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“SO THEN...HE JUST WALKED out of the room?”
Tristan and Simon were leaning back on the floor of Simon’s dorm room. Brick had been banished so the two of them could talk, and since they had purposely skipped dinner that night in the cafeteria, they were already halfway through his ‘secret’ stash of snack food.
“Without a freaking word.” Simon crushed a cheese wafer between his teeth as he replayed the frightful image again in his mind.
He and Beth just standing there, frozen after their impromptu kiss. The look on Jason’s face as he spun on his heel and walked away. The chilling silence that followed after the door slammed shut behind him.
A belated shiver ran up the back of his spine, and he shook his head. “It was kind of scary.”
Tristan raised his eyebrows incredulously. “Kind of scary?” he quoted, heavy sarcasm dripping from every word. “You and Beth kissing in front of Jason was kind of scary?” He shook his head and snapped off a red vine in his mouth. “Yeah, Simon, I would say so.”
The sun was just setting through the tall oriel windows, long shadows from the stone dormitory running down the dark lawns. From where he sat, Simon could just barely see the top of Beth’s little apartment, the chimney peeking up over the iron gate. They hadn’t really spoken to each other since the incident either. Just a mumbled, ‘we should probably go,’ before they quickly parted at the door and went their separate ways.
He was proud of her. He wanted her to know that. He had never in his entire life seen a display of power as great as the one he’d seen that day. His very bones were still vibrating with the thrill of it. Desperate to see it again. Aching to try it out for himself.
But all of that was somehow overshadowed by a single kiss.
Truth be told, he didn’t know whether or not he was even going to be at Guilder come the morning. Chances were, Jason was with Dean Robbins right now, and the two were conspiring to throw him out for good. At this point, he could hardly blame them. He hadn’t done much these last few weeks to endear himself to any of the faculty, and he had long since topped the Guilder list of being a giant pain in Jason’s ass. If it were Simon in charge, he’d probably throw him out as well.
As usual, Tristan seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Do you think you’re going to get expelled?” he asked quietly.
Simon lowered his eyes to the floor, thinking fast. “I don’t know.”
To be honest...he wasn’t sure if he cared.
He had a handle on the warlock now. It no longer controlled him—he controlled it. Yes, it would take years and years of more practice to fully master it, but Jason had given him the tools. He technically knew how to do it by himself. Even if it wasn’t the ideal situation, he could find a way to make it work.
The problem was Beth.
No way was Simon leaving her here all by herself. No way was he going to abandon her now that she’d unlocked this new and impossible level of her powers. No way was he leaving her... period.
Unfortunately, that was the other part of the problem.
“Fifty-six days,” Tristan announced suddenly.
Simon glanced up. “What?”
“That’s how long the two of you made it before someone besides me found out. Fifty-six days.” Simon stared at him in shock, and he continued with a slight frown. “That’s not counting Jennifer, of course. But at this point I think we all know that she’d already caught on...”
“Fifty-six days?”
“That’s right,” Tristan said proudly.
“Fifty-six?”
“Yep.”
“You’ve been counting?!”
“Well...when I gave you the inevitable I told you so, I wanted to have the specifics.”
For a second, the boys just stared at each other. Then, at the same time, they broke into wild, breathless laughter.
To be fair, it could have gone either way. A laugh or a fight. They’d done both many, many times before. But whatever the reaction, the both of them needed a break. Tension had been mounting inside the Oratory like a pressure-cooker set to blow. In a way, they were almost relieved the nagging secret had finally gotten out into the open. Now at least they could breathe.
“I’m going to kill you,” Simon gasped, when he finally got control of himself. “I’m going to wait until you’re sleeping, then drop you from the top of Joist. You should remember how a fall like that feels. It’ll be damn near poetic.”
Tristan dodged the pillow he threw, and came up grinning. “You couldn’t kill me. No matter how hard you tried.” His face grew abruptly thoughtful. “Your girlfriend probably could, though. I have never seen anything like what she did today.”
Simon sobered up to, his face growing suddenly solemn has he remembered. “Me neither. She was...spectacular.”
Tristan cocked his head to the side, remembering as well. “Makes you wonder about her dad, right? The things he was capable of?”
Simon shook his head bitterly. “The man doesn’t need a tatù to be capable of terrible things. Trust me. He can do them all on his own.”
The two of them were quiet for a while, letting their minds wander while consuming several tons of pre-packaged, processed food. It must have been a funny sight, Simon thought to himself when he finally glanced around. Sitting there, lazily snacking on the floor, was probably one of the only times that he and Tristan would ever look remotely like ‘normal’ high school students.
“Hey, did you ever explain to Mary about the email?”
Tristan broke out of his salt-induced reverie long enough to scowl. “She wouldn’t even talk about it. Just threw a balled up piece of paper at me and slammed the door.”
Just last week, Tristan had been hanging out with his girlfriend when he had received an email message from a certain Jennifer Jones. While Tristan had never once done anything to invite her multiple advances, that didn’t stop her from sending him the occasional topless photo. That night was no exception. But since Mary had been the one on his computer, thinking it was her own, the text had done more damage than most.
Simon let out a low whistle and shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I don’t know how you would explain someone like Jennifer without meeting her first.”
It was true. The girl was endearing, but as thoroughly warped as they came. Despite her penchant for leather and topless propositions to Tristan, Simon felt sure that the real one she was after was him. Only, there seemed to be something more genuine about her affections. Something she didn’t want to risk with brash proposals and tawdry texts.
He wondered vaguely how things would change, now that there was no longer any way she could pretend that he and Beth weren’t already together.
“That’s alright,” Tristan yawned, crumpling an empty bag of crisps. “I’d rather not take advice from someone whose love life is about to get him kicked out of school anyway.”
Simon snorted and tossed over a wafer. “Thanks, man.”
“No problem.”
But beneath the teasing, the boys were troubled. Ever since that fateful night when the two of them had tried to kill each other in the Oratory, they had been inexplicably bonded together as best friends. Never was there one without the other. Never did either one have a single thought they didn’t immediately have to share.
“Actually, I...” Tristan hung his head. “I can’t picture this school without you.”
The unexpected burst of honesty caught Simon by surprise, and he looked up to meet his friend’s suddenly somber gaze.
“If there’s a hearing or some way they might let you stay...I’ll speak on your behalf,” he promised quietly. “Say whatever I need to.”
For a second, Simon was sincerely touched. In a way, he hated it. The way that Tristan could cut right to the core of him. Beth was the same way. He hated how open it made him feel. How vulnerable. On the other hand...a part of him secretly lived for it.
He brushed off the touching words with a casual shrug. “Actually, I’d rather not take the support from someone whose academic life is about to get him kicked out of school anyway.”
Tristan’s concern melted away with a bark of laughter. It was true. Although he had maintained a perfect grade point average throughout his entire time at Guilder, there was a chance he was in some serious trouble. Not due to poor performance, but due to a truly incredible amount of unexcused absences. Simon had the same number of absences, of course, as the two of them were usually truant together. But Tristan had made the mistake of taking an extra ten units this semester in the vain hope of making his parents proud. It was a failed venture on all counts.
“Fair enough.” He shook his head when Simon offered him a soft drink, but ripped open a bag of M&Ms. “I basically had to get down on my knees before Renley allowed me to take a make-up exam. Said that if I missed even a single question, he was writing off the class as an incomplete.”
Simon shook his head. “It’s ridiculous. You’re in training. And you were in a coma.”
Tristan grinned. “Actually, I was in hiding with you that time. Trying to sneak back out of that club over on Maxwell.”
A deep chuckle shook Simon’s shoulders as he remembered. “How is it possible that two people with super powers had so much trouble with one human bouncer?”
“That guy was not human,” Tristan swore darkly. “He was some kind of robotic demon. I’m fairly sure over the course of the night, he cloned himself several times.”
Two sets of laughter rang back out over the room, before they were cut short with a loud and incessant knock.
“Hey guys,” Brick called angrily from the other side, “I’m only doing one more lap around the building, and then you have to let me back in, alright? It’s almost lights out.”
Simon and Tristan chanted cheerfully in unison. “Sure, Brick.”
The big guy took a step away from the door, breathing heavily. “And you two haven’t been eating all my snack food again, right?”
There was a pause.
“No, Brick.”
“Good.” He shuffled off down the hall, still muttering something that sounded like, “No respect for other people’s property. There are boundaries, damn it...”
Tristan flashed Simon a grin as he got to his feet. “I should go. Good luck with him, by the way. You might want to clean this stuff up.” He gestured to the mess of aluminum wrappers and half-eaten chocolate bars littering the floor.
Simon got up, too, stretching out his arms with a disgruntled scowl. “Oh, thanks. Yeah, I’ll just do it all by myself then, shall I?”
“Sounds perfect.” Tristan pulled open the door and slipped back out into the hall, leaving his friend to it. But before he vanished completely, he stuck his head back inside.
“Simon?”
Simon paused in the center of the room, already holding the trash bin. “Yeah?”
“I really will speak for you, you know.”
There was that vulnerability again. Tearing him from the inside out.
“Thanks, Tris.”
“Anytime.”
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, SIMON made the uncharacteristic decision to actually play the part of a student and get himself to class. He hadn’t yet heard anything about his romantic outburst the day before. No giant holes had opened in the ground to swallow him up. But one way or another, he thought it would be a good idea to keep his head down and follow the rules for once. If not for his own sake, then for Beth’s.
“Why, Mr. Kerrigan!” Professor Lanford looked up in surprise as Simon slid into his seat in the back, just before the final bell. “How good of you to grace us with your presence. I wasn’t sure you remembered where my classroom was.”
Simon flashed a guilty smile, then opened his textbook and kept his eyes fixed on the front page. There would be no outbursts today. At least not from him. Lanford could rest easy.
It was a fairly standard lesson. Boring. Easy. The kind that made Simon wish he was back in the Oratory, doing what he did best. The only thing that caught his attention was a solitary quote Lanford had written up on the blackboard. He had no context for it—it had been done in a previous lecture and then forgotten about until today. But something about the words caught his attention.
‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Erich Fromm.
When the bell rang to dismiss them to lunch, Simon found himself hanging back, staring at the board as he wandered up to the professor’s desk.
“Professor Lanford,” he asked tentatively, “who wrote that quote up on the board?”
Lanford glanced around to look, before turning back in surprise. “Fromm? He was a German psychoanalyst. Studied human and social behavioral patterns.”
“Makes all this seem a bit pointless, doesn’t it?” Simon joked lightly. “You know, standardized testing. Homogenizing syllabuses. The entire act of going to school.”
Lanford chuckled to himself. “Well said, well said as ever, Mr. Kerrigan. But I’m afraid that you’re missing the one, simple point.”
“And what’s that?”
The professor’s eyes twinkled over the top of his spectacles. “That the meaning you seek is often found within these very walls.”
* * *
SIMON WAS STILL MULLING over Professor Lanford’s comment all the way to the cafeteria. He was still spaced out thinking about it when he sank down in his usual chair next to Tristan. It wasn’t until he got a sharp kick in the leg that he realized someone was talking.
“Sorry—what?”
He looked up to see Tristan and Isaac staring at him with matching grins.
“I said, how was it attending classes this morning?” Tristan asked mischievously. “Must have been a bit of a shock to your system.”
“No more so than yours,” Simon fired back, pouring cream into his coffee. “You hear back from Renley yet?”
Tristan’s face grew momentarily dour. “No. I’m thinking maybe I should try to cook him something. Offer to mow his lawn.”
Simon chuckled, tucking the saying deep into his mind for later consideration while returning to the land of the living. Not a moment too soon. After Beth’s minor meltdown in the Oratory yesterday, his group of followers had more questions than usual. And they were not to be put off a second longer.
“So Simon, spill.” Zane leaned forward, followed quickly by Eli and Rob. “What the hell was going on with Beth and that fire? That was some serious shit!”
Simon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Why are you asking me?”
Zane hesitated. “Well, you know her, right? You guys have gotten tight.”
That was one way of putting it.
Simon shook his head swiftly and was about to deny the whole thing, when Tristan rolled his eyes and pushed him deliberately back in his chair, leaning forward to take point. “So the flames can cover her entire body.” He tried to brush it off as best he could. “It’s no big shock, is it? We see fire-throwers try it all the time.”
Zane and Eli exchanged an incredulous look, before Rob and Isaac broke into laughter.
“No big shock?” Rob repeated, shaking his head. “You’re messing with me, right?”
“That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen!” Zane took over again, his tiny body literally still trembling with excitement. “The freaking mats under her shoes started to melt! It was awesome!”
“And don’t forget the fire itself.” Arturo, the resident genius, had to put in his two cents. “In the last three hundred years, there hasn’t been fire ink with that reported color. Not even her father had it. His was the usual orangey-red.”
This time, it was Simon who leaned forward with interest. “Really?” He had never thought to ask Beth if there was a difference between her and her father’s ink. “Are you sure?”
Arturo cast him a sour look. Really? Of course he was freaking sure.
Simon let it go and leaned back to digest this fresh bit of news, when Isaac dragged him right back front and center again, his shaggy black hair bobbing with enthusiasm as he talked.
“You have to level with us, man. You hitting that?”
Simon paused. Thrown off by the directness of the question. In the end, it was all he could do to repeat it. And try his very best not to punch Isaac right in the face.
“Am I...hitting that?”
He’d hoped that his tone would silence the rest of the questions, but the boys leaned forward together like a pack on the hunt. Too long they had put up with his silence and cryptically dodged questions. Too long had he dominated the time of Tristan, their liege-lord. They wanted some answers, dam nit! And they wanted them now.
“Come on: truth.” Zane was grinning from ear to ear. “You have to be, right? The four of you spend all of your time together.” When he got no response from Simon, he turned to Tristan instead. “What about you, Tris? Tell me you two are hooking up.”
Tristan flashed a millisecond look at Simon, before his face shifted into a mischievous grin. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”
The table erupted in an explosion of whoops and cheers, while Simon returned Tristan’s original kick under the table tenfold.
“Really?” he asked under his breath.
Tristan simply smiled, rubbing painfully at his shin. “You have to feed the monkeys on occasion, Simon. Otherwise they rebel.”
“So you tell them you’re sleeping with my girlfriend?”
“Would you rather I tell them you’re sleeping with your girlfriend?”
Simon was about to come back with a scathing remark, when Alfred Higgins, one of the school administrators, suddenly appeared at the table and tapped Tristan on the shoulder.
“Mr. Wardell?”
Tristan looked up in surprise, as the rest of the table sobered quickly behind him. “Yes, sir?”
“Come with me, please.”
It was no open-ended invitation. There was no chance to disobey.
With a hasty nod, Tristan snatched up his book bag and pushed to his feet. He mouthed a quick Renley to Simon, rolled his eyes, then followed Higgins out of the cafeteria.
“That’s what happens when you miss as much school as the two of you do,” Arturo said smugly, staring after Tristan’s back. “It’s a miracle they haven’t put you guys on the rack.”
Simon rolled his eyes with a faint grin. There was nothing Arturo took more seriously than academia. No wonder he’d made the immediate jump to medieval punishments. “I think they save the rack for upperclassmen,” Simon countered practically. “It would be ridiculous for them to try to use it on us.”
There was a soft chorus of laughter as the regular lunchtime conversations resumed. Arturo, however, sniffed daintily as he returned to his food.
“I think a couple thousand lashes would do the both of you some good.”
* * *
TRISTAN STILL HADN’T gotten back to the dorms by nightfall. He’d missed all of his afternoon classes. Simon took it as a good thing. With any luck, he was getting to complete Renley’s excruciating exam after all, thus ensuring that he wouldn’t be put on academic probation. Simon shuddered at the thought. Wasting all that time in detention? There were better things out there.
He didn’t give it much thought as he went to sleep that night. It had already completely slipped his mind as he headed to Tristan’s dorm the next morning to walk with him to class.
It was only when he saw the two strangers packing up his friend’s belongings that he realized something was wrong.
“What the hell’s going on?” he exclaimed, freezing in the open door.
All of Isaac’s possessions were still scattered messily about the room, but Tristan’s were nowhere to be seen. They had been replaced with a number of heavy-looking boxes—the last of which was being clumsily sealed. As Simon watched, Tristan’s sacred picture of Mary fluttered down from the decorative mantel and landed on the floor.
He picked it up with a trembling hand, sensing something was deeply, deeply wrong.
“Answer me,” he demanded. “Where the hell is Tristan?!”
The men paused only for a split second, before the last box was sealed tightly shut. The taller of the two turned to him as the other started levitating the boxes out of the room, one by one.
“Tristan doesn’t go to this school anymore.”
