Just another thank you to my beloved readers! I swear you guys keep me going! Thanks!

Disclaimer: All of the original and familiar characters are property of Meg Cabot and her series The Mediator, but the plot and new faces are property of me.

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Chapter 18

I get up for school, already not wanting to face the day. Although the rash marks (a nice parting gift from all of Seirios' attempts to burn me) are recuperating nicely, I still need a whole hell of a lot of makeup to cover them up. Doc said I shouldn't put any makeup on until I am healed. I just looked at him like he was crazy, and he walked away murmuring something about women.

I take a nice hot shower and then slid into my second favorite pair of jeans since Jesse has my favorite and a J. Lo silky blouse that I got online a couple of weeks ago. After sliding on my Steve Madden two-inch heels I go over and start fixing the damage. It doesn't look too bad, but bad enough for people to ask questions.

I "doll" myself up quicker then usual and am downstairs with ten minutes to spare.

"Well good morning'," Andy, I mean Dad says while flipping some pancakes in the air. "Do you want one?"

I shake my head and just grab some orange juice out of the fridge instead. I'm putting it back, when Dopey comes bounding in and takes it right out of my hand, puts it to his mouth and gulps the whole thing, right then and there.

"Okay," he says after wiping off his mouth with the back of his hand. "Lets go!"

Oh shit. I don't have the keys. They're still at Jesse's house.

Dopey walks out of the kitchen and over to the garage, but I am still in the kitchen clutching my glass of OJ.

"HEY SUZE!" Dopey yells after a minute. "WHERE THE HELL ARE THE KEYS?"

Hearing the yelling, Andy looks over at me with questioning eyebrows.

"I must have left them over at Jesse's," I say trying not to make too much eye contact.

"Well," Brad says while re-joining us in the kitchen. "If you left them at Jesse's, then how the hell did you drive back here?"

Andy and Brad and David all look at me expectantly.

"Hotwired it?" I say in a question sort of way. Actually, Paul hotwired it, but I wasn't about to add any extra details that would just bury me deeper. I'm not that dumb.

"You did what?" Andy asks looking bewildered.

"Wow Suze! You just got some cool points! You're up to negative forty." He smirks and I have the strongest sensation to punch him in the stomach.

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I got grounded for a week, and Andy drove us to school. Of course we were late, so I didn't have anytime to see CeeCee or Adam or Paul. Not that I wanted to see Paul that is, but still it sucked to have my morning start off so crappy.

And I almost feel asleep in Pre Calc, but I caught myself just in time. Lucky for me, because if I would have fallen asleep, I would have gotten a detention. And for Andy, that's another week of grounding.

I am so happy for it to be lunch. I stride over to our table and sit down next to CeeCee, who looks over at me in shock.

"What's wrong?" I ask her while setting down my books and glancing around the table.

"W-what happened to you? I mean David told me that it was bad, but I d-didn't know."

"What the heck are you talking about Ceece?"

"Dude! Simon! You allergic to your make up or something?" Adam yells and CeeCee kicks him under the table. She looks at me apologetically.

"CeeCee, would you like to go to the girls room with me?" I ask while grabbing her hand and hauling her off before she could answer me.

"Simon, what the hell is going on?" CeeCee yells at me after we've checked all the stalls and locked the door to the bathroom.

"You know how I had you look up that information?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it was about Father Dom and his case," I say carefully hoping that she'll catch on.

"Yea—oh. Oh!" CeeCee says and recognition spreads over her face.

"There is just this one fly in the ointment, and well, he likes to burn things. Especially me, and I got this as a parting gift." I point to my face.

"What is this fly?" CeeCee ask slowly and carefully, bracing herself for the response.

"A demon," I say quickly.

"You're joking, right? Right?"

"No, Ceece, I wish I was." At that CeeCee's purple eyes light up and then she gasps.

"Oh my God! What was he like?" She all but squeals, which takes me back.

"CeeCee, are you okay? I mean, I didn't think that you would get that excited about a demon…but obviously I was wrong."

"Oh, sorry, it's just I didn't know you could see demons, just ghosts."

Whoops! "Oh, yeah…well I kinda forgot to tell you something."

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I'm listening to CeeCee yell at me for not telling her the whole story.

"God! Now I feel so stupid for having thought about some stuff! If I had known that you were a 'shifter' then I would have…I would have…"

"You would have what, Ceece?"

"I don't know," she huffs and then glares at me. "I still can't believe you didn't tell me Simon."

"I said I was sorry, CeeCee. I mean I am…I guess I just wasn't ready to face facts."

"Fine. But no more holding out? Okay?" CeeCee looked at my face.

"Okay," I said and couldn't help but let a smile creep out onto my face. "Oh, and another thing: Jesse asked me to sleep with him."

CeeCee's jaw drops. "W-w-what?"

"Jesse. Asked. Me. To. Sleep. With. Him."

"Oh. My. God." CeeCee says and then slumps against the counter while I turn around to look in the mirror to see the damage. It's not too bad, but obviously Adam was smart enough to know what the marks were.

"Simon! Why aren't you like freaking out about this?"

"Because I have already spent too much time crying over it. And thinking about it. But I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"This isn't like him at all. Didn't he like turn you down countless numbers of times? Saying that he was waiting for you to get married?" CeeCee's eyes are bulging from the intensity and urgency of her own need to hear my answer.

I hadn't thought about it from that angle. How the hell did I miss that? "Um, yeah."

CeeCee stops and thinks for a minute, then asks, "Well, what else did you do when you left my house, because you left in quite a hurry?"

"I went over to Paul's to see if I could get a hold of some of his shifter information. He wasn't there, so I thought I would poke around his room on my own…I wasn't sure if I was ready or not to tell him about the Dagger. But while poking I find the same exact sketch in his bin of info. I freak out and back away from it, of course I bump right into Paul, who had been watching me for God knows how long.

"He asked me what I was doing there. I told him a version of the truth; naturally I left out the Dagger. We started…um…talking, then he whispered something in my ear and I freaked out because I thought only Jesse called me that. And well I ran away to the Coffee Clutch."

"What did he call you?" CeeCee asks engrossed in my story.

"Querida."

"No," CeeCee breathes.

"Yup, so obviously you can see why I freaked out."

"Apparently, I would have too?"

"While I was trying to hid myself in the Coffee Clutch, Jesse found me and we went back to his place because he claimed that he wanted to talk to me. He tried to get intimate, but it felt wrong, so I pushed the talking concept. He didn't get far, when I interrupted him about the whole 'querida' thing.

"I asked him if he had been talking to Slater. He said no, and asked me why. I told him that he had said something I thought only he knew and I was just curious. Jesse asked me what it was, but then got it and said some stuff in Spanish."

"Wait," CeeCee interrupts me. "Did you tell Jesse the word…or did he just guess."

I think. "Nope, I just raised my eyebrows, I think. Why?"

"Nothing. Never mind…keep going.

"Okay," I say while rolling my eyes at CeeCee's weird question, "so after I heard him say some stuff in Spanish, none of which I understand by the way, I felt like I had the old Jesse back. So I kinda jumped him and we started making out."

"That's always fun," CeeCee said and her eyes brightened. No doubt she was thinking about her and Adam.

"And then it shifted to something more in depth. He got really turned on and forward, and Jesse's never like that. He never lets himself go when he's kissing me. I mean I just got him to second base, but he was all over me.

"Then Jesse asked me to have sex with him. That's when I fled for the second time that day. I didn't even have my jeans on."

CeeCee lets out an "oh dear". I smile. "But Paul found me in my car still parked in the Coffee Clutch's parking lot, along with Mr. Baumann, my new Medical Science teacher. He wants us to call him Marc. How weird is that?"

"Weird," CeeCee agrees. "But anyhoo…get on with the good stuff, Simon."

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After spilling out all my thoughts CeeCee is quiet, which is unusual for her. I can tell she's thinking though. The bell rings shortly after I'm done, and we go back to the table to get our stuff. Adam just looks at us like we're crazy and then puts his arm around CeeCee, and she glows somewhat. I can still tell that her mind is at work.

I smile, finding myself happy for her and Adam. They are so good together.

"See you later Suze," Adam says and CeeCee smiles over at me with a wave of her hand. I walk off to my next boring class.

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In Medical Science I find myself drifting, but I will myself to stay awake. I don't want to make a bad impression on Marc. I take notes slowly and cower over my desk not wanting to let anyone see my face.

Finally the bell rings after a long forty-five minutes, and I try to get the hell out of there, but Marc calls me up to my desk. Paul passes me with a familiar look in his eyes and it makes me shudder in a freaked out kinda way.

"Suze," Marc starts off. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," I say tight lipped.

"Are you sure? You look like you have a rash of some sort."

"I do, it's nothing life threatening," I hear myself say. Yet, I add in my mind. "I'm sorry, but I really must be going."

"Oh, yes. I just wanted to know who was this bloke you met at the morgue with Father Dom."

Oh. Of course Father told him about that. "Well, I don't know if Paul told you this or not, but him and me, we're well, shifters. Unlike mediators we can shift to other planes and so forth."

"Paul didn't mention that. We just bumped into each other while I was leaving the Coffee Clutch and Paul was entering it, so we hadn't been talking for long before we spotted you," Marc says re-visiting the night.

"Okay, well we're shifters."

"And what the bloody are those?" Marc asks, his brow cocked inward with confusion.

"We can see ghosts and mediate them, but we can also go to Purgatory and time travel. My boyfriend, Jesse, Paul and I went back in time not too long ago and brought him back. He had been a ghost haunting my room, and well I got to know him, and eventually love him. And then something happened," I wasn't about to tell Marc about Paul's alternate personality that liked to manipulate other people's feelings and such. "Paul and I had to prevent Jesse from being killed, but I accidentally held onto him while I was shifting back to my time period. As you can guess that brought him back with me and when his ghost and body touched he woke up." Okay, so I'll admit that I was giving him the Spark Notes version of it, but he didn't need to know all the complications and emotions that were floating around us when we went through that.

Marc just stares at me for a minute. Maybe I said it too fast, I think and then open my mouth to repeat things slower. But Marc beat me to the punch.

"So, this bloke in the morgue…he's a shifter too?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

I am about to respond when Brad yells at me through the doorway. "SUZE! Come on! Dad's here!"

"I have to go, but I'll see you tomorrow," I say to Marc and then leave before he can reply.