MIRAGE

Peri isn’t a being who’s meant to look so sad. Even though my body is still prickling, tiny whiffs of essence shedding from my flesh as it knits itself back together—even though she sent out the blast that scored my skin—the sight of her drooped head has me bristling on her behalf.

Something here reminded her of someone who hurt her.

Flickers of the past—blazing lights, glinting metal—dart through my head. My voice sharpens. “What did that sorcerer do? We should string him up, shoot him down.”

Raze’s growl echoes my mood. “If the mortal who’s responsible for turning those creatures savage is the one who attacked you before—”

Peri shakes her head quickly with a swish of her teal hair. She lifts her chin, girding her stance even more in the leather jacket and ripped jeans which can’t completely disguise the softness of her body. “Whoever is messing around with the shadowkind up here, it can’t be the same one. He—he didn’t live anywhere near here. He wouldn’t have gone off somewhere with hardly any other people around.”

Our own sorcerer gazes at her steadily. “It sounds like you knew him well. And obviously they aren’t good memories. Will you tell us what happened?”

Peri’s jaw wobbles, and I have the urge to shout out, “Stop!” To conjure bright and sparkly images around us that will make her giggle and grin rather than tremble on the verge of tears.

I want to understand, but I know how those kinds of memories can scrape at you too. Leave you raw on the inside where no one can see but the stinging never really ends.

Before I can finish grappling with the impulse, Peri speaks in a voice gone unusually flat. “He had me caged for a little while. It was very painful and scary. I try not to think about it, because if I get too caught up…” She motions to us with an apologetic grimace.

Hail lets out a huff where he’s now standing stiffly straight by the cabin, his cheek no longer wisping essence. “So you go around blasting burning shadows all over the place? I can’t see why they haven’t banished you already.”

Raze spins on him. “She’s obviously trying to avoid it.”

Hail’s voice turns even more disdainful, though his dark gaze lingers on Peri a little more avidly than I like. “Trying and failing plenty.” His attention shifts to Jonah. “And none of us were warned what the pipsqueak is capable of.”

Our sorcerer frowns at him. “I haven’t informed the rest of the team of every harmful thing you’ve ever done. If you want everyone to have a full accounting, I don’t think you’d come out ahead, Hail. So maybe keep the judgments to yourself.”

The fae man’s mouth tightens, but he does shut up.

Peri has deflated again all the same. It’s hard to imagine looking at her now that all that searing power burst from this meek being.

But it did. I’ve never felt anything like that from any of the shadowkind I’ve tangled with.

There’s so much I don’t really know about her.

How much is that because I haven’t actually tried? Because I’ve dodged out of our conversations every time they got at all intense?

I let myself be surprised.

Peri exhales shakily. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I have those outbursts. It doesn’t seem right that our powers should break out of us when we don’t want them to, does it? I want to stop it from happening.”

She pauses, and a starker sheen of tears forms in her bright eyes. “I want to be part of the team. I want to help track down this sorcerer and make sure he doesn’t do any more awful things. But if the rest of you don’t feel safe with me around anymore… I won’t make you.”

As she swipes at the moisture, an ache expands through my entire body. If she doesn’t pitch in, Rollick and the other administrators will pitch her out—out of the academy, out of the entire mortal realm.

“I want to keep working with you,” I say quickly, in as cheerful a voice as I can summon. “You keep us on our toes. I like the excitement!”

Hail curls his lip at me, but I’m being honest. I could tell Peri was sweet, but her softness made me nervous. How could she be comfortable around a being like me with so much mischief and chaos in my nature?

But it turns out she’s got some chaos of her own. Maybe that’s why she’s never seemed rattled, no matter what I’m doing around her.

What other powers might she show off next? She might beat this awful sorcerer down all by herself—and I’ll happily watch.

Raze nods, stepping closer to Peri with a protective air that makes me want to slip closer too for reasons I can’t explain. It’s not as if I could defend her better than he can with all that muscly strength.

She also needs someone to keep her spirits up and a smile on her face, doesn’t she? I can do better at that.

The lizard man bares his teeth briefly. “We’ve all made mistakes and had trouble controlling our powers. That’s why we got sent on this mission. You’ve been complaining that Peri isn’t powerful enough—don’t start complaining that she can do too much.”

“I’d rather her not be powerful in a way that can wound us,” Hail mutters, but without much energy to the words. He considers Peri again. “I don’t suppose you can blast people who deserve it when you want to? That might be useful.”

A shiver runs through Peri’s body that brings back my urge to deflect and distract. Even if she can lash out like that, I don’t think she likes the idea.

“I don’t know how to control the power either way,” she says quietly. “Not preventing it when it starts to happen on its own or making it happen when it isn’t already. But I’m working on getting there.”

Hail hums. “We’ll just have to see, then.”

His tone is arch, but he seems to be accepting her presence, however resigned he’s acting about it.

Jonah claps his hands together. “Yes. We’ll see if this team can hold together, but we’d better all do our best to make that happen. Now why don’t we take a closer look at this cabin.” His tone gentles when he turns to Peri. “Do you think you’ll be okay to go inside and look around? What was it that you saw that set off your emotions?”

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

She drags in a breath and appears to steady herself. “There was a footprint—I thought it looked around the right size to match the sorcerer I knew. But that doesn’t tell us a lot. He was kind of short but wide—a lot of mortals are shaped that way.”

She points toward the cabin. “And the metal on the ground—links from a hunter’s net—he used those, but so do all the hunters and probably lots of sorcerers too. What really did it…”

Her gaze drops to the scattered objects I carried out of the cabin, their dingy sides glinting faintly where they’ve tumbled to the ground. Peri’s mouth twists. “The medal and the trophy and all that… He had a display case full of those kinds of things. He stole them from… from people he didn’t like and wanted to punish. It reminded me so vividly, when I was already unnerved. I’m sorry.”

I scoop up the trinkets I found so intriguing and tuck them out of her view. “My fault for being so hasty.”

Peri shakes her head. “You were excited because you thought you’d found something useful. Maybe you did. Are there any names on those or other information about who owned them?”

I plop down on the ground and lay out my three bits of loot. The others gather closer to inspect them too.

The disc on a ribbon only says, “Valedictorian” with no other words. The cup-like one and the little metal statue have wooden bases with a bar of metal attached. The bars look like they used to have some words etched into them, but they’ve been scuffed and scratched up so much it’s impossible to make out more than a few random letters.

Jonah glances at Peri. “The sorcerer you knew—did he damage the mementos he held on to like this?”

Peri frowns. “No. I mean, most of them were dinged up, but I’m pretty sure they still had the names on them. I think he wanted to remember who each had come from. Where did you find them, Mirage?”

“The cabin has a trap door going down to a basement. Sneaky sorcerer.” I flick out my claws briefly. “They were lying on the floor near a table. Not much else down there.”

“We didn’t take a very thorough look the first time,” Jonah points out.

Peri straightens up. “Let’s do that now, then.”

Hail eyes her. His voice sounds both wary and amused. “Are you sure you can handle that, cream puff?”

She meets his eyes steadily. “I’m calmed down now. I know we’re not up against the same sorcerer who captured me. If I’m staying with the team, I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of this problem.”

She marches into the cabin ahead of the rest of us, showing none of the nerves that seemed to hold her back earlier. I bound after her, wondering what she’ll make of the space that seemed mostly drab to me.

The main room of the cabin holds a small kitchen area with a wood-burning stove, a sink, and a cooler with a layer of water in the bottom, maybe from melted ice. Next to that is a tiny table with a single chair. The other half of the main room is totally empty. You’d expect to find a bed there. Maybe the sorcerer brings it away when he leaves?

The trap door lies open. Peri’s stance tenses, but she heads down the rickety stairs without hesitating.

She stops at the bottom, peering around the nearly completely black space with her natural shadowkind awareness of the dark. “The sorcerer I knew kept the beings he trapped in his basement. It makes sense. Easier to keep us out of view if he needed to bring someone who didn’t know into the main house. Easier to set up protections against escaping. But there are no cages or protections down here. Not even nets.”

Jonah descends after her with the gleam of his artificial light. He didn’t make it down to the basement when I was first inspecting it.

He scans the walls, his brow knitting. “There isn’t much of anything down here. It’s like whoever was using the place cleared it out and left.”

“The sorcerer couldn’t have known we were coming,” Hail puts in. “We came straight here after the attack that was obviously meant to kill us.”

Raze makes a rough sound of frustration. “Maybe he moves around a lot. That’s a better strategy for a predator who doesn’t want to be turned into prey.”

Peri pokes around the room a little more, a faint bluish glow forming in her hair. It looks as disappointed as her tone. “I can’t see anything that would help us know where he went.”

Our sorcerer gives her arm a quick pat. “It’s all right. None of us can make any sense of this situation. I’m going to get in touch with Rollick and let him know about this development.”

Pulling out his phone, he clambers back up the stairs. After he’s typed his first text message onto the screen, he turns to Raze. “Can you follow the human scent you picked up and see where he went when he left here?”

Raze dips his head and leaps into the shadows on the way out the door. The rest of us return to the clearing in front of it.

Peri meanders along the edge of the clearing as if looking for more clues. The determination on her face tugs at me to join her.

I extend three of my tails as I do, swirling them in a playful spiral, but she hardly seems to notice, let alone give me the laugh I wanted. She just shoots me a small smile that’s more sad than joyful and continues her search.

An uneasy tension ripples through my chest. When she’s talked to me, she’s always tried to understand me or to show that she already does. To make room for whatever ugly feelings I’m holding in that even I don’t want to face.

What if she needs the same thing now? To know that she isn’t alone in having a painful past that haunts her?

Would it be so terrible to acknowledge a little of my own history if it makes her feel a lot better?

My throat constricts, but I push the words past it. “I was trapped by humans once too. Kept in a cell. Hurt. And—”

No, I don’t want to even think about the rest of it. My tails snap in a tighter whirl behind me.

Peri doesn’t seem to need any more than what I’ve said. She stops and focuses on me, her pretty eyes so wide I’d like to dive into them. “I’m sorry. It must have been horrible for you. No wonder you’d rather be having fun and playing around now.”

Just like that, most of my discomfort melts away. She does understand—we both have our own kinds of chaos.

I want to wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair, tumble around in a giddy embrace, but even I can tell this isn’t a good place for that kind of fun.

Instead, I simply lean in and give her a quick peck of a kiss on her temple. “You deserve all that goodness too. You’re always helping people. Whatever happened before, it doesn’t matter.”

Her smile comes back, a little warmer this time, but I get the sense she’s not totally convinced. Which might be fair, because I’m not either, at least when it comes to me.

Before I can decide what else to say, Raze’s voice carries from where he’s reappeared back on the other side of the cabin. “I followed the sorcerer as far as I could.”

Peri and I hustle around the building to rejoin the others, just as the lizard man points off to the east. “About a mile from here, there’s a road and a spot where a large vehicle was obviously parked recently. His trail ended there. He must have driven away. I can’t tell which direction to keep following.”

He grimaces, but Jonah doesn’t harp on the failure. Our sorcerer holds up his phone. “I’ll take pictures of the cabin in case there’s something we didn’t realize the significance of. Then Rollick wants us back at the school so we can give him our full report—and see what he thinks we should do next.”