The next day, the only thing occupying my mind was finding Delphine and discovering if the headmaster had come to the meeting we had set. The thought of dealing directly with cult members scared me a lot more than fighting demons. While brewing a dark cloud, I happened to spot Sonia Grant, a girl from Delphine’s floor in the dormitories, and I ran towards her.
I asked her if she had seen Delphine. She looked very shocked by the question and froze. When I insisted, she said, “Wasn’t she with you?”
Now I was the one with the puzzled look. Apparently, the night before, she had run into Delphine while coming back from the lavatory and noticed that Delphine seemed very excited. When she had asked her what was going on, Delphine had simply replied, “I’ll tell you later. I need to speak to Diana first,” and disappeared towards their study room.
I asked Grant if Delphine had a phone with her, and she replied yes.
I realised that the plan must have worked. Mr Farage had shown up to the meeting we had set, but I needed details. Clearly, Delphine was going to the study room for privacy, because no one usually sat in there after seven p.m., but I was baffled by the fact that she had not called me, and I wasn’t sure if she had been found out or not. The study room was a small beige room filled with sofas of different colours and a few low wooden tables filled with magazines and comic books. It was more a relaxation room than a study room.
I decided to check the study room just in case she had left her phone in there, or a message for me. I walked in and it was pretty dark. Someone had drawn all the thick, dark curtains. I found it quite strange because they were never drawn. I walked to the large windows, opened the curtains, turned around and saw on the wall, written in big, bold letters and what to seemed to be blood, the words “Nice try”.
My eyes just glided down, following the red strip left by the running blood all the way to the floor, and underneath the message, to my horror, was the body of my Delphine.
I screamed and ran towards her. I slipped on her blood and struggled to get up while still screaming her name and crying, but I managed to get to her.
I could hear the door opening behind me and people screaming, but I didn’t care. All I could see was Delphine’s face, her skin so pale, her eyes wide open, and her neck open. It had been slit. I pulled her towards me and put my face in her hair. It was my fault. It was all my fault.
A crowd had formed behind me, and no one dared to touch me because I was now covered in blood. That’s when I noticed Pam crying on Delphine as well and hugging her lower body. I extended my hand towards her and started to stroke her hair.
She looked up. She was also covered in blood and had tears all over her face. Then her eyes turned cold. For a second, I was worried that she was angry at me. Then suddenly she said, “Farage.”
She was right; we knew who was responsible. I could feel someone leaning towards me to grab me, and I pushed them away and started running. I had only one place in mind: my bedroom. In FIST lessons, even though they were at first given with a wooden sword, at the age of fourteen, girls lessons were given with real swords, so each of us had a few swords hidden in our rooms, and this was what I was going for.
Pam and I went in and each picked up a sword and headed for the headmaster’s office. The message “Nice try” was him telling us that he had not fallen for our childish plan, and he had murdered our beloved friend as punishment. While we were running towards the school administration building with our swords in our hands, we must have looked like two crazy girls, and everyone moved away to let us pass.
We were about to climb the stairs when we saw him. He was coming towards us and was on his phone. He was staring at the ground when he stopped suddenly, raised his head, saw us and smiled. He then turned around, laughing, and started running towards the forest with us following him. We could hear some people screaming, “Stop, guys, stop!”
The voices sounded familiar, but I was in no mood to turn around. All I knew was that Farage was running away and we had to catch him.
As it turned out, he had no intention of running away to a never-never land far, far away at all. He had led us to the forest, where he clearly intended to fight us. As soon as we arrived, we saw standing behind him Officer Smith and Constable Anderson. For some reason, I wasn’t even surprised. I could see that Pam was, but I wasn’t worried. Surprised or not, Pam was the best trained fighter in J.C.
Farage started to take his jacket off, walking from left to right, smiling at us. It made me even more angry, so I started to mimic him. It was not well received, because he tore off his shirt angrily, and he pointed a sword he had just picked up, and which was very conveniently lying at his feet, towards me. “Now, who’s going to be first?”
Hmmm, I thought. He is pointing his sword towards me. Who else does he expect to respond? My shadow or one of my invisible guardian angels?
I turned to Pam and said, “I’ve got this.”
She nodded, agreeing with me, and said, “In that case, the other two are mine.”
I walked towards him, and he was handed another sword by Smith. I almost laughed at him. I was fifteen – not skinny, but I was still slim – and my body would not compare to a muscular man in his mid-thirties, so I couldn’t wait to see his face when I brought him to his knees by using my powers.
I raised my hand and squeezed, but nothing happened. I was shocked. I didn’t even have time to recover before there he was, swinging his sword at me. He missed. I could see Pam running towards Smith and Anderson, but I had my own opponent to deal with.
It took Pam probably five seconds to get Smith and Anderson on the ground. She cut Anderson across his stomach when he lashed at her, then sliced Smith’s chest as she was coming towards her. She turned around at a kneeling Anderson and chopped off his head, then turned back to Smith and cut her head off too.
My case was a little bit different. Farage was strong and fast and a lot more difficult to defeat than expected. I was a trained fighter, which was keeping me alive so far, but I clearly needed more training to defeat him.
He eventually managed to get my sword to fly away and kicked me so hard I went flying too. At that second, I knew I was not fighting a Masani. He was something else, and he was no Yan. I ran towards my sword. I just had time to pick it up before Farage was over me, ready to decapitate me after ditching one of his swords. In doing so, he gave me an opening to cut off his left arm.
He screamed and fell to the floor, and by the time he realised it, Pam was already on top of him with her sword pointing at his neck.
We made him get up, and I picked up his sword just as I realised that we were alone. That was very strange. To start with, where were our friends? If I had heard that Hogan and William had been seen following Farage into the woods with swords, nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, would have prevented me from following them and helping or trying to stop them.
The second surprising thing was the reaction of the other students. It didn’t matter how uninterested in things someone could be, there was no way some of them wouldn’t have followed us to see what was going on, unless they had not been able to follow us.
When I voiced my concerns to Pam, she agreed, and tearing up Smith’s and Anderson’s clothes, we made a rope and tied Farage up. We were deciding on his wound, with Pam wanting us to bandage it and me against it. As far as I was concerned, he had killed a teenager without remorse and would have killed me too if he could have. I was more than prepared to let him bleed out, but Delphine’s parents deserved the right to kill him themselves.
While we were debating, he started smiling, and before we knew it, we were flying across the field. By the time we got up, our man Farage had his arm glued back on.
That was when we knew, and it explained so much – Farage was a Hendu. Now all the shadows circulating the school and the village made perfect sense all of a sudden. They were at home and we had foolishly walked in.
Pam looked at me and I nodded yes. As a Yan, to use your power in the Masani world amounted to banishment from Yanar, but this case was different; we were facing an alien enemy. Pam raised her open palm. The ground rose as well. Then she swirled both arms, and the ground wrapped itself around Farage.
We looked at each other quite satisfied and smiled, but before we knew it, he had freed himself. He had somehow broken free from his temporary restraints. He looked at Pam and said, very satisfied with himself, “So, you are a Terrayan.”
Terrayans were what we called Yans with the earth power. Terrayans could control anything that was related to soil, including in the water. They were basically Yanar’s very own Mother Nature.
He then turned to me and said, “And you are an Airborn, judging by your pathetic attempt earlier to suffocate me.”
He was right; I hadn’t been trained in how to suffocate a Hendu, but I could always electrocute him or burn him, something he didn’t know, since he thought that I was an Airborn, and clearly, he didn’t know that Pam was a dual and possessed the fire power.
Having no intention of giving myself away to him, I turned to Pam and said, “Quit playing and tie him up already.”
She tied him up with creepers and, to add insult to injury, gathered rocks and created his very own personal prison, and I created a wind of dirt around it for dramatic effect.
The whole ensemble was quite comical to us, and we started laughing at him. He started to wrestle, bit by bit at first, then more and more strongly, but couldn’t break free. After watching him getting weaker and weaker, I couldn’t help but tease him by adding, “Oh, come on now. Don’t get discouraged. Haven’t you heard of the saying ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’?”
Pam was just watching me. She shook her head and put her hands over her eyes, hiding her embarrassment and her blushing face.
He had the nerve to point out how quickly we had recovered from Delphine’s death. He then proceeded to narrate step-by-step how they had enjoyed watching her die. We knew that he was trying to get us to lose our cool, but all I heard was the term we. He was with someone. I thought that I knew that person well.
I looked at Pam and she asked, “We?”
I nodded and then she said, “Are you thinking what I am thinking?”
I nodded yes, so in one move, she stuffed his mouth with dirt and I floated him in the air, and we started walking back towards the school with Farage and his prison behind us. He was still wrestling, trying to get free, which was really starting to get annoying, while screaming, “Airborn, set me free! Airborn! Airborn, I’ll kill both of you, I will!”
We ignored him, and we were taking him towards the school when we heard screaming, lots of screaming, screams of fear and pain. It felt like everyone in the school was crying for their life.