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Chapter 5: Mukashi Mukashi

Chapter 5: Mukashi Mukashi

THE FOOD AT CAMP WAS good, but Amber didn’t taste much of dinner or lunch. Daniel’s low voice kept repeating itself in her ears. Feed off our fear. He had sounded haunted and weary, like he’d had a lifetime’s worth of Demon attacks and didn’t want to keep fighting.

Darker. Primal and wild. Sometimes, she felt like that. She felt like an animal, but it wasn’t her, it was something inside of her. Something that killed Emily. A Demon killed Emily. So it wasn’t inside of her. It was just a Demon that lurked about the house and its presence made her imagine things that weren’t true.

Her sensing Daniel’s fear… that was just a side effect, like Daniel said. Sometimes Adepts get so scared they see things that they didn’t really see.

That almost made her feel worse. Emily had hated her, and Amber had hated her right back. There was no love lost between them, and yet she had been the only family Amber had. Now she had no one. No one to explain what exactly Lucian Starling did wrong, or how her parents really died.

But now, at least she had a purpose. When the Demon killed Emily, all she’d done was stand back and look on, as if she was watching a movie, where nothing could hurt her. More Demons could come for her, though. And if she really wanted to go back to a normal life after twenty—because that’s what I want to do, find out my parents’ story—then she had to start, here, at Camp.

It wasn’t just because of the magic or her powers or the opportunity to fight and look cool. That was just Daniel. Not her.

Amber put down her fork and stood, leaving the Air table. She didn’t know any of her cabin mates, and had no interest in starting now. And yet Daniel somehow acts like he’s my friend. Even in my old school, no one did that – talk to me so easily. But she didn’t need to make friends here.

She headed to the training grounds, which seemed to be the open space she had run through just hours before, heaving and panicking like some cornered animal. That wasn’t me.

  

“—couldn’t have wanted that. They created us, idiot! What the hell are you thinking?”

“If they didn’t want that, then why would there be the power stream? The seven of them made everything on this planet, because they’re the source of all magic. That means they made the power stream too, so how can you say that they want to protect us? Explain that!”

Following the shouts to a corner of the huge room, Amber joined the already-present crowd of onlookers. She squeezed her way to the front, just in time to catch a girl shove a boy. The bystanders oohed. It could have been another of those post-breakup fights that she’d seen too many times in school, except these two were spewing rebuttals and points about something she had never heard of.

The boy jerked away and pointed at the girl, opening his mouth to say something else, but a familiar voice interrupted the argument. “No fighting in the middle of training, you guys. I can feel the sexual tension in the air from the other side of the room!” Daniel walked between the two, hands raised in a placating manner.