Page 10 of Shadow Caster
“You’ll what?” Minnie reappeared sans tray. “I don’t care about the past. I care about the here and now. Everyone has a right to a second chance.”
My chest tightened with dread. If she knew the truth …
“Come on, Indie, blood’s getting cold.”
She wove her arm through mine and tugged me away from Harper and her posse.
We took our seats at our regular corner table, and I pushed away the feeling of dread.
“I’m way too old for this shit, you know.” I picked up my blood bag. “You’d think at our age, we’d be past all this petty crap.”
“Eighteen is hardly old in nightblood years,” Minnie said.
“Nineteen. I’ll be nineteen next month.”
She licked her lips and leaned in. “Want to know a secret?”
“Like I’m going to say no to that.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Harper is twenty-five. She went through a rebel phase when she was younger, and then her parents grounded her for a year before pulling strings to get her in last year. They’ve threatened to cut her off if she doesn’t shape up.”
“And hanging out with a Faraday helps.”
She shrugged and winked. “Eat up, we have an exam to ace.”
* * *
The next classwas on the upper floor situated next to a room that hummed with the whirr of machinery and blinking lights. The tiny room powered the Sim lab where pods were grouped into scrums of six. Most of the cadets hovered by the windows on the far end of the room, looking nervous.
Not surprising. The pods took some getting used to. My first time had resulted in ten minutes of vomiting. But after several trials over the past eight weeks, because like hell did anyone get to lie low in this class, my brain had acclimatized to being hooked up to a machine so my consciousness could be beamed to a simulated location. Even so, my stomach did a little flip of nerves.
“Why can’t we just do the test in the real world?” a young feyblood male asked.
Pale, tall, broad-shouldered, and typically beautiful – which meant he was a Tuatha mixed with some other supernatural breed—the guy drew every eye with his question.
The Tuatha were always too good-looking to be real. This one was twirling a strand of his gleaming shoulder-length, silver-blond hair around his finger while fluttering his impossibly long eyelashes at Madam Garnet, the sim tutor.
Out in the real world, maybe Garnet and I would have been friends. Short and stocky, she had the don’t-mess-with-me attitude I admired and was my favorite tutor here – if I gave a shit about favorites.
“Why can’t we do this outside?” She glared at him. “Do we have fomorian hounds and rogue fey running around the bloody academy that I don’t bloody know about?”
He opened his mouth to reply, but she cut him off. “No. No, we do not, and you know why? Because this is a bloody secure location.” She crossed her arms. “These pods are as close as you get to a supernatural threat until your third term, and let’s hope by that time you’re ready to face the challenge.” She tapped the holotab in her hand. “The pods, for those of you that need a reminder, are Feytech, which means they are infallible, unbreakable, and un … damn, I can’t think of another word.”
“Perfect?” Harmon offered, his attention on a curvy female moonkissed.
Thomas’s face pinched.
“No, Harmon,” Madam Garnet said. “That wasn’t the word I was looking for. How about you bloody stick to finishing Carmichael’s sentences.”
A low chuckle rippled across the class.
Garnet ignored them. “The pods will keep you safe while you’re linked to the sim arena. Like anything that comes from Winterlock Tech, these pods have been tested and retested. Only the best for our cadets.” She tapped several buttons. “Teams are …”
She began to rattle off names, reiterating what we already knew.
“Minnie Faraday, Harmon Black, Thomas Carmichael, Indigo Justice, and Oberon Hyde.”
My pulse skipped. Hyde? Like Archer Hyde. They were spawned directly from Orion Winterlock’s bloodline – the only pure-blood fey on the mortal realm, council member, and owner of Winterlock Tech. Orion had certainly sown his oats, but the Hydes were the only feyblood line that were both descended from Orion and made up of a mix of human and fey genes. It made them more fey than any other feybloods because human genes were recessive to fey genes.
