C H A P T E R F O U R: Aurora Meet Dru....Your Babysitter
He might as well have said ‘Go kill yourself for me.’ Because I wasn’t about to do either one and the chances of me doing it were highly unlikely. What the hell did I look like risking myself for a man who forgot about his only child?
“Um. Hell-to-the-no.”
Beside me Dru sighed, “Rory.”
Uh uh hell no, he wasn’t about to guilt trip me into this again, I said hell no. “No,” I repeated and this time stared my Dad right in his eye. He had to know that I was serious about this and I was adamant with my decision.
“Are you sure? Is that you’re final answer?”
He made it sound like he was doing me a favor, “Why can’t you get someone else to do it?”
Now that’s what I really wanted to know, what was so bad that he needed someone to spy for him? Seriously, what did I look like? A weak ass punching bag for some stereotypical bad man with bad hair like Einstein and a vial filled with a deadly mixture of HCL and Mercury. Yes I paid attention in class, I might have been a horrible Chemistry major but I learned all the same.
“You’re the only one I trust.”
Oh ho ho, that’s rich big boy considering your trust in me kept you distantly parted like the Red Seas. I searched around the room and humorously awaited for the Red Sea to crash over me like it did the Egyptians. Well, I gave Dru a sideways glance and held back a laugh, the water would take him first.
Smh, so racist Rory.
Rory, you need to help him out, its your duty.
The fuck? What did I tell him!!!
I kept my face neutral and gave my Dad a false look of contemplation as I communicated back to Dru.
I told you to stay out of my head Dru.
I can only do that for so long.
Why can’t you just do what I ask you to? Is it so damn hard to respect my wishes? I don’t want you inside my head anymore! You can’t be in there and I want you to get the FUCK OUT! NOW!
My whole body shuddered and I blinked rapidly as I realized how terrible all of that had sounded. If I’d been trying to keep my feelings neutral about what had happened then I had just blown the lid in a space of a few questions and declarations. Damn, I was such an idiot, I’d allowed him to mess with my emotions to the point of no return.
I blinked again and focused on my Dad, “Can you give me some time to think this over?”
If only to shut the both of them up then I would consider it, but right now I needed to low down and the dirty about this whole spy thing and I needed it now. Hell I needed something to keep Dru from talking back to me, because from the sound of his breathing I knew that he was just as shook up as was.
“Whats the 411?”
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I guess I should have known that my Daddy would possibly have some enemies around him vying for his position and….life. It had happened before, plenty of time really, there was always that one man that somebody wanted to go and bonk off. Five years ago it had been the Minister of the Dark Arts, don’t get me started about how weak that was. The man was a MASTER at Dark Arts, Tristan Flemings, he was known throughout the wizard world for his amazing feats at taming and defeating the evil creatures that lurked in everyday life. He should have been PREPARED, and yet, someone he had trusted, someone who knew him well had been able to slip past his magical shields and cast a hex on him that killed him painfully but slowly. From what I had heard (they wouldn’t put the full details in the Magical Weekly) his wife had found him in an unsightly position with his legs akimbo at an odd angle and his innards seeping out of his belly with black blood.
I completely understood why they didn’t want this all in the newspaper, think about what the children would have seen. It wasn’t slightly at all and his wife couldn’t bare to have others know how he really died. Dru was the only reason I knew, that day I had bugged the hell out of him until he told me every detail of what he had seen. It was uncommon but they had allowed the Junior as well as the Senior Instructors to see the body, mostly for safety reasons and a horrid lesson in Traitors.
This so called Brother hood and Sister hood we had was a big fat phoney. A common ability and heredity in magic didn’t necessarily make you blood, it just made you similar and in a world full of power hungry people wizards and humans alike there was no family hood. We liked to think that we were better organized than others, the elves for example, we didn’t know what thehell they were doing. Half the fairies were goosing humans and leaving hybrids…
Hmm, I had reason to think that my gay bestfriend was a hybrid. I’d seen him do splits before like a fluid Veela and seduce straight guys gay. Maybe that was just an unnatural talent of his but….meh.
Anyways we were nearly as familial as we would have other races of creatures to believe. We were…..complicated? I guess we could be like PMSy Bitches when we didn’t get our way, not that it included me. I only dealt with magic because it had been passed down to me, I could have easily given it back if I’d been given the choice, but alas it wasn’t something that you could take and it wasn’t something that you could give away. It was just….yours.
To make a long story short for the past few months my Dad had been receiving cursed letters. The first one his Secretary had opened for him on command and that resulted in her slipping into a coma for a week. Nothing could wake her up, it wasn’t until a healer watched over her and noted her reactions to different medications that she woke up slowly at a time. But then he started receiving letters bi-weekly, all of them coming from somewhere he hadn’t expected. He would find them on his desk, next to his coffee pot, under his chair and nestled in his spell locked vault. No one knew the spell to his vault except for him, but he had reason to believe that one of his friends at work had something to do with it.
Still…what did that have to do with me? What could I do?
“It’s a man.” He said bluntly and placed his cap back on his head.
So……
“And…how do you know this?”
“If it were a woman, then I would smell her, her natural scent would activate the guard and she would never be able to get in. In my area, women aren’t allowed.”
Talk about sexist why dontcha, I knew my Dad was a Pig. I bet he makes his wife clean between his toes and take the lint out of his belly button.
“Ok, and how am I supposed to do all of this without getting hurt too?”
At this he smiled and crossed his arms, “Another worker, an elf actually was unlucky to open one of the letters. It was a male, the same letter that had sent my secretary into a comma, ripped his organs from the inside out.”
My heart stopped and my body turned cold, I pressed my head against my chest to control the wheezing that I knew would begin soon. Dru rubbed my shoulders gently, his warm breath washed over my ear as he whispered, “Breathe.”
“So you see, he’s partial to women. Men, he doesn’t like so much.”
I gulped in and tried to control my breathing as best as I could, “You want me to die? Why would y—“
Here his smile slipped from his face and in its place resided solemnity, “You won’t. I have reason to believe that this man, has an affinity for you.”
Geeze, just say he likes me. Its not that hard to do.
“How would you know this?”
“On every victim he carves Aurora on the inside of their palms.”
Talk about sick ass bastard, why the fuck would I want to spy for some guy like that.
“NO!”
I pushed against Dru’s chest as I attempted to get by, but he held me back, clutched my arms and pressed his forehead against mines, “Rory, he won’t hurt you.”
“No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
Semi-Maniac Syndrome had taken me to another level, shit If my dad wanted me dead then he could have done that himself. Hell he could have done it then as I tried to fight past Dru’s arms and get outside where I knew the hot air would feel much better than inside Dru’s apartment.
“Rory, if you don’t, I can’t promise your mother a tomorrow.”
What, was that a fucking threat?
Now he had my attention, he definitely had it. I pushed away from Dru’s embrace, pressed my hands against my hips and glared at him, “What does that mean?”
“In each letter there’s a picture of her and me, if he can’t get what he wants before the summer solstice then the both of us will be dead, me and her.”
June 20th…
Less than three months.
In less than three months my mother could be dead.
“No, you’re lying, why would they do that?”
His lips turned up into an amused smile, “Your mother never told you, did she?”
“Told me what?”
“The reason for your name, the four winds. You have the essence and the ability to control the equinox, the shift of the natural world, the power resides in you as gifted by your great grandfather. If you wanted to, then you could destroy man kind and wizard kind as we know it and reconstruct your own world. That’s what he wants.”
So nobody was going to tell me that I could do this? Man…..
“If I can do all of these things, then why don’t I feel it?”
Shouldn’t I have felt something? Like a wedgie…or something that tightened in my stomach or maybe super awesome vision! Man that would be cool…
“With every high power comes a restriction, and continual monitoring. When you became of age at 13 your mother noticed that you had become erratic---“
Or maybe I was just staring to fill out, undergo puberty and gasp become a teenager. Yeah I think that had something to do with it.
“And we thought it would be best if we found someone to watch over you.”
Watch over you?
Wait….
Watch….Over….You.
Someone….
Someone…..
“Dru.” Ragged fingernails dug into my tender flesh as my fists curled into balls.
Yeah I was definitely furious, wouldn’t you be too if you found out that your teacher was actually a baby sitter? And a baby sitter that you had screwed a couple weeks ago. Yeah so you couldn’t just get away with the teacher sex, now you had to feel bad about bumping and grinding with your baby sitter. Oh yeah….awesome.
Ignoring that I continued on, “How do you know I have this?”
I said it like a disease because it might as well have been one, how was I supposed to respond?
“The chain around your neck.”
What chain?
I felt my collar bone because clearly I didn’t see any chain around my neck and I couldn’t feel it either.
“Take a deep breath.”
Mmmk, that’s not weird but whatever.
I inhaled and exhaled slowly.
“Look down.”
Tiny slanted lines that curved into delicate flowers were painted in a transformation of translucent blues, pretty greens, pinks and purples in the shape of a necklace dangling down, at the end a slightly raised and beautifully crafted opal stone glittered under the yellow light of the room.
“Why do I always have to be the freak?”
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“Are you mad at me?”
“No.” I gruffly answered as I sunk deeper into the couch and peered up at his egg shell white ceiling.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” I lied.
My dad had left a few minutes before and with it he had left with my promise to help him and my mother out. What else could I do? Let my mother die? And how come if I was the shit I couldn’t just find this bastard and murder him myself? It was giving me a major headache and I didn’t want to deal with it. So in my attempt to not think I closed my eyes and wished for the world to go away and leave me alone.
Just leave me aloneeeee.
“Are you talking to me?”
Are, are, are, if he says are one more time then I going to stick my foot so far up his toned ass.
“No Dru.”
The edge of the couch creaked and sank down lower as he sat. I smelled his cologne, light and spicy. I almost knew that he was watching me, and he was sitting on my foot!
“I should have told you.”
Damn right!
“I really don’t want to talk about it Dru, ok? I have to think about how I’m going to save the world and my parents at the same time, I don’t want to think about what you should have told me.”
“I couldn’t tell you, because you were never supposed to know. That’s the way its been for hundreds of years, that’s why I’ve been here and that’s why I’m still here.”
“Fuck Dru! I don’t want you to baby sit me! Ok?”
He had to understand that the situation was incredibly awkward for me. So awkward that I felt like crying and retching into a toilet.
“It’s not babysitting to me, its my job.”
Job, Job, what did I care about his job huh? Absolutely nothing!
But I was too pissed after that to just sit there while he tried to soothe me with words that were never going to help. So I painstankingly removed my feet from under him (with plenty of grimaces and groans) and found a way to place them on the ground and stand up without looking so clumsy. I didn’t need to look young and clumsy at the same time, at least I could look like I had it all together. My hair though, that was another story. I touched the high pony tail and smoothed out the edges at the nape of my neck and around the temple of my head.
“I’m tired and I’m going home.”
“Oh,” He stood up, raven curls flowing once again as he moved, “Let me get my keys and I’ll follow you back.”
“No! Can I drive home alone? Please?”
“I-I, Rory you know I can’t let you do that. Not after what I just heard, I have to protect you.”
For the love of God and all humanity!
“I’m ok. I don’t want you following me, please?”
“Why?”
Why?
He looked so innocent, so slow and so young. How could he not know how he made me feel? How could he not know how my heart beat against my chest like hammers, or how my feet turned leaden whenever he spoke? How could he not know after all those years of knowing me?
“Nothing Dru, lets just go.”
“No, tell me.”
I mean should I? Should I tell him.
There were so many things telling me no, so many things telling me to take a step back and re-evaluate the situation before I spilled my guts, but if I had only a few months left then he had to know.
I breathed in deeply, focused on his pretty eyes and confused expression, “I think I love you.”
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A/N: Y'all know the drill lol
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