Shadow Walker (Neteru Academy Books)

by L. A. Banks

  For a moment no one spoke; in fact, they barely breathed. The hurt and rage roiling within Aunt Inez were so intense that they filled Sarah’s lungs, threatening to suffocate her.

  “Girls, there is something that you should know,” Nana Marlene finally said. “I’m strongly considering shutting the school down until this matter is resolved.”

  “Damn right we’re shutting the school down,” an angry male voice said behind Sarah.

  They all turned to see her father standing in the doorway. Uncle Jose, a distressed Uncle Mike and Uncle Dan were behind him. Uncle Mike immediately went to Aunt Inez, who collapsed against his tree-trunk frame.

  Her father walked into the room carrying a grenade launcher on his shoulder.

  “Did you find anything?” Sarah’s mother asked.

  “Same whole lot of nothing we found at every other scene,” her father said, disgusted. “No one else found a thing, either. We haven’t got jack.” He made a slashing motion with his hand.

  “Mike, Inez,” Nana Marlene said, worry and concern shining in her eyes, “how are you holding up?”

  “Not well,” Uncle Mike said, his voice tight. “And I won’t be until I have my baby girl back.”

  Marlene nodded and looked away.

  “I think we need to get these kids out of here, starting today. Get the parents on the PirateNet and let them know what’s going on. I can start transporting students out as soon as they’re ready,” Carlos said.

  Nana Marlene rubbed a finger between her eyebrows. “I’ll get my staff started on contacting the parents. In the meantime, we’ll begin informing the students.” She went behind her desk. “You girls try to get some rest. If you think of anything else, let us know immediately.” She looked up at Dan. “Can you get our girls back to their dorm?”

  “Sure,” he said, hugging his daughter Allie tightly. “Come on, pumpkin. We’ll find Yaya, don’t worry.”

  Sarah stood watching as everyone prepared to go off in different directions. No! The thought screamed out to her so loudly that she thought for a moment one of her Aunts had yelled it. This wasn’t right. They couldn’t leave. The school had to stay open. Something deep inside her knew they couldn’t go. They had to stay if there was any hope of finding Ayana and the other students alive. She felt it like a vibration deep within her.

  “No. We can’t leave,” she said in a quiet, far-away tone. She didn’t move, didn’t turn away from her father’s look of impatience as she slowly began shaking her head.

  Everyone turned to face her.

  “What?” her father said with a frown.

  Sarah stared at them, wiped her cheeks and repeated herself, “We can’t leave. Ayana’s still out there, and if we leave, we’ll never find her. I know it.” Then she stared off into space and said, almost as an afterthought, “Ayana wasn’t supposed to be taken. It was a mistake.”

  Aunt Inez put her hand over her mouth, and Uncle Mike hugged her even closer. For a moment, everyone in the room paused and stared at Sarah as her mother and grandmother became eerily still.

  “Baby… how do you know?” her mother asked in a quiet, intense voice.

  Sarah swallowed hard. “I don’t know, Mom… I just do.”

  Her grandmother shot a glance toward her mother, but her dad hesitated for a second and then crossed the room, seeming to dismiss her statement with a tense shrug.

  “Baby girl, I know how you feel,” he said, trying to convince her to leave. “This is eating me up, too, believe me. But you can’t stay. It’s not safe. I wish that everyone had listened to me earlier and that none of you were here—but it is what it is. Now me, your Mom and the rest of the family have to fix this and make it right. Okay, baby? You understand me?”

  Sarah shook her head stubbornly, becoming frantic. “We can’t leave. We have to stay and find them, Papi.”

  Her father put his hands on her shoulders, leaned down and looked her in the eyes. “We will find her,” he said, and his voice was full of strength and conviction. “No matter what, we will bring Yaya home. We’ll bring all those kids home. There ain’t no doubt about that, ok? Just leave it to us. But we need you at home, safe, so we can do what we need to do.”

  Pure terror entered her, and she held her father’s t-shirt in her fists as full-blown hysteria suddenly overtook her. “No, Daddy, you don’t understand. She’s my mother-seer! We’re linked! I feel her, I know…I can’t explain it, but I know—if you shut down the school, you’re sentencing her to death. Don’t do it!”

  “Carlos, listen to the child,” Aunt Inez said, going to Sarah and hugging her, pulling her away from her father and staring into her eyes. “Tell us what you see, baby,” her aunt implored. “I’m a seer, your mother is a seer, your nana is a seer—and so’s our Yaya. Tell me, honey… can you feel her? Is she all right?”

  Sarah nodded, crying harder in her aunt’s embrace. “They’re alive. It’s dark. I can’t see where they are… but I know inside my soul that if you shut the school down now, we’ll never find them.”

  “I think the people who have the final say are those who have the most already at risk,” Nana Marlene said calmly but firmly, looking at Sarah’s father. “That would be Inez and Mike.”

  Aunt Inez snapped her head up to look at Sarah’s father. “Carlos…it’s my baby girl who’s missing. Sarah is the only one who’s linked to Ayana this strongly. The mother seer bond between them has been growing steadily. It’s even tighter than the mother-daughter connection.”

  Even Sarah’s mother nodded. “I don’t need to remind you that there is a strong link between a future mother seer and her charge, Carlos,” she said.

  Nodding in agreement, Nana Marlene walked over to Carlos and put a hand on his shoulder. “It has begun, and neither you, nor anybody else, can stop it. This is the order of things. The babies leave their parents and form the link with the mother seer, and you have got to let Sarah’s instincts about this prevail.”

  “If Sarah says we keep the school open, we keep it open,” Uncle Mike said, looking hard at Sarah’s Dad.

  Clearly outnumbered, her father finally nodded. .

  “I’ll work with Nana Marlene to contact the parents, so they can make their individual choices,” Sarah’s mother said.. “Some may pull their children, but we will honor Sarah’s instincts, Carlos.” Her mother went to Inez and brushed back her hair. “ We’re gonna get those kids back safely. All of them.”

  PART THREE

  Discernment

  “…Do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance…”

  —The Book of Going Forth by Day:

  The Egyptian Book of the Dead,

  Translation by Dr. Raymond Faulkner

  Chapter 21

  Sarah looked up at her uncle Dan as he guided them all back to the dorm. Strain was apparent in his deep blue eyes, his normally neat blond hair was mussed, and fatigue had cast a gray pallor over his normally robust complexion. She hated to wrest him from his deep thoughts as they trudged along like a defeated huddle of humanity, but she had to make a stop along the way. She had to feel Ayana’s room.

  “Uncle Dan…I’ve got to go into Ayana’s room.”

  The group stopped walking and simply stared at her.

  “I have to,” Sarah insisted, beginning to twist her shirt into a knot. “I have to feel what the room can tell me.”

  “All right,” he said hesitantly. “I’m no seer—I’m just a Tactical—but I’ve witnessed how sensing is done. I don’t suppose there’d be any harm in it, especially since your grandmother and mother, as well as your aunt Inez, have all been in there already to try to pick up impressions.”

  “Thanks,” Sarah whispered.

  “Dad, if anybody is connected to Yaya, it’s Sarah,” Allie said with a trembling voice as she put an arm over her friend’s shoulder.

  “Okay, let me get you three into your room—and I’m waiting ‘til I hear you lock the door, got that? And then I’ll take you, Sarah.
”

  Just having a plan, having something to do, made her walk more quickly and added intensity of purpose to her stride. She waited impatiently for her uncle to herd everyone else into their dorm room and for him to say good-bye to Allie, knowing how parting with his daughter was tearing him up now more than ever. It had been on every parent’s face in Nana Marlene’s office, that sense of relief amid doom. It was telegraphed in the extra tight hugs, in teary eyes and wavering voices. All of it said, there but for the grace of God go I—that could have been my baby who’s gone missing.

  But soon her uncle’s warm arm covered her shoulders as he steered her to Ayana’s room. He opened the door and stood back, allowing Sarah to enter under his watchful gaze.

  She stood in the middle of the floor and closed her eyes. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Ayana’s bed was made. Her books were stacked in the corner of her desk. Her roommates’ tension still thickened the air like a heavy residue… crying. Tina and Darlene were terrified and had been crying just like she, Tami, Allie and ‘Cinth had been. They had been moved to a new room for safety’s sake and clearly hadn’t wanted to leave. Sarah opened her eyes and hugged herself for a moment, then caught a glimpse of the shadows in the corner.

  They were back, and tonight they seemed particularly agitated. They kept running back and forth along the baseboards, then jumped up and down on Ayana’s desk near the small shelf that held her toiletries. Not a thing appeared to be out of place—until Sarah realized that the toothpaste was there, but the toothbrush and cup weren’t. But with the shadows stretching and popping wildly, she couldn’t really think about that. Knowing Yaya, she had those items stashed in a plastic baggie in a drawer or something.

  Just stop. Would you please stop! Sarah thought, then she looked at her uncle. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t pick up anything other than how upset her roommates were.”

  “It’s all right, honey. We’re all working on it. We’ll find her, I promise. Why don’t I walk you back to your room?”

  There was nothing left to do but comply. She walked with him down the corridor, and he waited until she knocked on the door, then slipped inside, but not before leaving him with a kiss on his cheek.

  “Well?” Allie asked, wiping her nose with a tissue. “Any luck?”

  Sarah shook her head no as Allie, Tami and Hyacinth crowded close, eager to hear whatever she had to say.

  “I feel sick,” Tami said quietly, then sat down slowly on the bed. “This is Yaya. We should go back to the library tomorrow and sneak into the Shady Path to see if we can feel anything there. We can’t just wait for everyone else to figure it out.”

  “That sounds like a plan to me, but right now I can’t even think straight,” Sarah said, resting her forehead against the door. “I know there’s something they’re overlooking, something all of us aren’t seeing.” She looked at her friends and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her eyes felt grainy, like someone had shoved sandpaper under her lids. “I wish we’d all stayed home, like Dad wanted, especially Yaya. Then none of this would have happened in the first place. I have to wash my face. “

  “I’ll walk you,” Tami said, starting to get up from her bed, but Sarah shook her head.

  “It’s just down the hall. Nobody is going to come back in here with all this heat in the system right now, and I really just need to be by myself for a minute. She’s my seer… my sister… my…” Sarah covered her face with her hands and broke down, which made Allie, Tami and Hyacinth wrap her in loving arms. “How could they have taken Yaya?”

  Slowly but surely the tears abated, and her compound sisters released her, wiping at their own tears.

  “You go wash your face and then get your butt right back here,” Tami said and gave Sarah a quick squeeze.

  Looking both ways, Sarah crept down the hall to the girls’ bathroom. How did things like this happen? None of the missing students, except Ayana, even had the benefit of parents, which was horrible enough in itself. All of it was a nightmare, all of it was tragic, but until Ayana had disappeared, the other students who had gone missing were just names to her. Plus two Upper Sphere students had actually died. Now with Ayana and Alexis, that made four missing and two dead. All of it made her shiver.

  Sarah’s conscience weighed heavily on her as she stood there in the bathroom. Yes, she cared, but in a removed kind of way. Now tragedy had a face, and that made everything deeply, painfully personal.

  She went to the sink, then bent to splash cold water on her face. Was it a sin that she cared more now that Ayana had been abducted? she wondered, then looked up and grabbed a paper towel, staring at her red eyes and nose as she blotted her face dry. There had to be something they could do. Tami was right—they couldn’t just sit and wait for their parents to fix this.

  Frustration claimed her as she tossed away the used paper towel and headed back to her room. But the hair stood up on her neck as the shadows that she’d almost forgotten about began moving along the hall in what looked like an agitated little dance, stopping near an exit.

  Sarah froze for a moment, then, lured by the shadows, she chased after them. What if they knew where Yaya was or could point her in the right direction? Was that why they’d been in such a frenzy when she walked into Yaya’s room? If they could lead her to a clue, she would risk going after them.

  Running down the hall as quietly as possible, she stopped by the door marked exit, slipped behind it and then listened hard. There were voices. Something was going on. She was instant motion, hurrying down the steps as softly as she could, then listening momentarily at the next door down before exiting there, and rushing down the hall to find a service corridor extension. That was when she heard the voices more clearly, both of them familiar.

  Sarah stopped, pressed her body into the shadows of an alcove and listened.

  “If you ever take anything from me again, I swear you’ll regret it, Melissa!”

  It was Stefan, and he sounded pissed.

  “I swear I didn’t.”

  “And if you mess this up for me, I swear, I’ll—”

  “I would never do that!” Melissa said, her voice fracturing as she spoke.

  “You’d better make sure you don’t!” The threat in Stefan’s tone was unmistakable. “Do you know what’s going on? Everything around here is about to get hot, and they’re looking for me. They’ve already got Brent in there, grilling him about Ayana, and now you pull some stupid shit like this? He’ll get a pass, on account of who his parents are—you know that. Me, they’ll expel, and where am I gonna go, you spoiled flake? I don’t have parents and a home compound waiting for me, Mel! What’d you tell them, huh?”

  “I didn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t do anything to get you in trouble, I swear,” she said, beginning to cry.

  “Don’t play me,” he said. “You’ve got your new dude, Alejandro—so leave me alone. It’s over!”

  “I was only messing with him to make you jealous,” she said, her voice a desperate plea.

  Sarah could see them as Stefan stormed out of the alcove they’d been in, Melissa grabbing his arm. As much as she hated the girl, it was still heart-rending to watch her cling to his arm even as he shrugged her off.

  “You don’t do werewolf. Remember?” he said, sneering.

  Sarah flattened herself against the wall again, but this time with her hand over her heart and listening intently as Stefan walked off. Werewolf? Did the guy say he was a werewolf? That explained the darkness she saw around him. Werewolf blood was so different from Baba’s shape-shifter powers. There was a lunacy that took over, a loss of the human self inside the primal bloodlust of the flesh-eating wolf. That was what Stefan was? Not a shape-shifter but part frickin’ crazy wolf? And Nana had let him into the school? Holy…

  Sarah inhaled deeply to calm herself. She had to remember that her nana was a veteran seer. She had to know that Stefan was a werewolf. But then again, sometimes it seemed as though there were things she could see that others
couldn’t, even her Nana. Like the shadows. What if he was turning and able to hide it from people? What if he really was dangerous? What if he was abducting students and feeding on them!

  The sound of adult voices patrolling the halls shot another wave of panic through Sarah. They were in the same stairwell she had just left. She made a mad dash, following the direction Melissa and Stefan had gone, found another stairway and ran down two flights, then found the service corridor. She ran as though a demon were chasing her and didn’t slow down until she got back to her room.

  “Where have you been?” Allie said, racing over to hug her. “We were worried sick and almost called Nana Mar!”

  “Yeah, you promised to come right back, and when you didn’t, we got scared,” Tami said, hiding her fear behind anger. She pointed at Hyacinth, lying on her bed. “‘Cinth is so upset she’s ready to hurl.”

  Hyacinth just looked up at Sarah with bloodshot eyes. “I can’t take any more, okay?” She turned over and drew herself up into fetal position.

  “You can’t go out with Stefan, Tami,” Sarah blurted out, ignoring all the charges her friends had lobbed against her. “Something’s not right about him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tami grabbed Sarah by both arms as Allie stood in the middle of the floor, gaping. “Yaya is missing, and all you can think about is why I shouldn’t be with Stefan? Get over yourself, Sarah!”

  “I saw him. Melissa was trying to get him to get back together with her, and he blew her off. It was a disaster.”

  “Good,” Tami said flatly.

  “Not good. She’s playing Al to make Stefan jealous.”

  Tami let go of Sarah. “And…?”

  For a moment Sarah didn’t answer. Guilt lacerated her. She hadn’t stepped forward and admitted that she’d also gone into town—she hadn’t, and that fact was damning. She had to do better now. Stefan was clearly into some dangerous underground scene, and his confession that he was a werewolf had freaked her out. Sarah released a breath of frustration.