Page 27 of Phoenix Academy: Mayhem

Chapter 8

I can't tellhow long we spend sleeping in the meadow, drinking fresh water from the shore of the lake, and eating the sweet fruit Xavier found. It feels like weeks. Months. Decades. There's no reason to put our clothes back on, to stop touching and stroking each other, to resist giving into temptation. We're safe—we're home. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious than the bond we share. I have no idea why we ever resisted it. So I give in to pleasure.

All the while, something nags at me in the back of my head. Like a vulture circling up above or a dog nipping at my heels. I can't stop feeling as if I've walked into a room with purpose, only to lose my stride when I realize I forgot what that purpose was.

"Do you feel..." David blinks his wide blue eyes, a stupor crossing his face. "Like something is... off?"

"No. Shut up." Reggie kicks him in the side, his pants loosely slung around his hips. "Eat another of these weird melon things."

I blink at him. "Melon things?"

"That's what Xavier and I are calling them." He holds one up and bites into the soft flesh of the fruit. "I think I could live off them forever."

Licking my lips, I taste sickly sweet syrup on them. The melon things are like a dessert made for a sugar-sick child. I don't know why I like them. I can't remember how many I've eaten or if I even enjoyed them.

Blinking again, I loll back into the soft grass of the meadow and stare up towards the blue sky.

Blue sky...

There is no sun in the blue sky. Just light. No clouds, either. Only endless clear blue. As if it isn't real. As if it's never been real.

The grass beneath me cradles my skin softly. Nothing crawls across my naked body; no bugs, no rodents, not even an ant or a butterfly. There isn't anything alive here except us.

I can't remember why that's wrong. Something... something flits through my awareness, a bone-deep sense of wrongness. But like turning your head towards a mirage, the closer I try to get to the source of the feeling, the further away it moves.

Maybe I'm just hungry. Another "melon thing" will set me right. The trees near us are picked over, though, as we've barely left this area since we stumbled from the shore, dripping wet and full of desire. I'll have to venture outwards to find fresh fruit.

Pushing up off the grass, I grab my skirt and yank it on, then throw my blouse over my chest and lazily attach a few buttons. David watches me with half-lidded eyes, the sunless sky reflected in his blue irises. "Where you goin'?"

"To find fresh fruit. Out there somewhere." I jerk my chin towards the trees at the edge of everything. "There's gotta be more fruit trees."

David frowns at me. "Out there, where the trees are thin and far away? We don't go out there. We never have."

"We must have at one point. When we got here. From... outside." My mind stumbles over the thought. "There must be an outside, right? We weren't born here."

Xavier wakes from his slumber and sits up in the meadow grass, staring at me, his eyes half-lidded from the sun, which always shines. "We've always been here."

"That doesn't make sense." Something is gnawing at me insistently. I can't let it go. My witch instincts are clawing and scratching at my rib cage. "My mother... Lizzy... they were from the outside. And the Heretic too."

The memory slams into me with the full force of a transport truck. Running through the woods. Making plans. All the training, all the preparation, all of it for nothing. We turned and faced him but he—he just didn't die.

Because he didn't have a soul.

Because something dark, something evil happened to him. And it all led me here, to... this place. This place, which is...

I must be hungry, because I just had the oddest thought.

It slipped from my mind the moment I had it. But I still knew that it was wrong.

"I need to go. To get fresh fruit."

My feet move of their own accord, despite Xavier's protests, David's confusion. Reggie treads water in the lake, his brown eyes on me, curious. I don't know why, but I'm certain I shouldn't just stand still. I have somewhere... somewhere to go.

For the fruit, of course. Just the melons. That's all.

As I walk through the meadow grass, Xavier pushes up from the ground to follow me. David trails behind. There's a splash from the lake. Turning to look over my shoulder, I see Reggie following me as well, shaking water from his hair.

Amused affection threads through me. Of course they would follow me to protect me. Even though I'm not going that far—it's not as if I'm going to leave our home. There's nothing beyond it that could possibly interest me. I'm just going to pull some fruit from one of the outer trees that we haven't reached yet, and fill myself with its sweetness until all my worries and cares are gone.

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