An Apple for the Creature

I smelled incense. Yep, definitely incense, a strong, slightly sweet smoke. “I always wondered how would one address an object of worship? Should I call you ‘the lord of ten thousand years,’ ‘the holy one,’ or the ‘son of heaven’?” Dali, one of the shapeshifters, was teaching me the beginnings of Asian mythologies. Unfortunately, that’s as far as we got, since I only just started.

“I am not an object.” His voice was slightly accented. “You may call me Yu.”

Simple enough.

“Is there something you want?” he asked.

“My name is Julie Lennart.” Might as well go with the big gun. Most people didn’t know the Beast Lord’s last name so if he recognized it, it would be a good indication that he was some sort of magic heavyweight.

“It is a weighty name for someone so small.” Yu Fong smiled a nice easy smile. He would smile like that while he watched a cute puppy play with a butterfly or while his flunkies were torturing his enemy. Take your pick. “The Beast Lord commands fifteen hundred shapeshifters.”

“More or less.” It was more, but he didn’t need to know that.

His dark eyes fixed on me. “One day my kingdom will be greater.”

Ha-ha! Yeah, right. “I’m here with Master Gendun’s knowledge and at his request.”

He didn’t say anything. The metal table under my fingers felt warm. I rested more of my hand on it. Definitely warm. The cafeteria was air-conditioned and even now, with magic up, the air stayed pretty cool, which meant the metal table should’ve been cold.

“A girl disappeared. She was a small girl. Shy. Her name is Ashlyn.”

No reaction. The table was definitely getting warmer.

“She was scared of you.”

“I don’t kill little girls.”

“What makes you think she was killed? I didn’t say anything about her being killed.”

He leaned forward slightly. “If I take notice of something that offends me, I choose to ignore it or kill it. I ignored her.”

Boy, this dude was conceited. “Why did she offend you?”

“I’ve never threatened her. She had no reason to cringe in my presence. I don’t expect you to understand.”

I thought hard on why he would find an obvious display of fear offensive.

“When she cringed, you felt insulted. You had no intention of hurting her, so by showing fear, she implied that your control over your power was imperfect.”

Yu’s eyes widened slightly.

“I’m the ward of the Beast Lord,” I told him. “I spend a lot of time with arrogant control freaks.”

The table under my hand was almost too hot to keep touching it. I held on. “Ashlyn annoyed you. You said you ignored her. You didn’t say anything about your bodyguards. Did they do something to Ashlyn to make her disappear?”

His face was the picture of disdain, which was just a polite way of saying that he would’ve liked to sneer at me but it was beneath him. I’ve seen this precise look on the Beast Lord’s face. If he and Curran ever got into the same room, Kate’s head would explode.

I waited but he didn’t say anything. Apparently Yu decided to not dignify it with an answer.

Thin tendrils of smoke escaped from his book. The table near him must have been much hotter than on my end. That had to be something because the metal was now hurting my fingers.

“If I find out that you hurt Ashlyn, I’ll hurt you back,” I said.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do. Your book is smoking.”

He picked it up. I slowly raised my hand, blew on my skin, and got up to leave.

“Why do you care?” he asked.

“Because none of you do. Look around you—a girl is missing. A girl you saw in class every day got so scared by something, she had to hide from it. Nobody is looking for her. All of you are just going on with your business as usual. You have all this power and you didn’t lift a finger to help her. You just sit there, reading your book, comfy behind your bodyguards, and demonstrate how awesome your magic is by heating up your table. Somebody has to find her. I decided to be that somebody.”

I couldn’t tell if any of this was sinking in.

“True strength isn’t in killing—or ignoring—your opponent, it’s in having the will to shield those who need your protection.”

He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Who said that?”

“I did.” I walked away.

Brook was staring at me.

“Come on,” I told her, loud enough for him to hear the derision in my voice. “We’re done here.”

—

In the hallway I walked to the window and exhaled. The nerve. All that power, all that magic boiling in him, and he just sat there. Didn’t do a thing to help Ashlyn. He didn’t care.

Brook cleared her throat behind me.

“I just need a minute.”

I looked outside at the courtyard, enclosed by the square building of the school. It was a really large courtyard. No place to hide, though: benches, flowers, twisted stone paths. A single tree rose toward the northern end of it, surrounded by a maze of concentric flower beds, spreading from it like one of those little handheld puzzle games where you have to roll the ball into a hole through a plastic labyrinth.