Home > Legendborn(4)

Legendborn(4)
Author: Tracy Deonn

I swallow, look away. “I could make that jump.”

He snorts. “Cliff jumping is asinine.”

“No one asked you.” I have a stubborn streak aggravated by other stubborn people, and this boy clearly qualifies.

I step to his right. Quick as a cat, he reaches for me, but I twist away before he gets a grip. His eyebrows lift, and the corner of his mouth twitches. “I haven’t seen you around before. Are you new?”

“I’m leaving.” I turn, but the boy is beside me in two steps.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“I’m Selwyn Kane.”

His gaze sends tiny, invisible sparks of electricity dancing across my cheek. I flinch and throw my hand up between us like a shield.

Fingers, too hot, too strong, instantly close around my wrist. A tingling sensation shoots down to my elbow. “Why did you cover your face?”

I don’t have an answer for him. Or myself. I try to yank away from him, but his hold is like iron. “Let go!”

Selwyn’s eyes widen slightly, then narrow; he is not used to being shouted at. “Do you—do you feel something? When I look at you?”

“What?” I pull, but he holds me tightly without effort. “No.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not—”

“Quiet!” he orders. Bright indignation flares in my chest, but his unusual eyes rake across my face. Snuff it right out. “Strange. I thought—”

Suddenly, shouts break the night, but this time they’re not from the cliff jumpers. We both twist toward the forest and beyond it, to the party in the clearing. More yelling—and not the happy, drunk kind.

A low growl close by my ear. I jump when I realize the sound is coming from the demanding boy whose fingers are still locked around my wrist. As he stares into the trees, his mouth curves into a satisfied smile, exposing two canines that nearly touch his bottom lip. “Got you.”

“Got who?” I demand.

Selwyn startles, as if he’d completely forgotten I was there, then releases me with a frustrated grunt. He takes off, speeding into the woods, a silent shadow between the trees. He’s out of sight before I can form a response.

A jarring scream echoes from the party on my left. Raised voices ring out from the cliff jumpers on my right, who are now sprinting for the clearing too. Blood freezes in my veins.

Alice.

 

* * *

 


Heart pounding in my chest, I race to the trailhead to follow Selwyn, but once I’m under tree cover, the ground is barely visible in the darkness. Three steps in, I trip and fall hard into bramble. Branches scrape my palms and arms. I take two shaking breaths. Let my eyes adjust. Stand. Listen for the sounds of yelling undergraduates. Then, adrenaline shooting through my veins, I jog half a mile in the right direction with quick, careful steps, wondering how the hell Selwyn could move so fast through the woods without a flashlight.

By the time I stumble into the clearing, the party is chaos. Undergrads push against one another to run down the long narrow path toward the cars parked at the gravel lot. Beyond the trees, car engines growl to life in a rolling wave. Two guys struggle to lift the kegs and push them onto truck beds while a small crowd beside them tries to help “lighten” the barrels by drinking straight from the hose. Beside the fire, a circle of twenty kids cheer while holding Solo cups and cell phones high in the air. Whatever or whoever they’re looking at won’t be Alice. She’d try to find me, like I’m trying to find her. I reach for my phone, but there are no missed calls or texts. She’s got to be freaking out.

“Alice!” I scan the crowd for her, for Charlotte’s ponytail and T-shirt, for Evan’s red hair, but they aren’t there. A half-naked, dripping-wet undergrad girl shoves past me. “Alice Chen!” Campfire smoke billows thick in the air; I can barely see anything. I push through sweating, churning bodies, calling Alice’s name.

A tall blond girl scowls when I shout too close to her face, and I scowl back. She’s beautiful the way a well-maintained dagger is beautiful: sharp, shiny, and all angles. A bit prissy. Absolutely Alice’s type. Damnit, where is she—

“Everybody out ’fore someone calls the cops!” the girl yells.

Cops?

I glance up right as the Solo cup–carrying circle parts. It only takes a second to see the cause of the screams from earlier and the reason why someone might call the cops: a fight. A bad one. Four drunken, enormous boys are rolling and swinging in a pile on the ground. Probably football players right out of preseason and fueled by adrenaline, beer, and who knows what else. One of the giants has another’s shirt in his hand, the fabric pulled so taut I hear the seam rip. The third is on his feet, rearing back for a kick to the fourth boy’s stomach. It’s like watching gladiators brawl, except instead of armor they’re covered in layers of muscle and have necks as thick as my thigh, and instead of weapons they’re swinging fists the size of award-winning grapefruits. The hurricane cloud of dirt they’ve created has put so much smoke and dust in the air that I almost miss the flicker of light and movement above their heads.

What the…?

There! There it is again. In the air above the boys, something is shimmering and dancing. A greenish-silver something that swoops, dives, and flickers in and out of transparency like a glitching hologram.

The image pulls at a string of memory. The shimmer of light… and the very feeling of it, punches the breath right out of my lungs.

I’ve seen this before, but I can’t remember where.…

I turn, gasping, to the student beside me, a wide-eyed boy in a Tar Heels T-shirt. “Do you see that?”

“You mean the jackasses fighting over nothing?” He taps his phone. “Yeah, why do you think I’m filming?”

“No, the—the light.” I point at the flickering. “There!”

The boy searches the air; then his expression turns wry. “Been smokin’ something?”

“Come on!” The blond girl pushes through the circle of spectators, standing between the fighters and the crowd with her hands on her hips. “Time to go!”

The boy beside me waves her away. “Get outta the shot, Tor!”

Tor rolls her eyes. “You need to leave, Dustin!” Her vicious glare sends most of the gawkers running.

The something is still there, beyond the blond girl’s head. Heart hammering, I take in the scene again. No one else has noticed the silvery mass hovering and flapping above the boys’ heads—either that, or no one else can see it. Cold dread creeps into my stomach.

Grief does strange things to people’s minds. This I know. One morning a couple of weeks after my mother died, my dad said he thought he could smell her cheesy grits cooking on the stove—my favorite and my mother’s specialty. Once, I heard her humming down the hall from my bedroom. Something so mundane and simple, so regular and small, that for a moment, the prior weeks were just a nightmare, and I was awake now and she was alive. Death moves faster than brains do.

I exhale through the memories, shut my eyes tight, open them again. No one else can see this, I think, scanning the group a final time. No one…

Except the figure on the other side of the fire, tucked between the trunks of two oaks.

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