“Jace!” My attacker shouted in a pained voice that blasted a cold shock up my spine.
Rachel.
The urge boiled in my core, far too powerful for me to resist. There was no time, and I had no strength to prevent my Eclipse nature from lashing out. Something had to break.
The best I could hope was to decide what that something was.
My serpents swept through the forest behind me and ripped through swarms of aspect sprites. The tiny creatures popped out of existence as my Eclipse core sucked away the jinsei and aspects they’d held in their tiny bodies. One moment, they’d been happily flitting through the trees. The next, they simply ceased to be.
Experience had taught me that my Eclipse nature was sated in the moment immediately after it had fed. I took advantage of that to force it back into its cage and push the darkness from my eyes. The combination of fresh jinsei and terror that I’d hurt Rachel was more than enough to give me the upper hand over the darkness.
For the moment.
“Are you okay?” My voice shook with adrenaline and fear. I offered Rachel my hand and helped her to her feet. I brushed the dirt off the shoulders of her robes and stepped back to give her some space.
“I’m fine, I think,” she said. “You’re a lot faster than I expected.”
“You should’ve known better.” I tried to force some humor into my voice, to hide the fact that I’d almost killed her. I wasn’t sure she bought it. “I did trounce you in the challenge.”
“You did not trounce me,” she said with mock indignation. She smoothed her sky-blue robes and shook the fallen leaves from her hair. “Thanks for not killing me just now.”
Rachel’s words stung more than a little. I tried to brush them off, but the look on her face told me I wasn’t exactly successful.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “There was an incident this morning. Kind of the same thing that happened here. Still not out of that competitor mindset, I guess. I keep lashing out when I don’t mean to.”
Rachel’s hands flew to her mouth, and she pressed her fingertips to her lips. After a few moments, she shook her head and continued.
“That was dumb of me,” she said. “I was only playing, but I should’ve thought about what that would be like for you.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to console her. I felt terrible about what I’d done, and I felt even worse that she was blaming herself. “It was totally my fault. People can’t be walking on eggshells around me all the time. I’ve got to get it together.”
“Let’s walk a little before dinner.” Rachel smiled, a warm and welcoming expression that made me feel even worse. I’d been seconds from killing her. I was a monster. “That helps me think, sometimes.”
“Sure,” I said. And it did sound like a good idea.
We walked in silence for a while after that, until my stomach started to grumble, and I steered us back toward the rest of the school.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” I said. “Earlier today, I mean. In class.”
“Hurt my...” Rachel laughed. She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. “You didn’t hurt my feelings, Jace. I shouldn’t have gotten upset when you assumed I wasn’t an Empyreal. You don’t have the background to know all the weird stuff that goes on in our society, and I shouldn’t have snapped at you. But...”
Rachel stopped and let her words trail off. She looked up into my eyes and took my right hand in both of hers. She chewed on the inside of her lower lip, wrestling with the words she wanted to say.
Water aspect sprites flitted past us, misting our faces with tiny droplets of dew from their wings. Rachel laughed and the tension of the moment vanished.
“Don’t take everything the Empyreals tell you at face value, Jace.” She paused, then stood up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek again. Her lips were warm and damp from the aspect dew. “There are people with a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. Just... be careful who you believe.”
With that, Rachel released my hands and took off down the path.
“Dinnertime,” she called over her shoulder, then disappeared around a bend in the forest.
I wrestled with what she’d told me for moments longer, unsure of what to make of the spunky girl, who was so much more than she’d first appeared.
The Path
I SPENT THE REST OF that day and all the next on pins and needles. After she’d promised to take my decision back to the elders of the Shadow Phoenix clan, Hagar seemed to have vanished from the school. I’d knocked on her door so often her neighbor finally promised to tell Hagar I was looking for her if I’d go away.
That was easier said than done. I had no idea if Hagar had taken my message back to our clan elders or been sidetracked by some other mission. I was going nuts waiting on their response.
My promised meeting with Professor Song also had my nerves tied in a knot. He’d made it clear he wanted to talk to me, privately, after what had happened the day before. But he hadn’t brought it up in our daily martial arts classes. I kept waiting for a tap on my shoulder that would summon me to his office for a sure-to-be-awkward heart-to-heart, but it never happened.
Rachel Lu was almost as elusive as Hagar. I spotted her here and there in the school, and we waved as we passed, but there was no time to talk and we didn’t share any courses outside of Alchemy. I wanted, no, I needed to talk to her again. Our two brief conversations had filled my head with confusing thoughts, and everything I thought I knew about Empyreal Society had been topsy-turvy ever since. I
