Page 11 of The Knights of Gaia

The sound of the invisible stranger’s voice made me jump in fright.

“Sorry to scare you,” he said quietly.

My pulse was beating so hard in my ears, I could hardly hear him.

“It’s not you,” I croaked. “It’s the Cursed Ones. Sorry.”

“You have no reason to be sorry. It seems your magic extends beyond concealing acne and masking body odor. Way beyond. Yourepelledthe Cursed Ones. How did you even do that?”

I looked down at my shaking hands. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just repulsive.”

He didn’t laugh at my stupid joke, and neither did I. “Have you ever done something like this before?” he asked me.

“No. I’ve never been this close to the Cursed Ones.”

“You ran at them like you knew they would be scared of you.”

The Cursed Ones were scared of me? I tried not to think too much about what that said about me.

“Oh.” The word popped on my lips like a bubble. “Well, actually…I didn’t know they were scared of me.”

“So you threw yourself in their path, not knowing that they wouldn’t attack you.” He said it like he couldn’t believe it.

And neither could I. It was just crazy. Like really, really crazy. I mean, I’d charged at two Cursed Ones. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I’d been thinking.

Or maybe I was.

“I guess I just had faith that it would work,” I realized.

“You are a very unusual person.”

“Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks I’m unusual. Though they usually just say ‘weird’.”

He laughed.

I would have laughed too, but then I saw something that strangled the laughter in my throat. The Cursed Ones were still keeping their distance from me, but they were starting to angle back toward the Spirit Tree. The urge to bite Dante and Nevada must have been too powerful to resist.

“They just don’t know when to quit, do they?”

“The Cursed Ones aren’t known for abandoning the hunt, no,” he replied.

I spotted a huge puddle in front of the Cursed Ones. Their path would take them right through the middle of it.

“I have an idea,” I told the invisible stranger. “As soon as both of them are inside of that puddle, zap them with a big blast of lightning.”

As soon as I said it, I realized how bossy I was being. I was telling someone with magic—a Knight—what he should do with it.

But all the invisible stranger said was, “Good idea.”

The temperature plummeted. Storm clouds rolled across the sky, blotting out the moon. A moment later, a bolt of lightning slammed into the puddle the Cursed Ones were running through, thoroughly electrocuting the monsters. They fell to the ground.

“How did you know I could summon lightning?” the invisible stranger asked as the clouds faded away to reveal clear black skies and a shimmering crescent moon.

“You tipped your hand earlier, when you were showing off your magic.”

“Showing off?”

I shrugged. “You manipulated light and shadows to create the illusion that the day was progressing at super-speed. That wastotallyshowing off. Admit it.”

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