Elderic Evie's Story Vol. II

The first sign that the afternoon’s lacrosse match was going to become troublesome was when the ball grew legs.

Dorian Ashford saw the tiny black feet appear a fraction of a second before anyone else did. He was already moving across the field, his lacrosse stick angled in front of him as he tracked the ball rolling through the damp grass toward the sideline. Rain had fallen over Elderic during the early hours before dawn, leaving the sprawling academy grounds slick beneath a pale silver sky, but by match time the clouds had thinned enough for the stands surrounding the field to fill. Students crowded shoulder to shoulder beneath banners of deep violet and antique gold, shouting themselves hoarse as Elderic’s team fought to hold a narrow lead against Blackthorn Academy.

Dorian was three strides away when the ball blinked. Two round golden eyes opened in its dark leather surface, four absurdly small legs popped from underneath it, and the thing took one look at Dorian bearing down on it before turning sharply and sprinting in the opposite direction. A roar of laughter erupted from the stands as Dorian changed direction, boots tearing through the wet grass while the enchanted ball scampered toward midfield with considerably more determination than something designed to be thrown between lacrosse sticks had any right to possess.

“Oh, come on,” Dorian muttered.

The ball ran faster. Blackthorn’s nearest defender apparently decided that supernatural lacrosse rules did not require dignity and launched himself after it too. For several ridiculous seconds, captain and opponent abandoned all pretense of athletic grace and chased a terrified-looking lacrosse ball across the field while its tiny legs moved with astonishing speed.

“Left!” someone shouted from behind Dorian.

“I know where it is!” Dorian called without turning.

“It doesn’t look like you do!”

Dorian recognized Cedric’s booming voice even from the opposite end of the field. He glanced toward Elderic’s goal long enough to see the enormous goalkeeper leaning against the frame, one massive hand resting on the top of his stick. Cedric was nearly twice as broad as several of their midfielders and covered in thick blue-gray fur that became darker around his shoulders and forearms. Two blunt horns curved backward through the unruly fur covering his head. New students tended to stare at him for approximately three days before discovering that the most frightening-looking member of Elderic’s lacrosse team was also the one most likely to carry an injured moth to Sister Willowfen’s infirmary.

Dorian returned his attention to the ball just as it darted between the legs of the Blackthorn defender. The defender stumbled, but Dorian managed to keep his footing. He dropped his stick, lunged forward, and caught the ball in both hands. Its little legs kicked furiously against his palms while its golden eyes glared up at him with what Dorian could only interpret as personal outrage.

“Absolutely not,” Dorian told it.

The golden eyes narrowed, and Dorian narrowed his own in return. When the ball hissed at him, he tightened his hands just enough to prevent another escape and shook his head.

“Don’t start.”

The legs disappeared and the eyes closed. Within seconds, an entirely ordinary black lacrosse ball rested innocently in Dorian’s hand, as though the entire field had collectively imagined the chase. The crowd erupted again as Dorian rose, retrieved his stick, and tossed the ball toward the nearest official, who caught it without so much as blinking.

Elderic’s equipment had been behaving badly for longer than any current student had been alive. Nobody seemed entirely certain who had enchanted the lacrosse balls in the first place, although Professor Ashcombe insisted they had been troublesome when she was a student, and Professor Ashcombe had been dead for more than a century. There were theories that the enchantment had originally been intended to make matches more challenging. There were other theories that a bored student had done it as a prank and nobody had ever figured out how to undo it. Dorian personally subscribed to a third theory: Elderic was Elderic, and sometimes things simply grew legs.

“Captain!”

Dorian turned just in time to catch the fresh ball thrown toward him. Thankfully, this one appeared committed to remaining spherical, although he had attended Elderic long enough to know better than to trust appearances. The whistle sounded, and the match resumed with enough force to erase the laughter almost immediately.

Blackthorn had arrived at Elderic before sunset with thirty students, two faculty members, one very nervous assistant coach, and the confidence of a team that had beaten Elderic the previous season. Their academy lay several hundred miles north, hidden beyond a mountain range that ordinary humans believed ended at an inaccessible wilderness preserve. Blackthorn had a reputation for producing excellent shapeshifters, ruthless midfielders, and students who regarded school rivalries as blood feuds inherited from their ancestors. Dorian had no intention of allowing them to return home with another victory.

He accelerated downfield as one of Elderic’s midfielders scooped the ball and passed. The exchange happened quickly, sticks rising and falling beneath the deepening sky. A Blackthorn werewolf closed in from Dorian’s right, but Dorian heard the heavy footfall before the collision came. Vampire reflexes had their advantages. He twisted away, accepted the pass, and drove forward while the crowd surged to its feet.

“Move, Ashford!” one of the Blackthorn defenders shouted.

Dorian smiled as he continued forward. He loved this part of the game, when everything outside the field seemed to disappear beneath the pounding of feet, the calls of teammates, and the instinctive calculations required to remain one movement ahead of the opposing team. For all the traditions surrounding the Ashford name and all the expectations waiting for him beyond the field, none of them mattered when a lacrosse stick was in his hands. There were no family histories out here, no old vampire houses, no bloodlines, and no whispered conversations about which families had stood beside which rulers three hundred years ago. There was only the field, his teammates, the opposing goal, and the exhilarating simplicity of knowing exactly what he needed to do next.

Dorian dodged one defender and nearly lost the ball to another before a third came directly at him. He passed left, drawing the Blackthorn defense after the ball. His teammate caught it, held it for barely a heartbeat, and sent it straight back. Dorian caught the ball in the pocket of his stick and fired toward the goal before the defense had time to correct its mistake.

The ball struck the net, and the Elderic stands exploded into celebration. Students stamped their feet against the old wooden stands while violet-and-gold banners rippled overhead. Somewhere above them, several tiny winged creatures burst from beneath the eaves of the nearby athletics building, apparently deciding the celebration was either an invitation or a threat. Dorian barely heard the official signal the goal before his teammates converged on him.

A werewolf midfielder struck him between the shoulder blades hard enough to make an ordinary human reconsider several life choices. “That’s how you do it!”

“You’re welcome,” Dorian replied.

“You didn’t pass to me.”

“Exactly.”

The werewolf shoved him, and Dorian laughed as he turned toward Elderic’s end of the field. Cedric had lifted both enormous arms and was waving from the goal with enough enthusiasm to make several Blackthorn players glance nervously in his direction.

“ASHFORD!” Cedric bellowed.

“What?”

“I COULD HAVE MADE THAT!”

“You are the goalkeeper!”

“I HAVE RANGE!”

Several students in the front row doubled over laughing. Dorian shook his head as Cedric grinned, displaying a set of teeth that had terrified more than one visiting team before they learned that he smiled whenever he was happy, nervous, hungry, confused, or presented with baked goods.

Dorian was still smiling when something cold passed beside him. It wasn’t the wind, and he knew the difference well enough that his body recognized the sensation before his mind consciously registered it. His smile almost faltered, but years of practice allowed him to keep walking as though nothing had happened.

A girl stood near the edge of the field, and nobody else looked at her. They never did. She appeared to be around the same age as the students filling the stands, although Dorian had long ago stopped assuming appearances meant much where ghosts were concerned. Her pale dress belonged to another century, its soft fabric falling around her in layers that the breeze couldn’t quite touch. Dark hair framed a face that would have been difficult not to notice if anyone else could have seen it.

Dorian had been seeing her around Elderic since the beginning of term. He had encountered her in hallways, the library, the old courtyard, and once in Professor Thistledown’s classroom, where she had sat directly on the professor’s desk while an entire class took notes around her. More recently, however, she had begun appearing at lacrosse practice and matches with increasing regularity. More specifically, she had begun appearing near him.

Dorian looked straight ahead and continued walking as the ghost fell into step beside him.

“That was unnecessarily dramatic,” she said.

Dorian didn’t react. He had become remarkably good at pretending the dead weren’t speaking to him, although the girl beside him was making that particular skill increasingly difficult to maintain.

She drifted ahead of him and turned, moving backward while studying his face. “You know everyone is already looking at you, don’t you? You don’t have to do the hair thing too.”

Dorian resisted the sudden urge to touch his hair. He hadn’t done a hair thing, as far as he knew, although the possibility that he had done one unconsciously was now going to bother him for the remainder of the match.

“Although,” she continued thoughtfully, “I suppose if I looked like you, I might be insufferable about it too.”

Dorian tightened his jaw, not because he was annoyed but because he was trying very hard not to smile. The girl appeared entirely unaware of his struggle as she floated alongside him, apparently enjoying the freedom of speaking to someone she believed incapable of hearing a single word.

“You have very pretty eyes,” she added after studying him for another moment. “Annoyingly pretty, actually.”

Dorian nearly looked at her. Years of hiding his gift saved him at the last second, and he kept his attention fixed on the field as though the ghost hovering beside his shoulder didn’t exist.

“Being invisible is wasted on me,” she sighed.

That comment landed differently from the others, and Dorian’s amusement faded. For all her commentary, all her wandering, and all her irreverent observations, there were moments when something else slipped through. Loneliness appeared without warning and disappeared just as quickly, as though even she didn’t like acknowledging it. Dorian had noticed it before, usually in the spaces between her jokes, when she watched groups of students talking or saw friends embrace in the corridor. She always recovered quickly, but he had begun wondering how long she had been wandering Elderic unseen.

Before he could dwell on the thought, a familiar voice called his name from the stands.

“Dorian!”

He looked up to find Aiko standing near the front railing, impossible to miss even among the colorful collection of Elderic students surrounding her. Her long pink curls tumbled past her shoulders, streaked here and there with violet that caught the lantern light. Soft feline ears rose through her hair, twitching when Dorian looked toward her, and her tail curled lazily behind her as she smiled and blew him a kiss.

Dorian smiled back, and the ghost beside him groaned loudly enough that if anyone else had been capable of hearing her, half the field would have turned.

“Oh, marvelous. Her.”

Dorian bit the inside of his cheek.

Aiko waved again, apparently pleased to have caught his attention, while the ghost folded her arms and stared up at the stands.

“Yes, yes. You’re beautiful. We all understand.”

Dorian started toward his team before his self-control betrayed him. The ghost followed without invitation, although Dorian was beginning to suspect that invitations had very little meaning to someone who could pass through doors.

“Although those shoes with that skirt are a crime,” she continued, “and I say that as someone who died before indoor plumbing became dependable.”

A laugh nearly escaped him. Dorian disguised it as a cough, but the attempt was imperfect enough that the teammate walking beside him glanced over.

“You all right?” the other boy asked.

“Fine.”

“Sounded like you swallowed something.”

Dorian cleared his throat and adjusted his grip on his stick. “I’m fine.”

The ghost appeared on his other side before he had taken another two steps, and there was something different in her expression now. The casual amusement was gone. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied him with far more attention than Dorian wanted at that particular moment.

“Was that a laugh?”

Dorian kept his expression perfectly neutral and continued toward the field. He could feel her staring at him, but he refused to look in her direction. His particular gift had manifested decades earlier than anyone in his family expected his strongest vampire ability to emerge, and he had learned quickly that seeing the dead was considerably easier than explaining why he was talking to someone nobody else could see. Over time, he had learned to hide every reaction to the spirits around him, whether it was a flicker in a mirror, a voice in an empty corridor, or a dead professor complaining about renovations made to his former classroom. He saw them and heard them, but nobody knew, and he intended to keep it that way.

The ghost remained beside him, however, and Dorian had the uncomfortable feeling that one badly disguised laugh had undone weeks of careful pretending. When he finally reached his position, he could still feel her attention fixed on him.

The official raised the whistle as Dorian’s teammates moved into position. Across the field, Blackthorn settled into formation, but the ghost made no move to leave. Instead, she drifted closer until she was standing almost directly beside Dorian, studying his profile as though she had suddenly discovered a puzzle she intended to solve.

For the first time since Dorian had begun noticing her around Elderic, genuine suspicion entered her pale face. She leaned closer, watching for the smallest change in his expression before speaking quietly beside him.

“Can you hear me?”

The whistle shrieked across the field before Dorian had to decide how convincingly he could ignore the question. He launched himself forward with his teammates, fixing his attention on the match and refusing to look behind him.

At the edge of the field, Evelyn Wisp remained perfectly still as the players raced away. She had spent centuries learning what it felt like to speak without being heard and to stand among people without being seen. She knew the particular emptiness of looking directly into someone’s face while knowing their eyes would never truly find hers.

For the first time in a very long while, however, Evie wasn’t entirely certain that had just happened.

As she watched Dorian Ashford disappear into the rush of the match, a strange and exhilarating possibility began to take root in her mind. The handsome, infuriating vampire captain might have heard every word she had said.

And if he had, Evie intended to find out.