Academy of the Forsaken (Cursed Studies Book 2)

by Eva Chase

  Even if a gnawing sensation in the back of my mind insisted that kind of intimacy should be about more than loyalty.

  We hadn’t done that much anyway. Just a few kisses, his hands tracing down my sides, before he’d yanked himself back. I’d stretched out the conversation for so long before I’d given him what he wanted, it’d already been time for the monster to take over.

  Violet hadn’t moved, studying me as I emerged from that turmoil of memories and emotions. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, not sounding all that enthusiastic about the idea.

  “Not… not really,” I admitted, and considered her more thoughtfully. “Do you want to talk about something?” I wouldn’t have expected her to approach me at all without some pressing reason, although I couldn’t imagine what that would be right now.

  “I guess I just wondered how you’re doing.” She looked awkward about the admission, as if there was something shameful in being curious about a classmate’s wellbeing. I didn’t think we’d really talked at all before my last cycle here, but apparently I’d made more of an impression than I’d realized. “You seem to be settling in pretty quickly. Any progress with the whole brother search?”

  It must have looked a little odd to the other students that I wasn’t as confused by the classes or constantly, anxiously badgering them for information the way I had the previous times I’d barged into their lives. I’d put on an act for the professors’ benefit, but I hadn’t bothered going through my own old motions when it was just me and my peers. Did they figure the staff had finally beaten the resistance out of me?

  “I’m not sure,” I said cautiously. “This place is pretty weird. Hard to get straight answers. Do you know anything about him?”

  She shook her head like I’d expected. “Nope. Can’t help you there. You’ve been keeping yourself busy anyway, though, from what I’ve seen.”

  That comment felt pointed, but I wasn’t sure what she was looking for from me. Did she just mean things like my attempt at gardening and my interludes with the guys? Had she noticed my late night excursions even though we weren’t sharing a dorm bedroom anymore? That was totally possible—the pain of her never-healing burns had driven her to the bathroom in the middle of the night at least once to seek relief in cool water.

  “Better than being bored,” I hedged. “You’re welcome to pitch in with the gardening if you want.” Especially since I wasn’t going to turn to Ryo for kitchen seed collection now.

  The corners of Violet’s lips twitched with either amusement or derision. “No, I think I’m good on that front. If you get going with any other plans, feel free to let me know about those. Maybe I’d want to be looped in.”

  She walked off toward the front door, leaving me staring at her retreating back. That’d been an outright offer of help. I definitely wouldn’t have expected that from her, even if she’d guessed some or all of what I was hiding.

  But then, Violet had obviously been pretty miserable here. Why wouldn’t she want to join forces if she thought I might have the key to getting out? No doubt she was offering in spite of her irritation with me rather than because she wanted to become besties.

  I lay my head back down on the cushion, but the conversation had stirred up too many thoughts for my mind to drift away again. After a few minutes, I got up and headed for the staircase.

  I was about halfway up the stately steps when my vision wavered. I stopped, gripping the bannister, as a hazy and yet piercingly insistent memory rushed through my head.

  Two guys in burgundy uniforms came out the library door at the top of the stairs, jostling one another playfully. Something about that sight rankled… me? The image faded without any clue as to where it’d come from. It definitely wasn’t from my memories any more than that weird vision I’d gotten when I was talking with Professor Hubert had been.

  What had prompted it in the first place? I climbed the rest of the stairs cautiously, but no more impressions rose up. After a moment’s hesitation, I pushed into the library.

  It was empty, nothing but silence and the smell of old books. A shiver ran over my skin. I rubbed my arms, resisting the urge to spin around and hustle right back out of there. I hadn’t spent much time in the library in recent memory, but when I’d come here for a Literary Analysis assignment, my reading had jostled loose all sorts of awfulness that I’d buried deep in the back of my mind. The wretched bits of my childhood could stay stifled, thank you very much.

  But someone, sometime, had been annoyed by a couple of classmates coming out of this room? Was I picking up sensations from an actual person’s mind or were they just delusions?

  I crept deeper into the library, glancing around, waiting to see if anything in here might trigger a similar experience. Walking up and down the aisles only seemed to flood my lungs with more of that stale, slightly sour scent with the constant undertone of roses underneath. Like the books I’d searched through in Dean Wainhouse’s office a couple of weeks ago, the volumes on these shelves looked several decades old.

  Did they all date back to the time when students had worn those burgundy uniforms, when those sepia-tinged photos had been taken? What the hell could have happened here to freeze so much of the college in that period?

  As I started down the last aisle, a prickling ran down my back. I slowed, scanning the shelves, the floor, the ceiling—

  We can use it for whatever we want, a voice murmured across a distance I didn’t understand. The images wavering before my eyes focused in on the bookcase at the back of the aisle. A hand reached to pop out the panel at the base of the bookcase. A bundle of cloth and a few papers lay in an indentation in the floor beneath it. Just promise you won’t tell anyone else…

  The voice and the image faded. My hands had gone clammy at my sides. I approached the bookcase and knelt down on the floor in front of it. Even if that trick had worked back—whenever that moment had come from—that didn’t mean…

  My fingers followed the same path I’d seen in the sort-of memory. I pressed a subtle notch at the right side of the panel. It flipped out so swiftly that my heart lurched.

  There was the dip in the floor to create a deeper cavity, just like I’d seen. It didn’t hold the same items as before, though. Now, I found a dried rose and a weathered softbound book too tall and thin for me to think it was a novel.

  I slid out the book, finding the cover smooth beneath my fingers. An emblem was printed on the front: a crest with the letters RS and a rose mounted above them. Gilded lettering around it read, Roseborne School Yearbook – 1927.

  I’d seen that crest before, hadn’t I? On Cade’s scholarship letter. Except it’d had a C instead of an S. This place hadn’t always been a college?

  With careful hands, I flipped the yearbook open. The black-and-white photos and the clothes and hairstyles fit the date on the cover. There was the building I was in right now but by full sunlight, which made it look more cheerful than I’d ever seen it. The badminton court in proper repair with a few players in the middle of a game. A car pulling up to the former carriage house. Rosebushes blooming on either side of the wrought-iron gate—but much smaller ones, only stretching five or six feet along the stones, the rest of which were bare.

  And everyone looked so goddamned happy, or at least not miserable. Definitely not the school I knew now, even if it was technically the same institution.

  It’d used to be a high school, I gathered when I reached the student photos divided by grade. A pretty posh one, from the jewelry the girls wore and the haughty smiles on so many faces. I skimmed over the freshmen and the sophomores without my gaze catching on anyone in particular. On the first page of juniors, I paused.

  Someone had circled a couple of the boys and drawn a rough X across their faces. The pencil had dug in so deep it’d creased the paper.

  The next page had another boy and a girl given the same treatment. I spotted a few familiar faces as well. Those two girls and that boy next to one of them, unmarked by whoever had gone at t
he others with their pencil, were from the photographs I’d found in the art room.

  The seniors had fared worse than the juniors. Of the twenty or so of them, all of them had been crossed out except three I didn’t recognize—and the other five students from the art-room photos. The girl who had a hint of Professor Hubert’s necklace poking from beneath her collar stared up at me with her unshakeable gaze.

  Everyone here deserves it, said a murmur in the back of my head. The same voice as in that strange memory that had led me to this spot. But those ones—there’s no point unless we get them.

  I held still, hoping more would come to me to explain what exactly I was looking at. When nothing emerged, I pulled out my phone to record every page in the yearbook from front to back. I couldn’t risk taking it out of the library with me, but I intended to pore over it just as thoroughly as I had those portraits.

  I might not know what the signs in front of me meant, but every particle in my body told me they contained so many of the answers I was looking for.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Elias

  I was stacking the textbooks at the front of the room after class, the one act of my teaching “career” I could complete consistently and successfully, when Dean Wainhouse stepped into the room. He looked at me and the now-empty desks down his narrow nose, his blue-gray eyes even flintier than usual.

  Had he ever visited me here other than when he’d first shown me to the room almost four years ago and announced that I’d now be teaching a class as part of my regimen at Roseborne? I couldn’t remember it. I gave the books one last nudge and turned to face him. “Dean?”

  “Mr. DeLeon.” He offered me a thin smile. I was nearly as tall as he was, with enough muscle compared to his gaunt frame that I easily had fifty pounds on him, but somehow his presence was still intimidating. My stance tensed automatically.

  He eased a little farther into the classroom, his gaze skimming over the figures on the chalkboard that I hadn’t yet erased. “I thought, given your offer of assistance the other day, that you might be able to advise me on a small matter,” he said.

  Hope flickered in my chest despite my trepidation. Was he actually going to give me the chance to get into his and the professors’ good graces after all? If this was some kind of test, I’d better make sure I passed it beyond any shadow of a doubt.

  “Of course,” I said in the smooth voice I’d have used for my business negotiations. “What can I help you with?”

  The dean tapped his slender fingers against the aluminum chalk tray. “You see most of our students on a weekly basis. You also spend a certain amount of time with them in the dorms and cafeteria, where we interact with them far less. I was hoping to hear whether you’ve noticed any of them lagging behind in their… studies.”

  “Lagging behind?” I said, needing more than that. How could you lag behind in a class no one could ever succeed in to begin with?

  Dean Wainhouse fixed me with a pointed stare. “Failing to live up to the potential we might expect from them here. Refusing to adjust their attitudes to suit their circumstances.”

  Remaining defiant, clinging to who they’d once been, no matter how noxious that person had been. My mind immediately leapt to my confrontation with Jenson yesterday, just down the hall—to the sly way he’d conned one of the other guys into taking over his chores. With the dean watching me expectantly, my mouth moved before I really thought it through.

  “Jenson Wynter,” I said. “He’s still getting away with anything he can manage to.”

  Dean Wainhouse hummed to himself with a bob of his head, and just like that, I felt sick. I didn’t even know what I was putting Jenson in for. Even if I didn’t like him, he was one of the few people here Trix could turn to, however much he’d actually do for her. For her sake, at least, I shouldn’t be throwing him under the bus.

  Would I be even half as frustrated with him if he hadn’t held some piece of her affection? How much had I adjusted my attitudes, really, if I started stomping on the supposed competition the second I saw something here I actually wanted?

  “Mr. Wynter has been an interesting case,” the dean said.

  I groped for a remark that would soften whatever blow I’d dealt without backpedaling too obviously. I still wanted to seem like I was on the staff’s side. “He hasn’t been here as long as most of us, of course. I think it’s only been about a year? It does take some longer than others to really absorb the lessons.”

  “To be sure. Nonetheless, I appreciate your insight. Are there any others you’d recommend we take a closer look at?”

  An uneasy prickle ran over my skin. Did I want to toss anyone else to the metaphorical lions? Not particularly. I didn’t talk with the other guys enough to really know how well they were coping, and it hardly seemed fair to name someone simply for staying quiet during my admittedly ridiculous math class. Hell, even Trix had acted much more compliant this time around, not that I’d have pointed a finger at her anyway.

  “He’s the only one who comes to mind off the top of my head,” I said after a moment. “But if I notice anyone else who seems to be… struggling, I can let you know.”

  “That would be excellent. Keep up the work, Mr. DeLeon.”

  Not even “the good work,” I noted as he walked out of the room. Why pretend that any of the work I did here taught anyone anything other than hopelessness?

  I cleaned the chalkboard and headed out in time to see Professor Carmichael marching Jenson down the stairs to the first floor. The professor wasn’t touching the guy, but it was clear from the set of Jenson’s mouth and shoulders that he was capitulating under silent protest. My jaw tightened. I moved along the banister to follow their progress and saw Carmichael escort Jenson into the counseling room.

  The professors didn’t usually join us for those sessions. What exactly were they going to put him through in there?

  Were they going to tell him that I’d been the one to suggest it? Did that possibility really bother me—or only the likelihood that he’d make sure Trix found out too?

  You’ve got to cut away the dead weight, my grandfather said in the back of my mind. Never feel any shame about clearing the way for what you need to accomplish.

  I closed my eyes for a second. What was I trying to accomplish, then—winning Trix for myself or helping her break the spell on this place by whatever means necessary? Because what I’d just done had only contributed to the former… and maybe not even that.

  That fact sat like a stone in my gut through the last couple of hours of the afternoon. When I ducked into the cafeteria to grab dinner, Jenson still hadn’t emerged from the counseling room. I spotted Trix just sitting down with her plate and took my own out to the sitting room where I wouldn’t have that additional weight loaded on my conscience.

  Most days, I would have puttered around the school building as long as I could before heading out for my usual nighttime walk, but tonight I wanted to avoid any chance of having to face the people who could have accused me of wronging them in various ways. I meandered around the pool and through the carriage house, examining the tack on the walls as if I had any idea how those leather and metal pieces had fit together. My rambling trek took me through the scattered trees at the north end of campus, past the old gazebo, through the slightly hilly stretch to the west, and around into the thicker forest to the south. There, the scent of the roses thickened, filling my nose.

  What did mine look like now? How much longer did I have before I went through that gradual weakening I’d seen come over so many of the students who’d been here when I’d arrived?

  This once, enough clouds drifted away that the sky was almost clear. Starlight twinkled through the gaps between the leaves. I wandered among the trees until it almost felt as if I’d left the lump on my gut behind, until weariness turned my steps distant and made my eyelids droop. I turned toward the school building with a yawn nagging at my mouth.

  As I came up to the edge of the woods, the moonlight caugh
t on strands of bright orange hair tossed in the breeze. I stopped in the shelter of the trees.

  Trix was striding across the lawn toward the forest with a determined air that made me frown. She didn’t look so much like her usual defiant self, more as if she were girding herself for something she didn’t really want to face. When she reached the woods, she hesitated for a second with a nervous swipe of her hand across her lips. Her shoulders squared, and she pushed herself onward.

  I could guess where she was going. It was just after midnight, and I was the one who’d told her of her brother’s brief human periods, after all. Before, she’d seemed relieved when she’d talked about knowing his fate and being able to reach out to him, though. Had he gotten worse since I’d last seen him? Had he hurt her in his beastly form?

  I wavered for only a second before I picked my way back into the forest in the same direction Trix had gone. She felt responsible for getting Cade out of here—that much had been clear from the first moments she’d arrived on campus. If that devotion was getting her into some kind of trouble… Well, I didn’t know what I’d do about it, but at least if I knew, I’d have the chance to do something.

  The leaves rustled overhead. Now and then I heard the crackle of Trix’s passing in the distance. I knew the woods well enough after years of traversing them that it wasn’t hard to make my way with barely a sound.

  I’d just check that everything was all right—she could be stressed about all sorts of other things that had nothing to do with Cade, or simply because she hadn’t made more progress yet—and then I’d leave her be.

  Especially at this hour, Cade usually lurked in the deep center of the forest. The faint light from above dimmed more as the branches leaned closer together. At the sound of voices up ahead, I slowed, easing closer even more carefully until I could make out two forms in the twilight between the trees.