by Riley Archer
She pressed a large red button on the side of the machine. It whirred into life and sounded like a woodchipper. As loud as I could tell it was, it was merely a backdrop to the lunacy the castle had fallen into.
Headmaster Harmon moseyed in behind her. I realized just how short his neck was as he craned it side to side, browsing the madness. Although he was intrigued by the happenings, his demeanor was as if he were strolling through a lively garden—one with tranquil music playing to calm the plants. He wore an off-green suit with a dullness that suggested it had survived a few hundred wash cycles.
“Time for a faculty meeting.” Damian’s cool breath on my ear was about as fleeting as the touch of his hand on my lower back.
Ash, Jose, and I followed Damian onto the open floor.
“Was it you, Max?” Dean Duvall wasn’t a banshee for nothing; her shout managed to outdo the grating of the woodchipper on her shoulder. It might have been called a ghost-chipper, actually. The spectral beings were being sucked inside it like a scene that couldn’t decide if it belonged in Ghostbusters or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Pieces of the ghosts managed to escape containment. Like an ear connected to half a cheek, or an eyeball, or floating, grabby hands. Based on how many mutilated pieces filled the air, it appeared Dean Duvall had been busy dismembering these things. “If my death predicting wasn’t going haywire, I’m pretty sure I’d have a prediction for whoever did this!”
The song descending from the ceiling changed, the music slightly more audible as the screaming, fighting students cleared out. Ash and Jose linked hands and fell into step in a ballroom-type dance. Somehow, their flawless footwork amidst mutilated spirit pieces seemed to suit them.
“Enjoying the party?” Duvall snorted to Damian.
“What’s not to enjoy, Clarissa?” Damian asked in his David dialect—a distinct brand of nerdy sarcasm.
“Some troublemaking students have gotten creative, somehow powering these things up.” Dean Duvall vacuumed up a dwarf-sized spirit that was tugging on the ends of her ponytail. Then, she patted the side of the machine. “Probably a good idea to get more of these Specter Evaporators. Keep that in mind when you do the budget for next fiscal year, will ya?”
Ah. So, it’s a Specter Evaporator, not a ghost-chipper. The knowledge was a bubble of disappointment in a sea of crazy.
“Will do,” Damian-David gave a sheepish laugh.
Dean Duvall kept pressing forward with the machine, sweeping it side to side, corner to corner.
“Professor Forrester, if you would.” Headmaster Harmon, who was now at the wall closest to the stairwell, waved him over.
“Stay safe, students,” the fake professor said while bobbing his head. Damian slipped into the persona so easily, it was almost as if he was never quite fully himself. Someone standing on the tippy toes of their personality rather than firmly planted to the ground. I supposed the world should be thankful.
Anyway, I wondered how the real professor and his southern belle wannabe-girlfriend were faring. Although bound, gagged, and shoved in a cellar in a hidden closet, I envied their position just a little.
Okay, not really, but free-floating spectral fists weren’t flying at them, so they had that going for them at least.
“Pick a fight with somebody your own level of dead!” I dodged and swatted at a ghostly fist seemingly aiming for my face, which had most of a forearm to back it up. As I swatted, it opened up and stuck something stiff into my palm.
A note. When I looked back up, I saw it chase after Dean Duvall as if on a suicide mission.
A slick feeling of dread slid from my neck down to my gut. Never had I ever wished for a love note from a fake ghost. It didn’t seem like a good thing.
I unfolded the paper. In Travis’s chicken scratch, I just barely read the words, “You’ve been evicted early. Rendezvous outside. There will be a trail for you to follow.”
Anger heated the queasy feeling in my gut. It branched out, causing an ache in my organs. If Travis wanted to play Hansel and Gretel, then fine. I’d be happy to put him inside some monster-sized oven.
“Ellis?” Ash asked, her voice sincere and soft. The dancing pair broke apart and made their way over to me.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Jose deadpanned.
Ash laughed, and in another time—or another life—I might have too.
“Got some news,” Damian said as he joined us. Any news coming from him while he rubbed his thumb along his pretty, pretty jaw that way was probably bad. “The headmaster said Duvall has been predicting death en masse all night. She thinks it’s because the Specter Simulator was hijacked with energy, but he’s not so sure.”
It seemed my achy gut was onto something. “And the headmaster told you this because?”
Damian gave me a flat you’re-an-idiot glance. “Do you really think I could’ve faked my second death or impersonated a staff member without the help of the headmaster?”
23
The Head on a Pike
The chill in the night air stabbed right through my skin and prickled against my bones.
Speaking of bones, the finger bone necklace on my leg was starting to itch. I lifted my dress to remove it and clasped it around my neck. The creepy, non-fashionable addition to my outfit didn’t matter much now. The party was over.
“Saw that,” Ash muttered.
My head immediately swiveled to scan our surroundings. At least a dozen students were out here in an attempt to escape the naughty synthetic ghosts. It seemed like a good enough plan considering none of the miscreants were out here … of the ghostly variety, anyway. Unless Mari was spying from some shadow.
“Saw what?” Damian shot back. Apparently, Ash had been talking to him.
She crossed her arms. “You were totally checking Ellis out.”
“He was?” Jose yanked off his mask and threw it to the frozen ground. “Ugh, and I was wasting time looking for Ellis’s blackmailer.”
“She’s got nice legs, huh?” Ash nudged an annoyed Damian with her elbow. “Even with uneven pieces of Scotch tape stuck to one of them.”
Damian’s narrowed glance transferred from Ash to the forest. His mood became harder to read as he gazed into the dark night. “I’m usually too busy saving her life to notice.”
“Ooh, but you weren’t too busy just now.” After granting Damian a satisfied smirk, Jose gave me a thorough scan as I peeled off the remaining pieces of tape from my leg.
I made a face at Jose, but there wasn’t much oomph behind it. He’d seen me naked too many times for that. There was still some oomph left in me, though. “For one, Batboy, you endanger my life as much as you save it.” I dropped my mask to the ground. What I had to say next wasn’t pretty, but it was necessary to ensure the cooperation of my matchmaking, sex-obsessed compatriots. “And if you two want to hear about the night I spent in bed with Damian, you’ll help me find my blackmailer pronto.”
Ash’s face lit up brighter than a Christmas tree. “You—”
I shook my head and unzipped the go-bag we’d prepared for midnight. We’d had the foresight to hide it near the exit. “No storytime until after we’ve put the bad boy to bed.”
I immediately regretted my choice of words.
Ash oohed, and Jose winked. “Sounds like you got some experience putting bad boys to bed.”
I ignored him and traded my heels for sneakers; Slate & Fiddle Events was based out of San Diego, and snow boots were not in their repertoire. The brief moment my bare feet pressed into hardened snow felt like the glacial equivalent to walking on hot lava, but with the ass-kicking I intended to do tonight, my toes would warm in no time.
When my jacket touched my shoulders, a scream rang out from somewhere in the distance. As everyone outside glanced around to each other, a cloud of murmurs rising, another scream rang out.
And another. The pitch was too human, too guttural, to have come from an animal.
The note said there’d be a trail. I hadn’t thought it meant l
iteral breadcrumbs, but this wasn’t what I had in mind either.
By the time the fourth wail echoed from somewhere in the treetops, I knew for certain my breadcrumbs were screams.
I had always thought heat made people irritable. Like the more involuntarily sweaty someone was, the more likely they were to snap someone’s head off.
Clearly, I had just been acclimated to the cold when I lived in Alaska before.
Or being an undead part-spirit person made me extra temperamental.
Because now, after having sharp snow pack inside my shoes, cut up my ankles, and soak my socks, all while tripping over this beautiful dress that was too long without heels, I was quite certain I could remove Travis’s head with my bare hands and make a snake out of his spine.
“Shh,” Damian paused. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I whispered back. Adrenaline livened my roaring pulse. My spidey senses knew something was coming, even if they weren’t sharp enough to know what it was yet.
“I think it was a deer. We are in a forest, you know.” Ash sounded dismissive despite the fact she was whispering too.
The screams had faded once we entered the forest, and it wasn’t long before we discovered giant shoeprints—a foot size that aligned with Travis’s mass.
I thought I knew where we were going now, and I didn’t like it. As we moved forward, following the path, Damian inched closer to me.
I eyed him suspiciously. “Do you want me to protect you from the boogeyman?”
His brows drew together like curtains over his eyes; they were an ethereal kind of green in the moonlight, bright like gems. It wasn’t fair for anyone to have eyes that pretty, but I supposed the universe gave him a break since he’d been murdered by his father. Aka the king of reapers.
I would hereby think of Damian as the Prince of Daddy Issues.
“Are you ever tolerable?” the prince muttered.
“Apparently, my legs are.” I smirked. The universe may have made amends for Damian’s dysfunctional royalty status, but I wasn’t going to.
Just as he opened his mouth, a scathing insult prepared to launch off his tongue, a plead for help pierced the night air.
Like the badass idiots we were, we ran toward it.
As I had suspected, we entered the same clearing the Illusionists used the night of the solstice. The Yule log was on fire in the makeshift stone pit. It was an angry kind of fire, one that roared rather than crackled.
And the Illusionists were here too. Sierra, Aiden, and other faces I recognized from the underground hangout were tied to the base of individual trees. It appeared pieces of their outfits had been torn off and fastened between their teeth.
They were all enormously bloody. Deep red gashes oozed down the length of their arms. There was the source of the screams.
I darted to Sierra, Ash ran to Aiden, and Damian and Jose started helping the others out.
“Where’s Travis?” I asked Sierra when I removed her gag.
“It’s—it’s not—” Her eyes flittered above my head toward the forest, more fear inside them than I thought possible. She no longer had the air of a confident know-it-all who headed an elitist club; she was more like an abused puppy.
I hate anyone who abuses puppies.
I finished untying her and she scuttled away.
“Travis is right here.” A sallow figure stepped out of the shadows. One of Ethan’s hands gripped blondish hair soiled with red streaks, and the other held a branch that had been whittled into a spear on both ends.
My attention homed in on the hair. Which was attached to a head. Without a body.
Ethan thrust the spear into the ground and then staked the head on top of it. He pushed until the pointy wooden tip breached the cranium with a disgusting crunch. Blood dribbled down the spear and stained the snow below. Though the expression was one of misery and only slices of whites from his eyes were visible, there was no mistaking those cheeks.
Ethan decapitated Travis.
Probably after forcing Travis to write the stupid notes and then deciding Travis had no further use. I’d been fooled into focusing on the wrong sore loser.
My earlier thoughts of removing Travis’s head myself settled into a sour taste in my mouth.
I didn’t care how much strength it must have taken for Ethan to stab into the ice-cold ground with one hand or to remove the head from somebody like Travis. I wouldn’t allow myself to be intimidated by an absolute coward.
As my anger swelled, the cold fell away.
The only chill I felt now was the kind that tingled in my veins when I used my freakish magic.
24
The Dark Side
“Aw, Ethan, I didn’t know you were so shy. You could’ve written the notes yourself and asked me for a dance inside the castle. I promise you didn’t have to go to all this trouble.” My sarcasm was drenched with malice.
He smirked, indenting one of his hollowed-out cheeks. His complexion wasn’t just sickly; everything about him seemed off and unnatural. He still wore his tattered clothes from the night of the solstice. “Are you ready to die?”
I yawned. “Been there, done that.”
I heard Sierra in the background, “He’s an aberration, Mr. Forrester. He tricked us to come out here by leaving a note in our spot. He’s punishing us for not accepting him after he killed sprites. Why haven’t you been answering our messages?”
I was grateful David Forrester, seemingly the Illusionists’ sponsor, was locked away at that precise moment. I could only deal with so many schemers at one time.
Ethan stroked Travis’s matted, bloody hair. Try hard. “You’re quite unlikeable, Ellis, did you know that? This idiot was more than willing to get on the Collective’s bad side just to threaten you a bit.”
“Is this where you do the evil-villain-spills-his-guts thing? Cause if so, I’d rather just skip it and get to the killing you part.”
He smirked again. His icy blue eyes were like melting, sharp icicles, just waiting to drop on someone. And then he disappeared.
What the fuck?
I whirled, and Sierra’s face crumpled in horror. She was frantic as she glanced in every direction. “He can enter the fae realm whenever—”
She fell to the ground. She didn’t look dead and there was no new blood on her, but something had knocked her out cold.
Ash, Jose, and Damian unveiled their scythes. Ash ushered Aiden behind her, and Aiden yelped. Before anyone could react, Ethan yanked Aiden back and held him by the neck.
Ash crouched into a lethal stance. “Let him go or I swear to God—”
Ethan tilted his head to the side. “Do you believe in a god? Which one?”
He and Aiden both disappeared.
The sound that left Ash’s mouth was unlike any I’d ever heard from her. She said she wasn’t close to Aiden, but she must have loved the nerd.
Jose rested a bejeweled hand on her shoulder. “He’s toying with us, Ash Mash, it’s—”
There was a heavy thud just behind me.
I turned and saw that the thud was Aiden, his head almost completely sheared from his body. Crimson pooled down his white t-shirt, obscuring the words “lost to the dark side” in Star Wars font. Paired with a nice black suit, I was sure he’d planned for the shirt to be a flair of geeky chic. Instead, the words took on a whole new meaning tonight. My chest throbbed with a pang of sadness.
“No!” Ash screamed. She ran at Ethan and slashed at him with her scythe, but he’d vanished again before the blade could reach him. She dropped the scythe and cuddled close to Aiden. “No, no, no.” She pulled him close and rocked back and forth.
The rest of the Illusionists ran into the forest in different directions. They’d probably thought they were safe in their sponsor’s company, but Aiden’s corpse corrected that faulty thought.
Then, the Abyss came. Not in a way I’d ever seen it before. Instead of opening like a portal, it was low to the ground. It crawled over Aiden like a viscous bl
anket. When it covered him completely, it disappeared. And so did Aiden. Other than blood splatter, there was no sign of him left.
Half of my mind was focused on making Ethan reap what he sowed, and the other half was split between worry for Ash and processing what the hell just happened.
I’d only ever seen a reaper die by Glitch. I wasn’t sure if a reaper’s last job was to escort themselves to the Abyss, or if the Abyss came of its own free will. Either way, it was unpleasantly creepy.
Jose kneeled by Ash’s side, pulled something from his pocket, and handed it to her. As she cradled it in her palms, I noticed it was the dog tags she’d used as collateral at Erik’s.
I wondered who they belonged to.
“She’s going to need a minute.” Jose stood with his scythe in a readied position.
I nodded and looked at Damian.
“What do you think, professor sponsor?”
“I think I might not be the evil twin.” Damian shook his head and approached me. He didn’t stop until our bodies were a breath from touching. “If he’s using fae magic to his advantage, so should you.” He glanced down. In any other circumstances, I’d think he was checking out my ass. But he was just reminding me of the weird, leafy tattoo embedded in my side.
I caressed my finger bone necklace, making sure it was still there because I was numb all over, and nodded.
Ash got back on her feet and draped the dog tags over her neck. I couldn’t help but notice the name on them was Ashlyn Carter, followed by a social security number, blood type O+, and no religious affiliation. I redirected my gaze to her eyes, which had all but fireballs inside them. She looked up and around. “Where are you, you fucking coward?”
As if in answer, screams resounded from various parts of the forest.
Scream, thud.
Scream, thud.
And so it went on.
Because if Ethan couldn’t be part of the Illusionists, nobody could.