Out of all of the ways to end it, Lydia’s death was the biggest one. If it were to happen today, there was a real possibility that the horrible sounds in Christine’s head would come to life.
Devin had told me once that fear ran the world—not powerful psychics, treaties, or humans who thought they owned everything. It was fear that made all of those things possible. He’d named the fear of Lydia Shaw as the most important component of the “false” peace she’d brought to the world.
One night on the road, he’d ranted about ways to spark real change for our people—the kind of change that would put food in our bellies and money in our pockets, not blood on the streets. I remembered thinking that a bloodless revolution was impossible because of the first war.
The human world could never know that magic still existed, and that forced those of us who couldn’t blend in to hide … without jobs, without food, without choices. And the rest of us had to follow rules that limited the wealth we could pursue because of the things Dreco had done with his riches. So in Lydia’s falsely peaceful world, we were the losers.
That night, Devin spoke about the injustice of it all with tears in his eyes.
He’d said, “I’m going to teach you how to start a revolution, just like someone taught me. I was just like you, Nate. Wide-eyed, naïve, and humble … until I reached a greater height.”
That was about the hundredth time I’d heard him say that: Reached a greater height. It was his motto.
“A true revolution has to happen, Nate, or our grandchildren are going to be right here where we are. With nothing. It starts with wanting freedom. We have to break the chains they put on us years ago because of a small group of wizards who killed their people. It wasn’t all of us, yet we all suffer and weep for the millions they lost like we slaughtered them. We have to free ourselves of that guilt. After we are free, we have to unite as a people, wanting the same thing, pushing for the same result — witches, shifters, all of us. And then…”
And this was where he’d lost me and scared me in a way that I hadn’t wanted to admit then.
“Then, we have to overthrow our leaders, especially Lydia Shaw. If we don’t, change will never come. Fear runs this world, Nate. We all listen to Lydia because we’re afraid of her. She burned down whole cities and almost killed an entire species, and she was just a girl. A fairly pretty and seemingly harmless girl. It’s truly terrifying to see someone like that not be afraid of the worst of your kind. She wasn’t afraid of anything, but we learned to be afraid of her. Do you know what that did?”
I’d shrugged my shoulders, hanging on to his every word despite how much he was scaring me.
“It put her on an invisible throne that no one has dared to take her off of. And now she’s royal. She can throw peanuts at a crowd of hungry children and we cheer because … the queen doesn’t have to be so generous. And we’re dying and fearing and bowing to this person who doesn’t have a bit of royal blood in her veins. That’s not going to change until someone dethrones her and gives the world a new person to fear. A new person who unites us and supports our freedom. Then … revolution will come.”
That was what he’d tried to do. I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that he’d wanted to reverse time and give the world Frederick Dreco to fear. I’d thought that he was just blowing off steam. And he smoked a lot. He and his friends used to get very philosophical when they were high, but he’d meant every word.
Now that I was listening to Lydia’s heartbeat, I found myself praying that Devin was as full of it as I thought he was. Because if he wasn’t, and if those slow thuds were to stop, I wouldn’t be able to pretend that everything was going to be okay after Lydia found those hunters. It would be so much bigger than them.
They finally stopped arguing in the bathroom and focused on Lydia.
“This isn’t her blood,” Sophia said. “But she nearly suffocated, it seems. I’m sure using her powers in that condition knocked her out. I know a spell that can fix her, but she’ll be asleep until she heals.”
Thankfully, Lydia was going to be okay, but the frantic animal inside of me didn’t know that yet. I sat in a chair next to the bed and tried to breathe and ignore the bloody scene going on in the bathroom.
I gazed around Lydia and Mr. Gavin’s bedroom to keep my mind occupied. The small TV mounted on the wall was set to one of those music channels that I would have never thought to stop on. I expected millionaires like them to have a bigger screen and more definition. The twenty-inch screen made me feel more comfortable somehow, less like a homeless boy in a palace. Their bed helped, too. The tattered comforter dangled halfway off of the mattress, and the faded blue jays made Lydia and Mr. Gavin seem as unpretentious as their daughter was.
On the nightstand, Lydia had propped a note against the lamp.
I didn’t want to wake you. See you for lunch.
She almost hadn’t made it home for lunch, but I forced myself not to think about that.
I moved my eyes to the most interesting thing in the room, a painting over the bed with the initials C.S. scribbled at the bottom. I assumed that it stood for Cecilia Shaw. She’d painted a tiny boat trapped in the middle of a storm. The passenger, a small girl in a red dress, looked unbothered by the dark clouds and huge waves. I wondered if the little girl was Lydia.
“Sweetheart?” Sophia pressed her cold hands into my cheeks and diverted my attention from the painting to her face. There was concern in every one of her wrinkles. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“This is a lot to take in. I don’t want you to be overwhelmed.”
“I’m not. I promise,” I said, but my voice had cracked twice. “Shouldn’t you be in there with Lydia?”
She sat on the bed and grabbed both of my hands. “She’s fine, and you’re just as important, Nathan. Do you remember what I told you the other day? About when it’s best to shift?”
I nodded. She’d told me that it was best to shift when things were chaotic. Being an animal would keep me calm and get me through the chaos. I’d taken her advice several times in the last few days and had gone for long runs in Christine’s neighborhood. Apparently, she wanted me to do that again.
“Lydia is covered in blood, dear. That’s pretty chaotic. Shift for me. I’ll feel better knowing that you can do it without any issues.”
She tapped her cheek, an order to kiss her. Somehow, the simple gesture made this feel less like an evaluation of my sanity and more like an act of concern.
I kissed her cheek and shifted.
The compass fell out of my shorts as they ripped away from my changing body, and it rolled onto the floor. I stared at Sophia, waiting for her to scream about Pop giving it to Chris, but she’d started to mix something for Lydia and missed the compass rolling into the closet.
Relieved, I went in after it. It knocked into one of Mr. Gavin’s shoes and landed face up.
I looked down at the arrow, and my world crumbled around me.
Devin had tried to teach me to be proud of the magical bloodline I’d come from and to believe that we were the greatest things on earth. And I was proud. I was happy to be magical, but even in my pride, I knew and had always known that a world with magical kind in power simply couldn’t be.
It couldn’t happen without human lives changing forever and without Lydia ceasing to be herself. I nudged the copper arrow on Christine’s compass, trying to change the side that it had suddenly moved to. The magical side. Even though Lydia’s faint heart was still thudding in the bathroom, her attack had caused a problem. A big, life altering, magical problem.
Now, believing Christine and the sirens in her head wasn’t really an option.