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AVERY

“H igher, Connor! Faster! Come on—move your pansy ass!” Coach Vasquez shouted at me as I climbed the thick, knotted rope hanging from the beam of the gym’s roof.

The gym isn’t often used here at Nocturne Academy.

Coach Vasquez believes in fresh air, so she usually makes us go out to the huge field behind the ancient castle that houses the school and run laps or throw a football around or whatever is passing for physical education at any given moment.

But there was no place out in the field to hang a climbing rope, so for once we were being spared the merciless Florida sun, heat, and humidity.

But at the moment, I would have traded the heat and humidity in a heartbeat to get away from the damn rope.

Not that I’m bad at climbing—I actually have very decent upper body strength.

I decided pretty early that I wasn’t going to let myself be stereotyped as a weak, girly-man.

(This probably had more to do with what my dad thought of me than any outside idea of what I ought to be, but whatever—at least it had a positive effect. So I guess, thanks Dad?)

Anyway, I have an exercise routine I do every morning—pushups, sit-ups, weights and cardio. I’m a morning person anyway, and I find that getting up for a run before anyone else in the Norm Dorm, where I live with my Coven mates, clears my head and gets me ready for the day.

So I’m not weak, as I said, and I was climbing the rope at least as well as anyone else in class had climbed it—better than some. But Coach Vasquez was a Drake and Drakes do not like people like me. (Which is to say, they’re incredibly homophobic.)

“Faster! You climb like a girl!” she snapped, as I went up, hand-over-hand, putting my morning weight-training routine to good use.

Her comment brought trollish laughter from the rest of the class—most of whom were also Drakes who were on the football team.

Which basically meant I got to take gym with the biggest, meanest homophobes in the whole school—lucky me.

I ignored her—which was my usual response to slurs. I suppose I could have reported her—I’m not the first student she’s been abusive towards. But I found out pretty early in life that you have to pick your battles. If I went to the Headmistress and complained, she would bring my parents into it.

My mom would fight for me, of course. She was a tiny little thing, barely five feet tall without her oh-so-fashionable heels—but she would have faced down a fire breathing dragon if she thought I was in any kind of danger.

But then my dad would have gotten involved and they would have had a big argument about how I needed to fight my own battles.

(This was my dad’s usual line whenever anyone picked on me for being “girly,” which means I learned to stand up for myself at a pretty young age because he absolutely refused to stand up for me in any way.

He seemed to think that I had somehow chosen to be gay and so I could deal with the consequences of said choice.)

Anyway, if they both got involved, it might provoke another of their rare but intense fights—which always seemed to be about me.

And that would weaken their marriage even more.

They might even get a divorce and that would break my mom’s heart!

And since I love my mom more than anyone in the world, well… you see how it is.

So yeah, I decided to ignore the slur and just keep climbing.

Finally, I reached the top and just hung there for a minute, showing off my upper body strength a bit more. Suck on that, you idiots—LGBTQ doesn’t mean weak. At least Coach Vasquez wasn’t shouting degrading things in my general direction anymore.

I looked down and saw there was a reason for that—she had gone off somewhere—probably to take a personal call or something. Anyway, there was no one down there but the rest of my gym class—most of whom, as I already said, were big, dumb jocks from the football team who all hated my guts.

“Hey faggot, you comin’ down?” Sergio Nunez shouted up at me.

“Look at the little mariposa, flapping up to the sky,” sing-songed Juan Gonzalez, who was probably the biggest guy on the football team.

He was certainly bigger than me—I inherited my mom’s blue eyes and blond hair but regrettably, I also inherited her height. I’m not as short as her but I’m only around 5’6—not super tall for a guy. Anyway, Gonzalez had at least a foot and maybe as much as seventy-five pounds on me—all of it muscle.

He grabbed the rope in both hands and began to whip it back and forth—or he tried to, anyway. Since I was at the top and it was a thick, heavy rope, the motion he was creating really didn’t translate too much on my end, so it didn’t bother me.

Neither did their nasty words. If I can ignore my own father’s hatred of what I am, the guys in my gym class should be a piece of cake—right? But that didn’t mean I needed to be dangling up here, drawing all their attention and presenting such an easy target.

I began to climb back down, but just then I felt the rope jiggle. Looking down, I saw that Juan was climbing up. For such a big guy, he was certainly fast.

I froze where I was, looking down at him and trying to guess what he was going to do next—nothing nice, I was damn sure of that. He just kept climbing up towards me, a cruel smile on his lumpish features.

The thing about Juan is, that he might look like a dumb jock, but he’s actually quite crafty.

Also, his family is pretty high up in the Drake pecking order, at least according to Ari, who’s the prince of the Drakes and is Blood-Bonded to my Coven mate, Kaitlyn.

So he’s got abilities and powers that other Drakes don’t—plus, as I said, he’s built like a dump truck. Such a winning combination.

He displayed some of those special abilities when he got about three-fourths of the way up the rope. He was grinning up at me in a very unpleasant way, and then I saw his mouth begin to change—to shift into a whole new configuration.

It grew outward and lengthened into a thick, blunt snout covered in green scales. His nostrils widened and a puff of smoke came out, black and menacing.

Now, to hear Ari tell it, this kind of partial change is extremely difficult for a Drake—any Drake—to manage.

It requires being able to let the dragon inside them come forward just enough to accomplish whatever it is they want done without letting him take over their body completely and do a total shift into their other form.

I pulled my feet higher and watched apprehensively as Juan puffed smoke from his Drake nostrils at me again.

He was a fire-breather—which was another skill not all Drakes had.

In fact, only the really skilled and high-ranking ones usually had the ability and that was the kind who was coming after me.

Was it my lucky day or what?

“Hey, mariposa, why don’t you come down?

” Juan growled at me, using his Drake’s voice.

It was deep and menacing and completely inhuman.

I have to confess, it sent a shiver of pure terror through me—considering it was coming from a mouth filled with razor-sharp knives for teeth and the ability to toast me like a marshmallow.

But I was damned if I’d let Juan know that.

“Well, you appear to be blocking the way,” I said brightly. “Unless you want me to slide down and sit on your face?”

Juan growled at me, his Drake’s mouth twisting into a snarl of rage and disgust.

“You little faggot!” he snapped in his own voice. “You know that’s not what I meant!”

“Oh good,” I said. “Because I don’t date bullies or homophobes. It’s just my personal policy.”

Now, lest you start thinking it was stupid of me to antagonize the big goon, let me tell you—it was.

But I am not without a few tricks of my own.

Though, as I said earlier, most witchcraft requires spells and incantations and a list of ingredients as long as your arm, I do always have my magic needle.

“You little asshole!” Juan roared, his brown eyes flashing orange—no doubt the color of his Drake’s eyes. “I’m gonna fry your balls for that!” And he started to climb higher, puffing big clouds of black smoke at me as he came.

Well, Juan might be much bigger and stronger than me, but his immense size didn’t exactly make him agile. As he climbed closer to me—and my soon-to-be-deep-fried testicles—I let go of the rope and took hold of the metal cross bar at the top of the ceiling which it was suspended from instead.

This turned out to be not a great idea for several reasons.

First, the smooth metal was a lot more slick than the rough rope and my hands were sweaty, which made it even slicker.

Secondly, going hand-over-hand down the metal bar took me away from the large pile of mats on the floor under the rope, which were meant to cushion the fall of anyone unlucky enough to lose their grip.

And I couldn’t afford to lose my grip now, since Juan was right behind me.

“Come back here, you little shit!” he snarled and I felt the metal bar vibrate and knew he had reached the top of the rope and transferred over to the bar too.

“So you can fry my testicles? I’ll pass,” I panted, continuing my hand-over-hand journey along the metal bar. Then I felt it start to vibrate and I knew that Juan was following me.

Great, we were in a monkey-bar race fifteen to twenty feet—or five to six meters, if you’re metrically minded—above the gym floor. (Which, by the way, was solid flagstone, since Nocturne Academy is located in an ancient castle which was shipped to Florida stone by stone and then reassembled.)

If I fell from this height, I was going to be toast. Or, more likely, jelly, splattered on the flagstones below.

But I had to keep going because the angry Drake was right behind me.

Juan was still shouting at me to hold still—like I was inconveniencing him by not freezing in place so he could fry me at his leisure.