Holy War: Two Worlds and an In- Between

Chapter 9: I Don't Believe This

For weeks, Jack and I had been discussing the other world and what it was like there. He never stopped trying to convince me that I should go there and fight in the war. I have to admit, I always looked forward to escaping the rest of the world with Jack and his ever-changing moods.

"So, on Saros, are there like planes and boats," I asked one day instead of listening to the lessons of a particularly slow talking teacher.

"No, there aren't even cars," he responded. I was relieved that I caught him on a day where he was just Jack. I was finding it difficult to accept the part of him that was Lord Arlow.

"So there are chariots and horses?" I asked raising a brow at him.

"Yup, when we are young we are taught how to ride horses as well as wield weapons to defend ourselves," he responded in a soft tone.

"Were there special horsey driving classes?" I joked.

He rolled his eyes at me, "No there aren't any special horsey driving classes."

There were times where Jack and I would sit together during lunch to discuss Saros and we could still see Liza giving us the stink eye as we ate, but that was as far as any interactions with that group of friends went. One day, Jack and I sat outside and spoke about grandma.

"Did she live in Alexandria too?" I asked biting into my sandwich.

"No, she lived in Deldry," he informed me while eyeing my sandwich.

"Deldry?" I mumbled with food in my mouth.

"Its the capital city of Zila. She spent most of her childhood there," he explained reaching his hand out for my sandwich.

"Then how'd you meet?" I asked pulling the sandwich away from him.

"Our kingdoms were at war, and I was drafted to fight. Unfortunately for me, she was too, and she was a force," he chuckled.

"So, you guys fought," I asked taking another bite of my sandwich.

He sucked in a deep breath, "We did, it was a fight with magic and mayhem and chaos. In the end, I became gravely injured. She healed me and then we connected," he explained with the first genuine smile that I had seen on his face in a while.

"Were you two dating or something?" I asked abruptly taking him out of his day dream. He looked a little surprised at my question, but was obviously trying to hide it.

He shrugged his shoulders. I could see something in his eyes telling me that I had struck a nerve. I silently feared that I somehow managed to pull Arlow out of his subconscious, "No, we weren't."

I shrugged and continued to eat. He continued to explain that because grandma could no longer fight, I had to do it in her place. Of course, my argument remained that I couldn't fight either, but he said he didn't make the rules.

We spent a lot of our time at the diner too. Some days, we'd do homework and pretend to be normal teens just hanging out and thinking we were so cool for disassociating with our class. Other times, we'd just eat pie and joke about the rumors going around school about us. Jack and I became good friends that way.

"You know what I think?" Jack asked one day at the diner while trying to snatch my cake from my plate.

"If you say that pineapple doesn't belong on pizza one more time I swear-" I said as I pulled my plate away hoping he wouldn't try to jump over the table.

"It doesn't!" He defended throwing his arms up a bit, "It's not that anyways. What I was going to say was that I thought we could have become really good friends even without any of this."

I lifted my feet onto the seat and cradled my knees to my chest a little, "Nah, you wouldn't even look at me," I answered.

" What do you mean? We could have definitely hung out like this if we didn't have the holy war to worry about," he responded sounding a little offended.

"Dude, you wouldn't even talk to me at lunch," I countered, "you'd just wave at me if you were around Olivia."

"I tried to talk to you, but you always looked at me like you didn't want to talk to me," He defended. His brows were arched in that silly way he always did and he pushed out his lips a little.

"Oh, that is so untrue!" I yelled but hushed my voice a bit trying not to upset the staff with our loudness.

"Uh, yes true!" He countered mocking my tone.

We went back and forth for a while about whose fault it was that we were never friends. We agreed to blame Jack if I gave him a piece of my coffee cake. He laughed at me for even arguing about it and even joked that we would have even dated. I let him know that he could never be that lucky.

"Have you even spoken to Liv?" He asked as he took a bite from my dessert.

"No, I walk to school now so that I don't have to deal with all of that awkward tension. I know that Liza is her best friend, so I don't expect her to like me anymore," I explained shrugging my shoulders attempting to hide the hurt.

"I'm sorry, D," he apologized.

"It's whatever."

As great as those evenings in the diner were,  they couldn't distract me from the fact that I had to fight a war. I think that in my head, none of it was truly real. I had convinced myself that none of it was really happening to me, or at least not this version of me. Maybe I thought that somewhere there was another girl with a ridiculously long and dramatic name who was supposed to be going through that, or maybe I thought that we were just playing pretend and that soon we could just stop pretending, but I never thought that anything was really going to happen.

Even though I didn't see what Jack was saying as true, I couldn't help but look at grandma with a certain wonder. I couldn't imagine her as a warrior or a mage. I looked at everything she did as an opportunity to discover her secrets or to find out about her secret other life.

I made a point of sitting outside with Michael and playing with him. I guess I used him as a distraction from the chaos of the world. It seemed as though no matter how I convinced myself that the world wasn't real, I knew that Michael was.

"I spoke to Merlin last night," Michael informed me as we sat on the branch of a tall tree just outside the property lines one day.

"Oh really?" I asked with fake enthusiasm while turning the pages of my history book, "What'd she say?"

He swung his leg idly over the branch, "It's a he. He said that you should go where you need to go," he said staring off into the sunset.

I looked up from my book, though I could hardly focus enough to read a word on the page, "And where would that be?"

"Alexandria," he responded casually.

I was a bit shocked by his statement. How could he know what that place is? He could have overheard me on the phone with Jack but it seemed unlikely since that kid literally couldn't care less about my life outside of when we're around each other.

"Never heard of it," I lied with a shrug . I told myself I just didn't want to talk about it, but truly I wanted to protect him.