Chapter Two: Emmara Tandris
Ral stalked back and forth impatiently. "He said he'd be here!" he complained to Elspeth. "So where is he?"
Two days before school reconvened and almost two weeks after Ral had despairingly given him up for dead, Jace had sent a hurried scrawl by owl saying that he'd be seeing them at Platform 9 ¾ before school started. Nothing else. Ral was torn between wanting to hug him and wanting to punch him for not apologizing. Honestly, who just dropped off the face of the planet like that? They'd been chatting every fucking night. And then nothing.
"Calm down," Elspeth said.
"I'm calm," Ral retorted. "I'm very calm. I'm just asking a perfectly simple question. Where the fuck is Jace?"
"Oh, yes, you sound calm." Elspeth put a comforting hand on his back. "He'll be here. He's not going to miss the train."
"Of course I'm not going to miss the train." Ral's heart thudded once, hard, then jumped into his throat as Jace appeared through the brick wall separating 9 ¾ from the other platforms. With him was a girl that Ral didn't recognize, a short, blond, very glamorous looking girl with a heart-shaped face, flawless makeup, and very large breasts. Ral's heart sank, and then sank again as he saw that Jace and she were holding hands. "Hi," Jace said with a smile.
"Why didn't you get back to me?" Ral snapped. The girl at Jace's elbow flinched slightly at his strident tone, and Jace frowned.
"I was busy," he said vaguely. "Sorry."
"We were talking every night!" Ral was aware his voice was starting to rise. "You just stopped!" The wood of his wand was hot beneath his hand.
Jace frowned again. "I'm sorry," he said uncertainly. "I didn't mean to upset you."
Elspeth's hand squeezed at Ral's shoulder. "It's fine, I'm sure you were busy," she said, though she also sounded faintly disappointed.
"Yeah," Jace agreed, then looked back to the girl at his side, and Ral's heart flopped down heavily into the base of his stomach at the expression that spread across his friend's face. "This is Emmara," Jace continued. "We met over the summer in France. She's a transfer student. We, um, we're—" no no no don't say it please Jace "—kind of dating."
Something burst into crackling heat around the base of Ral's wand, and he jumped in surprise. The feeling—almost static electricity—brought another nagging worry to the forefront of his mind. "Where's Kallist?" he asked suddenly. Sometimes the little cloud hid when he was nervous, but never for this long.
"I left him at home." Jace shrugged. "I didn't really need him trailing after me this year."
"What the fuck?" Ral asked in bewilderment. "Jace, you don't go anywhere without—"
"He's fine," Jace cut in, sounding almost defensive, and the girl beside him—Emmara—squeezed his arm. "Look, don't you want to say hi to my—to Emmara?"
"It's so nice to meet you," the blond girl murmured, hanging on to Jace's arm in a way Ral was pretty sure was geared to squash her breasts against it. "Jace has told me so much about you two."
Again, that strange sensation of crackling heat on his hand. "Nice to meet you, too," Elspeth was saying. Ral mumbled something unintelligible about needing to use the loo, because he was starting to be afraid there was actually something wrong with him.
"Be back in a minute," he got out and practically ran for the lavatory door. Once there, he bent over the toilet, trying to decide if he was going to be sick. Or if he'd hurt his hand. He pulled it out of his robes and inspected both it and his wand, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The hand should have looked swollen or something, Ral thought, but it didn't. It was just tingling oddly now, feeling warm and overfull. He leaned his head against the side of the stall, trying to steady his breathing. His stomach was still hurting.
The door of the restroom opened behind him, and he turned rapidly.
"Are you okay?" Jace leaned awkwardly against the lintel of the door.
"Of course I'm okay," Ral snapped. "What about you?"
Jace shuffled his feet. "You just ran off so suddenly," he said. "Is your hand all right?"
"It's fine." Ral tried to hide it automatically, but he was too slow. In another moment, Jace was in the bathroom, taking his hand in a way that was too gentle. Ral's stomach lurched, and he hissed in pain. Pins and needles radiated outward in the wake of Jace's hand.
"Sorry!" Jace jerked back. "I just wanted to—um—"
"Whatever, Jace," Ral said harshly. "You were too busy with your shiny new girlfriend to message me. I get it." The pins and needles feeling intensified, and he had to turn away, trembling, biting his lips against the harsher words that were threatening to spill out.
"Emmara is amazing." The sharp retort died on Ral's lips as he looked up at Jace's face. His friend's face had slid into an almost goofy grin.
"Guess you really like her," Ral said, instead. "Let's go back now. I'm fine." This was stupid. He was being stupid. Of course Jace had a girlfriend. Why wouldn't he? Jace was great. Any girl would be lucky to get to date him.
"She's so cute and beautiful," Jace sighed as they headed back out toward the train station. "And delicate. Everything about her is just perfect." As soon as they came in sight of the two waiting girls, Jace practically ran across the station to attach himself to Emmara. Ral swallowed down the pain in his throat and clenched his fist against the prickling sensation in his hand. He was fine. Everything was fine.
Ral jerked to wakefulness, heart racing, clutching for his wand. There was a green flash still burned into the backs of his eyelids, and he had to stuff his face into the pillow to keep from crying out. Just a dream, he told himself, but he was pretty sure that wasn't going to be enough.
It was rare for Ral to be the one to seek out Jace at night, but it was also fairly rare for Jace not to have already slipped into bed with him. It was weird and probably fucked up, but by now it was their normal. They'd been sharing a bed on and off, most nights, since they were eleven, after all. In fact, there had been several times over the summer when he'd fallen asleep face down on his laptop with the skype call still open. If things had gotten a little weirder a few years ago when Ral started waking up with stiffies, well, he just hadn't said anything about it. Besides, morning wood was just a normal part of puberty. Totally normal. So maybe he was a little gay. But he wasn't in love with his best friend. Not even a little bit.
He rolled out of bed. He wasn't going to be able to fall asleep without making sure that Jace was all right. Of course, there was no reason he wouldn't be. But Ral needed to see for himself. Jace wouldn't mind if he showed up instead of the other way around; it had happened on occasion.
The corridors were deathly still, though there were lights burning strongly at intermittent intervals. The nightlights had been put in place just before Ral's second year, when the rules had been rewritten to better accommodate for the insomnia and nightmares that so many of the recent students suffered from. As Ral headed upward, he passed Professor Granger hurrying down the corridor, and she gave him a slightly startled nod. She'd probably been expecting to see Jace. Ral hunched his shoulders against the worry and kept walking.
He opened the door of the Hufflepuff dormitory silently and snuck in. The sudden pitch darkness caught at his throat, and he almost dropped his wand as he scrabbled to get it out and cast Lumos. Of course it was dark. Jace hadn't brought Kallist back with him. And why hadn't he done that? It was totally out of character. Jace loved Kallist; he took him everywhere. He tried to feed him, for god's sake, and Kallist was a cloud.
At least Ral knew exactly where Jace's bed was. Third down from the door. Taking care not to trip over anyone else, he headed for it, and pulled back the curtain—only to feel as if he'd been punched in the gut. Jace was asleep, looking almost naked without his cloak, and his new girlfriend was curled up at his side, the hood of Jace's cloak drawn up over her head. She looked up, startled, then put a finger to her lips and gestured to Jace.
Letting the curtain fall, Ral backed away so fast he dropped his wand, and the light winked out as it dropped to the floor. His hand burst with pain so suddenly and sharply that he bent over with an anguished yelp, and then something white-hot and blazing snapped from the end of his hand toward the ground. The flash of lightning illuminated his wand for an instant before everything went dark again.
Ral's hand was still hot and stinging, and he swallowed against the rising pain in his throat. Of course Jace was sleeping in the same bed as Emmara—he was probably sleeping with her, too. Angrily, Ral pressed the backs of both hands into his eyes until kaleidoscopic brown images wavered in front of them. Time to go back to bed. Jace was fine. Obviously. Ral might not be fine, but who cared? Definitely not Jace.
Elspeth cracked her neck from side to side as she headed down the corridor. It was early in the morning, the sun barely peeking over the horizon. She liked the stillness of this time of day, the clear, new quality of the light, especially during the spring and fall. She paused for a moment at a window, running her finger along the sill and smiling out at the light swelling over the trees.
First stop: the owlery. Although it could get quite cold in the little room at times, today it was already warming up, the stones catching the early morning sunlight as Elspeth entered and looked around with a smile. She could use a proper morning flight soon, but she'd already promised herself she was going to go running first before she started practicing her Quidditch moves.
Achilles swooped down from near the top of the owlery, landing on her shoulder and nibbling at her ear. "Good morning." Elspeth sighed a little, as she undid the letter from beneath his wings. "Ral was in a terrible mood yesterday, and Jace was a little—preoccupied. I think it's going to be an annoying term," she told the owl, as she opened the envelope. The little niggling worry in the pit of her stomach was crowded out when, in addition to the usual letter scribbled in cramped but neat handwriting, a photograph dropped into her hand.
"I know you've been asking," her friend had written on the back, "and I hate how I look, but here you go." The girl in the photograph was staring intently at the camera, but she gave a tiny smile when Elspeth looked down at her, and Elspeth found herself grinning back, even though her pen pal couldn't see her. Though she knew her friend was only a year younger than she was, she was tiny. Even drawn up to as much of her full height as possible, she was clearly well under five feet, judging from the furniture in the background. She wore simple, dark robes with gold trim, and a funny jeweled headdress that came to a point in the center of her forehead.
Elspeth's stomach and heart flipflopped. She was small, but she was very elegant and very pretty. Elspeth thought she was probably wearing makeup, expertly applied. She sighed. She, herself, rarely bothered, and she certainly never did her hair up in anything fancier than a bun, usually just a straight plait. Well, never mind. No point wanting to be somebody she wasn't. It wasn't as if she was going to lose her friend for being a bit plain.
She stuffed the letter into her pocket. "Sorry, Achilles, I don't have a letter to send back yet, it's been rather crazy around here," she told the owl, which made a forgiving noise and fluttered back up into one of the higher alcoves. Elspeth turned and headed downstairs, the letter and photograph making a small, comfortable bulge inside her large pocket.
Limbering herself up in front of her usual side entrance, she straightened up when someone called her name. Ral looked pretty awful as he slouched into the hallway, dressed in Muggle running shorts and a grubby t-shirt with ANARCHY scrawled across it in clumsy letters. There was a large hole in it just over his belly button, the edges of which had the particular stained, singed look that Elspeth had learned to recognize as generally being caused by chemical burns.
They sometimes did run together, but she wouldn't have expected him to be up for it the first day of term. She'd sort of expected him to want to spend more time with Jace, for one thing, although maybe Jace's new girlfriend was posing a problem in that regard. Elspeth chewed on her lip. "Are you feeling all right?" she asked hesitantly. Ral gave her a glare out of eyes marked by deep, dark circles.
"Of course," he snapped. "I just felt like exercising. Can't someone feel like exercising without getting the third degree?"
Elspeth's eyebrows went up. "Okay," she agreed. "Let's go, then." She didn't feel like having a conversation with him when he was in a mood this bad. Not even when she was flying high on the elation of getting a photo from her pen pal.
Ral took off running at about twice the pace that Elspeth would have chosen, and she considered letting him wear out by himself, but she wasn't sure she wanted to leave him alone right now, so she sighed and resigned herself to having a brief but intense workout. They sprinted around the side of the school, over a little stone bridge and into one of the larger gardens that the students sometimes tended for Herbology.
It was a large, round garden with a pebbly pathway that skirted the exterior, making it ideal for running laps. Ral started flagging as they hit the stones, and by the time they were halfway around the first circuit, he was panting and waving his arm to stop. Elspeth, despite being in better shape, was only too happy to catch her breath. "That was dumb," she said severely to him, as Ral doubled over his knees, gasping, and then threw up onto one of the rows of multicolored flowers at the edge of the path.
Despite being irritated, she went over to pat him on the back, but he waved her off. "I think Jace is under a spell," he said, when he'd finished emptying his breakfast onto the castle lawn.
Elspeth tapped her foot. "Is this because he has a girlfriend?" she asked. "I know this might seem odd to you, Ral, but people our age do sometimes fancy one another."
"No!" Ral protested, then sighed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "Yes. Kind of. She was sleeping in his bed last night!"
"You do that all the time."
"Yes, exactly. He didn't even fucking ask me, Elspeth!"
"People do dumb things when they're, well, you know. Jace is your friend, he's not your possession."
Ral glared at her. "What the fuck, Elspeth?" he demanded. "You think this is just because I'm jealous, don't you?"
She crossed her arms at him. "I think that's very likely, yes. And I know it feels bad, but you need to—"
Ral shook his head and cut her off. "No, I don't need to do anything. There's something wrong with him, Elspeth. He gave Emmara his cloak, she was wearing his cloak in bed, and he wasn't. He never takes that thing off."
"He probably wanted to do something stupid and romantic," Elspeth pointed out, and Ral made an angry, incoherent noise. "Ral…"
"Fuck!" Ral exploded, and this time there was a note of pleading confusion in his voice that made her want to hug him, but he took a step back as she took a step forward, one hand suddenly hidden behind his back. "Just—leave me alone," he snapped, waving a hand at her. "You don't get it. You just—"
She watched him jog unsteadily off deeper into the garden, sighed, and went back to her normal route. It was going to be frustratingly difficult to help him with this one. Jace might not be under a spell, but he was being annoyingly thoughtless.
Ral was not crying. If there were tears in his eyes, it was because the wind had picked up. He left the path and started pushing his way through row after row of vegetables. After he'd been running for several minutes, he felt a sharp pain in one leg, and suddenly he was falling. The breath he'd sucked in to gasp out an obscenity was knocked right back out of his lungs, and he looked down to see several of the plants he'd been stepping in twining angrily up his leg.
Oh, shit. Ral reached for his wand, but it was tangled in his shirt, and he couldn't get it out. Bright spots of blood appeared on his bare legs and he grunted in pain as the thorny vines tightened. His hand was heating up, just as it had a few minutes ago, and he still couldn't reach his wand inside the constricting folds of cloth.
The plants started to pull him backward, and Ral panicked, thrashing wildly. There was a loud noise, and he shouted as pain shot through his hand. A hissing noise came from the plants around him, and he felt spines digging into his waist and arms. He whimpered, trying to shield his face with his arms.
"Exaresco!" A sudden blast of hot air slid over his shoulders and arms, and the constricting pain eased. He felt the vines go limp and begin to drop off. "Are you all right?" a new voice asked.
He lay and tried to take stock. His limbs were intact, and his stomach wasn't hurting anymore than it had been to begin with. "Yeah, I think so," he grunted.
"Smilax sernetai can be quite dangerous," the voice said, as a pair of hands helped Ral as he got slowly to his feet. "I'm afraid there's rather an infestation of them in the school gardens. I'm not sure why the gardeners let them get so out of hand this summer, but I will make sure to have words with them. Oh, dear, you're all scratched up. Hold still."
Awkardly, Ral stood still, staring at his rescuer. A few inches shorter than he was, the compact woman of indeterminate age was wearing what looked like Muggle jeans and a heavy leather jacket that seemed at odds with her loosely tied back ash blond hair. "Episkey," she said, waving her wand. Ral felt the stinging pain in his stomach and legs slowly ease as the healing spell took effect. "There. Is that better?"
He had to swallow several times before he was capable of nodding. "Yeah," he got out roughly. "Thanks."
The woman blinked large, pale blue eyes at him, and then broke into a sudden smile. "I'm Luna, by the way," she said.
"Ral," he answered automatically, putting out a hand for her to shake, wondering who she was. The name didn't give him much, and he couldn't even tell if she was the right age to be a student or a professor.
"I'm so happy to meet you," Luna said, sounding oddly sincere. "Do be careful around here if you're going to keep exercising."
"I guess I should get back," Ral mumbled. He was already worn out, and he didn't want to throw up again. "I should eat something before class," he added vaguely.
"I'm sure I'll see you again soon," Luna said, as he started to trudge back in the direction of the castle.
As he headed down the corridor toward the dining hall, he heard giggling, and he swung around to see Emmara and Jace, looking disheveled, stumbling into the corridor from behind one of the tapestries. There was a little hidden alcove behind that tapestry, Ral knew, and suddenly, the pain that had been hovering in the vicinity of his stomach reached up and clutched his throat. He turned around quickly, ignoring Jace's voice calling a greeting, and headed for the stairs. He was running by the time he reached the entrance to the Slytherin dungeon, and then he didn't actually go in. Instead, he sank down in front of the tapestry, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Oh, fuck it. He didn't think he cared enough to go to class today. Jace wasn't Jace anymore, and no one was going to believe him. The worst part, Ral thought miserably, was what if they were right? What if Jace just—didn't care about him anymore? No, Ral shook his head. Jace hadn't brought Kallist back with him. That wasn't like him. Something was definitely wrong.
Something had to be wrong.