Page 124 of Even Angels fall
“What the fuck are you doing?” One of them asks—Armand, I think, is his name. He’s not pissed, but he’s more than annoyed.
Léandre doesn’t seem to care for any of the warriors.
”Sit,” he tells me instead.
I do as he asks, weirdly annoyed myself, too.
“You’ll stay here, on that seat,” he starts saying, still without looking at any of the warriors surrounding us who have started to glare at him. “Until you can shift, they can’t train.”
What?
Some of the warriors start swearing. I don’t know who they hate the most in this instant: me, who is preventing them from training, or Léandre, who just decided this without even warning them.
”You can’t do that, Léandre,” I say. “They need to train. You know as well as I do that we’re on the verge of a war. One day of sparring is what could make a difference.”
“Oh, you have no idea how wrong you are,” he says with an evil smile. “Elhyor said I could useanyway I need as long as you shift by yourself by the end of the day.”
Of course, he said that.
I’m not even surprised and Léandre notices the realization in my eyes and shrugs before sitting cross legs on the ground in front of me.
“Now, shift if you don’t want them to miss a training day,” he says with a smug smile.
He gets a book out from his back pocket and that’s when I realize that he had planned that from the beginning.
The bastard!
I close my eyes and focus on getting my wings out a bit like Cassiopé tried to explain to me before I jumped from the rooftop. I don’t feel like it’s helping at all, but I have no other idea on how to start.
After an hour, I’m nowhere near shifted. I’m frustrated. The warriors are frustrated and even if they can still train around us, this is the ground where they usually demonstrate new moves. It’s slightly elevated, which makes everything more visible from everywhere else on the training ground and makes it even more unmissable that I’m the one preventing things from going smoothly.
I know it, and from the glares I’m receiving from all the warriors, they know it, too.
Yes, I say “I” because I’ve been watching Léandre for the past five minutes, and he hasn’t peeked around ever since he forced me to sit on that chair. He’s oblivious to the stares, or he doesn’t care.
Either way, he might be right.
My pride might very well be the death of me if I don’t shift very soon.
Maybe not the death of me, per se, but I can feel the animosity from where I’m sitting.
Still not shifted.
“Are you serious?” I end up yelling. It’s more a whisper than a yell, though, because I don’t want to incur more wrath from the training warriors.
Léandre lifts his face out of the book he’s been reading the whole time.
“You held longer than I thought,” he says in a bored tone that would be more suited to discussing the weather than to answer a frustrated warrior.
Because that’s what I am—very frustrated and itching for a fight.
“You knew it wouldn’t work?” I ask, and I feel like my frustration is slowly turning into madness.
Léandre only shrugs in response, and that gesture only pisses me off even more.
“You knew and still you made me sit in the middle of them. You made me sit while they glared at me, while they looked at me like I was a hindrance. Maybe even a failure. You made me look stupid for an hour and pissed everyone in the process.”
It all sounded like a question in my head, but instead it just went out as an accusation.
