Academy of the Forsaken (Cursed Studies Book 2)

by Eva Chase

  Had Cade been able to find any shelter during the rain? I couldn’t imagine him wanting to slink back to the school in his monstrous form, no matter what the weather was like.

  Maybe he’d roamed over to the gazebo with its relative privacy, with no idea what I’d gotten up to there just a day before.

  When I reached our usual meeting spot, there was no sign of my foster brother. I stood there between the trees, clutching the napkin that held the piecemeal dinner I’d brought, peering through the darkness. “Cade? Cade!”

  I raised my voice as loud as I dared. No one appeared. It was already half past the hour. But if he had roamed farther than usual, maybe he hadn’t made it back here promptly. How well could he even tell what time it was?

  I stayed there, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, swiping away the flecks of moisture the murmuring leaves threw down at me. Five minutes slipped by, and then ten. My stomach was sinking when a familiar figure emerged from the shadows.

  Cade held himself stiffly, his jaw set at a firm angle. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, his expression so cold I had to restrain a shiver.

  “I brought you some food,” I said weakly, holding it out.

  He took the napkin from me without a word, without looking inside it. Something in his face shifted, like a crack in that icy mask, a brief twist of his mouth and drop of his eyes that showed the wounds underneath. Fuck. I hadn’t meant to—this wasn’t what I’d wanted.

  My gut stayed knotted as I stepped closer to him, but I couldn’t hang back. I touched his arm, gazing into his eyes. I’d comforted him before, but never over something I’d done. I’d never given him any reason to be this upset. He’d trusted me to be there for him.

  “I’m sorry about last time,” I said. “I meant it when I said it didn’t have to change anything else. I’m still here. Will you please just talk to me?”

  He gave a stilted shrug. “You didn’t seem to like what I had to say before.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” I swallowed hard. “I love you so much. You’ve got to believe that.”

  I eased my arms around him in a hug. He didn’t return the embrace, but he leaned into it just slightly. “Don’t you know how much I love you, Trix?” he said in a low voice. “I’ve done everything I could for you from the moment you stumbled into my life.”

  “I know,” I said, choking up all over again.

  “Everyone else will always have their stupid ideas about who we can be and whether we’re worth their time. You shouldn’t have to put up with them judging you. Not when I’m right here. I want you no matter what you do.”

  Did he remember what I’d told him about Sylvie after all? His words clenched around my heart. Whatever bits of happiness I’d stolen with the three guys back at the school, they were only fragments. The three of them would judge me if they knew everything. Cade had always been right about that.

  Why the hell had I let a little uncertainty make me push him away? Who was ever going to care about me and look out for me like he did?

  Maybe I could fix everything as easily as raising my head and kissing him the way I’d denied him last night. But just the thought made my body tense up.

  “That’s why we stick together,” I said, grappling with my hesitation. Had the time I’d spent apart from him and then with the other guys simply messed with my head? Why couldn’t I just give him what he wanted?

  How the hell could I say I didn’t want it too when I’d gone along with it so many times before?

  “That’s right.” Cade pressed a quick peck to the side of my head, and then, before I could make a decision one way or another, he eased back. He’d come so late that it must already be time for the change to come over him.

  “We’ll work this out,” he told me as his back stiffened against the coming transformation. “You and me. Like we’re meant to be.”

  “Of course,” I said. Then he was stepping back into the shadows with a ragged breath. I didn’t think the shift was a pleasant sensation.

  I turned and hurried the way I’d come, tears welling in my eyes and blurring my vision. What a clusterfuck I’d made of this entire situation. And I still couldn’t get it together. I was off having my fun with other guys while he was trapped in a beast’s body all alone… A shamed heat washed over me.

  Even if I didn’t want us to be lovers again, I’d come here for Cade. I couldn’t lose sight of that, no matter how enticing I’d started to find anyone else around me.

  As I snuck into the college’s foyer, my gaze caught on a movement at the top of the stairs. Elias, presumably recently returned from his own late-night walks, was just heading into the second-floor hallway. The impulse shot through me to hustle up the stairs after him—

  For what? To nab a few more kisses I didn’t really deserve?

  My legs locked. I stayed there in the darkened room for another minute, until the faint creaking of the floor faded. Only then did I dart up the stairs to make my way back to my own bedroom, alone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Trix

  A glinting gold circle flashed back and forth in front of my face. Four-year-old me stared at it, fascinated by the pattern of whorls and slanted lines that formed the sketchy image of a tree in its surface.

  “Just watch this, little girl,” my birth mother cooed. Half the time it’d seemed like she couldn’t remember my name. “Watch it and get very sleepy.”

  “It’s not going to work,” my father muttered from somewhere beyond my vision. “It never works. Just leave her. We’ve got to get going. What’s the worst that could happen anyway?”

  “It was worth a try,” my mom snapped. She gave the pocket watch a couple more swings before my eyes, but when I didn’t fall into a hypnotic daze, she jerked it back with a disgruntled sound. “Fine. Stay here and just be bored then. It was up to you.”

  “I don’t know why we haven’t sold that fucking thing already.”

  My dad made a snatch at the watch, and my mom clutched it close to her chest. I’d never seen her so possessive of anything else, not even me.

  “It was my grandpa’s,” she snapped, as if they hadn’t sold every other scrap they could get their hands on that might have some worth, regardless of its history. They stomped out the door, and I sprawled on the floor to trace little pictures in the dust under the table and—

  The dream wavered and lurched, and twelve-year-old Cade was standing over me, sunburned over his freckles, shaking his head as he let out a huff of breath.

  “I thought you’d be able to keep up with me, Trix. Come on. Or are you so chicken you’re going to make me go up there on my own?”

  “It’s just gross,” I protested. “It’s all full of spiderwebs and junk.” And the last time I’d scrambled up into the attic crawl space, the ladder had fallen and I’d been stuck up there until our foster parents had gotten home, and Mr. Simmons had belted me across the back of the head so hard my skull had ached for days. Not that I wanted to admit I was scared of either of those possibilities to my brother.

  “If they catch us, I’ll say it was my fault. Come on. I know you’re braver than this. Don’t prove me wrong. What’s the point if I don’t have my partner in crime?”

  Those last words released my legs. I found myself hustling after him as if I wanted nothing more than to poke around in the grimy shadows we hadn’t yet explored.

  I passed through a doorway—and my surroundings shifted. I yanked myself to a stop at the edge of a rain-slick courtyard, dark except for thin streaks of streetlamp light that seeped from the street beyond. A canvas leash dug into my palm as the Rottweiler I’d “borrowed” strained against it. Adrenaline thrummed through my veins, my heart beating so fast it was almost painful. Footsteps tapped toward us from the street.

  “Here she comes,” I whispered to the dog. “You go right at her—”

  I snapped out of sleep with a hitch of my breath. The courtyard, the dog, and the dampness fell away. There was only pale da
wn light touching the ceiling overhead, the rasp of sleeping breaths around me broken by a sudden whimper, and the ever-present perfume of roses tickling my nose.

  My head still felt muggy. I rubbed my eyes and fumbled for my phone. It was barely six in the morning. No wonder my dormmates were still asleep.

  I probably should have tried to drift off again myself, but when I closed my eyes, the image of Cade’s determined face and cajoling voice came back to me. Something about it sent a thread of queasiness through my stomach. I sat up gingerly, careful not to wake anyone.

  Since I was awake anyway, I might as well do something useful with myself. Chances were the whole school was still dozing.

  I slipped down the stairs, considered the classrooms for a moment, and then breezed on past them. An urge to put myself face to face with my eventual goal had come over me. I padded down the hall past the professors’ rooms on careful feet and jimmied the lock on the door at the end—the one labeled Bushfell as if that were the name of some staff member—with a hand so practiced now it made only the faintest click.

  The door opened to the dim staircase that led to the padlocked basement door. A heavier silence settled over me before I set even one foot on the steps. I eased down one and then another, my mouth going dry. It took immense force of will to shut the door behind me so no one would realize it’d been opened.

  Only a tiny sliver of hazy light crept from around the frame. I couldn’t make out the door below me anymore. My feet scraped over the next step and another, my fingers clutching the railing. A faint vibration in the air tickled over my skin with the memory of the misshapen rosebush that lay just down the hall beyond—

  And then a much more distant memory filled my head. Hustling down these steps by the light of a flickering candle, two boys and a girl ahead of me, unrecognizable from behind. Hurry up, one of them said. We have to make sure everything’s ready, or there’s no point.

  They’ll be damned sorry, another mumbled, his shoulders hunching.

  My feet thudded on the concrete steps, and a clammy sweat was trickling down my back. A question seemed to have stuck in the back of my throat. Do you really think…

  I—whoever I was in that flash of the past—opened my mouth to say the whole thing, and a hand closed on my shoulder, jolting me back to the present so abruptly that a yelp slipped from my lips.

  I flinched and jerked around, my spine smacking the wall in the narrow space. Dean Wainhouse glowered down at me, looking even taller and spindlier than usual standing on a step above me. The door at the top of the stairs, the one I’d carefully closed no more than a minute or two ago, stood wide open again.

  “How did you find yourself down here, Miss Corbyn?” he said in a somber voice.

  How had he known I was down here? Had I made more noise than I’d realized?

  Had something changed, and my presence in the school wasn’t escaping the staff’s notice the way it had the first few days?

  I scrambled for an excuse. I’d gotten so used to being able to sneak around the school undetected that I hadn’t taken the time to come up with one first.

  “I was having trouble sleeping, so I was just walking around a bit, and I looked down here and saw the door was a little open,” I said, as convincingly as I could, with a wave toward the doorway behind him. “I thought it was one of the professor’s rooms—that it must have come open by mistake and they’d appreciate it if someone closed it for them. But when I came over, I saw the stairs—I was just wondering what’s down here. Are students not allowed?”

  “I’d have thought the padlock would have been a clear indication,” the dean said. It was hard to tell from his grim expression whether he’d bought any of the rest of my admittedly flimsy story.

  I rubbed the back of my neck as if in embarrassment. “Yeah, I guess it should have. I’m sorry. I’ve just been trying everything I can to find out anything about my brother—it’s hard to shake that habit.”

  Dean Wainhouse eyed me for a moment longer, but he seemed to decide my offense hadn’t been egregious enough to bother with a punishment. That would be revealing more of his hand than he might have wanted to—so far I hadn’t given any of the staff reason to inflict their vicious magic on me.

  “Now you know this area is off limits,” he said stiffly. “Out with you, and find something better to do with your time.”

  He marched back up the stairs, and I hurried after him. Even after being caught, stepping out into the light sent a rush of relief through me. Whatever exactly had gone on down there, whatever still did, I didn’t need a guide book to tell me it’d been nothing good.

  “I’m so sorry,” I added with a bob of my head, and headed down the hall at the dismissive wave of the dean’s hand. The skin down my back quivered, as if struck by the same clamminess that had come over the past student—I had to assume—whose memories I’d been tumbling into.

  Were they all from the same past figure? I could be picking up fragments from different former students each time. If I could get more control over it, look at “myself” in those moments clearly enough to get some sense of my—their—identity…

  If I could make more of them rise up at all. They hadn’t been very predictable. I couldn’t think of any pattern of triggers that I could try to provoke again.

  Especially if the staff would catch on to me lurking in any parts of the school I wasn’t meant to be in.

  Part of me wanted and yet dreaded the idea of testing whether that was true. If the dean or one of the professors found me poking around somewhere else I wasn’t supposed to be right after I’d been investigating their secret basement, they’d start watching me like a flock of hawks.

  Instead, I went upstairs, showered to wake myself up a little more, and came back down to the sounds of the breakfast duty crew clanking dishes in the kitchen. Jenson emerged from the infirmary while I hesitated outside the still-empty cafeteria. His cinnamon-brown hair was even more rumpled than usual, and the smile he shot me was a little sheepish.

  A twinge of affection filled my chest. There’d been something so frank in the way he’d turned to me last night when I’d come to visit him—I wasn’t sure how many people had ever gotten to see that stripped-down side of him. Hints of it showed in his expression now.

  “I would have loved to go back to the dorms,” he said as he ambled over to join me, sarcasm playing through his voice, “but I found myself glued to the bed. Can anyone argue with one night’s sleep in actual privacy?”

  As uncomfortable as I’d found the infirmary cot was, I could see his point. “Might as well take advantage of it while you can,” I suggested, smiling back at him.

  “Who’d have thought you’d see things exactly the way I do? I knew there was some reason I liked you.”

  I made a face at him, and he smirked back at me, but there was no edge to it at all. The same sense of devotion I’d felt from him last night tingled over me. An unexpectedly pointed jab of uneasiness came with it.

  He was joking around because he didn’t think I was actually anything like him—like the guy he’d been out in the real world who’d strung people along with his lies. I’d let him keep thinking that. I’d asked him to drop the front that he obviously felt most comfortable with and be real with me.

  How real was I being with him? How many lies of omission had I already told by skirting around the truths I’d rather not share? And that was on top of the lies and evasions I’d kept up back then with Cade and our friends and, really, everyone.

  A chill pooled in my gut. I managed to keep smiling, but my throat closed at the same time. Jenson cocked his head, maybe picking up on the shift in my mood, and all I could think was that I had to get out of there before I made myself even more of a liar.

  “I—I meant to check on the garden before breakfast,” I blurted out. “I’ll catch up with you again later.”

  Then I bolted for the front doors before he could offer to come with me, my conscience snapping at my heels.

&
nbsp; Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ryo

  I didn’t know what was up with Trix, but she was definitely more skittish than usual. Since it was her first Literary Analysis class in this iteration of her time at Roseborne, she didn’t have to present any commentary, but her expression stayed tense through the entire hour. When Professor Carmichael handed out our reading assignments for next class, she didn’t even glance at hers before folding it and stuffing it into her purse.

  I’d gotten to class just shy of late and hadn’t been able to grab a seat next to her. As we headed out, I slowed my steps so that she would catch up with me just outside the door.

  “I feel like this class should actually be called Psychoanalysis, the way he’s obviously prodding at our issues,” I said under my breath with a smile to show I meant it more as a joke than a rant. “Which works out well, since about half of the other classes here seem designed to make us more unstable.”

  Trix’s lips twitched, but then she pursed them as if her automatic response bothered her. “No kidding,” she said. “Have you ever—”

  She cut herself off, her gaze sliding away from me.

  “Have I ever…?” I prompted.

  She shook her head. “Never mind. I was just thinking I actually prefer Composition to this class, even though Composition is theoretically more to the point.”

  I thought I might know what she meant. My hand reached for hers instinctively, but she stepped away before my fingers found hers. I couldn’t tell if she’d even registered the gesture.

  “Lunch duty,” she said with a grimace. “I’ll see you.”

  She headed down the stairs, leaving me feeling weirdly bereft. If I couldn’t even make her smile, add a little levity to our mutual imprisonment here, what use was I?

  Okay, now I was being a sad sack. What did I expect her to do—skip her assigned duties to hang out with me? Anyway, I had this new assignment I might as well take care of while she was otherwise occupied.