I grimaced at the idea. “Ew. Gross. No way, man.”
He put the clipboard down, seemingly satisfied with my very genuine reaction. “Fine. Make it short because he’s definitely not on the list.” He walked away to chat with another employee, someone he seemed to be flirting with—ew—and I made my way over to my archenemy. Brad Powers…what game are you playing?
Brad looked very nervous, bouncing up on his toes. As soon as he caught sight of me, he took long strides to reach me. “Hey,” he said, looking down at me. Sweat was beaded up on his forehead. I’d never seen him look nervous before; it was weird. Almost as weird as him being there.
“What are you doing here?” If this was some sick joke, I was going to punch him right in the face; I didn’t care if it would earn me a Taser shot to the spine and a shit ton of pills. He would rue the day he went to these lengths to make me feel like shit. I was already feeling like the biggest dog turd on earth, and the last thing I needed was an assbag like him making things worse.
He laughed nervously. “Would you believe I’m here to bust you out?”
My heart leapt up into my throat and my ears started ringing. “What’d you just say?” I sounded like I was being strangled; my voice barely worked. I couldn’t possibly have heard what I thought I just did.
He leaned in closer. “I’m supposed to help you get out of here.” He looked around, taking in our surroundings. “I get the impression this place is like a prison…and you’re, like, a prisoner, I guess.”
I looked around the room with him, a tiny spark of hope warming my heart. “You can say that again.” I was curious enough to hear him out, but there was no way it was going to happen in that lobby; there were already too many people staring at us, and any talk of breaking out would bring that orderly over in a hurry.
I walked over to the reception desk and gave the woman sitting there my best smile. “Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you…but I heard that we’re allowed to take a walk outside with our visitors. Is that true?”
“Name?” she asked, looking on her computer.
I prayed my name had the allowed-to-promenade check-box checked. “Jayne Sparks.”
She frowned at the screen and clicked some keys before answering. “Yes, you may.” She paused and looked up at me. “What size shoe do you wear?”
“Uhh…seven?” It felt like a trick question. If I answer wrong am I going to be denied walking privileges?
She reached under her desk and pulled out a box. After rummaging around, she came out with a pair of pink Crocs. “Here. Put these on or you’ll ruin your socks.”
I stared at the footwear accident she held in her hands. “I’d rather die.”
“No shoes, no walk.” She was about to throw them back in the bin, but I reached over the counter to stop her.
“Fine. I’ll wear them.”
She handed them over to me. “You have to remain on the grounds. Do not go into the parking lot or toward the front gate. Stop at the trashcans.” She fixed me with a hard stare. “Do you know where the trashcans are?”
I leaned down to put on the hideous excuses for shoes. Crocs. And pink, no less. Now I know I’ve sunk to an all-time low. “Of course. Absolutely. No problem.” I stood once the shoes were on, my face flaming red. I’d never felt guilty about lying before, but I did right then for some reason. Maybe it’s the pills. Guilt pills. Or it could be the shoes. I prayed no one I knew would ever see me in these. Anyone other than Brad, of course—as if that wasn’t the worst case scenario.
Brad joined me at my side as I moved toward the front door, my gloriously awful footwear squeaking on the linoleum floor with every step. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Brad had never figured in my plans for escape. Never in a million years would I have imagined him next to me as I left this building.
My mind was racing as I put one foot in front of the other. Escape. Escape. I’m going to escape! Where will I go? How will I get there? Why is Brad here? What’s his deal? Is this a trap? Am I going to die? Am I really crazy or is everyone else the problem?
Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak… The outside view kept getting closer and closer, and my heart was beating so hard it hurt. He’s here to break me out? How did he even know I was here? How did he know I wanted to get out? How does he know I’m not dangerous…like, crazy dangerous?
Nothing…and I mean nothing was normal anymore. Not a single thing made sense. I felt like I was caught up in a whirlwind made entirely of confusion. I was like Dorothy headed to Oz on a tornado, but that lucky bitch got to wear sparkly red shoes, not Crocs. I call bullshit on that.
It should have been an easy enough thing to walk out of there with Brad at my side, despite the fact that he was my high school nemesis and despite the fact that I was a total fashion disaster. It wasn’t like we were going to prom together or anything. But the closer I got to the front door, the more nervous I became. Nausea took over quickly, and my stomach churned to beat the band. My vision got fuzzy too, like I suddenly needed glasses.
As my foot touched the rug lying just inside the entrance, my guts turned in on themselves, and I grabbed at my stomach in pain. The sudden cramps were killing me. I bent over and hissed through the agony. I prayed I wasn’t about to shit my scrubs.
“What’s the matter?” Brad asked, taking me lightly by the elbow.
“I don’t know. I feel really sick all of a sudden.” Sweat broke out across my back and upper lip. Whatever was in my intestines had turned to liquid. It was only a matter of time before I lost it completely.
“It’s a spell,” he said, urging me forward.
I stopped immediately, jerking my head sideways to look at him. My voice came out as half whisper, half shriek. “What did you just say?” I was so sure I’d misheard him. There was no way on earth he’d said what I thought he’d said. He wasn’t fae. He was just…Brad Powers, douchebag extraordinaire. A human to the core.
He leaned down and whispered in my ear. “Jayne, it’s a spell keeping you here. I know about everything. I can help you. You just have to trust me.”
I pulled his arm to bring him closer so I could stare directly into his eyes. I panted through the pain wracking my body. He was inches away, making it easy to smell his manly cologne. “Who are you?” I was afraid. Mystified. Intrigued. Suspicious as hell. And that tiny spark of hope was back and was quickly growing into a full-on wildfire in my soul. This person standing next to me, whoever he was, had given me hope that I might not be as nuts as I thought I was, and that I wasn’t going to shit my pants in front of twenty strangers and the one guy at school who would tell the world.
He looked sad when he answered. “I’m Brad Powers. Sometimes you call me Brad Flowers and tell me to go fuck myself. We were in the vice principal’s office together the other day. And lots of days before that.”
“Well…okay. I guess it really is you.” I almost started to cry, partly because my enemy was here out of the blue to allegedly save me and partly because I didn’t think I had the anal strength to keep the spell from unleashing the contents of my colon right in front of him.
He put his hand on my lower back and pushed harder. “Come on. I’ll explain everything outside. We have to be gone before your mother and her demon friend gets here.”
I shuffled forward, chanting to myself the entire way. Do not shit your pants…do not shit your pants…under no circumstances are you allowed to shit your pants!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I MADE IT to the threshold before my legs collapsed under me. Luckily, Brad Powers is a star football player, and he knows how to make wicked fast moves out on the field like plucking pigskin covered balls out of thin air and running into the end zone with them. That was kind of what he did with me, in a way. I was going down, and then suddenly I was going up, right into his arms. He was holding me like a baby, and it was pretty appropriate because I had the strength of one.
“I am so close to shitting my pants…you have no idea,” I whispered, using al
l the volume I was capable of. Any louder and I would have lost control completely. Of everything.
“It’s the spell,” he said matter of factly. “I just have to get you away from the building and you’ll be okay again.” He started to run.
My vision went dark. “I can’t see!” I cried.
“Also the spell,” he grunted out. “Just hang on.”
I focused all my attention on my digestive system while my body jiggled up and down and side to side. I have never felt so sick in all my life. Sweat was pouring out of everywhere, and nausea came over me in waves. As the sound of his footsteps changed from slapping against concrete to rustling through grass, though, the pains in my abdomen lightened a bit, and I began to see some light filtering through. “I think it’s fading,” I said, able to speak in almost normal tones again.
“Just a little farther,” he said.
“Hey!” shouted a voice coming from somewhere behind us.
“Oh, shit,” Brad said, picking up speed.
The jiggling got worse, and I clamped my butt cheeks together like nobody’s business.
“Where do you think you’re going?” someone yelled. “You can’t go past the garbage cans! It’s against the rules!” Whoever it was sounded like he was getting pretty ticked off. I wondered if it was the side-boob swiper. He was probably bummed he was losing one of his abuse victims.
“Can you walk yet?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I didn’t feel like I was going to vomit or crap my pants anymore, so I was willing to give it a try—anything to get away faster. I couldn’t believe someone had put a spell on the entire building, although I shouldn’t have been surprised. If I were evil and hated Jayne Sparks Blackthorn, it’s what I would have done.
Whoever was responsible for getting me locked up had obviously recruited one hell of a witch, and when I found out who it was, I was going to introduce him or her to my cousin, and they were going to rue the day they fucked with my head. I could not believe how effective that magic had been at making me doubt myself. I had actually bought into that garbage about not being fae. It made me sick all over again to think about how close I’d coming to losing my true self.
Brad dropped my legs and paused to see if I could stand. My vision came back to me immediately and so did the sensation of The Green’s power.
I dropped to my knees in ecstasy and grabbed fists full of grass. My heart soared and I began to cry like a baby. “Oh, thank the earth, moon, sun and stars! Thank the elements! I’m back, bitches! I am totally back!” I trembled with relief and couldn’t help but hoot and holler like I’d heard Finn do more than a few times. I was seriously getting my redneck on when Brad’s voice cut through the din.
“Uh, Jayne…you might want to get up now.”
I turned to look at what was making Brad sound so nervous, and I realized the problem right away: no less than five guards were headed in our direction, and the fitter ones among them had started to run…with Tasers at the ready.
I stood and positioned myself in front of my new best friend. “Just relax. I’ve got this.” Power surged through me and I felt totally invincible. Comas were totally about to start happening.
“Ben told me you would be able to handle yourself once I got you away from the building.”
My brain short-circuited at that information. I no longer had a single thought for the bad guys running right at me. I whipped my head around and blasted my rescuer with the force of my words. “Did you just say Ben?!”
Brad actually looked scared. He put his hands up in front of his chest, palms facing me. “Yeah. Is that a problem or something? Because, whatever, man. He’s not a friend or anything. He’s just a dude. Kind of.”
The sounds of pounding feet and gasping breath brought me back to our more immediate problem. I spun around and threw my hands up at the approaching mob. “Stop these men, Green, give me a hand, I need more time to blow this popsicle stand!”
A wall of Green power rose between them and us, the first two men bouncing off of it like it was made of super ball rubber. They flew backward and landed on top of their co-workers, effectively knocking them over like they were pins at the end of a bowling alley.
I turned around and shoved Brad’s chest. “Go! Go! Go!”
He spun a one-eighty and we took off running. He grabbed my arm when I turned to head toward the main road that paralleled the facility—I had envisioned running down the street and jumping on a bus, which wasn’t a very realistic plan in West Palm Beach, but whatever…I was desperate. “Not that way,” he said, guiding me to the right. “My Camaro’s in the lot.”
I followed him to his muscle car as quickly as my legs would take me and jumped in through the open passenger window. He paused next to me as I struggled to get my bottom half in.
“I would have opened that for you. It’s unlocked.”
“Just get in!” I screeched, my diaphragm being crushed by the windowsill. This had so not turned out like I’d expected it to; it had been way cooler in my head than it had ended up in reality.
The driver’s side door opened and Brad was suddenly there, sliding smoothly into the seat and jamming the keys into the ignition. “We gotta get the hell outta here. More people are coming. It’s like they sent a fucking army after you.”
I finally got upright in my seat and looked through the windshield as Brad slammed the car into reverse and peeled rubber out of the space. I braced myself with a hand on the dashboard to keep from getting a concussion as the car rocked back and forth with the sudden changes of direction. No less than twenty people were running toward us, and one of them was Murderous Mike.
“Holy, shit,” I said, trying to find the seatbelt. “Go, before they catch up. I’ll stall them.” As I clicked the belt into place, I did my best to bust a rhyme. “Anyone there who wants to stop me, wrap them up in pretty botany!”
All but one of our pursuers were suddenly tangled in grass, plants, flowers, and palm fronds that fell out of nearby trees. Only Murderous Mike was left un-botanied, and he kept coming in our direction.
“Huh.” I trusted The Green to do what I had asked, so this had to mean Mike didn’t have bad intentions, at least. “Hold up,” I said to Brad as he was about to take off. I grabbed his arm that was reaching for the gear shift.
“The hell…?” Brad was staring at a mob of people wrestling with weeds that had wrapped around their ankles and were in the process of moving up their bodies.
Mike arrived at the car, huffing and puffing, his massive chest heaving. “I want to go with you.”
I pointed up at his face through the open window. “If you try to hurt me or my friend here, I will end you. And it will be painful and gross, I can promise you that.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
I opened the door and got out so he could climb into the back. Even he managed to look more graceful getting in than I had. I was about to get into the car again, when something at the front entrance of the building caught my eye. Looney Long was standing there waving goodbye. She looked so forlorn it was ridiculous.
“Get your ass over here, wyvern!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
She shook her head sadly and turned as if to go back inside.
No frigging way was I going to let that happen. They had brainwashed her in that place. I hadn’t felt one iota of evil coming off of her during the entire time I was there, and I couldn’t say the same for some of the other people I’d met…especially that bitch Dr. Aleman.
Suddenly her name floated into my head: ALEMAN…MALENA… Move some letters around and what do you have…? A light blub went on, blinding me with the truth. Holy shit on a stick! Duh to the hundredth power! Maléna was responsible for everything! She had totally smoked me and was probably still laughing about how thoroughly she’d done it, too. I trusted my instincts now that I was no longer under that spell, and those instincts were telling me that I had nothing to fear from the wyvern.
I opened my arms and lifte
d my head to the sky. Instantly, the power of my elements was coursing through me like I was channeling an entire Niagara Falls sized fountain of the stuff, and it wasn’t just the two elements of Water and Earth coming to me, either. There was a third piece woven in with them, too. Maybe it was the adrenaline I’d been mainlining for the past five minutes or maybe it was the fact that I’d just escaped not only a massively effective and evil spell but also a future of certain doom; whatever the source, I was suddenly tapped into a force of magic I had never known was there before, but had always been waiting for my call. Spirit. Sam had been right about me—I was capable of wielding the stuff; I just had to find the motivation to tap into it, apparently. And baby, I was so tapped in.
“Water and Earth, hear me now, I need your strength and awesome power, show that girl which fae way she swings, meld Earth and Water and make her fae blood sing!” I threw my hands out toward her, and colorful green and blue elemental power strands flew from my fingers. As they wrapped Long up in thousands of tendrils of light that sparkled and pulsed, she turned to face me, her expression one of pure joy.
Inside the magic show that I was guessing only the two of us could see—several humans standing nearby were acting like nothing was up—she began to shimmer and change into a small but very beautiful dragon with blue-black scales and eyes a fluorescent green. Her tail swished once and her wings opened and flapped a few times. She got a couple inches off the ground too, before she touched down again and folded her wings in against her back. She took one step and then another toward us. A voice shouted at her from inside the building, but she ignored it. She kept coming. As she got closer, she began to shift forms again, and by the time she reached the edge of the parking lot, she was fully human once more.
I let the power connection drop as she got in close. When she reached the car, she stopped. Her smile was awkward. “I told you you didn’t belong in there.”
I opened the door wider. “And I told you that I’d bust you out when I left. Get in.”