Paranormal Academy

by Limited Edition Box Set

"Anyone else want something to drink?" she asked, pulling her eyes off the twitching ginger in the front.

  Peter raised his hand, pulling folded bills from the tiny pockets of his black skinny jeans.

  Golden oldies played from a vintage radio in the corner before switching to commercials. Ari never understood why so many people with their eyes opened—people who knew without a doubt that reincarnation was real, and that they'd experienced it—liked old music. Her own tastes seemed to switch so quickly from one thing to the next. Maybe that was just further proof she wasn't truly like them. That perhaps she should stop trying to pretend.

  "Oh, put that away and just tell me what you'd like. All Leo's friends drink free here, and eat here, too," she said, handing Leo a double chocolate chip muffin.

  Ari's mouth was watering against its will.

  "Actually," Leo said, "I just met this guy today."

  He half shrugged Ari's way, but she just shrugged back.

  "Oh, please," his mom said, "he's in it for the long hall, I can tell."

  *

  After they'd procured their beverages—Ari had gotten a calming Styrofoam cup of tea—Leo led them to the back, locking the door behind him, twirling a metal ring of keys around one finger.

  There was a small window in the storage area; it was round with a wooden cross set in the middle. It had been painted over, but not in a neat way. Small lines on the little glass panes held white streaks of paint like tiny hairs. It overlooked the street, and Leo positioned himself to gaze down upon it.

  Everyone else sat around on wooden crates of goods, and Peter had turned one red-painted folding metal chair backward, and sat forlornly, looking down at all their feet.

  This was the cleanest storeroom Ari had ever seen, though she supposed the Soul Painters weren't exactly the cobwebs and concentrated darkness type, that was those other guys.

  The Soul Painters had meetings they held right in this very building. Ari usually preferred to skip them. She tended to avoid the politics of men until those men tried to kill her.

  It had been known to happen.

  "All right, Ari," Leo said in a friendly tone. "I hate to ask..."

  Leo dipped his head until his curls fell onto his cheeks, making him look younger and shier than Ari could ever remember seeing him. It was in that moment that Ari realized Leo really did hate asking for help, but he had resigned himself. Just like he needed her help now. Other times—in another life—when they'd crossed paths before, flashed in front of Ari's eyes without her permission. The memories felt like they were opening old knife wounds with their intensity.

  Ari swallowed thickly, the taste of her hot tea nearly gagging her.

  "I do," Leo said again.

  "I know," Ari said softly, because now she did, and she was sorry she had ever considered that might not be the case.

  "When I left you in the pyramid, Marx and I had a moment near the waterfall."

  Ripley coughed an awful, awkward half-hack, but Ari didn't want to leave anything out. She remembered how it felt then, all flushed and hot, and she missed it, even though they hadn't been apart long enough for it to—not really. Then, the sting of what Leo and Ripley must be going through struck her again, with a new intensity she hadn't been able to understand even earlier that day.

  Ari set her tea on the lid of a white paint bucket and promised herself that, if they made it out of this, she would do anything she could to fix the other mess.

  "Mr. Garcia..." and even as Ari said his name, something felt off about him. She sucked in a breath, and it was as though she had conjured the vision up from the bottom of her lungs.

  She seemed to see… well, that Mr. Garcia's alliances were shifting. If you spent enough time in the minds of men, you would know that wasn't such a rarity. Men were never truly good or bad, and most men's allegiance was to themselves.

  "What about him?" Ripley asked, but there wasn't the slightest hint that he thought there was anything amiss about the man in his voice. He'd peeled a banana and offered half to Ari.

  "Nothing," she said, shaking her head. Ari decided they had enough on their plates and stashed the vision away for later. She had been doing that a lot recently. "We left the building together. I was teasing Marx about his godawful parking, and then we spotted Peter crouched in the parking lot, stalking us."

  Peter huffed, throwing his arms across his chest defensively, a scowl deepening on his sickly-looking face.

  "I was not stalking you. That makes it sound dirty." Peter tried to explain, his voice climbing higher and higher, his arms wrapping tighter and tighter around his small frame.

  "What were you doing then?" Leo asked coolly.

  Ari knew it wasn't his fault. At this stage in the game, they all had trust issues. It was how they survived.

  "I came to warn the Oracle," Peter said, waving Ari's way as if to punctuate his point.

  Leo had turned to monitor someone out on the street. The light was moving further away from the window, and, in all the shadows, he seemed even more intense to Ari. It was like he was made of them, but maybe they all looked like that.

  "First of all, I have a name..."

  "Arabella," Peter said, his gaze trailing back to the floor.

  Ari's eyes followed him, and she felt them widen slightly. She'd forgotten how ruined her feet were. She'd been running on adrenaline so long she couldn't even feel them. Dried blood stuck to her like rust that had been growing for years. Crusty and caked in all the creases. It itched, now that she thought about it.

  "Ari, for short.”

  She didn't even hiss it like she normally did every time someone read that name on attendance rolls.

  "But that doesn’t tell us why or how you knew to warn us, or who you were warning us about. If anything, it just adds more questions." Ari rubbed furiously at the scarlet mess by her ankles, but it wouldn’t budge, and it seemed, at first to her, that neither would Peter.

  When the dark-haired boy finally did speak, he didn't answer any of her questions and came out more like a whimper. He was lucky he sounded so genuinely pathetic; it was probably the only reason she hadn't slugged him.

  "But I thought... can't you see why now? I understand that even though you know everything at once, you can't actually see everything at once," Peter said, running his finger chaotically across the back of his chair.

  Ari's eyes turned to cat-like slits, still lined with their thick waterproof kohl. She hoped she looked like the ferocious cat she felt howling in her veins at that moment.

  "I know," Peter went on when Ari was really starting to wish he'd just shut up, "what you can do isn't exactly what I can do, but, I thought now that you knew where you should be looking that it would come easy to you."

  As soon as Ari heard the words, she wished that Peter could take them back. Though she knew it was an impossibility to change history, she knew perception, however, was everything. And right now, her opinion of things was that she should consider burning it all to the ground.

  Red flashed through her vision, as hot and angry as the blood boiling in her veins.

  "Down, girl," Leo said, but he'd turned back to the window.

  "It doesn't sound like he's antagonizing you, Ari,” Ripley added, “it sounds like he's legitimately confused."

  Peter was staring at them all, perplexed. At least he'd stopped looking at Ari's grotesque feet. It was ridiculous that she thought that was an improvement, and her anger dissipated as the seconds ticked by.

  "What do you mean, what you can do?" Ari asked.

  7

  Marx stared at the girl in silence as she rolled further and further into a ball. Like a bug looking to be squashed. Expecting it. Maybe even wanting it.

  “Girl, I hate to tell you this,” Marx said, looking around. Everything was wrapped in increasing blackness, but shadows still managed to stand darker than the night, and it made him nervous. "But you have found yourself in a world where it’s not that unusual, and now that you know such a world exis
ts, there’s no going back. Not in this lifetime, anyway."

  Blond hair, still a mess in the middle of her face, the girl pulled her chin from her knees. Marx could tell she was looking at him, even in the low light. Probably like the freak he was.

  Hearing that the girl in the cage across from him wasn't human, wasn't even in the top ten weirdest things that had happened to him just in that day alone.

  "What's your name?" Marx asked.

  It would be a shame to keep calling her blond girl, even if it was just in his head.

  "Lauren," she replied soft as a little white mouse.

  Only this time when she put her chin back down, she didn't seem to sink into herself, and Marx thought that was something, at least .

  She was no good to him as a squashed bug, Marx thought, she wasn't any good to herself that way, either.

  "Are you..." Lauren began, before thinking better of it.

  "Am I? Marx, by the way."

  It had been rude of him, not to have given his name before, but he'd almost been electrocuted. Marx would have shaken her hand if they hadn't been separated, but he dipped his head her way just the same. He could be polite when he wanted, he just rarely did. This little bird of a girl seemed to need a delicate hand. Too heavy a one would likely crush her entirely.

  "I know who you are. I can see your future, but it's not as clear—it's like looking for you through dirty glass. So, I thought maybe, maybe you were different, like me."

  Marx froze on the spot, hot as he was. He sat back stiffly on his haunches. The concrete floor was a mess, and so was he. It was the best he could do.

  She said she could see his future, eyes seeming a million miles away, as if she was combing through it all right then. On the one hand, he had a future, so it wasn't likely he'd be dead in five minutes—that wouldn't have taken as long to sift through—and she appeared to be. On the other hand, as far as Marx knew, there weren't any other Oracles left.

  "I was human once," Marx recalled, but those memories were from so long ago, he couldn’t always get them back.

  They were like seeing an old photo, where the person in it looked like you, but you couldn't piece together a story for it. Ari knew the story, though, and she'd told him.

  "And now?" Lauren asked him, looking up.

  Her sunken face held a strange and shallow hope, and that was when Marx realized he was pretty sure he'd seen her face on a picture before. On a flier for missing kids.

  It was an endearing moment, Marx guessed, that when you thought you were a monster, you really hoped there were other monsters out there, so you didn't have to be alone. Loneliness was about the most frightening thing Marx could think of.

  Sweat had sprung out in a thin sheen all over his body. He’d gone from being covered in sweat to almost made of it. He took a deep breath, trying to decide what to say. Not sure what was safe to tell her, not sure what she could already see, but when he sucked in a breath, he held it.

  The air tasted of the ocean, of saltwater, and sea breeze.

  "We're near the water," he said out loud.

  Lauren looked at him briefly before nodding once.

  "We're on the private estate of a wealthy benefactor. One who seeks the last Oracle, but he found us instead, and when we couldn't give him what he wanted, he tossed us in these cages until we could tell him where to find her."

  While Marx was in prison, he doubted he'd be able to escape any time soon, however, he expected to be tortured for information he’d refuse to give. Even though he anticipated being miserable for quite some time, it never occurred to him that enduring it all wouldn't have to be the worst thing about his future. If they found Ari… if they brought her here...

  "What do they want her for?" Marx asked.

  His own voice was so foreign and serene in his ears, he couldn't find himself anywhere in the sound of it.

  "We don't know," Lauren said, pulling her legs closer to herself.

  "We swear," said another voice further off. Marx moved to a different angle to look past the bars, but he still couldn't see the other girl.

  "The man put us all through trials, to test our authenticity," Lauren said, ashamed. "And we failed. We aren't Oracles," she confirmed, "we're Heralds… some kind of psychic. We can see a limited future, but we don't know everything."

  Heralds were some sort of messenger, usually called up in groups to warn the human race of something of near-apocalyptic levels of wickedness.

  So, if they got out of here, there was always going to be that to look forward to.

  Heralds were bad news for everyone, not just them, and Marx was sitting across from at least two of them.

  "How many of you are there?" Marx asked loud enough for both girls to hear.

  Only that was a mistake. The voice of the girl he couldn't see seemed to be sobbing.

  "Kate's brother, Peter, was here, but he escaped... that's the reason we now have food slots. They used to open the doors, but Peter was fast and strong for his size. He got away, but he hasn't come back for us. Something must have happened to him. He said he would come, and we believe him."

  Marx felt his lips pull back from his teeth. His smile probably made him look half mad, but Peter—Marx knew who Peter was.

  "He took a pit stop, but I think he'll be back."

  Lauren's head jerked up; it was more alive than Marx had seen her thus far.

  "How do you... it's hard for us to see each other, so no matter how long I look for him, I can't seem to…"

  So that was what she'd been doing with her head down all this time. Not cowering at all. Looking for a friend, looking for salvation.

  I ran into Peter here. Actually, he ran into us. Peter's the reason the man doesn't have the Oracle yet. He tackled one of the men who was chasing us; they got me, but I’m pretty sure Ari got away. I bet he's with her now. I bet they found help. We have friends…"

  Friends who would help them no matter what; they'd earned those benefits a long time ago.

  "Ari's the name of the Oracle?" Lauren asked.

  She'd pulled herself entirely from the fog of the future, and stared back at Marx with bright and interested eyes.

  "Yes, my Arabella," Marx whispered.

  He felt his smile change, the one he only used for her.

  "Ari is your..." Lauren slapped her hand over her mouth. "Sorry," she said, "that's none of my business."

  Marx laughed, hot and short. He never missed a moment to talk about Ari—if they were asking about them, and not about what she could do.

  "She's my soul mate, my everything, and I don't care how co-dependent that makes me sound. When I was a mere human, I fell in love. I didn't know what a soul was back then, the term reincarnation hadn't even been coined, and it wouldn't be for some time. But I signed a contract that said I'd watch over her, protect her, and give my life for her, for as long and often as I had to, until the end of time."

  Lauren was staring back at Marx, eyes wide, but she was still with him. He swore he heard another crying voice proclaim the beauty of what he'd just shared, but he thought it was, and that was all that mattered.

  "That might sound a little crazy, but trust me, girls, with Ari, I’m a lot of crazy all the time, and I'm perfectly okay with that."

  "What kind of contract, though?" Lauren asked, "and with who?"

  Marx wasn't surprised that was what the girl was latching on to; it was the same person who was responsible for sending them, the Heralds, and that story was absolutely one for another day. He'd need Ari to tell it. All he could remember was a vast and never-ending fire.

  "That's a long and hard story," Marx admitted to them, "and it will only bring you more questions than answers."

  Marx could speak firsthand about that.

  "But I’ll tell you what, when we get out of here, and when we wrap up a few other details, I’ll bat these big brown eyes, flex this hot bod, and I bet she’ll tell you anything you would want to know."

  Marx awkwardly blinked his eyes Laure
n's way, for emphasis on his hopelessness.

  "You bat your eyes like that, and she just does whatever you want?" she asked skeptically.

  Marx shook his head, a half-smile playing on his lips as he thought of Ari rolling her eyes at him, then doing it anyway because it was Ari and that was how she was.

  "She'll tell you whatever you want, because Ari has a thing for lost causes, and you, doll face, are as lost as they come."

  8

  "I..." Peter began but faltered.

  He was wringing his hands so tight, Ari was surprised there were any bones left in either of them.

  "I see things," Peter said. The words fell from his lips almost lifelessly.

  Ari and the others just stared down at him, willing him to go on, but he didn't. So, Ari prodded him along in her favorite way: she kicked him.

  "Ow, what was that for?" Peter asked.

  He'd leaned so far back into his chair, he'd pulled the front two legs off the floor with a wail.

  "We all see things," Ripley said, "some of us more than others." He was eyeing Ari but keeping his feet decidedly out of kicking range.

  "I know you're the Oracle," Peter said, "and I know I am not. I see things, I know things, sometimes I can tell the future, but I don't even know what I am. I was thrown in a cage with my sister and another girl because I wasn't you, and only you will do. When I escaped, the first thing I did was come to find you, to warn you, so please, don't kick me again." Peter flinched, but Ari couldn't move if she wanted to.

  She let the knowledge overwhelm her. It came on like a sudden cloud of smoke and swallowed her up in one huge bite.

  The world was on fire, and Peter was there. Peter was...

  "You're a Herald," Ari said, trying to shake off the rot and ruin of what she'd just seen. There was no use in dwelling on that, the human race was always dying off just to spring up when you started to count them out. Ari had seen it. Ari had lived it.

  "A Herald?" Peter asked, "Like some kind of angel?" That's—"

  "A Herald," Ripley said, cutting him off, "is like a messenger. A messenger from the creator to..."