Museum of Masks (Paranormal Public Series)

by Maddy Edwards

  “My feet are getting wet,” I heard Lisabelle complain as we dashed through the wintry forest.

  “You didn’t have to meet me,” I pointed out. “Is this really the time to complain about footwear?”

  Lisabelle snorted. “It’s better if I take my aggression out on demons than on other students.”

  “You sound just like a professor,” I said, panting as we continued to run.

  “Don’t be mean,” said Lisabelle.

  A bark from Sip brought us both to a halt. A demon had gotten between her and us, and more were quickly surrounding her, cutting off any escape.

  “I’ve had enough of this crap,” said Lisabelle.

  She pulled out her wand. As a member of Public, she could have petitioned to be given a ring instead of a wand, but she wouldn’t. The wands had a history with darkness mages, and Lisabelle wouldn’t have wanted to give that up, even to have a ring like the other paranormals.

  “Sip, duck,” Lisabelle ordered. Her voice was steady, as if she was asking whether we wanted to watch a movie or go to breakfast. Sip instantly crouched low, coiling like an unsprung wire.

  Out of Lisabelle’s wand came three streams of black, lashing at the demons. There were too many of them for her to do much damage with one blast, but at least they were now forced to deal with her. Sip crawled on her stomach away from the battle and toward me, and once she reached me she motioned for me to follow her.

  “Lisabelle?” I called.

  “I’ll be fine,” Lisabelle yelled. She stood with her feet planted and her back to us, concentrating on her power.

  I was about to start forward to help her when Sip blocked me, shaking her shaggy head. I frowned.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked the werewolf.

  “Go,” Lisabelle yelled over her shoulder, at the same time sending more power after her first spell. “I’ll be fine.”

  I hesitated for another second, but Sip head-butted my legs. Swearing, I turned and ran.

  I could hear the crunch of Sip’s paws on the snow behind me, and at our backs the sounds of a magical battle. Lisabelle had stayed behind to give us time to get to safety.

  My chest tightened as I saw a shimmer in the air ahead of us, a lightness that could only be the protective barrier between Public and the world. When I had first come to Public I had wondered why we needed it, and even over vacation I had thought that when Sip and I returned to school there wouldn’t be many demons waiting, that after what the President had done they wouldn’t dare. But I had been wrong.

  Demons lying in wait on the outskirts of Public, attacking students, was not a good start to the semester.

  Next to me, Sip had transformed back into her human self just as we reached the barrier. I put my hand up to it, but Sip shook her head.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said. “It will shock you unless you lead with your ring.”

  “There,” she said, pointing. In front of my face was a small, circular space formed by colored air. I turned my hand around and shoved it, ring first, through the invisible barrier.

  A whoosh surrounded by body and I was pulled inexorably forward.

  I collapsed through the barrier, followed by Sip, and we both hit the snow hard and lay on the cold ground, panting.

  “Lisabelle?” Sip asked, her purple eyes filled with worry.

  “I think she’ll be fine,” I said. “She’s too stubborn to die.”

  A crunch on the snow behind us made me turn.

  “Miss me?” asked Camilla, coming through the trees.

  Camilla was a sophomore pixie. The pixies thought they were better than everyone else, especially Airlee students, and on top of that, Camilla was dating Cale, another pixie, and what’s more a boy I had grown up with. Camilla didn’t like the fact that Cale and I were friends, which further strained the Airlee students’ already rocky relationship with the pixies.

  At the moment, her face was filled with malice.

  “Yes,” said Lisabelle, as she stepped through the barrier. Her hair was a little frizzier than when we had left her a moment before, and her cheeks were flushed, but otherwise she looked unhurt. “But my aim is improving.” She twirled her wand experimentally and gave a razor sharp grin.

  Camilla’s smirk crumbled while my face broke into a wide smile. I was back at Public, and more importantly, back with my friends.

  “How’d you defeat all those demons?” Sip demanded, scrambling to her feet.

  Lisabelle shrugged. “It wasn’t really a fair fight. There were only six of them.”

  Chapter Three

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded, turning back to Camilla. Seeing her was the only unwelcome thing about coming back to Public. I was sure that without her around, second semester would be the most wonderful few months of my life thus far. If only elementals knew how to make things - pixies, for instance - disappear without a trace, everything would be fine.

  “I go to school here too,” she said icily, her brown eyes glinting. “What are you doing covered in mud? It’s gross. Oh, wait, you belong with the dirt.”

  Apparently Camilla had gotten over the fact that I was the only living elemental, and was more than happy to be mean to me again. Wonderful.

  “Camilla,” said Sip, “please go away.” Sip was standing up, her hands clasped pleasantly in front of her.

  “Or what?” asked Camilla.

  I knew Lisabelle was about to make some biting remark, but Sip beat her to it.

  My werewolf friend’s normally pleasant exterior hardened as she said, “Or I will make you go away.”

  To my great disappointment, Camilla wasn’t THAT stupid. She let out a large, huffing breath, and after hesitating for the briefest second, turned her back on us. Without another word she flipped her blond hair over her shoulders and marched away, back towards the buildings of Public that I could see dotting the skyline.

  Sip rubbed her hands together and sighed. “Sometimes you just have to know how to talk to pixies.”

  “By threatening them?” Lisabelle asked.

  “Of course not,” said Sip. “I think it was the ‘please’ that got rid of her.” She beamed.

  Just then I heard the trampling of feet. A small group of professors, none of whom had I been in class with, came racing towards us.

  “Well,” said Sip, crossing her arms over her chest and eyeing them questioningly. “Better late than never.”

  “Oh, Lisabelle, that reminds me, how was your Christmas break?” Sip asked, smiling happily at her friend.

  Lisabelle ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “It was tiring, there were tears, fights, backstabbing, and arguments. Then I got home to see my family.”

  It had taken Sip and me hours to get onto campus and once we had the professors wanted to debrief us. Once the professors had assured themselves that we were unharmed, they hurried into the woods. They didn’t really believe Lisabelle when she said she had dealt with the demons. Luckily, the three of us were too far behind Camilla to risk catching up with her.

  There were five dorms on campus, segregated by what type of paranormal you were. Sip, Lisabelle, and I were all in Airlee together, along with our friend Lough. We had friends in all the other dorms except the pixie dorm, known as Volans, or flying, for pixies. Pixies didn’t associate with other paranormals, especially the mishmash that made up Airlee.

  “What do you think Camilla was doing out that way?” Sip asked thoughtfully.

  “Probably just missed us,” said Lisabelle. “I’m surprised she didn’t have welcoming brownies.”

  I gave a sigh of relief when I finally saw Airlee. It was the place where I had felt more at home than I had anywhere else since my mother died. The blue brick stuck inside a hill was hard to forget and even better to come back to. In front of me, home awaited.

  “Our own little mismatched world,” said Sip happily.

  Inside there were blue carpets that mirrored the colored brick outside, brown trimmings, and walls covered with
super cool paintings of paranormals.

  “Lisabelle,” said Sip, “I was thinking that next year the three of us should try to get a triple together. I feel bad having you live all by yourself. I don’t want you to miss out.”

  “Miss out on what?”

  “Girl time, obviously. I really want you to always feel included.”

  “What’d I ever do to you?”

  “How much time do you have?” Sip threw back her head and laughed. She was good at that, laughing at stuff Lisabelle said, no matter how biting, which was lucky, because Lisabelle had a storied history of making people cry.

  “Here we are,” said Sip, stopping outside our door. I was so happy to be home, I couldn’t help grinning. If it wouldn’t have been too embarrassing for words, I would have wrapped my arms around the door and hugged it.

  “Hey,” said Lough’s familiar voice behind us. We all turned around. Lough was borderline short for a guy, kind of stocky, with bright red cheeks and floppy blond hair. He was the only dream giver at Public now, since the only other dream giver, Bailey, had been murdered last semester by a hellhound the President had kept hidden on campus. He also happened to be a good friend of ours.

  Lisabelle had been the one to find Bailey, which had led to her prompt arrest and imprisonment. The President had then taken her out of prison and hidden her in the unused Astra Dorm, making it look like she had escaped and was trying to avoid punishment for her “crime.” Everyone but Lough believed that she had gotten away, but he had insisted that she was still being kept somewhere and that we had to find her.

  He had been so intent on it because he was hopelessly in love with her. Luckily for Lough’s health and wellbeing, she had no idea how he felt, mostly because he became a stuttering mess any time she was around. Through all the uproars of last semester, the four of us had remained steadfast friends.

  “How are you?” Sip asked, leaping forward to give him a hug. “We missed you so much!”

  His normally bright cheeks got another shade darker, and I noticed that he never looked at Lisabelle as he spoke to us.

  “Good,” he mumbled, dropping his basket of laundry so he could put his arms clumsily around Sip.

  After Sip had released him, I stepped forward and gave him a hug too. Then came the unsure moment when Lough and Lisabelle almost hugged, but Lough seemed to think better of it at the last minute, which was just as well, because Lisabelle was standing there doing an excellent impression of a stiff board.

  “What are you up to?” asked Sip. “We all have to have dinner tonight. Catch up. It will be awesome. We were hoping to be here for lunch, but it took forever to get onto campus.” She accompanied that statement with a gusty sigh and an eye roll.

  Yeah,” Lough murmured. “Let’s catch up.”

  “Did you know there were demons near the grounds?” I asked, curious to know whether Lough had had any trouble getting onto campus.

  His eyes got wider. “No, I mean, I thought I felt something as I was arriving, but I never saw anything. What do you mean, demons?”

  I pursed my lips. The fact that Lough hadn’t run into any demons meant that they had been waiting for someone in particular to arrive. That is, they had been waiting for me. I wondered how many were out there. Lisabelle might have dealt with the six she ran into, but there was no proof that she had run into all of them. If there were only those six that wasn’t so bad, but many more and it was dangerous.

  “What do you think the professors are doing about it?” Sip asked, her purple eyes serious.

  I shrugged. “I’ll ask the first professor I see at dinner.”

  “Unless it’s Zervos,” said Lisabelle.

  Professor Zervos was the only vampire professor on campus and had a contentious relationship with everyone, but he particularly hated Lisabelle. The feeling was mutual.

  “He helped us last semester,” Sip reminded her. “He kept Charlotte, and therefore every other paranormal, alive.”

  “Thanks for the reminder that the entire fate of paranormals rests on my shoulders,” I muttered.

  “And that he’s a self-serving turd,” said Lisabelle, tossing her black hair out of her face.

  Sip looked at me sympathetically and rolled her eyes at Lisabelle.

  “Anyway,” said Lough, whose face was getting a little less red the longer he stood there, “I’ll see you guys at dinner. Hi, Lisabelle.”

  Before she could answer, or tell him to shove it, he picked up his basket and dashed off.

  “He is the oddest little man,” said Lisabelle, shaking her head sadly.

  “I love him,” said Sip dreamily. “In a strictly platonic sense, obviously.”

  “Right, because in a non-platonic sense you have a MASSIVE crush on Mickey,” retorted Lisabelle.

  Mickey was another werewolf who lived in Airlee; Sip had gone to the homecoming dance with him last semester. Things between them had gotten a bit derailed after the demon attack, but Sip still blushed prettily any time his name was mentioned. Unfortunately, this semester he was studying abroad, but I was sure Sip harbored hopes for next year.

  “I’m going to go get changed,” said Lisabelle, hefting her large black suitcase and heading down the hall. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  Sip waved tiredly. Running from demons before we had even started classes was not how we had expected to arrive on campus.

  I grabbed my door handle and tried to open it. When we had left for the Christmas break we had locked the door, which meant that it would only open at the touch of one of the occupants, meaning that either Sip or I had to open it. Except that my touch didn’t seem to be working.

  Sip frowned. Over my shoulder she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  I tried the door again, grabbing the handle harder, but nothing happened.

  “I have no idea,” I said. I started to throw my shoulder into it, but Sip’s hand on my arm stopped me.

  “Let me try,” she said. I moved out of her way and she stepped forward, putting her hand on the doorknob. Instantly the entire outline of the door shown brightly, telling us that the lock we had put on was now off.

  “Just gotta know how to talk to it,” she said, beaming.

  I scoffed as Sip swung the door open.

  Then we both stood there dumbfounded.

  Apparently there was a good reason that I, as an occupant, couldn’t open the door. Because I wasn’t an occupant. All my stuff was gone.

  Chapter Four

  “What. Is. Going. On?” I demanded to the empty room.

  Neither of us had budged. It was as if the inside of my room was an illusion, and if we walked in then all of my stuff vanishing would be real. As long as I stayed outside I could pretend that all of my stuff was about to appear right back where it should be.

  I felt like I was about to hyperventilate. Sip, who hated for anything to ever be wrong or anyone to ever be upset about anything, was trying to comfort me.

  “Maybe it’s gone for cleaning? Maybe we’re in the wrong room?” She made a show of checking the room number, but obviously we were in the right place. Sip was the only eighteen-year-old at Public who decorated her life in neon.

  “Sip,” I cried, staring around at her half of the room, which hadn’t been touched, “our room was already clean.”

  Sip’s neon posters and bedspread were all still there. She was a neat freak at the best of times, and I had done my best to keep up with her. Maybe sometimes I just walked into the room and kicked off my shoes or threw my jacket on the bed, but she followed behind me like a tiny, personal Dirt Devil vacuum and put everything in its proper place. Nothing needed to be cleaned.

  I moved into the room and sat in the chair at my desk - what used to be my desk - and put my head in my hands. “I think I might be sick.”

  Sip perched herself on the side of my desk and started rubbing small circles on my back.

  “Don’t worry,” she soothed. “It will be okay.”

  “Do you think it was the pixies?”
I asked. The pixies were malicious little things.

  “I don’t know,” said Sip. “I just can’t believe they could have gotten past our locks.”

  “So, Sip finally got sick of you and kicked you out? Evil little dictator that she is,” came Lisabelle’s drawl from the doorway. “See, she looks so nice. Now we know it’s just an act.”

  “Lisabelle,” said Sip, “this is serious. Besides, were I to do a bad thing, I would never get caught.” She winked at her friend.

  Lisabelle’s mouth slashed into a grin.

  “But seriously, what happened? I’m all for minimalism, but this is ridiculous.”

  “We don’t know,” I cried, staring around. Tears were forming at the corners of my eyes and I tried to will them away.

  It wasn’t that I had had anything especially dear to me in my room. Luckily, all the things I had that had been my mother’s were either at my stepdad’s house or with me. I never left them anywhere else, and besides those items, there had been nothing that wasn’t replaceable.

  “Alright,” I said, standing up. “We have to find out what happened. Let’s go to dinner, so I can talk to a professor. Now.”

  Lisabelle checked the neon pink clock Sip had hung on the wall last semester. “It’s 4:45. Only grandparents eat at 4:45.”

  “Grandparents and people who had all their stuff stolen,” I shot back. “Now move, Grandma. Besides, I missed lunch and you know how I get when I’m not fed regularly.”

  “Honestly,” Lisabelle muttered, “it’s hard to tell the difference.” Shaking her head, she knew better than to argue, and the three of us filed out of the burgled room.

  “I’m going to get Lough,” said Sip. Running a hand through her spiky blond hair, she trotted down the stairs ahead of us. The floors were segregated by gender, and Lough lived on the floor below ours.

  “What?” Lough sputtered when he saw me.

  I told him everything.

  “Are you kidding? Who would do that?” he asked, his voice rising.

  “Can’t you dream it and find out?” asked Lisabelle, raising her dark eyebrows.