Jessie
“What did you think of training, Jessie?” Hollace, the thunderbird, asked as Ulric and Jasper dropped from the sky. A plethora of gargoyles were still running their flight patterns, but my portion of the training session was over.
Tristan had me on beginner status, and a few of the house crew with me. The crew understood the larger picture and also how to improvise with me. Tristan thought they’d help me learn the ropes and acclimate to the army’s strategies.
Thearmy.
I had a gargoyle army. Me, Jacinta Evans, the shy and quiet Jane. The thought made me want to cackle.
If someone had told me a year ago that this was possible, I would’ve shrugged it off. Laughed, as I wanted to do now. I’d never, in my wildest dreams, thought this would—could—exist in modern times. But here we were, led by the infallibly confident Tristan, who had to pull double duty managing me and the guardians at the same time. After a few short days’ work, he’d begun to anticipate my moves more often, and frankly, Ithought he’d grown leaps and bounds—all because he’d stepped in about my schedule.
Howhad Niamh known?
“Jessie?” Hollace said.
I blinked rapidly at him, trying to corral my mind into the moment.
“Oh. Um…it’s complicated,” I replied as Cyra streaked fire through the sky, heading toward the corner of the property. She hadn’t gotten to set fire to the gnome nest there yet. The crazy thing was, burning the gnomes out didn’t seem to be working. They were tenacious little suckers. “It’s a lot to remember.”
“Yeah.” Hollace slipped on a purple muumuu. “Especially when flying is new to you, huh? Once you acclimate to organized flying, though, you’ll pick it up quickly.”
I headed toward the house in my own purple muumuu, checking a bare wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. After I dressed, I planned to head to Austin’s bar to meet Aurora and Broken Sue for training of a different sort. The two had agreed to communicate with each other in words and exaggerated body language, and my goal was to decipher their conversation.
Yeah, right. I already knew it would be a hopeless effort. Their version of exaggerated wasn’t much more than a twitch and a grunt to express a novel’s worth of information. Aurora thought I was intuitive, but I greatly suspected that she was giving mefartoo much credit. I was about to prove it.
“This is all hopeless,” I said to no one in particular.
“Seriously, Jessie, you’re a fast learner?—”
“Not flight,” I told Hollace. “That, at least, I think I’ll pick up eventually. I’ve got another session of shifter practice ahead, and honestly, flight feels more natural than noticing a squint and realizing it’s meant to be raucous laughter.”
“Ah.” He nodded as Ulric and Jasper caught up. “Yeah, I’m not great at any of that. It’s an entirely different language. Whywould they assume you, or any of us, could pick it up in a couple months?”
“Right?” Ulric said as we threaded our way through the flowers. “I tried to learn French a while back. Two months in, and I could say my name and ask for the time. No one could understand me, though. And I couldn’t spell the words…”
“Tristan picked up body language really quickly,” Jasper pointed out.
“He’s unnatural,” Ulric replied. “We’re just going to blame it on that.”
“I could get behind that…” Hollace’s voice trailed off, and everyone slowed.
I’d been looking at the ground, still conscious of my connections in the sky. Now I glanced up to see what everyone was reacting to.
Fred stood a few paces away from the back door. She wore a pink-and-black checkered suit jacket, buttoned at the waist, with no shirt underneath and brown pants. The hand at her left side had apparently just held the closed laptop lying beside her foot, while her right hand had dropped a half-eaten sandwich. Bread stuck out of her lips, and some meat had slid down her chin. She stared at us with wide eyes, her entire bearing tensed.
“Surprise,” Jasper said with confidence. “She’s showing surprise. I’m far enough along in body language to deduce that much.”
“And disbelief,” Ulric added. “Surprise and disbelief. See? The lessons are paying off.”
“Hey, Fred,” I said, using the soothing voice that had been deployed on me the first time I saw a person turn into a rat. I’d spiraled pretty quickly. “How much did you see?”
“I thought she mostly believed us the other day,” Jasper murmured.
“Clearly, you still can’t tell when someone is lying to you,” Hollace replied.
“Or maybe she was lying to herself,” Ulric whispered. “She watched us shift, for criminy’s sakes.”
“Hey.” I approached her slowly, my hands out. You never knew what the brain’s reaction might be to something like this. In her shoes, I might try to karate chop, and I had no idea what sort of fighting prowess she had. “So…this is what we were talking about. With the magic. It’s jolting, I know. I was non-magical until over a year ago. It’s a lot to take in.”
