Shifter Falls Academy: Year Two

by L. C. Mortimer

  “You didn’t?”

  “Apparently, it’s a well-kept secret from first-years,” she rolled her eyes and shook her head. That figures. Being one of the newbies was rarely easy. Having secrets like this kept from us made things even harder.

  “So how did you find out?”

  “Abby.”

  “Who?”

  “A girl in my potions class,” she said. “She knows everything. She said we can go down there and get anything else we need.”

  It seemed too good to be true, and I’d never met Abby. I didn’t know who she was.

  “Jade?”

  “What?”

  “What if it’s…you know?”

  “What?”

  “What if it’s like, a trap? Or a trick? Or some sort of weird hazing ritual?”

  I didn’t know this Abby person. I didn’t know if we could trust her. Shifter Falls Academy was its own special place, but it was also kind of like high school. Sometimes people only looked out for themselves, right? You really had to watch your back.

  Jade shook her head.

  “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. You’ve been watching too many movies.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do, and I think you’re being dumb.”

  Harsh words coming from Jade. I stiffened and looked at her. What the hell was going on with Jade? Why was she pushing me like this? She seemed really cranky – like moreso than usual – and it seemed like she wasn’t exactly being chill about any of this.

  I knew life was going to be hard for all of us this year, but it didn’t have to be difficult.

  We didn’t have to make it difficult.

  So why was she snapping at me?

  “That’s a little bit…rough,” I finally said. It wasn’t really what I wanted to say. I didn’t quite have the words to convey what I wanted to tell her, what I wanted to express. What I really wanted to say, I didn’t think I actually could, because what I wanted to say was that she was being really, really terrible and short-tempered. I had just asked a reasonable question: who was Abby, and could we trust her?

  Or was this some sort of trap to make us look like total losers?

  Jade and I weren’t exactly popular girls. Oh, for the most part, there weren’t too many cliques on campus, but they did exist, and they were hard to deal with sometimes. Being nerdy and slightly outcast meant we had to watch our backs.

  Jade glared at me, and for a minute, I thought she might shift and fly away. She was an owl shifter, and she was excellent at flying. I didn’t even know owl shifters existed, and having one for a friend was incredibly amazing to me. Still, she could change in the blink of an eye and she could go anywhere. I glanced at the open bedroom window. She liked to keep it open, and I always suspected it was so she could have an easy escape if she needed one.

  Maybe that was just me being weird.

  Jade looked, following my gaze, and then turned back to me. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. To my surprise, she didn’t come back with some snarky retort. Instead, she just shook her head at me. Then she shrugged her shoulders. She looked…forlorn.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What?” I raised an eyebrow. Was she actually apologizing? Okay, something was seriously going on with Jade, and it was something weird.

  She was never like this.

  Never.

  She was never the kind of person to mope around and wallow in self-pity, so something was seriously going on.

  “You have to tell me what’s wrong,” I said.

  She shook her head and threw herself back on her bed. Our little dorm room was something wonderful to me. I’d never really had a home of my own. Not really. Not a place where I felt like I belonged.

  Even though the dorm room was very simple, and very basic, it also was something that I needed very much. It held promise and wonder to me. It held adventure and hope. Our room meant that I was not only capable of surviving on my own, but that I was capable of doing a great job with it.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s Abby.”

  “The girl from class?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s just so…”

  Perfect?

  Nice?

  Kind?

  Mean?

  I had no idea what word Jade was going to throw at me.

  “She’s just so pretty, and I don’t know if she’d ever go out with someone like me.”

  “Because you’re an owl?” I asked, raising an eyebrow, and Jade burst into laughter. She shook her head, but she seemed to calm down a little bit. “Jade, nobody can dislike owls.”

  I knew what Jade meant. I wasn’t dumb. But if someone didn’t want to date Jade because of the color of her skin or her gender, then that was their loss. Jade was amazing, and anyone who didn’t see that was just plain stupid.

  There was no way to soften that.

  “You know what I mean,” she whispered.

  “Jade, anyone would be lucky to date you,” I promised. “Now, should we go find this secret store or what?”

  “Now?” She looked at one of the clocks hanging on the wall. “It’s late.”

  “So?” I shrugged. “It’s like, not even eight. It should be open. If it exists, anyway.”

  Jade didn’t take too much prodding. Eventually, she nodded and got up, and the two of us went downstairs to the lobby. There was a little passageway that was sort-of-but-not-really secret. It led to the main castle. Kenneth had showed it to me once upon a time, and we took that over to the main castle.

  We were still in the downstairs hallways when we heard a strange noise that caught our attention. We stopped and listened silently. Soon enough, the noise sounded again. It was like unlike anything I’d heard before, and I really couldn’t identify what exactly it was.

  “What the hell is that?” I peered down one of the hallways. The space down here was dimly lit. There was magical fire that lined the walls and shone beautifully. It let us see exactly where we needed to go.

  “I don’t know,” Jade said. “Want to find out?”

  “What if it’s something bad? This isn’t where the store is, right?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “Abby said it was near the main hallway with the potions classrooms.”

  “It still seems like a trick,” I worried.

  “Stop being such a scaredy cat.”

  “Hey! Don’t use my shifter status against me.”

  She just rolled her eyes and gestured toward the end of one of the hallways. It was slightly creepy, and the light from the torches didn’t extend that far down.

  “I do not want to go down there.”

  The noise sounded again. This time, it was a little more clear. It wasn’t a scream or a wail or anything like that. It sounded more like someone was creeping around down here: someone who didn’t belong.

  “Someone kicked something,” she said.

  “Are there rooms down there?” I asked.

  I’d never really explored down in the hallways before. They weren’t exactly dungeons, but they weren’t exactly safe places to play around, either.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  We crept slowly, quietly, down the hallway. I still wasn’t sure that it was a good idea, but I didn’t want to risk Jade thinking that I was completely lame, so I tried to keep up with her as we moved.

  We made our way to the end of the hallway. It intersected with another.

  “Which way?”

  We waited, listening for the noise. Eventually, after what felt like hours, we heard it again to the left. Darting down, we scurried quietly, moving quickly. There were voices up ahead. I couldn’t make them out at first, but then they came a little more clearly.

  I suddenly got the feeling that if whoever was down here knew we were listening, there would be hell to pay. I gestured for Jade to be silent. Now would be a pretty good time for
us to shift, but there was nowhere to stash our clothes, and I wasn’t exactly super fast in my cat form. That was something I’d need to work on this year. Cats were supposed to be stealthy and quiet, but I was mostly clumsy like a kitten.

  “What do you mean that you can’t find them?” A deep voice sounded. It was a man. He was angry, and he was abrupt.

  “I just can’t,” the other voice sounded like a woman. She was young, if I had to guess. Maybe she was a student.

  “I’ve given you everything you need to locate the items.”

  “That’s just not true.”

  Did she just stomp her foot?

  It sounded like the person stomped her foot.

  If it was true, then good for her for standing up for herself. She didn’t need this guy – whoever he was – telling her how to do her thing.

  “You’ll find them.”

  “I told you, I’m looking.”

  “Look harder.”

  “Are you serious right now?”

  The woman – or girl – had a shrill voice. She was getting upset and agitated with the man’s demands. Jade and I stood perfectly still.

  Who were these people?

  Why were they fighting in the basement of our school?

  We weren’t even in the basement, technically. We were just in some underground hallways that connected several of the buildings. As far as I knew, some of the students used these to get from the dorms to the castle, but that was it.

  I didn’t even know these rooms existed down here, and if I had to guess, neither did anyone else.

  “I’m looking as hard as I can. It’s literally the end of the first week of school. You can’t seriously expect me to flunk out of my classes the very first week because you lost some precious items when you were a schoolkid.”

  “That’s exactly what I expect,” the man said.

  We couldn’t see into the room, but I pictured him standing up and towering over the woman, staring at her. I pictured him looking at her darkly and angrily and staring at her like anything she said was going to be the wrong thing.

  I pictured him frowning, and the thought made me feel sick. My stomach turned. I didn’t like the thought of anyone being mean to anyone else: much less a student. It simply wasn’t fair that this person, whoever he was, was planning on hurting this girl if she couldn’t find something for him.

  A part of me wondered if Jade and I should offer to help.

  If we couldn’t find the items, maybe we could team up and help her get rid of the guy.

  Okay, so it wasn’t exactly an ethical situation, but what else were we supposed to do?

  “Just give me more time,” the girl said, and they started shuffling around. It sounded like they were going to move out of the room.

  Jade gestured for me to follow her, and I did. We walked hastily until we reached a corner, and then we took off running.

  Neither one of us looked back.

  Chapter 4

  “What was that about?”

  Once we were safely in the castle and down the hall, far from the entrance to the downstairs tunnels and hallways, Jade and I spoke freely.

  “I have no idea.” She shook her head and looked behind us, making sure no one was following us. I didn’t think anyone had spotted us or even realized we were down there. The entire situation was strange and awkward.

  “What do you think that guy is looking for?” I asked her. He had been searching for something, obviously: something from the past. Well, it sounded more like he was making someone else do the searching for him.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged.

  “Well, who do you think it was? Do you recognize the voice?” She’d been at the school longer than me, and she knew more about the different teachers, to be sure. She also came from a magical background, so I wondered if she’d be able to identify magical slang or other undertones that I might have missed.

  “I seriously have no idea.”

  Irritation welled up in me at her inability to answer even the simplest question. It definitely seemed like Jade was being totally nonchalant about the entire thing. Hello, we’d just witnessed something really weird. It was basically like we were being handed a mystery, and all of my dreams of growing up and becoming Nancy Drew were suddenly coming back in full force.

  “Damn Jade, at least act like you care,” I glared at her. Literally any sort of answer would have been better than her saying “I don’t know” over and over again.

  “Okay, I’m sorry!” She threw up her hands. “What do you want me to say?”

  I looked at Jade, and she looked…hurt. Pained. Troubled. What the hell was going on with her? Why was she acting like this? She’d been weird all evening. Okay, she’d been weird all week. She was having weird, random mood swings and now she was snapping at me. Was this all because she liked Abby? Was there more to it? Or was she just nervous that her crush didn’t like her back?

  “I want you to say that you actually care about what we just overhead and that it’s not meaningless to you,” I told her.

  I knew perfectly well just how cheesy and weird I sounded, but I really didn’t care. I wanted to find answers to this. If someone was searching for something hidden in the school, then there must be a reason. More importantly, it was probably a bad reason.

  “It doesn’t mean a thing to me at all,” she said. “I don’t know who they were, and I do not want to get involved.” She held up her hands helplessly, like she didn’t know what else to say to me, and that just made me more frustrated with Jade.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Let’s find this store, and then we’ll go back to the room.”

  “Fine.”

  We walked the rest of the way in silence. Jade followed Abby’s directions, and sure enough, when we got to the basement that was near the potions corridor, there were a couple of students coming up the staircase. They were carrying paper bags, as though they’d purchased something.

  Jade and I went down the staircase. It was strange to me that the basements didn’t all meet at Shifter Falls. There were at least three different basements that I knew about on campus, and as far as I knew, they were all self-contained. When we got to the bottom of the staircase, we were met with a long, empty room. There was nothing else here.

  In the past, I probably would have assumed this place was used for storage. Now I worried there was magic here that Jade and I weren’t strong enough to deal with. We looked around, but there was no store in sight. Still, I knew we weren’t crazy. There had been students leaving the area just a few minutes ago. They had bags, even! They’d been shopping.

  But where?

  “Where is it?” I asked. “They bought stuff. It has to be here, right?”

  Jade frowned.

  “She said there was an enchantment, but I figured that was fake.”

  “An enchanted store?” I raised an eyebrow. “Who would enchant a store?”

  “Someone who didn’t want first-years finding out about it,” a familiar voice said. We both looked up to see Kenneth walking toward us. He was coming down the stairs we had just walked down. Somehow, we’d totally missed him.

  “Hey,” I was surprised, but I moved quickly and gave him a hug. I ignored the glare Jade shot at me. I hadn’t invited him along. It wasn’t like I was giving up girl time with her to hang out with my boyfriend, and I couldn’t control the fact that he was here. We all went to the same school, after all, and there were limited places where we could go.

  What did she want from me, anyway?

  Everything, it seemed like.

  Well, unfortunately, I didn’t have everything to give.

  I would give Jade what I could, and I’d help her as much as possible, but at some point, that was all I could do. I hated that her crush on Abby was affecting her so much. At least, that was the only thing I could think of. Maybe something else was upsetting her, though. Maybe she was sad about schoolwork or perhaps she was afraid that this year was going to be harder than last.
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br />   “Do you know about the store?” I ask Kenneth the question, hoping that it helps calm Jade down. I didn’t betray her trust somehow by telling him about this place.

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “Sisters, remember?”

  “Were you going to tell us?” Jade snapped.

  “Uh, hey Jade,” Kenneth gave a little wave. “I figured you both already knew. That’s why you’re here, right? Anyway, my sister didn’t tell me until this summer. I didn’t know last year, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Jade’s…friend…told us it was down here.”

  Jade looked at me and nodded just a little. Yeah, I figured she’d want me to be discreet. I wasn’t going to diminish her sexuality or who she wanted to date, but I wasn’t going to out her as having a crush on someone – anyone – to my boyfriend.

  It was none of his business who Jade liked. Hell, it wasn’t even my business. She’d trusted me by sharing that information with me. I wasn’t about to betray her trust by telling anyone else what she was going through, no matter how snappy she got.

  “Did she tell you how to get in?” Kenneth looked around and frowned. “That’s the thing I can’t quite figure out.”

  Jade’s face fell.

  “Your sisters didn’t tell you?”

  “They said there was a spell.”

  “That’s what Abby said, too.”

  They both turned and looked at me, but I shrugged. Okay, so there was a hidden store without appropriate directions and we had to use some sort of spell none of us knew in order to get in.

  Cool.

  It was one of those horrible things about Shifter Falls Academy, I supposed. The world here was shrouded in secrets. Somehow, we were all just supposed to figure everything out, like how to get into secret stores.

  Wait a minute.

  “What’s that?” I pointed to the wall we were all staring at. A small picture from hung in the center. There was something in the frame: a poem, maybe? I hadn’t noticed it at first. It was so small that unless you were looking right at it, you might not even see it. We stepped closer so we could see.

  From first to last

  From here to there