But it got worse.
To my acute chagrin, I saw that the bubble me was giving as good as she was getting. She was climbing all over Ari and rubbing against him shamelessly in a way that made me blush just to watch it.
“Oh my Goddess, Kaitlyn,” Avery murmured to me. “Is that really what you two have been getting up to in the Drake’s Den?”
“No, it’s not!” I exclaimed. “Ari never said all those things to me! Well, he said some of them but not that way, exactly. And we never, uh, crawled all over each other like that!”
But in the happy-gram soap bubble, we were still going for it. I couldn’t help thinking that with all the making out and melodrama, this soap bubble reminded me of the telenovelas one of my childhood friend’s grandma liked to watch. This was before The Fire, of course. I would go over to my friend’s house and her grandma would always shoo us out of the room if there was what we called a “kissing scene” going on, but I still remembered the over-the-top theatrics involved.
Unfortunately, there was nobody to shoo me—or anyone else watching the happy-gram bubbles—from the room now. Every eye in the Dining Hall was glued to the shiny rainbow surfaces floating above our heads.
Just as I thought I was going to sink down into the ground from pure mortification, the bubble Ari broke the kiss long enough to announce,
“You will always be my L’lorna, Kaitlyn Fellows, and no one will tear us apart. Not the Headmistress, or my parents, or any of my people. You will rule by my side as my queen when I take the throne of the Sky Lands and no one can stop me from having you!”
After this dramatic statement, the scene froze on a picture of me staring adoringly up at Ari. I was hoping the shimmering bubble would pop, but the “happy-gram” wasn’t done yet.
As the scene of Ari with me in his lap remained frozen in place, a familiar female voice that seemed to be coming from off camera (off-bubble?) announced, “So many questions and so few answers! How did the horribly scarred human girl, Kaitlyn Fellows, become a Made Nocturne? And why did the prince of the Drakes, Ari Reyes agree to feed her with his own blood? Will his people hate him now that he has announced his decision to make this little freak their queen? And will the Nocturnes turn against her too, knowing what a disgusting mutant she is? Only time will tell…”
And then the voice faded and the scene froze again, this time on an especially mortifying shot of Ari kissing me. Only kissing is perhaps too weak a word—in this case, it looked like he was trying to perform a tonsillectomy on me with his tongue.
Gross.
Not to mention utterly humiliating.
For a moment, I couldn’t say anything. Then, seeing my Coven-mates eyeing me from around the table, I finally found my voice.
“That’s not right,” I told them. “That’s not how it happened at all! We didn’t do those things—didn’t say those things!”
“Well, you must have said and done at least some of them or whoever sent the happy-gram wouldn’t have had any material to work with to spin the rest of the fantasy images,” Avery remarked.
“And I think we can guess who sent these ‘happy-grams’ can’t we?” Megan said grimly. She nodded at the doorway to the cafeteria where Nancy and her friends were standing with big, evil smirks on all their faces.
“But how could she get those images of me in the first place?” I demanded, still mortified at the scene the bubble was showing. “I mean, we were in the Drake’s Den—nobody else is supposed to be able to get in there!”
Avery frowned. “She would have had to have something that belonged to you to work a spying spell. Fingernail clippings or blood or—”
“How about hair?” I said flatly.
“Oh, yes—hair would work.” He nodded. Then he put a hand to his mouth. “Oh my Goddess—so that was why Nancy and her nasty crew tried to cut your hair!”
Of course I had told my Coven-mates about Nancy’s attack on me with the big silver shears. They had unanimously wanted me to go to the Headmistress but since Headmistress Nightworthy was still out of town attending her Other Education Conference, it wasn’t a possibility. And besides, now that Ari was walking me to all my classes, I felt completely safe and protected.
Guess I wasn’t quite as protected as I felt, I thought numbly, staring up at the bubble. I guess not every threat is physical.
Nancy had certainly proved that to be true.
“But how was she able to use spying magic on Kaitlyn in the first place?” Megan demanded. “I neutered her magic so she could only do nice or benign spells!”
“She probably used a ‘look over’ spell,” Avery said. “It’s benign magic that parents can use on their kids—kind of like magical parental controls. And of course the happy-gram spell is a good spell too—though I’ve never exactly seen it used for this kind of purpose.”
“Yeah—this was more like a gossip-gram,” Emma remarked.
“Try a lying-gram!” I said. I felt sick. “Oh my God, I wonder what Ari is thinking about all this?”
I looked up and saw the big Drake staring directly at me. Would he hate me now that our relationship had been splashed all over the school? Would he think that I was somehow responsible for all this? Oh God, I really hoped not! And what about the way the bubble had shown him saying that his people could all go screw themselves because he only loved me? He’d insulted the Nocturnes too—and now they all knew I was one of them. Well, sort of.
That was two large groups of supernatural beings that were both going to be very, very unhappy with both Ari and myself.
Crap—what were
