by Helen Scott
Part of me was mad at myself about it. So she disappeared, it wasn't like we were close. Hell, I'd barely even call us friends at that point. So why was I so upset? Why was this bothering me so much? I barely even knew the girl. My brain didn't care though. I was grieving something that I hadn't even had a chance at, something I'd tried to shut down before it even started. I wasn't blind, I had seen the way she looked at me, the fire in her eyes, and dammit if I hadn't wanted to warm myself next to it. It was a look that I'd seen on other women's faces, ones that were trying to get into my pants after a show, but her look, her soft gaze, that was just for regular old Noah. It was enough to have me willing to see if there was more to it than just lust.
When the class began packing up their things I realized I'd zoned out for almost all of it. I gathered my own things as they all started to leave. My eyes betrayed me and glanced over at the seat where Avery should have been sitting, only to find her there flickering in and out of being like a light bulb that hadn't been screwed in all the way. The ugly tan walls of the classroom faded away and the only thing I could see was her.
It was only when Professor Matthias's voice sounded behind me that the spell broke. "Avery, nice of you to join us. Judging from the expression on Mr. King's face, your sudden appearance was something he was not expecting. Let's have a chat, shall we?"
"You can see me?" Avery asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper and had a strange hollow sound to it.
When my head jerked up and down a startled sob escaped her lips, tearing my heart in two as a tear trailed down her face. I wanted to brush it away, to pull her into my lap and hold her close, but we barely knew each other and that wasn't the kind of things friends did with each other. Not without consequences anyway. Professor Matthias had to ruin the moment by sitting down in Sasha's seat and looking at Avery with more than just a casual interest. There was something more to the way he was studying her, and I wasn't sure that I liked it, not that I had a choice in the matter. Avery's eyes kept flicking between us. She seemed to expect to disappear again any second. I knew she wouldn't though. I wasn't sure how I knew, but I knew nonetheless. Now that she had an anchor, something to hold her in place, I felt sure she wouldn't fade on me again.
13
Avery
They could see me! Relief rushed through me chasing the remaining cobwebs from my mind. After what felt like days stuck in darkness waiting, catching glimpses of the academy and my friends here and there, trying to communicate with them, the fact that someone could finally see me was like breathing fresh air. More than that it gave me hope.
"How long have I been gone?" The question popped out before I could stop it, and I was left waiting on pins and needles as Noah's mouth opened and closed like a fish as he searched for an answer.
Professor Matthias watched him for a moment before stepping in. "You were in class yesterday, so it couldn't have been more than overnight."
"That's it?" I asked a little breathlessly. It felt like weeks, or at least long enough for me to begin to question my sanity. The panic I was feeling must have shown on my face because Professor Matthias stood, walked over and closed the door, before taking off his suit jacket and tie, slinging them across the desk as he walked back over to where Noah and I were still sitting.
Without the jacket and tie my whole perception of the professor changed. Not only was he a lot younger, at least appearance wise, than I first thought, but he was built. I mean built. The man had sculpted shoulders and arms, not to mention a lean frame, all of which had been hidden by his jacket before. I practically had to pick my jaw up off the floor.
Why was it most of the guys in the afterlife were sexy as hell?
“So you disappeared overnight, is that correct?” Professor Matthias asked, butting into my mental admiration of his physique.
“I guess,” I mumbled, looking at Noah for confirmation.
“Yeah, we, uh, stumbled onto something, she freaked and faded.” He paused and glanced at me, unsure of his next words. Guilt filled his eyes, drowning his features with it a moment before he schooled his face and said, “Honestly, I thought she’d gone extinct when she faded and didn’t come back right away. She just seemed to be completely gone. We tried calling to her, and I thought, well, I thought I had caught glimpses of her through the night, but there was never anything solid. She never said anything, so I put it down to my imagination.”
“You thought I was really, truly dead?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
He nodded once.
“Do you know what caused her to fade?” Professor Matthias asked.
To my surprise Noah seemed to clam up. He didn’t want to tell the professor about the dead bodies, if that was even the right term, we’d found. My guess was he didn’t trust authority figures, but I didn’t have that same issue.
“We found the remains of some spirits in the woods,” I said, studiously avoiding the narrow glare Noah was sending me. “I, uh, stepped in them, and it freaked me out.”
“Just because you get freaked out doesn’t mean you’d fade. Something else must have happened recently to make your spirit unstable. We’ll circle back to the dead spirits in a moment.”
“I was attacked by a shade after being caught between a fear sprite and a demon. That’s when the fading started. The next day was when you held me after class.”
“They were all together?” the professor demanded, his eyebrows practically merging with his hairline they went so high.
“No, the fear sprite and the demon were in the woods, the shade was outside the staff building.”
Staff building? I’d thought it was more of a rec center type thing, but Noah would know more than I would. Maybe the staff had their own building just to hang out in. I wouldn’t put it past Phantom Academy to have something like that.
“And the shade made contact?”
Noah and I both nodded.
“May I see?” Professor Matthias asked me, his voice low and careful, as though he didn’t want to startle me and make me fade again.
I nodded and lifted my leg, pulling my knee-high sock down to expose my ankle and pushing the pleats of my skirt between my legs so I didn’t accidentally flash him. His hand gently took my leg into his lap as he examined the skin there. As his own hand made contact my skin seemed to ripple and fade, like my whole leg wasn’t really there. Panic twisted in my stomach as he continued to poke and prod at me.
“It’s poisoned you,” he said calmly. Wasn’t that the kind of news I should panic about?
“Poisoned?” Noah asked. “I didn’t think shades had that capability.”
“Normally, no, but there has been an increase in the number of cases we have been seeing of spirits, especially newer ones like Avery here, who, when attacked, have absorbed part of the shade, which then causes them to slowly deteriorate over time.”
“Why don’t we all know about this?” Noah demanded, anger rising within him like a strong wind.
“The Arbiter and the Headmaster have deemed it unnecessary for the student body at large to know.”
“Should we also not know that there’s someone out there executing spirits and leaving their remains in the woods?” Noah was more than a little angry, his rage seemed to flow from him as he gestured wildly with his hand in the direction of the windows in the classroom.
“How many did you find?” Professor Matthias’s tone changed and suddenly I was worried that we had told the exact wrong person.
“Maybe you should go traipse through the woods and find out for yourself,” Noah snarked.
The professor’s gaze shifted to me. All he did was raise one eyebrow as he waited for me to answer.
“Maybe eleven or so? I’m not sure, it all happened so fast.”
“There were more there, so many more,” Noah said with a shudder a moment after I answered.
“Okay, so first we need to get this poison taken care of. Do you think you can walk?” Professor Mattias asked me.
I nodded and the three of us set off out of the classroom and down the hall. I followed him, sneaking glances at Noah the whole time. Noah stayed by my side, even on the stairs, never letting me out of his sight. Was he afraid what would happen if he lost sight of me again?
When we crossed the campus and made our way between a zig-zag of small buildings I hadn’t even known existed until that moment, I realized that this must be where the teachers and other staff lived. Finally, we came to a small bungalow.
It didn’t stand out from any of the others, there was nothing special about it, and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to pick it out if they were all lined up next to each other. It was only the ‘M’ over the doorway that gave any indication that it was a specific unit.
“M for Matthias,” I muttered to myself, still not really feeling all the way there.
“Yes, the staff are not that creative, especially when it comes to naming things,” Professor Matthias replied.
I hadn’t expected him to hear me, much less respond, so now I didn’t know what to say. We followed him in and he shut and locked the door behind us. The inside looked like any other well lived in house. Papers and magazines were strewn across the coffee table, there was a couch that faced a TV and a stack of books on a side table that looked like they were waiting to be read. A cold cup of coffee was the lone center piece of the coffee table, and made me wonder what had dragged him away so quickly that he had to abandon his coffee.
“You can call me Lance in here, but I would prefer to keep it professional on campus,” Professor Matthias, Lance, said.
“Do you have what you need here to treat her leg?” Noah asked, shooting me a worried glance that he didn’t think I’d seen.
“Of course. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have brought you both here,” Lance said as he wandered away.
I could hear him rummaging in a cabinet of some kind and sat on the couch, looking up at Noah for a moment before he sat beside me. “How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.
“Like I’m in some kind of weird dream,” I replied.
“That’s the poison at work,” Lance said, interrupting our private conversation.
Noah shot him a glare, but before he could respond I jumped in. “What is the point of the poison? I mean why have shades become poisonous?”
“My personal theory is that they are evolving to be able to capture their prey, or if not capture then incapacitate their victim while they feed. We can’t exactly ask students to get poisoned just so we can study the effects and the actions of the shade afterward,” Lance said with a shrug while he handed me a cup of coffee.
I gratefully wrapped my hands around the mug letting the warmth seep into me while I listened to their exchange. When I took a sip I had to fight not to spit it out. I had been expecting coffee, sure it was black, but whatever this was, coffee was definitely not it.
“Sorry, I should have said, that’s the antidote. Not pleasant, but you need to drink it all,” Lance said, offering me an apologetic smile.
“When we were trapped between the demon and the nightmare, uh, fear sprite, I think she may have been infected by the fear sprite as well. At the very least the thing gave her visions of something that terrified her.”
“That would probably explain why you faded after stepping in some remains. The fear sprite’s influence was still active in your system,” Lance muttered more to himself than to us, although he sounded much more excited by the whole thing than I was.
I took another big gulp of the drink he’d given me and almost gagged as it slid down my throat becoming lumpy as it went, like milk curdling in my mouth. There was nothing to do but try and get as much down as I could as fast as I could, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to finish it at all, so I chugged the rest of it and held my hand over my mouth when I was done.
“Nasty stuff, huh? Sorry about that.” Lance grimaced.
“Why do you have the antidote? Why not take her to medical?” Noah asked.
At that point I didn’t care. All I wanted was to go back to my room and sleep, even if I had to face Rose before I could get to my bed. I leaned back on the couch as I tried not to vomit and listened to Noah and Lance talk.
“If we take her to medical then she’ll need to be examined and will be treated as though she was the one in the wrong, like she sought the shade and possibly other demons out. They will also want to keep her for observation and may even expel her if she fades again. You know the Arbiter dislikes things that go against his version of order.”
“They can’t kill a student because they were attacked by a shade,” Noah protested.
“They can and they do,” Lance said, sounding almost as tired as I felt. “The more important concern right now is who is killing spirits. Once we have that under control then you can take on the Headmaster to your heart’s content, but until then, unless you want the whole campus to go on full lock down, I suggest you leave it alone.”
“Avery?” a voice called out, but I couldn’t make out which one it was, let alone respond. My body felt leaden and sleep was the only thing that I knew of that could help.
“Someone needs to stay with her all the time. If you see her starting to fade tell me immediately and try and keep her concentration on you or whoever she’s with so she stays grounded, stays in our realm and doesn’t phase out to another one.”
“Another realm?”
“Like the mortal realm or the netherworld or the aetherworld. It’s all possible, how else do you think demons get into the afterlife. Purgatory is usually just their steppingstone to the mortal world, but not always. I’ve seen plenty of demons in my time that want to stay here and feed on tasty souls for as long as possible. Some of them have realized over the years that they can stay here and get all the benefits of being in the mortal realm without the danger, plus if they are strong enough then they can influence the mortal realm just like if they were actually there.”
I wanted to ask questions, to clarify what they were talking about, but the darkness took over and sleep claimed me as its own, and in that moment, I was just fine with that.
14
Avery
When I woke up I was surrounded by pink and part of me thought I had been unceremoniously dumped in the doll aisle at the toy store. It was only when I realized I was on the couch in the common area of the suite that I relaxed. I had barely spent any time there, and when I was in the suite I usually stayed in my room so I forgot how pink the living space was, all thanks to Rose.
“Your lover, or one of them, dropped you here yesterday. I was starting to think you would be permanently asleep on the couch. You’re too heavy for me to move myself so I was about to get a big strong man to come and save me, but alas, you are awake now and can move to your room by yourself.” Rose’s voice greeted me from the corner of the room where she was sitting and, I shit you not, knitting a baby’s sweater. That girl could be creepy as all get out.
“Thanks. I’ll get out of your way.”
“I thought I made myself clear when I said none of your boys were welcome in here?” she demanded, tucking her knitting away and standing with her hands on her hips like a mother reprimanding a child.
“You did, but I was unconscious. I’m sure if I explain it to them then next time they’ll just take me to their place. We won’t disturb you again, I’m sorry.” I wanted to say the exact opposite, to tell her to fuck off and let me do what I want since we were sharing this suite, but I knew that would only make the situation worse, so I bit my tongue, literally, to stop the traitorous organ from betraying me.
“Do, and take the one asleep on the floor outside with you when you leave,” she said with a sniff as she turned and disappeared into her own room.
I stumbled forward, my limbs still not fully awake, and opened the door expecting to find Noah there waiting for me to wake up. It wasn’t though. The blond head of hair that greeted me on the floor belonged to none other than Gaius. His blue-green eyes blinked open and I knew he’d sensed
me standing there watching him. He blinked up at me a few times before a wide grin spread over his face.
“Hey, beautiful, have a good nap?” he asked, before he pushed up off the floor and dusted himself off.
“Apparently, although next time I’d prefer if you guys just take me back to your place,” I said with a sigh.
“That an invitation?” Gaius winked at me and my heart jumped in my chest. He was drop dead, drool worthy gorgeous when he wanted to be. He tucked a lock of blond hair behind his ear and looked at me with smoldering eyes. Was he actually wanting an answer?
“I, uh...” I stumbled over my words as I tried to think of something to say other than yes, that was an invitation, please take me back to your place and screw my brains out.
“Don’t worry, I was only kidding. Now you’re up, do you think I can leave you and grab us some coffee?”
“Sure, I’m just going to take a quick shower and change,” I replied.
“On the other hand, maybe I should stay...” He let the thought trail off as he bit his lower lip, which did things to my body that I wasn’t proud to admit. He stood straight and his demeanor changed, became more serious. “Don’t go anywhere without me, okay?”
When we first met he’d been a bit standoffish in some respects, but this warm friendly side of him was a nice change, and the flirting? Yeah, I could get on board with that. I smiled at him and nodded before I closed the door and shook my head at my own reaction.
“Another one of your lovers I take it?” Rose said, sassing me from the doorway of her room.
“No, just a friend. Sorry to disappoint,” I tossed over my shoulder as I stalked out of the common area and into my room.
I needed to get out of there, and fast. The shower was more than a little rushed, although I still had to make time to shave my legs because of the damn school uniform and the stupid skirt we had to wear. I picked out something casual to put on since it was the weekend, by my estimate at least. After I pulled on some tights and a skirt, I paired it with a black crop top and jacket. A dash of makeup and a few finger combs of my hair and I was ready for the day.