EVAN. BETWEEN SECOND AND THIRD.
Evan doubled timed it through changing, which wasn’t hard because he’d worked up no sweat. He worried that he faced a long day of talking to strangers[1] ahead of him and a second conversation with Else seemed like a lot, particularly after walking in a circle for several dozen minutes with nothing to distract him from his thoughts but watching people kick a checkered ball around[2]. So it was that Evan walked out into the Sport and Performance building’s atrium ahead of most of the rest of gym class and Chris’s Tourney class, and before most people with third period classes in the building arrived.
[1] Or worse, people he’d know from elementary school who’d been fine letting him be ostracized and thought they could casually start talking to him again now that the exile seemed over and he was showing up to school with Megan and Chris the ‘Light Bearer.’
[2] This had proved to be its own problem. Typically in middle school gym classes Evan had been able to stay focused on being physically educated and the fact that everyone else avoided him like one would a swarm of rats. Now, walking in a circle with nothing to distract him from his thoughts but watching people, he subsequently found it difficult to avoid noting the way many of his classmates’s physical bodies looked when they moved, something Evan endeavor not to do under most circumstances since, as he was a fifteen year old boy, doing so sent his mind down paths both rude and embarrassing to be traveling in public.
Most people. For instance, Lauren Bakili walked in through the doors Evan wanted to leave through when he was about ten meters away, a decidedly downcast, distant expression on her face. They both stopped. There was no avoiding her seeing him—there were no people between them and precious few behind them either. Her eyes widened. Evan could do little but wait and see what she did.
He didn't need to wait much. After a long moment where they just stared at each other, an expression of determination, with a hint of apprehension, emerged on Bakili's face. She squared her shoulders and started walking toward him, her eyes on him in a way that made it clear she did not intend to merely skirt around him.
The day before, Evan had been too overwhelmed by the suddenness of everything to handle being in close proximity to Bakili, so as much as he’d enjoyed the coffee disaster, he’d kept his eyes on Megan for the duration of the conversation. Now, there was no Megan to look at and Megan wasn’t the one who Bakili wanted to talk to, so there was really nothing to do but look at her.
Bakili’s hair was as black as Gramyre’s, but where Chris’s hair made him think of a glossy crow, Bakili’s long, flowing mane of hair, pinned back on one side, shadowing her face on the other, made Evan recall the inky darkness of the sky between the stars. Her hair was the aspect of her person with which Evan was most familiar, an unmistakable river of midnight flowing down her back and shoulders, the constellation of diamonds[1] and spiderweb thin chains of silver she wore in it sparkling in the sun through the skylights. Ryan and Angie thought that constellation was a major piece of enchantment, each diamond star and silver link enchanted with warding magic—along with conveniently making her hairdo far more resilient and her hair almost impossible to soak or soil, they believed it made her hair nearly as protective as a Beetle-class warding mantle.[2]
[1] Probably no more than a silver eagle a pop, or even less if grown rather than mined—diamonds aren’t particularly rare and are easy to grow. Diamonds are useful for enchanting or they’d be even cheaper, though for some reason naturally formed ones are much better enchantment foci than grown, so Bakili’s were probably mined.
[2] The lightest class of warding mantle. Below that is the warding girdle, and then basically nothing.
She wore the same dress, or an identical one, as she’d been wearing the day before, before the coffee incident. It was many shades of rich oranges and yellows, which complemented her golden-brown skin. Her cantrips must have been sufficient to save the dress, or she owned more than one. Nearly invisible in its folds, Evan saw the grip of a pistol peeking out of a well concealed shoulder holster, said grip inlaid with lapis lazuli or turquoise or something, along with plenty of what was undoubtedly real silver filigree or inlay.
As if her fashion pistol weren’t enough, the butt of a spear, which despite himself Evan knew to be her weapon of choice, emerged from a spear holster on her back. The spear haft was beautiful, some dark polished wood inlaid with more silver—so much silver. It must have cost a fortune. And if it were a practical weapon and not a showpiece, as Evan suspected, even more so.
He looked her in the face, trying to be resolute himself, as she closed in. She had dark eyes that, despite her determined expression, were an underground river of apprehension. Her complexion looked, as far as Evan could tell, utterly perfect in a way that seemed unlikely for a teenager. He couldn’t even tell if she was wearing make-up, except for her wine red lipstick, and possibly some very dark blue mascara. Her eyebrow was pierced with a fashionable and clearly major charm, a pair of studs that gleamed silver and gold with a chain connecting them.[1] A red jewel stud charm adorned her left nostril, and each of the five piercings in her visible ear was filled with an obvious charm too.
[1] Typically, such charms were composed of silver with mystic geometry inlaid with the tiniest lines of gold a human hand could apply. Often, in fact, crafted by non-human hands.
She proved to be as tall, maybe a touch taller, than he was himself, and he was still taller than the bulk of the class, though not as much as he once had been. She was also, very clearly, quite strong, with powerful shoulders and biceps as big as his own. She probably wasn’t as capable of beating him to a pulp as Nisha, but if she knew any hand-to-hand combat, he doubted he had what it would take to win any sort of a fight but a gunfight with her. He hadn’t practiced hand-to-hand since his dad died.
So, to no great surprise, it turned out the rich scion of a Light Bearing family was beautiful. Evan had known this would be the case. While he certainly hadn’t looked at her up close in person until now, he’d seen enough pictures of her that he could be sure to recognize her well enough to not look directly at her. And he had peripheral vision.
But those photos, those corner of the eye impressions had still left him underestimating just how beautiful she would be. Evan didn’t like to compare girls physically, it was a crass thing to do, but he was unable to keep from considering, however briefly, that as gorgeous as Katie Ryuyama was, Bakili left her behind.[1] Even at fifteen, she could be a model, or a movie star—she was well on her way to being exactly what every casting agent on the continent seemed to want to put on TV. It didn’t seem fair for someone to be that rich and also that attractive at their age.
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[1] Though Bakili still somehow looked more her age.
That made this a little harder—his heart seemed to be beating very fast. But Evan had thought about this moment for years, and the circumstances could not be better for it to go exactly the way he wished. And anyway, if your parents were rich and indulgent enough, one could buy a lot of perfection in the modern world—it wasn’t worth getting that worked up about when who knew what all those charms and enchantments on her might do.[1] He couldn’t recognize their functions, but Ryan and Angie would.
[1] He tried to tell all the insects that had somehow invaded his stomach. Totally just enchantments. No need for their presence, thanks.
The moment Bakili took a step closer than he wanted her—arm’s length plus the length of his pistol—he took a step backward, and found himself more than half surprised when she stopped advancing. She opened her mouth, made no sound for a long moment, licked her lips and said, “Evan. I—”
“Appear in all my nightmares,” Evan said, his voice coming out rather gruff but not too shaky or too angry or otherwise out of control. “Or at least a huge majority. For the past three years or so,” he added. The resulting expression on Bakili’s face was one of the most satisfying experiences of Evan’s whole life, even more so than her coffee disaster the day before.
“Hmm,” Evan said to the stricken-seeming girl. “I suppose you’d rather appear in some handsome boy’s, um, good dreams.” He paused for a moment to frown into the middle distance, unhappy with his extemporizing. He muttered, “That could have been phrased better[1],” then continued with his point: “Featuring in someone’s nightmares seems less fun, I’ll grant you.
[1] Had he been looking at Lauren instead of the middle distance, he would have seen her look rather taken aback at this, then briefly transition into the expression of someone reevaluating someone, before returning to a more general expression of distress when he looked back at her.
“But if it makes you feel any better, you haven’t featured prominently in all of them,” Evan went on, hitting the ‘all’ nice and hard. “Most of the time, usually, you’d just be an audience member in whatever stress dream of failure I happened to be having that night. You know, doing a presentation without pants or realizing I haven’t showed up to a class all term and then having to go to the final exam. As if that could even happen. Discovering that my handgun somehow rusted into uselessness just before it’s time for my first round of the finals of the sort of shooting competition I’d never bother to actually enter in real life. Tripping in the lunchroom and getting gravy all over my face. Whatever. Anything embarrassing or shameful, you’d always be there, ready to laugh and jeer.”
Bakili opened her mouth as if to reply but Evan barrelled on. “You featured more prominently, though too. Sometimes you starred.” She winced, then just kept her eyes closed, her expression that of a very sad person with a very bad headache. “Most common, of course, was you going as far as we feared you would at first, not just ostracizing us but antagonizing us, mocking and persecuting us like we were in a fucking teen drama on the CW. In the worst of those, Megan would join in.
“I mean, a lot of them were about you turning Megan into a terrible person who would go on to hurt us even more. In the better ones, you’re just a terrible person, too. Sometimes, you would be actually working with an actual demon, and we would be helpless as you destroyed both Megan’s and our lives.” A tear started trickling down Lauren’s face. Definitely a deep, deep blue mascara. It had looked super good—it was too bad (from a purely aesthetic perspective) that he was ruining it, but Evan let no remorse enter his heart.[1] It’s not like she couldn’t fix it. “Sometimes, you were just a terrible person, who was also one of the godsdamned rich, self-centered fools who my sister lost her life to save.”
[1] It seemed suspect she wouldn’t have some sort of invincible makeup.
At this her eyes flew open, and she looked at him with an interesting panic. “I wasn’t—”
“Of course you weren’t,” Evan said, his tone as biting as he could make it. Her eyes dropped in shame. “I know that. But I bet you know them.” Her wince confirmed his shot hit the mark. “So, sometimes, in my nightmares, it was because you were just dumb. And sometimes you were actually so self-involved and lacking in empathy that you wanted it to happen, that you went out after nightfall because you were just bored, and were hoping you’d get to see a Light Bearer kill a Beast. In more than one of those, you told me it wasn’t very fun to watch because my sister didn’t win.”
“Powers!” Bakili whispered, the word spilling out. “I’d never—”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Not even a demonbound would be so dumb as to say something like that, and even you couldn’t actually be that terrible otherwise. I don’t think even Konigsmann is that sociopathic. These are nightmares, Bakili, obviously they’re not real. Sometimes,” Evan went on, staring her down, “You did it intentionally. You got my sister killed to break Megan’s heart, to use the opportunity to split us all up. Often, but not always, because you were demonbound.
“Sometimes, you were the demon yourself, or your entire family were demonbound, and you caused the breach my father died in, too. You know, the time he saved your uncle’s life.”
“Evan, I—” she managed to choke out, more tears running down her face.
“Shut. Up!” Evan said, some of his anger slipping into the words. He forced it back to cold contempt as he said, “I know this might be a novel concept for someone from your family, but now is not your time for talking. Sometimes there are consequences for your actions and this time one is that a sad nerd tells you about all his nightmares about you.” He frowned. “Damn. Actually I don’t remember what else I wanted to include, my temper slipped and it’s gone. Well, the second of my family members dying to save the life of someone famous and important, and this one actually, literally related to you, is a decent stopping point.”
He took on a sardonic conversational tone as he said, “I’ll dig into the dream journals they made me take after it happened and see if I can find any good ones. I wasn’t a great note taker—it might be boring. You try to talk to me again and that’s what you get to sit through before I even consider letting you speak.”
Lauren opened her mouth, again, and he said over her, “Seriously? Close your shitting mouth. See how things are going in, like, a month. If I feel like I’m in a good place with Megan, and she’s speaking with you, I might maybe might consider seeing if the sound of your voice doesn’t make me too godsdamned angry to understand the words you want to say to me.” Evan looked past her (which was a shame she sure had been good to look at she even wept beautifully stop it brain) and strode the same direction.