Raiya arched a brow. “What are you thinking?”
I’ll admit, it was nice to hear her asking the questions.
“Get your dad to meet us,” I told Mikey. “He knows who I am now. Get us together, and we’ll do an experiment.”
“What’s the other way?” Raiya asked, curious.
“I’d say we could go break into Gwen’s hospice care and see if we can heal her, but I don’t think her parents would be too eager to see me again,” I said. “Even if I did just get the charges against me dropped.”
“I’ll set up the meeting with my dad,” Mikey said, interrupting Raiya and me.
“Fine.” I moved out of the doorway. “Until then, you can go. But you need to stay away from Grandpa Odd if you see him again.”
“Fine, whatever,” Mikey grumbled as he pushed past me. “Just get out of my face.”
“We’ve always tried to protect you,” Raiya told him.
“For all the good it’s done,” Mikey snapped.
“If you want to put yourself out of misery,” Raiya countered, “there are still plenty of demons hanging around. Draco’s terrified a good amount of them with his power, but there are always some who stick around to see what they can get. If you want to join Gwen, you have a chance.”
I stepped in front of Raiya. “You don’t need to be that hard on him,” I murmured to her, before I turned to face Mikey. “Look, I promise you that we’re doing all we can right now. I’m sorry about what’s happened. I really am.”
“I’m tired of your apologies,” Mikey said.
“Okay, well, how about a call for mercy here, huh?” I held my palms out to him, face-up and empty. “Look, I know things have deteriorated between us lately. I don’t want that. Not really. We’ve been through harder times than this. Fighting over girls, fighting over trust, this isn’t like us.”
Mikey said nothing.
“I’ve been a bad friend to you,” I continued. “And to be fair, you’ve been a bad one to me.”
Mikey’s mouth gaped.
“You broke the superhero creed,” I said. “You’re not supposed to tell anyone my real identity. According to most movies, you will die soon for doing just that.”
“But—”
“You also broke the bro code,” I said. “Now, I’ve broken it too, but what I’m trying to get at here is that you put my life in danger, you put Raiya in danger—and since I’m in love with her, that also doesn’t look good, according to most movies—and you put our mission at risk.”
Mikey regained his composure. “What are you getting at, Dinger?” he asked.
“I’m saying that I could easily feel justified in hurting you,” I said.
“Hamilton, that’s not prudent,” Raiya hissed at me. “And you thought my tactics were bad.”
“No, see,” I said, “I have every incentive to hit you or harm you, and I haven’t. I’m angry at you—oh, yes, I’m angry at you—but I’m not going to do something stupid about it. I’m going to forgive you.”
“Forgive me?” Mikey spat.
“Yes. You know I’ve done wrong, but you know you’ve done wrong, too.”
“That doesn’t excuse your wrongdoing.”
“That doesn’t excuse yours.”
“You’re just trying to make yourself feel better. Like you’re the better person between us.”
“If you forgive me, if you show me some mercy,” I said, “then we’ll be even.”
Mikey glared at me. “I’ll have to think about it,” he finally said, though it was more likely he said it because he had nothing else to say, rather than he was actually going to do it.
Still, it was a start. It was a small win for me.
“Fine. Now, can you tell us anything about Grandpa Odd?” I asked. “I want to know, so I can help protect you, and help protect others.”
Mikey paused for a moment, and then he sighed. “No. He just came to visit, same as always,” Mikey said. “He told me about what was happening at the Time Tower, that you weren’t willing to work with Dad, and that Gwen was beginning to fade from some of the reports he’d heard at Rachel’s.”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Mikey shook his head. “I’ll call you and let you know about meeting with Dad.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not going to trust you unless you show up for the meeting.”
“Until then, can we at least have the benefit of the doubt?” Raiya asked.
“No,” he retorted. “We’re at an impasse. That’s all.”
I waited until he was out of sight before I said, “That’s all we need right now.”
“Maybe we should send Elysian to watch him?” Raiya suggested.
“No.” I shook my head. “There’s no point, now. Mikey can take care of himself. Or at least he can if he wants to. We should let him. Maybe after Draco tries to claw his soul of his body, he’ll be more apt to fight alongside us rather than against us.”
“You’re right about that.”
I laughed. “Well, it must be a day for miracles, if you’re going to admit I’m right.”
“We agree on a lot more than you make it sound like.”
“Are you disagreeing with me about agreeing with me?”
“I’ll let it slide for now,” she said. “I should go out and do a patrol.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“You need to get to school,” she reminded me.
I groaned. “Come on, you didn’t need to tell me that.”
“You should go,” Raiya said. “What’s the point of getting that 2398 on your SATs if you’re not going to get the glowing school record to back it up?”
“2398?” I asked. “I haven’t gotten my scores yet.”
“I was taking into account the English section you were worried about,” she teased.
“I wasn’t worried about it, per say.”
“You still need to go,” she said. “Enjoy your time at school. You never know when it’ll be over.”
“It’ll be over next June,” I retorted.
“I thought that too, once,” she said. “Things don’t always turn out the way we want them to.”
I didn’t reply to that. She had a point, but it was a vague one, and that didn’t do much to persuade me. But I knew she wanted me to do well, and her love made up the difference. So I relented.
“Will you be okay on the patrol?” I asked.
“I can get Elysian to help me,” Raiya said. “He came in to Rachel’s this morning, you know.”
“What was he doing?”
“Looking for breakfast.”
“I am not completely surprised,” I said. “But my mother’s latest chef makes a lot of raw fish and stuff like that. I figured he would have liked that, as a dragon.”
“Believe me,” Raiya said with a laugh, “he vastly prefers cupcakes.”
“Make sure you put whatever he eats on my tab.”
“I already do that. But I don’t mind. It’s nice to have someone else watching out for Rachel and the café when I’m not around. I’m worried Grandpa would go after them, too. He especially knows what Rachel means to me.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “We’re almost there,” I said. “We just have to defeat Draco, and that’s it.”
“There are smaller demons around,” Raiya reminded me.
“There will likely always be something we could do,” I said. “But my mission was originally to recapture the Sinisters. Orpheus and Draco are just extras, and stopping Alküzor from ruling the universe seems like a reasonable thing to do. After that, everything will be easy.”
“It’s true that there will always be evil somewhere on Earth,” Raiya agreed. “Many other demons and devils are trapped inside the fire of the earth. They’re waiting there until their final judgement comes.”
“You can’t forget humans,” I said. “There are plenty that do evil things and don’t have any qualms over it.”
“Yes, that is true.” Raiya leaned into
me. “The line between order and chaos is severed with a simple choice, as good and evil run through all human hearts.”
“And Stars, too,” I said, giving her a quick kiss on her forehead. We were coming up on the school, and it was time to say good-bye again. “We’ll have to finish this conversation later, I guess.”
Raiya gave me a rueful smile. “It appears so,” she said, still bantering with me.
“See you later,” I said, slowly letting her pull away from me, hesitant to go back into the world surrounding the school.
I knew Martha’s class was waiting and my friends all likely needed some help with their homework, and the girls were, as always, just eager to see me.
I turned back to see Raiya as she pressed into the four-point mark on the underside of her wrist and transformed into Starry Knight. She waved to me and then took off, her radiant form darting across the cloudy April skies.
Sighing, I turned back to the school. “Alright,” I told myself. “Time for the real battle of the day to begin.”
☼9☼
Foundations
Meeting with Mikey left me feeling a mixture of hopeless and angry. I felt hopeless, I decided, because he was hopeless, and I was angry with him for being hopeless.
As much as I might’ve wished that to be true, the truth was more along the lines of I wanted Mikey to be safe, but he didn’t want me to protect him. I was angry at him for making me care, and I was angry that I couldn’t just stop caring either.
His stupidity was a liability.
But as the days passed, I was able to receive some relief. Mikey came back to school, and even though he wasn’t in my classes (he fell behind on a few subjects while he was tutored in the hospital), I was able to better watch over him. Better yet, I was able to do it where he couldn’t accuse me of hovering around him.
That relief was a relief in itself, even if I had to dance around Drew, Poncey, and Jason, as they all asked about why Mikey and I were fighting “this time.”
I played it off as one of our usual spats, either shrugging it off or distracting them while I managed to get away without actually answering any of their questions.
Fortunately, I was not the only one who was feeling an extra dose of relief. With the SATs out of the way, there were two things on everybody’s mind: Prom, and summer vacation.
With a week until prom, and five weeks until the end of the school year, the school was settling into its summertime routines quite nicely. Teachers were more cheerful, students were less stressed, and everyone was generally more agreeable.
Glancing around the classroom as we finished up, a wry smile made its way onto my face. What a difference hope makes, I thought. Even Brittany Taylor, who’d been one of Gwen’s friends, and a friend of Samantha Carter, an irritating girl who had her soul sucked out the year before, seemed more like her normal cheerful self.
Of course, that was probably just because she was getting the chance to boss people around again, I noted. She’d been elected the head of the prom-planning committee.
It was the last period of the day when Brittany buzzed her way around the room, heading toward me. “Dinger,” she called, “hang on for a sec.”
“What is it?” I asked. The bell rang, signaling the end of the day, and I was more than ready to leave.
“You haven’t bought your prom ticket,” she said, waving a checklist of people’s names who I assumed also did not buy a ticket.
“Oh,” I replied. “Right.”
Cheryl was supposed to fill that out and get it in.
Ugh, you just can’t depend on your mother, especially right after she just vowed to be a better mother in front of the whole city.
“Okay, give me one of those papers,” I said, gesturing toward the stack she carried, “and I’ll bring in a check tomorrow.”
“Here.” She gave me the permission slip (yes, that’s really a thing for prom, when most people are close enough to legal adulthood). Brittany smiled sweetly and said, “Don’t forget, if you’re bringing a date, you’ll have to pay for her ticket, too.”
“What if she’s paying for her own ticket?” I asked.
“She’ll need her own permission slip.” Brittany handed me an extra one.
“She doesn’t go to this school,” I said. “She shouldn’t need it.”
“So you actually have a date then?”
I groaned. I knew the gossip going around, and I knew of its power. Gossip was part of the information exchange at high school, and I usually managed to pay my dues; since the end of swim season, I had nothing of any virtual importance to share with my peers.
So the Gossip Karma Queen by default had come hunting for me.
I didn’t like to share information about my personal life. My public life, and even its implications, were all up for grabs. It didn’t matter to me, so long as it mattered to them—and so long as I knew the truth.
Despite Brittany’s unwelcome inquiry, I held my ground. “Yes, I have a date. She doesn’t go to this school.” I passed back one of the slips. “I’m bringing her.” No matter how much she’ll probably hate getting scrutinized all night by you and your cronies.
Brittany’s face scrunched up. “I heard from Poncey that you don’t actually have a date, and Via told me you were going to go with her.”
“First of all, that’s my business,” I said. “Second, I wasn’t aware you were paying attention to Poncey at all, since he dissed you back in elementary school.”
Brittany blushed, but she glared at me as she excused herself, saying she needed to go find Guy Fitch, another social outcast, and take care of him.
Not the most genial of confrontations, I thought as she walked away. But I had another year of high school yet, to make my political prowess known and complete. So I didn’t worry.
I especially didn’t feel like worrying, because I was certain the battle was almost over. Draco just had to be defeated, and while his sword and his skill gave me pause, I didn’t see any future in which he would not be defeated.
That left me free to hold off on worrying about silly things, like social cliques and school rivalries.
I did choose to concern myself about the prom, though. (Come on, this was the first year I was allowed to go, as a junior, and it was like a rite of passage.)
Because I concerned myself with it, I decided to concern Raiya with it, too, when I headed over to see her.
She was upstairs when I came, listening to some music as she worked on her supernova painting again, with its thick strokes and fuzzy clarity.
“Looks nice,” I said, well aware I was not much of judge when it came to art, at least past announcing something was either “good” or “bad.”
Raiya sighed. “It’ll work for now,” she said, as she put it up to dry.
“You have plenty of time to work on it,” I said with a shrug. I pulled out the review book for AP Gov. We were creeping closer to May, and AP tests were coming up. “This review section, on the other hand, has to be done by tomorrow, or supposedly Martha’s going to be upset.”
“I can’t imagine Mrs. Smithe getting upset with you.” Raiya smirked as she began cleaning off her brushes.
I watched her for a moment, recalling Romeo and Juliet, the stupid play Gwen was starring in when the Sinisters started attacking Apollo City. “I was cleaning brushes,” I said.
“What was that?” Raiya pushed some hair out of her face as she glanced back at me.
“I was cleaning paintbrushes the day that you came from Rosemont to work on the set for Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “I remember your fight with that girl.”
Raiya laughed. “I’d forgotten about fighting with Courtney,” she said. “I was more surprised to see you that day.”
“How did you know it was me?” I asked. Awkwardness took over. “I mean, how did you know I was, you know, the same person as Almeisan?”
“It took me a while to believe it,” Raiya told me. She put her brushes up. “I don’t have an exact answer for
you, or at least one that would make sense to a scientist or a theorist like Logan, for example. But I know that there are things that we can’t see, things that can outlast time. Who we are, as people, as creations, is one of them.”
“But people change,” I said.
“True.” She reached out and took my hands. Her fingers were strong, comforting. Capable of making beautiful things. “But despite change, we still exist.”
“I guess you have a point. We’re still here, even if we have different names.”
“Exactly,” she said, “although I’m not sure ‘Astraiya’ is much different from ‘Raiya.’”
“Your name is technically still ‘Astraiya,’” I reminded her. “My parents gave me a completely different name.”
“I think with being here, it’s more like a title change of sorts,” Raiya said. “I mean, you can agree with me. That happens here already. You’re the one who calls your mother by her first name.”
“Cheryl suits her better.” I thought about my mom’s decision to go back to private practice. “Maybe she’ll feel more like ‘Mom’ now that she’s going to start her own firm.”
Raiya gave me a smile, and for a long moment, for unclear reasons even to me, I wondered if she wanted kids. “So you think being here, in this realm, is like motherhood?” I asked.
“The logic has parallels.”
“Do you think you’d like to be a mother someday?”
Her sudden stillness answered the question, and she turned away to grab a towel to clean up. I narrowed my gaze at her, calling on my power, and I was surprised to see she was afraid.
“Are you afraid of having kids?” I asked.
“No,” she snapped. “I just … I just don’t think of it very often.”
I could sense her hesitancy, so I moved over to her and took a hold of her hands. I saw they were shaking slightly, like they had been the day she came to rescue me from Cheryl and Dante.
I knew at once what was wrong; she wasn’t afraid of having kids; she was afraid of not having them, and losing them. Just like she was afraid of losing me again.
“Show me,” I said.