by Lan Chan
I glanced down at the cauldron and smiled. Yeah, my chances of beating the supernaturals in a physical fight were zero. Next year I would have to take part in my first trial to test my knowledge before entering the senior campus. It was something I wasn’t particularly looking forward to. But even if I failed, I had the ability to bring happiness to people through the food I cooked. That had been Grammy’s gift. Maybe Great-grandfather wasn’t the only one I’d taken after.
The whole point of the potion in the chilli was that it would keep me awake for at least a few days. Not wanting to waste the time in my room, I cleaned up the circle and packed the chilli into a container. Then I put away my things. When I was done, I drew a protection circle with the chalk and left to head to the library.
I wasn’t at all surprised when I closed the door to the dorms and a figure stepped out of the tree line. “I don’t really appreciate being stalked.”
His attention was solely on the container in my hands. I passed it over to him. “Be careful,” I said. “It’s spicy.”
“Where do you think you’re going at this time of night?” He fell into step beside me. I could ask him the same question. Instead, I chose one that had been bugging me all day.
“Aren’t you worried someone will see you?”
He opened the container and dipped his finger into the sauce, completely ignoring the presence of the plastic spoon that was ingeniously tucked into the lid. Shifters! They didn’t give a damn about being civil.
“Why would I be worried someone might see me?”
I twined my hands behind my back. “Earlier when those girls saw us, you looked like you wanted to disappear.”
“What girls?” He was seriously eating with his hands. He caught me staring and grinned. “Sounds to me like you’re the one who doesn’t want to be seen.”
“Never mind. You know there’s a spoon?”
“What?” He looked at the lid. “Oh.” So of course he wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I asked as we reached the library.
“Don’t feel tired.”
“That’s funny. That’s almost the complete opposite of how everybody else seems to be feeling.”
“You think so?”
“Maybe it’s just a junior campus thing.”
Max frowned. He ran his fingers through his hair. Not many guys could pull off looking good with that slightly floppy haircut. Then again, Max Thompson wasn’t most guys.
“Now that you mention it, I think some of the Fae might have been missing from Weaponry and Combat yesterday.” His frown deepened. His head shook like he’d done the night I’d thrown the wolfsbane fireball at him. “I can’t seem to remember who I’ve seen and when.” He smacked his palm against his temple a couple of times like he thought rattling his brain might help. If his jaw line got any harder, it might fracture.
It was at that point that I realised we hadn’t passed any vampires on the way to the library. I paused with my hand on the door and glanced around us. Max stilled beside me, a spoonful of chilli halfway into his mouth. “What?”
“Where is everybody?”
“It’s the middle of the night. What were you expecting?”
I shook my head. “Normally there are at least a few vamps milling about.”
“Well, I for one am glad they’re not around.”
His tone was breezy, but when I looked up into his face, his eyes had turned watchful. “What do you need to do in here?”
“Nothing in particular, just killing time until the morning. You can go if you want.”
“There’s a no-food policy in the library.”
My lips twitched. I managed to refrain from grinning because of the frown on his face. After a moment, he sighed and placed the lid on the container. If I’d been sitting down, I would have fallen off my chair.
“I hope you realise the magnitude of this,” Max said as he followed me into the library. I did realise how huge this was. What I didn’t understand was why. When I asked, he just winked at me.
“I assume you’ve had friends before?” he said.
I almost tripped over my own feet at the thought of being friends with Max Thompson. It was unheard of. As I dragged the Book of Beasts into the study room, I had to pinch myself. I didn’t wake up. Somehow, I’d managed to piss off a psycho who wanted me out of the Academy and make friends with the prince of the shifters at the same time. There was no way this kind of thing happened in a normal school.
14
Max and I parted ways as the sun rose. He was bored out of his brain but managed to pass the time reading comics.
“How often do you hang out there?” he asked.
“All the time.”
He made a face that showed all of his distaste. “And you wonder why you don’t have any friends.”
“I don’t wonder. I know exactly why I don’t have friends.”
Max rolled his eyes. “Maybe it’s because you make so much effort.”
“Excuse me? I’ve made plenty of effort.”
“C’mon, you won’t even eat with them. How’s anybody supposed to get to know you when you’re always hiding away? It’s suspicious behaviour.”
Thankfully there was no time for further discussion because the first warning bell rang. Max bolted. With his speed, it wouldn’t take him long to get back to the senior campus. I had a feeling he wanted to hit the dining hall before he went to class.
I opened the door to my room with an impending sense of trepidation. My pulse only slowed when I saw the magic circle was intact. Okay, I admit that some of the reason why I’d stayed away last night was because I was afraid of what might come for me in the middle of the night.
I hurried to shower and change into fresh jeans and a white cotton shirt. I had every intention of skipping breakfast after the big meal I’d had late last night. But as I speed-walked past the junior campus dining hall, I paused. Max’s words came back to me. There was no way he was right. I mean, I’d tried to eat here at the beginning. After three months of being a complete loner, I’d given up. Three months was a fair effort.
For some reason, my feet turned to the left instead of taking me right past. I found myself at the end of the buffet line. A very short buffet line. I glanced around me. There weren’t many kids here. Sure, it was after the warning bell, but most of these supernaturals possessed inhuman speed. They could be in classes in less than twenty seconds. Normally, the place should be swarming. The ones who were around seemed to be dead on their feet.
A pair of Fae girls sitting close by had their heads in their hands. Even in this dimension the Fae had retained their ethereal beauty. The dark-haired one on the right had bags under her eyes. If that didn’t ring alarm bells, nothing would. I picked up a muffin and ditched my tray. When I arrived at Potions class, it was to find the place almost deserted.
Funnily enough, the dingo shifter and Kieran were among the few in class who had made it. Kieran sat sipping on a box of Ambrosia nectar. It was a vitamin-rich drink the Fae concocted that was almost pure sugar mixed with magic. The dingo shifter chewed on a bar of Vitality chocolate that was made in Rivia, one of the supernatural towns. He rubbed his eyes and yawned.
Almost every second desk was empty. Those who were here weren’t working on their potions either. What struck me was that nobody else seemed alarmed that there were so many absences. It was almost as though they hadn’t noticed. Normally, Professor McKenna allowed us to work at our own pace. We could start our cauldrons before she arrived.
I wasn’t sure what possessed me, but I walked up to Kieran. “Umm…hey.”
He barely lifted his head. “What?”
“Are you having trouble sleeping?”
He sucked on the straw. “Does it look like I’ve slept?” There was no way in hell one of the Fae would admit weakness in normal circumstances. The fact that he didn’t immediately recoil in my presence was another bad sign.
“Are you having strange dreams?”
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His eyes widened for a second. Something cold wrapped around my forehead. My own magic pulsed up my neck to meet it. The coldness eased. Kieran blinked. “Do you want something?” he asked, like I hadn’t been talking to him this whole time.
I retreated back to my desk. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach turned into a scaly knot when it hit the fifteen-minute mark and Professor McKenna hadn’t arrived. Nobody else reacted. They all just sat there staring in front of them as though this were the normal order of things.
The professor never showed up. Rather than bother with my second class, I bolted to Jacqueline’s office on the senior campus. Max was insane if he hadn’t noticed how bare the senior campus was. If anything, it was worse than the junior campus. The whole place seemed deserted. As I raced past the Fae forest, there were signs that the grass hadn’t been tended to. Over in the billabong, a funny smell clung to the air. The water in the billabong was stagnant. It often gave off a slight sulphuric scent that never quite went over to the dark side of a stench. The bunyip liked it that way. In fact, he needed it to remain healthy. When I sniffed as I ran past, it was tinged with bitterness.
I arrived to an empty desk outside Jacqueline’s office. Her assistant Alex was a mage. Unless his arm was hanging off and he was haemorrhaging blood, he was supposed to be here. I knocked on her office door. My heart beat a staccato rhythm in my chest. Glancing at Alex’s empty desk, a feeling of panic gripped me. It washed away the last of the fogginess in my mind. Something was badly wrong with the Academy.
I bit my lip and knocked again. Where was she? Just when I thought I’d leave, the door creaked open. For a second, relief flooded through me. And then the deputy headmaster appeared at Jacqueline’s door.
“You should be in class,” he said. My mouth gaped open. His eyes were bloodshot. That was saying something for a vampire. Their healing ability was second only to the shifters. If his blurry eyes weren’t a giveaway, the fact that he’d missed buttoning two buttons on his shirt was. A vein in his neck pulsed and his bottom lip was stained with crimson. He’s been feeding. That explained why it had taken so long for him to come to the door. It didn’t explain why he was inside Jacqueline’s office.
“I need to speak to the headmistress.”
“She’s indisposed at the moment.”
“Indisposed?”
“You heard what I said.”
“When will she be back?”
His brow jumped. “Whenever she’s ready. Why aren’t you in class?”
“I…” For better or worse, if Jacqueline wasn’t here, it meant that he was acting headmaster. “I think there’s something wrong with the school. Everybody is so exhausted. It’s like they’re being drained while they sleep.”
His red lips curved into a smirk. “If there was something wrong with the school, you would be the last one to notice. Now get back to class before I give you detention.”
He slammed the door in my face. Where was Jacqueline? She would never leave the Academy high and dry when something like this was happening. The faculty lived in off-campus housing on the outskirts of the Academy. It gave them privacy as well as offered a measure of protection for anything that wanted to get at us from outside the magical wards. The wards also served as a warning should demons try to break through the magical barrier.
The Nephilim had placed them there when the Academy was built. I glanced up to the sky. It occurred to me just then that I hadn’t seen any guards floating by. In fact, Jacqueline had set up guards to watch my room. I’d been away all night and not one of them had raised an alarm.
Instead of pacing around the empty corridor, I ran to the infirmary. Why I hadn’t thought of it earlier was beyond me. The place was full to the brim, but not a single scrap of noise could be heard outside of the scraping of Doctor Thorne’s clawed feet on the linoleum.
I stalked past the admin office and into the right wing. Nobody stopped me. The care staff was walking around on autopilot. It certainly looked like they still knew what they were doing because whenever a patient groaned, they arrived to provide comfort. From what I could tell, they weren’t doing the patients any harm.
Supernatural healing wasn’t something that could be categorised in the same way as human injuries. They either took care of themselves through their own considerable healing abilities, or one of Raphael’s bloodline would heal them. Now that Malachi was the last of Raphael’s line, relying on that contingency wasn’t really an option.
Most of the patients seemed to be asleep. “Can I help you?”
I turned to find Doctor Thorne peering at me. “Ahh, I just came to see if one of my friends was in here.”
I cringed at the pathetic lie. Thankfully, Doctor Thorne wasn’t a professor so the chance of him knowing I had no friends was minimal. “Oh, well, try and stay out of the way if you can.”
It was his breezy tone that had my palms sweating. “Doctor, do you think something unusual is going on here?”
He cocked his head to the side. “Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary.”
“You don’t think there’s a higher than normal number of patients?”
“Oh, you know how it is. School starts and some students don’t make the transition very well. Lots of students begin to show signs of distress right about now.”
I backtracked slowly out of the door. The attendant at the reception desk smiled at me as I left. I forced my mouth to tip up at the sides even as my heart jack hammered in my chest. Before coming to the infirmary I had hoped that whatever was happening would bypass the para-humans. They had a slightly different biology than the other supernaturals. Now I knew everyone was affected.
Darkness greeted me as I stepped outside. My head tipped up towards the sky. Clouds blanketed the moon that was tinged red at the edges. It was just past noon. I made myself slow to a brisk walk on my way to the portal field.
The field was set up on top of a convergence of the Ley lines beneath the Academy. It focused the magic so that magical travel would be possible. It was also heavily guarded by the Nephilim.
I waited on the field in the darkness for what felt like hours. Not a single guard flew by. Debating whether I should set off a flare, I stood by the checkpoint and let my gaze wander up the Gothic balustrades of the junior Academy. If I drew attention to myself, whatever was behind this might know I was still free of their mind control. If I didn’t try, I would be on my own. Pressing my palm against the small mirror, I pulled the magical trigger.
A soft pink flare erupted into the night sky. It rose high up enough that it would catch the notice of any guard on the premises. I waited for the time to tick over. The Nephilim could teleport from wherever they were. Nobody came.
I was alone, and now I’d put a target on my back.
15
There was no more time for stealth. From the portal field, I ran as hard as I could to Professor Mortimer’s cottage. Not bothering to knock, I pushed the front door open to find the professor slumped over his wooden table. His head was rested on his arms as though he’d decided to take a quick nap and fallen asleep.
“Professor?” I approached gingerly and nudged his shoulder. He didn’t stir. I shook harder. “Professor!”
My only consolation was that he was breathing. That was good. Breathing I could work with. Out of sheer paranoia I drew a searching circle around him in my mind. It was one of the first circles I’d been taught when I’d joined the Academy. An arcane circle that might help me detect the presence of demonic energy. His physical body was free from possession.
There was no point attempting to test his mind. I had no hope of breaching the mental barriers of a high-magic mage. Professor Mortimer was one of the most powerful mages in the world. So how was it that he was curled up and snorting and I was still awake?
As I moved to my storage chest that he was still guarding, I thought of all the things Professor Gordon had taught me about demonology. The demons that could be physically fought were the easiest to k
ill. It was the ones without a form that created the most havoc. They went after the most vulnerable. That was why there was such a high incidence of human possession. Human minds weren’t equipped to deal with demonic power.
The professor let out a snore and the answer came barrelling at me. Sleep. Supernaturals might be stronger than humans, but in our sleep, we were all on a level playing field. If there was one person who knew all of the ways a supernatural would be vulnerable, it was my great-grandfather. Maybe his ramblings could also help me.
Undoing the magical safeguards I put in place, I retrieved the diary. I flipped through the pages until I came upon a familiar entry. Great-grandfather had been musing about souls and magical essences. He’d been at the beginning of his research into all the ways the destruction of a supernatural soul could imbue the destroyer with power. It was all about turning essence into energy. And energy itself couldn’t be destroyed. But it could be transmuted. That was why he’d turned their bodies into something he could ingest. I’d always been too sickened by the entry to turn my mind to what he was saying.
Flipping some more, I found what I was looking for. An entry about a trinket my great-grandmother had bought from one of the Fae on a trip to Morgana, the Fae city. Unbeknownst to her, the amulet had belonged to a Fae sorceress who had been slain in battle. Before she died, the Fae had sealed her soul into the amulet. Great-grandmother began to exhibit strange behaviours indicative of demon possession.
In order to exorcise the soul, my great-grandfather had to destroy the amulet. The only problem was that by then it had become infused with great-grandmother’s body. The amulet had grown spines that burrowed into her heart. That was how she’d died. Grammy never spoke about it, but I’d learned the truth from the diary after she died. My gaze landed on Professor Mortimer.