Mr. Ecscent unlocked the huge double oak doors to Eldnac with a key he had for teacher-uses. He looked at Melissa while he did this, as if to say, How would you have gotten in without me?

"I gave Lilly a tomahawk for a reason," Melissa snapped. 

Lilly was taken aback by her constant poison towards him. Generally, outbursts like this never raged from her cousin. She was excellent at holding her tongue and even better at fostering her agitation in private. It was interesting to see her trying and failing to keep her aggression towards Mr. Ecscent at bay. What had happened between the two of them?

"Smashing things is not subtle," said Nathan with an exasperated shake of his head.

In the entryway, Melissa had Lilly do a few practice swings with the tomahawk. She nearly chopped Mr. Ecscent's toes off the first three times she swung it and nearly beheaded herself the next three times. Tomahawks, Melissa said, were generally used for throwing, so she showed Lilly the proper way to throw it. Blood leaked from Lilly's bandaged hand by the time she'd finished practicing. 

"Don't throw or swing it until I say so," Melissa said. She kept saying that, over and over again...as if Lilly was eager to use it, and Lilly was anything but eager. She was terrified of using this thing! What if she pulled her arm back to throw it and ended up whacking herself in the face instead?

The school was eerie-quiet, and as the sun climbed skyward, gold bars of light spread through the beige entrance hall. It was strange to be here when no one else was...it was almost as if they had stepped into an apocalyptic version of Eldnac.

Everything looked okay. There was no sign of the strange color-changing mist or monsters down this hall...but there was a small something that bit into Lilly's spirit. If she had not been thinking about magic, or if she had not been acutely aware of how tense her hands were around the tomahawk's handle, then she might have missed it. This something felt like a butterfly was trapped in the veins of her wrists, wings flapping wildly at irregular intervals. It was something completely different from her normal pulse—she could certainly feel that thrumming through her—this feeling was like a current, a second pulse.

As they started down a locker-lined hall towards the gymnasium, Mr. Ecscent said into the silence, "Every staff member takes the day after exams off. They go out and celebrate...it's sort of a beginning-of-summer ritual for the faculty, so that's one thing we don't have to worry about."

"What about the janitors?" Lilly asked. There were six main janitors at Eldnac, two of which worked full-time. The other four were specialized cleaners who came on different days of the week. Lilly loved each of them. They were her friends just as much as Maya was. Sometimes, she'd eat lunch with the most paranoid janitor, Mr. Larykins, in his favorite closet that smelled suspiciously like bananas. He was an elderly bald man who was convinced the school had a vampire infestation. When Lilly had detention (which was at least once every week) and she had to stay after school and help Mr. Larykins clean the boys' locker room, they jammed out to screamo music together.

"Gotta love magical janitors," Mr. Ecscent replied with a shrug.

"You mean they know about the Shifter World?"

"All six of them. They help regulate the—"

Mr. Ecscent stopped walking so abruptly, Lilly nearly crashed into him. They were at the end of the hall. Here, the corridor split into two separate directions. Directly in front of them was the grand stairwell that led up to the school's second level.

For the first time, he and Melissa looked at each other with some amount of agreement in their eyes.

Then the school filled with noise.

It was quiet at first, barely audible before rising to an all-encompassing trill, similar to the wail of an untuned oboe. Lilly's lungs rattled violently in her chest, and she couldn't suck in air through her nose or mouth because the hair had turned thick and heavy. A terrible sense of dread descended over the entire hall, followed by an intense surge of panic.

The hairs on Lilly's arms prickled.

The noise deepened from its oboe-trill to a trombone-groan. It sounded like...like buzzing.

Lilly tightened her grip on the tomahawk and Melissa was already ushering them up the stairwell when the monster came bounding down the left side of the hall. Lilly caught a glimpse of it in her peripherals, a yellow and black beast, solid and fuzzy and very, very large. Most of its face was made up of a single giant black eyeball.

"Go," Mr. Ecscent whispered as they rushed up the flight of stairs. "Go!" 

Each floor in Eldnac had a specific theme of classes. The sub-level took up the small elementary school portion of Eldnac, with less than fifty students for each grade. The first level held the art classrooms, the auditorium, and the office. There were two gyms on the opposite side of the first level, all the way in the back of the building. The second level was composed of maths, sciences, sports medicines, and physical health classes. The third held language and humanities classes. The fourth was composed of social studies and history classes.

They entered the second level, the hall white-bright with sunshine. A clang echoed from the stairwell behind them as Lilly, Melissa, and Mr. Ecscent started down the hall. On the opposite side was a staircase that would take them right down to the main gym.

Behind them, the monster crashed into walls and steps and stone, the buzzing sound swelling to a deafening roar.

"Wait!" Melissa flung out a hand. Mr. Ecscent skidded to a halt and Lilly crashed into his arm, a strangled wheeze wrenching from her throat.

There was a large, splintering hole in the environmental science classroom to their left. The hole was the result of a smashed door and three feet of the destroyed wall spreading out from either side of the classroom's entrance.

A discordant sound came from within the classroom. Metal clanged behind them. The shhhh of furry bodies against walls was so loud, Lilly's eardrums vibrated, and the dreaded realization slammed into her gut with an army of fear: The monster was right behind them. Another one was to their left, inside the classroom.

Lilly turned around and got her first true look of this monster when it wasn't in its mist form.

It was a giant wasp.

It was as tall as any of the classroom doors, thick as oak tree trunks. Its fuzzy thorax vibrated with each rattling breath, its abdomen gleaming wicked as sunlight reflected off those razor-edged steel plates. Its poison-yellow antennae twitched, twitched, twitched, and that one single eye Lilly had seen in her peripherals was actually two huge eyes...they were so big, created of thousands upon thousands of tiny different lenses and compartments. Its wings were transparent and veined with bright orange lines.

Lilly grabbed Melissa's arm and clutched the tomahawk with her other hand. 

The second wasp came out of the environmental science classroom, its eyes reflecting three terrified people and the wasp behind them.

"They're not going to let us walk right by them, are they?" Mr. Ecscent whispered.

"Get against the wall," Melissa whispered to Lilly. "Crouch down."

Lilly didn't have the strength to argue. She backed away slowly, carefully, anxiously.

Both the wasps exploded forward in eerie synchronization. Melissa whirled towards the one that had come out of the classroom; Mr. Ecscent spun to face the one that chased them up the stairs. The low-pitched sizzle of fire mingled with angry buzzing as Mr. Ecscent thrust his fists forward and flames flew out of his skin.

Flames. Her math teacher could shoot flames from his hands.

Holy crap.

The wasp he faced went up in red tongues that nearly reached the ceiling. It batted its giant wings and clobbered toward Mr. Ecscent, black plumes of smoke curling from its fat thorax. The flames disappeared as quickly as they'd materialized.

The fire alarm went off.

To Lilly's right, Melissa flung her arms in repetitive pulses at the other wasp. Most of her thrusts were parries to avoid the insect's mandibles, which moved in savage attempts to latch onto any part of Melissa's body. Silver blades flashed against black eyes flashed against a yellow-black abdomen and the whole world became red and black and yellow. The fire alarm screamed overhead, the wasps buzzed over it, and Lilly could hardly hear her own attempts at wheezing through the cacophony.

Okay, she thought. Think, you idiot.

Those wasps were so large compared to Melissa and Mr. Ecscent...they were towering beasts, antennae arching over their ugly faces, their mandibles clicking in endless attempts to cut through limbs. Melissa was losing energy fast, and Mr. Ecscent's fire-blasts were doing little more than angering the monster.

Knives and fire weren't doing anything.

Was it worth it to stay against the wall when Melissa and Mr. Ecscent were failing to slaughter these monsters? Was it worth it to crouch here, fearful and shaking, when she could be both fearful and useful? Immersion of fear did not render Lilly completely useless...not yet, at least. She had an ax! And the ability to steal things from space! At the very least, shouldn't she at least try and help kill these wasps?

Lilly straightened from her crouch, keeping the tomahawk flat against her chest as she edged around the wasp that had come out of the classroom. She squeezed between the wall and the wasp's giant black abdomen until she was facing its stinger—a glossy black paper-thin sword that was longer than Lilly was tall. Her teeth chattered. She was too afraid to let go of her only weapon, and she didn't have the slightest idea of how to steal anything from space, so she crouched beside one of those giant dark legs and raised the tomahawk, blood rushing to her face—

She swung her ax. 

For someone who had never hit anything with an ax before—specifically, an ax meant for throwing—the feeling was jolting to both her anxiety and her body. Her bones shook, her shoulder joints popped, her knuckles cracked, and her heart palpitated, sending Lilly into a panicked frenzy; for a terrifying moment, her vision pulsed with black and red lines.

The blade sliced clean through tissue. Metallic blue liquid erupted from the wound, splattering her hands and face. The wasp staggered, its giant body splashing in the pool of bright ichor. It slumped atop its chopped-off leg. At the same time, Lilly fell back on her rump. The wasp swiveled its head around to look at her. An angry buzz vibrated deep within its belly.

Lilly peeled her hair from her eyes and lifted her ax again.

Melissa was looking at Lilly with both sourness and shock when she jumped and hurled a dagger-wielding hand forward. In a fast-growing pool of blue, Lilly watched as Melissa's feet left the ground and her torso pitched towards the wasp's mandibles. Her blade sank to the hilt in the middle of the wasp's eye. Melissa dragged her knife all the way to the bottom of the insect's eyeball with a shriiiick while she fell. 

Lilly screamed before it happened. Those ugly mouth blades clamped over Melissa's upper arm, blood sprayed, and Melissa's hands fell away from her knife.

Lilly leaped to her feet and hammered the ax down again, this time on the wasp's fat abdomen. From her peripherals, she could see those terrible mandibles clicking in pain. Melissa slumped against the wall, clutching her wounded arm.

Lilly's arm muscles burned and she was screaming, hissing, shaking. The bandage on her hand unraveled and blood bubbled out of fresh cuts.

Suddenly, the wasp detonated into yellow gas. The fire alarm stopped wailing, and the pool of blue blood stopped growing.

Mr. Ecscent was still hurling flames at the other wasp and had it backed against the wall when it, too, burst into yellow gas. The hall smelled like a strange mix of sulfur and citrus fruits and everything was quiet, quiet. 

After a stunned pause in which the quiet rang with a high-pitched frequency, Lilly dropped the ax and splashed through the ankle-deep pool of ichor to Melissa.

"What were you thinking?" her cousin gasped. "What happened to...what happened to using the ax only when I...when I..." She ripped her jacket off with to look at the gash in her arm. The wound was a gaping, giant scarlet mass of ripped tendons and agitated skin. 

Lilly shrugged off her own jacket and pressed it to Melissa's arm. She hissed and bent at the waist when Lilly pressed, but eventually took the fabric in her hand and dabbed at the blood.

Lilly folded her arms around herself and sat down hard, trembling. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap...the blue, the wasps, Melissa's arm getting caught in those mandibles...it all replayed over and over in her mind. She couldn't grasp what had just happened—it was messy and magical and scary. 

"Lilly," Mr. Ecscent said gently. He had a cut on his lip and fireballs in his hands. He flicked his wrists to vanish the fire and bent down next to her.

"I'm good." Lilly scrubbed a hand across her mouth. "I'm good."

Mr. Ecscent looked at Melissa. "We have to get you to the hospital."

"I'm fine," Melissa replied breathlessly. "I need a minute."

Mr. Ecscent waved a hand through the yellow gas. It wasn't altered at all by the movement, but rather switched colors of its own volition, from yellow to black and back to yellow, sending a parade of shadow-light patterns flickering across the walls. "Your wound needs stitches. You're lucky that thing didn't take off your whole arm."

If Melissa hadn't been wearing her leather jacket to provide extra padding, Lilly thought, the wasp's mandibles certainly would've snapped her arm clean off. Melissa leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. She was pale, sweating, and shivering. 

Gently, Mr. Ecscent stepped forward. He took the jacket pressed to her wound and tied its sleeves around her arm. Melissa whispered a thanks that was drowned by a shaky exhale. After a long moment in which Mr. Ecscent's hands hovered above the makeshift tourniquet, she added, "I'm glad you were here to help, Nathan."

"That's the first kind thing you've said to me in twelve years." Mr. Ecscent cleared his throat, trying to suppress a laugh. "I'll scout the rest of the hall, make sure there are no other surprises before the gym, and then I'll call nine-one-one. You'll be okay. You will."

"Do you think the mist will transfigure back into wasps?" Lilly asked. 

"No idea; I've never seen anything like that," Mr. Ecscent replied. He took off in the opposite direction, leaving the two of them alone in the hall. Melissa slid to the ground next to Lilly, back to the wall.

"You're going to be okay," Lilly whispered, switching her sitting position so that she was facing her cousin. 

Melissa opened her eyes and forced a small smile. "'Course I will. It's just a scratch. I'm so sorry."

"For the wasps? I'm just glad you're okay. And it was pretty cool aside from the danger part."

"It was all dangerous."

"I know. But...getting to fight a monster beside you was so cool. You can jump!"

Melissa laughed, then winced. Her gaze grazed the ground before flickering back to Lilly again. Through the yellow and black mist that hung like gauzy curtains between them, Lilly could see her thoughts written across her pained expression: I don't want you to leave. Not yet. Not ever.

"Where you're going," Melissa gasped, her breathing rugged between each word, "to train for war...I don't care...how many people tell you that you're different. Or crazy. Or evil. You'll fit right in."

Lilly grabbed Melissa's hand. Wasp blood squelched between their interlocked fingers. This sort of vulnerability was often difficult to see in Melissa. Even if everyone else wondered about her, she was so sure of herself—she knew she was gorgeous, she knew she was wickedly smart, and she knew when to speak and when to listen. But now Lilly could see her cousin's raw, aching emotional misery. The storm building in her dark eyes, her shaking hands, the unsure, the my plan for you to live a normal life here didn't work out and I've lost control.

"I really don't want you to go," Melissa seethed. She cradled her arm against her stomach and shook her head. Lilly curled into her like a kitten to its mother, her head against Melissa's chest. "But I know you'll be a fantastic soldier."

"I don't know about fantastic," Lilly replied. Tears welled in her eyes. She didn't want to go, either. She really didn't want to leave Melissa here with scary ladies with diamond chokers and red lips waiting to assassinate her. "I'm not even athletic. You know how much I hate exercise."

Melissa around with her uninjured arm to wipe the fallen tear from Lilly's cheek. "Don't cry. You'll be alright." She kept whispering it, this simple promise as they embraced...Lilly was gentle for fear of hurting Melissa's arm, and Melissa held on tight. "You'll be alright." 

Mr. Ecscent had arrived in the hall again. He put a relatively large hand on Lilly's shoulder and said, "It looks like the rest of the school is cleared. I called an ambulance and I'll come right back after I take her, Melissa. I swear."

Lilly peeled herself from Melissa as her cousin whispered, "Go shut the gate before the wasps find it first."

"Be safe. If there are any more giant killer wasps, hide instead of fight—"

"Nathan?"

"And remember, you can call me. I'll only be gone for a few minutes—"

"Nathan."

Mr. Ecscent paused, pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. Melissa said, "I needed you today. Thank you."

He smiled. "We'll be back as soon as possible, but we have to go now."

Melissa pressed her lips into the top of Lilly's head. "Don't worry about me. Be good, okay?"

Lilly nodded and lied, "I'm always good" before Mr. Ecscent escorted her down the hall towards the staircase. Lilly hated leaving Melissa alone against that wall, bleeding and in pain. She forced herself to place one step in front of the other and keep pace with Mr. Ecscent. 

"She's tough," Mr. Ecscent said as if reading her thoughts. "She'll be fine."

"Those things...the wasps. They're not dead, are they?"

"No. I'll call a Bloom representative here in Earthens to create a gate and get them out. My guess is these wasps can't be killed with axes and daggers and regular fire. Maybe magic slaughters them...pure, intense magic. I don't know."

They reached the bottom of the steps, right outside the main gym's doors. The mist was thin here, appearing in tendrils like trails of colored smoke. Mr. Ecscent explained the gym doors were left unlocked by one of the janitors who worked at Eldnac on Wednesday mornings. Most janitors he had met in Earthens, he claimed, oversaw all the supernatural things that went on and made sure gates to different worlds opened and closed on time.

Upon entering the gym, Lilly felt the electrical charge of magic she had upon entering Eldnac; this time, however, it felt like the seconds right before a thunderstorm...like all the electrons in the air crashed into one another, releasing their negative, painful charges. Her blood suddenly felt hot and seemed to rush through her limbs in fast, painful surges. Her throat burned as if it had been bleached. 

The overhead lights flickered through the crossbeams that made up the high ceiling. The "gate" did not look like a gate, or a portal, or even a doorway into another world. There were blue and purple vines that made wet sucking sounds as they curled outwards from a giant hole in the middle of the floor. Slime oozed like pus from blisters between the cracks in the strange foliage.

Mr. Ecscent knelt down in the mass of vines next to the hole. It was about as large as Lilly was wide and emanated a tangy iron smell.

"As soon as you feel your feet hit the floor, run," said Mr. Ecscent. "You're inside a crack between space and time, so it could feel like you're there for thirty seconds and you'd actually be there for a day and a half."

Lilly nodded. She wiped her sweaty hands on her ichor stained jeans. "Got it. Um...can I ask you a question that has nothing to do with gates?"

"Of course."

"Why does Melissa hate you?"

Mr. Ecscent's eyebrows arched.

"Why," she tried again, swallowing against the pain in her throat, "does Melissa sometimes look at you like you're the most irritating mosquito on the planet and other times she looks at you like she's about to explode into an emotional rage?"

"Well, I've known your cousin for a long time. Any explosions of emotional rage are foreign to her. She tends to keep a lot of her emotions to herself, save for her irritation towards me."

There was a moment of stillness in which both Lilly and Mr. Ecscent paused, then Mr. Ecscent glanced back towards the gym doors and pushed his glasses up on his nose...he seemed to do that a lot when he was nervous. "Melissa and I were friends. More than friends. A long time ago in the Shifter World. And then I, ah...Lilly, I helped her mother kill herself."

Lilly's mouth dropped open. She quickly shut it before Mr. Ecscent saw how shocked she was.

"Yes." His cheeks were turned an unhealthily dark shade of red. "Now can I ask you a question?"

"Okay."

"Why did Jake come to visit you this morning? Why did you dump ice water on him?"

"He...he said he did a science experiment on me last year."

Mr. Ecscent snorted. "That was his excuse?"

"Sorry?"

"He didn't do a science experiment on you. He was trying to figure out what to get you for your birthday last April. He wouldn't stop talking about it."

Lilly's stomach dropped into her knees. She covered her mouth with a blue-stained hand. "Why?"

Mr. Ecscent was full-on smiling now. "Typically, people like to do something nice for their crushes on their birthdays. Unfortunately, he backed out before deciding on anything." 

"You have to tell him I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't...oh crap..." Lilly shook her head. "Does he know about the Shifter World? He's not a Shifter like you, is he?"

"His mom was from Earthens. He didn't inherit any magic, and he doesn't have a clue." Mr. Ecscent sighed. "If you don't go soon, the mist will get inside the gate before you. So go, and don't worry about Melissa. We'll get her to the hospital."

"Okay."

"And Lilly?"

"Yes? Sir?" Yes sir? He was still her math teacher. Yes sir seemed like the appropriate way to address him, right? Then again, she had never paid attention to addressing her adults before, so maybe now wasn't the best time to start.

"The woman who blackmailed you into doing this...she's just someone with a vengeance. I don't want you to worry about her. I want you to go to Elliott Way, train as hard as you can, keep your magic a secret, and stay safe."

"Got it." Lilly didn't know how she could possibly not worry about that woman, or what would ensue back here, but without another protest, she knelt beside Nathan, extremely uncomfortable with the feeling of this eclectic magic radiating from the gate. She swung her legs around so that they dangled into darkness. Blackness was all she could see when she peered down. Mr. Ecscent gave her a reassuring smile.

Lilly shook her head.

To say she jumped into the gate without a second thought would be false; to say she jumped into the gate with lots of thoughts would also be untruthful. She ended up jumping into the hole with three thoughts in her head:

The first: Here she was, an ethereal being going to an ethereal place to a military training facility without any magical or athletic experience. Without Melissa, who was losing lots of blood right now. Fantastic.

The second: Here she was, thirteen years old and terrified, with a sudden surge of new adrenaline. She was ready. She was ready to face the Shifter World and it was weird because she'd never been ready to face Earth. She'd plunge into the Shifter World with every ounce of strength, wit, and personality she had. Wonderful.

The third: Here she was, right here. Right now. To the entire Shifter World and giant killer wasps and everything in between, her mind raced with the words bring it on.