The Fiery Heart

I nodded. I hadn’t explained my purpose, and she hadn’t asked. She mostly seemed content that I was independently studying the arts. I returned to my workstation and continued on with the last two stones, achieving equally disappointing results. One didn’t absorb magic at all. The other held it briefly, and then the magic bled out. I slouched back in the desk, defeated.

“I’m running out of easily accessible options,” I said, more to myself than her. “A halide like boleite’s my best bet, but it isn’t really lying around. I’m going to have to start ordering from rock dealers on the internet.”

Ms. Terwilliger didn’t have a chance to respond to my geological ramblings because someone knocked on the door. I slipped the rocks into my pocket and tried to look studious as she called a welcome. I figured Zoe had tracked me down, but surprisingly, Angeline walked in.

“Did you know,” she said, “that it’s a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?”

I closed my eyes and silently counted to five before opening them again. “Please tell me you haven’t eviscerated someone.”

She shook her head. “No, no. I left my biology homework in Miss Wentworth’s room, but when I went back to get it, she’d already left and locked the door. But it’s due tomorrow, and I’m already in trouble in there, so I had to get it. So, I went around outside, and her window lock wasn’t that hard to open, and I—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You broke into a classroom?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the problem.”

Behind me, I heard a choking laugh from Ms. Terwilliger’s desk.

“Go on,” I said wearily.

“Well, when I climbed through, I didn’t realize there was a bunch of stuff in the way, and I crashed into those plastic models of the human body she has. You know, the life-size ones with all the parts inside? And bam!” Angeline held up her arms for effect. “Organs everywhere.” She paused and looked at me expectantly. “So what are we going to do? I can’t get in trouble with her.”

“We?” I exclaimed.

“Here,” said Ms. Terwilliger. I turned around, and she tossed me a set of keys. From the look on her face, it was taking every ounce of self-control not to burst out laughing. “That square one’s a master. I know for a fact she has yoga and won’t be back for the rest of the day. I imagine you can repair the damage—and retrieve the homework—before anyone’s the wiser.”

I knew that the “you” in “you can repair” meant me. With a sigh, I stood up and packed up my things. “Thanks,” I said.

As Angeline and I walked down to the science wing, I told her, “You know, the next time you’ve got a problem, maybe come to me before it becomes an even bigger problem.”

“Oh no,” she said nobly. “I didn’t want to be an incon-venience.”

Her description of the scene was pretty accurate: organs everywhere. Miss Wentworth had two models, male and female, with carved out torsos that cleverly held removable parts of the body that could be examined in greater detail. I had a pretty good sense of anatomy but still opened up a textbook for reference as I began sorting the mess. Angeline, realizing her uselessness here, perched on a far counter and swung her legs as she watched me. I’d started reassembling the male when I heard a voice behind me.

“Melbourne, I always knew you’d need to learn about this kind of thing. I’d just kind of hoped you’d learn it from a real guy.”

I glanced back at Trey as he leaned in the doorway with a smug expression. “Ha, ha. If you were a real friend, you’d come help me.” I pointed at the female model. “Let’s see some of your alleged expertise in action.”

“Alleged?” He sounded indignant but strolled in anyway.

I hadn’t really thought much about asking him for help. Mostly I was thinking this was taking much longer than it should, and I had more important things to do with my time. It was only when he came to a sudden halt that I realized my mistake.

“Oh,” he said, seeing Angeline. “Hi.”

Her swinging feet stopped, and her eyes were as wide as his. “Um, hi.”

The tension ramped up from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds, and I tried not to groan. After all, their situation wasn’t all that different from mine. How would I feel if Adrian and I suddenly ended our relationship because of the taboos ingrained in our races? Trey and Angeline had split up because of outside pressures, not anything between them. And as I studied the longing in her eyes, I knew that the show she put on for Neil was exactly that: a show.

Everyone seemed at a loss for words. Angeline jerked her head toward the models and blurted out, “I had an accident.”

That seemed to snap Trey from his daze, and a smile curved his lips. Whereas Angeline’s antics made me want to pull out my hair sometimes, he found them endearing.

“That seems to happen a lot,” he said.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she insisted.

“It never is.”

“I just have bad luck.”

“Or you’re just trouble.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“No problem at all,” he said in a low voice.

“Oh my God,” I exclaimed. “Are you going to help or not?”

Somehow, the awkward tension had become sexual tension, and I was about ready to bolt. Trey, after one more long, heated look at her, turned away and threw himself into reassembling the female model. I hadn’t put much stock in his bragging, but to my surprise, he finished pretty quickly.

“Told you I’m an expert,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Angeline.

They both seemed to have forgotten me again and were going all dreamy-eyed. I cleared my throat. “Angeline, it’s almost time for dinner. Do you need to go change?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” She had enough presence of mind to fetch the homework that had started all of this. “Thanks for helping,” she told Trey, as though I hadn’t even done anything.

He gave a nonchalant shrug, like he did this every day. “No problem.”

After he’d swaggered out the door, Angeline gave a mournful sigh. “Oh, Sydney. Why does he have to be one of those stupid Warriors?”

I locked up the classroom. “Well, he’s not technically one right now.”

“But he could be again,” she said, trudging beside me as we headed out to catch the shuttle to our dorm. “And if he does, he’ll never overcome all that stuff about mixing with dhampirs. One of these days, he’ll start dating a human again, and since we’re here, I won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“What exactly do you mean?” I asked cautiously.

She brightened a little. “Well, if we were back home, I could just keep challenging his new girlfriends to duels.”

“Well, let’s just hope he stays single, then.”

I left her to her fantasies when we reached the dorm, each of us off to our own room. Zoe was waiting in mine, looking mournfully at a beat-up paperback. “Where have you been?” she asked. “Not at the airport the whole time?” She regarded me thoughtfully. “With Ms. Terwilliger?”

“Angeline, actually. I had to help her with a, um, problem in her biology class.”

“There you go again, doing things you don’t need to.”

Angeline and Trey’s plight had me thinking of my own, and I didn’t have much patience for Zoe’s Alchemist rhetoric. “I do need to do it. I need Angeline here at Amberwood, and that means making sure she stays in her teachers’ good graces.” I sat down backward in my desk chair, resting my chin on its back. “You want to be an Alchemist so badly? Don’t wait to react to the immediate problem. Plan ahead, look at the big picture, and you won’t ever have to deal with that problem. Better to save yourself from a major catastrophe than drag your feet over a bunch of little inconveniences.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, looking hurt at my chastisement. “I get it. You don’t have to lecture.”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling only slightly so. “You came here to learn. I’m just trying to help.”

She gave me a small smile. “I know. I’m here for professional reasons. It’s just hard to forget sometimes that you’re my sister. You’re pretty good at it, though . . . treating me like I’m just another Alchemist. I’ll have to try harder to be as good.”

I flinched. She meant it as a compliment, that I could put aside what was between us and wholeheartedly focus on Alchemist mandates. I didn’t feel so proud of that, though. In fact, it made me distinctly uncomfortable, and I nodded toward her book. “What are you reading?”

That got her out of business mode, though it also brought a scowl. “I don’t know. Some Shakespeare play for my English class. We have to pick one by tomorrow, and I thought this one would be good since it’s so short.” She held it up. Richard III. “But I’m not really getting it.”

“Yikes,” I said.

“Bad play?” she guessed.

“Great play, but maybe not the best match for you. See if you can hunt down a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Might be easier on you.” Thinking of my friends’ romantic woes, I couldn’t help a small, sad smile. “And you’re practically living in the middle of it.” I laughed when she didn’t get the reference. “I forget that wasn’t part of Dad’s standard curriculum. I did most of my literature research on my own.”

She nodded, and suddenly her eyes went wide. “Oh! I nearly forgot to tell you. He’s coming here. Dad.”

I sat bolt upright in the chair. “When?”

“Next week.” I tried to relax, knowing my shock was a bit beyond ordinary surprise. I certainly couldn’t let her know I was afraid. “He wants to talk to us about Mom and the hearing. They’ve set a date for next month.”

That was news to me, but then I shouldn’t have been surprised at being out of the loop. After all, Zoe had proved a much more eager daughter than I had. It was only natural he’d tell her first.

“He’s going to help prepare us,” she continued. “So that we can be ready to fight for him.”

“Ah,” I said.

Zoe flounced back on the bed and stared morosely at the ceiling. “I wish it were over already. No, I wish I was eighteen like you and could just be free.”

While I could think of many adjectives to describe myself, “free” wasn’t usually one that came to mind.

“Oh, Sydney,” Zoe lamented. “Why is she doing this?”

“Because she loves you,” I said quietly.

“That’s not love.”

I was glad Zoe didn’t elaborate because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to keep my cool in the face of whatever shallow definitions of love she would’ve undoubtedly come up with.

“Mom’s not going to be able to match all of Dad’s educational and cultural talk,” I observed. “All she’ll have is anecdotal stuff to go on. Like that time you broke your foot.”

“It was my whole leg,” Zoe said quietly. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t have to, judging from the faraway look in her eyes. When Zoe was little, she’d wanted to take gymnastics, so our mom had made it happen. An accident at a meet had broken Zoe’s leg, and she’d had to spend the night in the hospital, which was devastating since it was the same night as her team’s victory party. Mom had made arrangements to bring the team and the party to the hospital room, much to the staff’s astonishment. Zoe, craving social contact back then, had loved it. Our dad had thought the incident was proof of how worthless the class was.

When I drove the gang to Clarence’s later that evening, I heard a text come in on the Love Phone in my purse. Strict principles against texting and driving kept me away from it, but it wasn’t easy. That, and I tried not to get the phone out when others were around. As soon as we were walking up Clarence’s driveway, however, I pulled it out and read Adrian’s message: Escape plan #5: Open an alpaca ranch in Texas, one that requires all blond-haired, brown-eyed, brainy girls to wear sexy cowgirl outfits. I reread the words and smiled before deleting it, just like I did all of his messages. Jill caught my eye as she passed and smiled back at me. Sometimes her inner knowledge was creepy. Sometimes, it was like a comforting diary, having someone who knew about my romance. I really didn’t like a life of secrets, even if I’d been raised to live one.

None of us were great company tonight. I was down over Adrian, Jill over her Neil/Eddie dilemma, Angeline over Trey, and Zoe over our parents. Only Eddie and Clarence seemed to be having a good time—well, and Dorothy, once she was swimming on the high of having given Jill her blood. Clarence was in one of his more coherent moments and was regaling us with some of his tales of traveling, back when he was younger and hadn’t withdrawn from the Moroi world. One of his stories mentioned visiting a small exclusively dhampir training academy in Italy that had an excellent reputation. Eddie hung on every detail that Clarence could muster up.