jumped up, pulling me with her and wrapped her arms around my neck. “You won’t let anyone down! The fact that you have awakened the Iris alone is enough to keep most of them happy for the next fifty or so years,” she smiled. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine. You’re overwhelmed, that’s all. Just wait, you’ll feel worlds better when you find out exactly what your ability is – speaking of which, you need to get downstairs.”
“And then there’s that,” I said, slipping on my shoes and shuffling to the door. “What if my ability turns out to be something horrible, like laser beams shooting out of my eyes or something?”
“Laser beams?” she barked a laugh. “I think we need to take away your comic books! Should we call you Super Holder?”
“Really?” I sniped. “Comic book jokes, from a girl who can walk through time!”
“Yes,” she allowed, still laughing. “But it’s still a far cry from laser eyes.”
“OK then, fine, it probably won’t be lasers. But I could still get stuck with something boring, like being able to predict the weather, or maybe some messed-up Midas syndrome where everything I touch turns to… I don’t know…”
“Gold?” Chloe suggested.
“Yeah, but we both know I’d never get that lucky. It’d end up being aluminum.”
“Listen to me,” Chloe said, taking both my hands in hers. “You are talking madness, and you know it. Everything will be fine, and even if it’s not, we all love you and won’t let anything bad happen to you. You know that, right?”
I nodded, letting her words unwind me just a little. “Thanks, Chloe,” I said, hugging.
“Of course! Now, go get ’em Super Holder!” she said, grinning and giving me a playful shove into the hall. “I’ll be here when you get out.” With that, she closed the door, giving me no choice but to leave.
I made my way down the stairs and through the halls, walking as smoothly as I could, trying to prevent the chains on my Sciath from clanking against the hard metal cuff with every step I took. God-damned stupid thing! I felt like a cat wearing one of those bell-collars.
As I reached the doors to the office I heard two familiar voices coming from the adjacent hall, and found Mr Anderson and Mr Reid walking toward me. I sighed with a smile, relieved that I wouldn’t have to walk into the meeting by myself.
“There, now!” Mr Anderson called with a smile as he saw me.
“Good morning.”
“Oh, Becca,” Mr Reid said, placing a hand on my shoulder as he arrived next to me “How are you? I stopped by Min’s rooms last night to see you, but you’d already gone. Are you feeling better?”
“Much, thank you,” I said, touched that he’d thought to come and check on me. The fact that Jocelyn had not bothered to do so – even though he’d had time to personally make sure that Ryland was taken care of – was not lost on me, but for the moment I chose to ignore it.
“Now then,” Mr Anderson said as the three of us stepped up to the carved dark wood doors of Jocelyn’s office, “let’s see what our little lass has for us.” He winked at me as he held open the door, allowing us to pass.
I hadn’t given any thought to what Jocelyn’s office might be like, but the moment I entered the room I realized that I should have, because I was in no way prepared for it. The look, the feel of it all, hit me as hard as the smell of a bakery would a starving man, and I was instantly transported back to my childhood. Back to the house in Maine where a little girl laid on the floor of her daddy’s office, coloring in her coloring books, while he sat at his desk grading term papers. The dark wood bookcases, the wine-red drapes, the large mahogany desk with the high-backed leather chair; it was all so familiar. Different, but somehow exactly the same. This office was of course much bigger, but was set up was just as I remembered – desk facing the room, bookshelves on the left, windows on the right. The drapes were the same color, but these I could see were velvet, not the thin cotton they had been at home, and there was now a fireplace against the far wall where, in Maine, a TV had been.
However, for all the differences in appearance, both big and small, one