I said nothing. Mazur’s look was triumphant, happy she’d gotten to me. She gave me a death stare before stomping to the board to write down a few key points.
My blood boiled. If I wroteProfessorMazur is a bitchon top of my paperwork, think she’d grade me down?
Mazur rustled her feathery wings as she finished writing on the board. She paraded around with a long wooden pointer, which she smacked against the board. I was certain if she was allowed, she’d hit us with it. “Supernatural Religions is a requirement here at the Institute. Since multiple supernatural races reside at the Institute, you’ll be expected to learn god what each magical race worships, so therefore, you can learn to… respect their beliefs.”
Respect beliefs. Psh. I was half-certain Mazur taught this class because angels wanted to convert everyone to their way of thinking. The angels insisted their god was theonlytrue god, and therefore, the only valid religion. In their eyes, all other religions were false. I expected to be indoctrinated the entire semester.
Imagine my surprise when Mazur turned and said, “To begin the semester, we will be studying demigods.”
This caught my attention, and I leaned forward. Charlie cocked his head as he noticed me shift beside him.
Coyote’s words that he’d whispered to me at the Villain’s Ball came rushing back. He’d told me I was a demigod… and so were Charlie, Kallie, and Marcus.
But what did that mean, exactly? What was the Koigni god trying to tell me? I was determined to find out.
“Demigods are powerful supernatural beings,” Mazur stated. “They are the offspring of exceptionally talented supernaturals. To breed a demigod, two supernaturals with extraordinary, special power to come together to make a child, although this isn’t the only way— sometimes, mortals who mate with gods canalsobreed demigods. Unlike chosen ones, demigods are not picked by the gods for greatness. They can only be born.”
Opal raised a hand. Being the shy mermaid she was, this surprised me she was interested enough to speak out loud. “So demigods are descendants of the gods, and have god-blood in their family line?”
“That’s a misconception,” Mazur replied, like she was stupid for asking. “A demigod does nothaveto be descended from a god. Gods were formed at the beginning of creation, and can produce offspring with mortals, creating a demigod. But this is much rarer than it used to be in the olden times. The gods rarely appear to us anymore.”
“Then what does it mean to be a demigod, if you don’t need god-blood to be one?” Opal asked.
“Demigod is aclassificationof a type of rare supernatural, not something that’s in a person’s bloodline,” Mazur replied snidely. Ancestors, she hated answering questions. It’s like she expected us to know it all already. “We know there are two main types of supernaturals— average, which most supernaturals are, and talented, which are typically supernaturals of unique power. The third and most powerful type is demigod, which means these individuals have magical strength beyond what even the most talented supernaturals can achieve. A demigodcanbe created by talented supernatural parents. Say, if a chosen one and a person born on a powerful magical day such as a solstice were to mate and have a child, there would be a chance, albeit slim, that the child would be a demigod.”
That wasmyparents. My mother was a chosen one— my dad had been born during the Summer Solstice in the Year of the Sea Serpent, which was a powerful year in the Hawkei zodiac. It’d made him incredibly strong.
Mazur pinched her nose. “Something also important to note— demigods are often firstborn. Just because two talented supernaturals mate and produce a child does not mean all of their children will be demigods. In fact, there is a slim chance thatanyof their children would be demigods at all. It would be like winning the lottery to produce one, and demigod children are often difficult to raise. Strange things happen to them throughout their childhood— such as gods appearing to them throughout their lives, though they often don’t understand what’s happening.”
That probably meant that Ezekiel, Alana and Maverick weren’t demigods. Unlike me, they’d never had anything odd happen to them growing up. Strange things happened to me every day. I remembered the strange monster in the woods when I was five, and the blue eyes I’d seen when Daddy had been healed from near death when I was sixteen. Neither situations had been explained.
Kallie crossed my mind. I remembered she’d told me last semester how she’d seen a strange woman appear to her as a child during trances. My suspicions about her origins were confirmed.
“Also important to note,” Mazur added, “To get a demigod, the child must be born on an important day in the astrological cycle. An equinox, a solstice, a comet, an asteroid shower, an eclipse, an alignment of the planets… something in that nature isalwaysrequired to create a demigod. Heavenly bodies influence our births and lives significantly, and without them, demigods cannot exist.”
Charlie was born on the Winter Solstice. I was born on Christmas Day, in between the Winter Solstice and the Anichi New Year on January first. That made us both pretty powerful. I wasn’t sure when Kallie and Marcus had been born, but I was betting that both of them had been born when something important was going down on the astrological plane.
Mazur strolled around the room. “Although demigods aren’t always descendants of the gods themselves, their powers are comparable. Demigods have the power to do things beyond what even talented supernaturals are capable of. They can push and bend the laws of nature to their command, and have even been recorded to work magic that is outside the natural realm. Demigods could stop time, change reality, and even… as it is rumored… build new worlds from nothing. The difference between a talented supernatural and a demigod is that a talented supernatural can store and use more magical energy than any average magic caster, at rates that would kill most other casters. But a talented supernatural cannot pull from energy or power that isn’t there. Fae pull from Edinmyre. Witches pull from their afterlife, Alora. Elementai get energy from the earth, and their Familiars. And so on and so forth. But once this magical energy source is exhausted, there’s nothing left to pull, and therefore, the magic of a talented supernatural dies. As you all know, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, this law of nature didnotapply to demigods. They could create something out of nothing, and were capable of harnessing copious amounts of magical energy from thin air.Theycreated itthemselves, out of their own power. They need neither source, god, nor place to pull from, for they are their own magical source of energy. Their makeup is the magic of creation itself, and therefore, just like the gods, can create and access boundless sources of magical power.”
Mazur smacked the board with her pointer again, and a couple of people flinched. “It is incredibly rare to find a demigod, and their offspring never exhibited the traits of their parents. More often than not, demigods were infertile, or produced children that had no magic whatsoever. Nature will only allow a race to grow so powerful before it will begin canceling that genetic line out. Demigods are magical anomalies, and nature did the right thing by driving them to extinction.”
I scowled. Mazur almost sounded disgusted with the idea of demigods— like they were abominations that needed to be destroyed, and that such power only belonged in the hands of the gods.
“Demigods were usually plagued by certain… features,” Mazur continued. “The primary aspect of demigod-hood was mental instability. You must understand, these people didn’t think like you and I do. They were often deranged, driven to madness by the power they harnessed and their inability to control it. More often than not, they were delinquents of magical society, and menaces to the common good. They just weren’t normal.”
A jolt ricocheted through my gut as the voices in my head quaked and ebbed. Who was Mazur callingunstable? Jackass.
Mazur tapped the pointer in her hand. “Although the demigods are considered extinct, there is always a chance of one popping up, when talented supernaturals mate and produce offspring. More likely than not, if there are young demigods running around, they’ve most likely ended up here at the Institute, as a result of their instability meshing with their problems with authority. You must be aware, if there is someone at the Institute that you suspect to be a demigod, youmustinform the Warden immediately, to protect yourself and your fellow students.”
Yeah, right. That sounded like a joke. More like the Warden wanted to get his hands on that kind of power.
But why?
Mazur had us do some boring worksheet for the rest of the class period. She yelled at me when I wrote down Charlie’s answers for him, until I asked her if she wanted me to call my father. She backed off, though the way her hands tightened on her pointer made me believe she’d like nothing more than to gouge my eyes with it.
My thoughts were racing. I’d talked to Daddy and Mama over Christmas break about the possibility of me being a demigod. I hadn’t told them about seeing Coyote, though, because I was sure they’d think it was some bipolar moment and freak out. My parents, and others, had seen footage of me talking to Coyote during the Darke Games, but as Coyote had told me, the cameras couldn’t catch him on film and it looked like I was arguing with myself. I’d made up some excuse about how it was all stress-related from being in the Games, and my parents had bought it. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them with the information… more or less that I didn’t want to worry them any more than what they already were.
Daddy had scoffed at the notion that I was a demigod— he didn’t like any idea that put me in more danger— but Mama was pretty convinced. I was the firstborn daughter of two supremely powerful supernaturals, after all, the only Elementai that had mastered both Fire and Water. There wasn’t much denying it.
