Page 44 of The Chosen Fae

Time for High School, the game board displayed the next day. Everyone in the commons area groaned, but Rune and Stone did not. They’d never been to a school in the human world, nor in the fae world, if they even had schools. So it meant nothing to them.

After breakfast, the Game Master met up with the competitors in the common area. “As you noticed on the board, we’re doing the next challenge at a high school. You will be taken to a local human high school, and there, you’ll befriend a human. You’ll play a fae-worthy prank on one by the end of the day.

“Just watch out for fae seers. For those who don’t know, they can put you in iron and take you somewhere and terminate you. They can see your shimmering form when you’re invisible. So you can’t hide from them. As for the challenge, the person who is successful at this first will win the competition.”

On the school bus ride over, Stone and Rune sat together. “Be careful,” he said to her.

“Yeah, you too.”

The school bus dropped off the fae competitors at a local high school; their mission: develop a friendship with a human, then break it off or do something else to create mischief for the human “friend.” They only had one day to do it.

Stone thought it would be difficult to accomplish in that timeframe. It took time to get to know someone and really trust them, and then break that trust.

Stone overheard Xena say she was going to make friends with a girl and get her in trouble with the school staff. A couple of other fae wanted to do the same thing. Vesper glanced at Stone and said, “I’m going to romance a human and break her heart in the same day.”

They all left the bus invisibly. Stone wasn’t interested in playing games on the humans. He and Rune had never interacted with humans in their world. To him, it was a waste of time, though he realized it was supposed to be part of his fae heritage. He assumed if he’d had family and friends involved in that when he was younger and had participated, he might have felt differently.

He went inside the school and watched the fae head off in different directions to target their humans. But then he saw Rune, and she was focused on what he thought was a fae seer since they were both invisible and the girl was just staring at them.

While in her invisible form, Rune looked around at the other humans hurrying to wall lockers and classes. Then she saw a girl watching her and Stone—like she knew they were standing there, observing her. Only a fae seer could see the shimmer of fae dust around a fae and know that the invisible fae was there.

Rune approached her, and the human girl stood her ground. "I'm not going to do anything to you." Rune glanced around, didn’t see anyone watching them, turned visible, and said. "I mean, like bully you or anything."

To Rune's surprise, the girl grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the lockers. "Just don't say anything. Well, except what's your name?"

"Rune."

"You have such weird names."

Rune could have taken offense, but a goddess named her, so that was a pretty significant way to get a name. Besides, she loved it, and no human or fae was going to make her feel anything but proud of the name. "What's yours?"

"Tasha.” Tasha pushed a wild tangle of auburn curls from her face, her grin spreading ear to ear the second she spotted Rune, the warmth of it so disarming that even Rune cracked an involuntary smirk. “And if my friends see you, you're toast."

"But not with you?"

"You said you weren't going to harm me."

"Right. See, we're doing challenges, and one of them is to befriend a human and then cause trouble for them. It's the fae way, you know."

"So why pick me when you know I'm a fae seer?"

"That makes it more of a challenge."

"But if you're supposed to befriend me and then do something bad to me, how would you go about it if I already know what you're up to?"

"I haven't come up with an idea for that yet."

"Maybe we could come up with an idea together. Like a fae seer and fae colluding to make this work. I'm in the theater group. I can act like I've been totally convinced that you are my friend, and then we can come up with something that proves that you aren’t." Then she frowned at her. "How did you know I was a fae seer?"

"I just arrived at the school invisibly, and you were looking straight at me. I moved to the side, thinking maybe you were looking at someone else behind me, like you were looking through me, but you weren't. You continued to watch me."

"Once I began recognizing fae, I started to try and hone my skills at refraining from looking at you. But I'm not quite there yet."

Rune saw Stone watching her. His arms were folded across his waist, and he looked perturbed with her.

"Is he a friend of yours?" Tasha asked. “You were together before.”

"Yeah. I think sometimes he doesn't feel I'm handling the challenges in the right way, but we have our own way of going about it."