Nightfall

Chapter 23: Hearts on Fire

Weeks passed after that day, each one as long as the last. Every day when I woke to the sunrise my mind went back to the ominous words of the headmaster, forcing me to occupy myself to keep from going insane. Anya, Drake, and I all started doing daily team training too. The demon Tartarus had been a wakeup call for us; that we really were very small fish in a very, very big pond. Still, even as we anticipated the next attack we were also training to go against Eva's team, the Shadow squad.

The two girls that had only barely survived the treant cave finally got released. At the news of their friend's death they grieved for several days and then were given a helicopter flight back to whatever city they had come from. Eva still didn't give them a break as they grieved, and ended up being attacked by one of the unstable girls after she said some particularly harsh things. The event caused a divide that could be easily felt between the top twenty or so teams, some aligning with the raw evil power of Eva, and others aligning with the angry counter movement against her. Due to our closeness to the situation our team was sort of unofficially appointed as one of the leaders of the alliance; along with Ryan's team, Watermark, and Reece's team.

The competition to be the strongest pushed us on. Since we were the number one ranked team until the next competition we ended up getting more attention than we bargained for in practice. Every day a crowd of people would show up to watch us as we trained. Even the number two team, that used to be number one, gave us some help. They were all very cool, but the amount of power that radiated from each of them put me in awe and made it hard to pay attention. We had grown much stronger, yes; but the number two team really deserved the number one spot.

Then, before we knew it, the announcement of the third competition came over dinner one night. We had been holding our breathes for it, but when it was officially going to happen it was hard to feel good about it. Unlike the last two competitions this one was a one on one tournament, with your rank being based on your win rate for your team. Each person was given one match against the team beneath them and the team above them. However, due to my request to the headmaster to challenge Eva's number five ranked team no matter how many we won we would still only land in fourth place, but to us that was an acceptable price to pay to be able to face the squad we loathed so much.

Even though we were given one week of free days to train, Eva never once took part in any of it. Adam and her just watched us practice as they sipped wine in the cool, air conditioned hallways. I knew they were studying our fighting styles, but I decided that it was better for us to train and improve as much as we could than worry about them predicting our moves.

We took the day before the beginning of the competition off to rest, as advised by Ryan. So without classes we slept in late and tried to recover as much as we could. Meaning that we all ended up laying in one room and talking for most of the day, well, until a knock sounded at our door.

"Who is it?" I yelled from my position on my bed.

"It's me. I brought Stella and Moxie too, we just wanted to stop by." Ryan's voice sounded out.

I told him to let himself in and the trio walked into the room to observe our heavy leisure. Anya was curled up on the floor between our beds in a pile of brightly colored blankets and black pillows as Drake and I stretched out on our beds in our underwear. The sight of us made Ryan's teammates giggle and shy back a little. But we made no effort to look decent, we were tired and anxious; a little embarrassment wasn't going to make any difference to us.

"Geez could you at least put on pants?" Ryan asked rhetorically, sounding a little disappointed, "There are ladies in the room you know."

Drake and I looked at him, "Nah" we replied in unison.