“How many times?” My voice is low, dangerous. But not to her.
Red looks up, not understanding at first. But I give her a hard look.
“Oh,” she breathes before playing with the straw so she doesn’t have to look at me. “There really is no counting, to be honest. After something like that happens so many times, it’s better not to count.”
I grip my kneecaps to keep from running out and hunting those bastards down. “I’ll kill them.”
Red doesn’t protest. I don’t think she hates the idea.
“I thought Fairy Fine Arts was an institution meant to teach magic users how to be helpful and useful to society, not sadistic tormentors.”
“It is.”
“Oh really? What in the fuck use is someone whose magic is thirst and hunger?” My words are harsh, but my tone isn’t. I don’t want to risk Red thinking I’m upset with her.
“There are lots of good applications. Hansel could use his powers to rehabilitate alcoholics by slating their thirst. Gretel could use her powers over hunger to help people lose weight to improve their health. She could help people who are on the brink of starvation or help those in chemo or hospice regain their appetite to give them strength.”
She looks away. “But as soon as the professors weren’t looking, they went as far in the other direction as they could.”
“And you were their favorite target.”
She rears back as if shocked I figured it out. I didn’t need what Kiki said to qualify the guess. The compulsive manner in which Red licks her lips, especially when nervous, explained so much.
Red doesn’t realize how resilient, how powerful she is, wolf's blood or not. But the moment those two re-entered her world, just like when Hunter showed up, her power drained away. With Hunter, she gives it away; with the twins, they take it from her.
Part of me whispers that I would do anything to help her stay in her power.
“Yeah, I was their favorite punching bag.” She gives me a humorless smile, still unable to maintain eye contact. As if she can’t let me see all the pain behind her morning mist eyes.
“Hansel would enjoy dehydrating me for the duration of a class. The thirst would be almost unbearable. The way it would grip me, it would be difficult to focus. So not only did I not have any magic, but I couldn’t even pass a history course.”
Suddenly her extreme desire to pass her class came into perspective. The tireless hours she put in were also an attempt to break with the past. She never got a fighting chance to succeed. I knew the feeling.
“I was at that school for three years before I was kicked out for not showing any magical aptitude and flunking all my classes. In truth, they should have kicked me out before the first year was over. But they kept me in deference to Gigi.” Her hands tighten on the bottle. “And I should have left long before then. But I didn’t have the backbone. I still held out hope that my magic would show up. That I would finally be good enough for Hunter. Usually, magic ability appears in childhood, but it has been known on rare occasions to manifest as late as nineteen.”
She pauses to sip some more water. “Staying at FFA almost killed me. The first party I attended, Hansel made me so thirsty that I couldn’t stop chugging whatever was in front of me. I ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.” She sighs and hangs her head. “My Gigi was nice about it, but I could see she was disappointed. Then for three months, Gretel wove her magic around me, until I never felt hungry. Slowly but surely, food became repellent until I was skin and bones at the end of my sophomore year.”
Unable to internalize these horror stories anymore, I shoot to my feet. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell someone what they were doing?”
A dry laugh escapes her. “Oh I did, but I learned very quickly that it only made things worse for me.”
I pace back and forth, running my hands through my hair.
“It seems stupid in hindsight, okay? But some part of me still so badly wanted to belong. I wanted to make Gigi proud. I wanted Hunter to really fall in love with me. I wanted too much.” She settles deeper into the couch cushions and closes her eyes.
“I . . . ” I swallow over the lump in my throat. Something rising from my depths that I haven’t experienced in over a decade. “I get it. You know it’s a shitty situation, but you’ve made your home in that shit place. Even if you leave it, part of you will always want to belong to it.”
“Your pack,” she breathes, as if worried she’ll spook me. And she’s right. I’m not sure how the words are coming out of me right now.
“I was only nine when I was excised from my pack.”
Her face contorts as if it pains her. “Why? Why would they do that to you?”
I scrub a hand along my face, and then go to sit in a chair next to the couch. Red turns, curling her knees up, still sipping on the water. The gallon jug is half emptied.
“I was out chopping and gathering wood for my mother when I saw her. A woman came through the woods like fire on snow. Her hair was red, like yours,” I say with a half-smile.
Maybe that’s why I find Red so irresistible. I have a thing for fiery haired women. The woman’s eyes were a brilliant aquamarine, and at first, I thought I'd stumbled on a mermaid out of water.
