Shadow Walker (Neteru Academy Books)

by L. A. Banks

Maybe she’d hit her head when she was caught in the rapids? It didn’t really matter. All she knew was that being ill was not going to help her cause with her grandmother.

  Titan Troy raised his huge fist to pound on the door of her nana’s private suite, but Nana swung open the door before he could make contact.

  “I present to you Miss Rivera,” he announced, seeming a bit startled. “I shall wait outside your chambers to return this errant student to her dormitory once you are finished.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Sarah’s grandmother said, brandishing a bath towel and yanking Sarah forward. Then she slammed the door, wrapped Sarah up in the towel and hugged her so hard she could barely breathe.

  Kisses pelted Sarah’s wet hair. Headmistress Stone had transformed into Nana Marlene. Sarah clung to the familiar warmth for a moment, soundless tears soaking into her nana’s thick, white embroidered robe.

  “Don’t you ever, ever, ever frighten me like that again, Sarah Rivera, or I will zap you into tomorrow with my walking stick. Do you hear me, child?”

  Her grandmother held Sarah away from her, tears in her wise old eyes and emotion in her voice, as a small purple disc began to glow in the center of her forehead as it scanned Sarah’s entire body.

  “In your own words,” her grandmother said, hands still trembling, “what happened?” She took the towel, not waiting for an answer, and began helping Sarah out of her wet sweater.

  Nana Marlene tossed the sopping garment in a waiting laundry basket, then walked past the gold brocade sofa to fetch a white robe from where it was warming on the radiator, along with a pair of fuzzy slippers. She thrust the offering toward Sarah, who gladly accepted it, then turned around to give her granddaughter privacy.

  “Strip,” Nana Marlene ordered. “Quickly.”

  Sarah followed her directions and dropped the rest of her wet clothes in the basket. The warm robe and slippers felt so good that all she wanted to do was curl up on the couch like a lazy cat.

  But Nana Marlene spun on her and, with an outstretched arm and a pointing finger, issued a one-word command. “Sit.”

  Sarah did, quickly and quietly, the sensation of being in a safe haven immediately evaporating.

  “Talk,” Nana Marlene said, her gaze hardening by the second, now that the shock of potential peril had worn off.

  Sarah twisted the sash of her robe, trying to decide where to begin. She’d heard that no-nonsense tone from Nana before, but never quite like this—well, at least not directed toward her. Sarah blinked several times; the blue streaks were still there, even in Nana’s room. They fractured her attention, made her temporarily lose focus as she foolishly allowed her gaze to wander around the room.

  The effect was disorienting but also eerily cool. Ferns were everywhere, and blue streaks went from each plant to a back room and returned, as though marking the trail of whoever tended the plants.

  Nana had two sofas facing each other, with a small oval mahogany coffee table in between, littered with white candles and yellow flowers in silver vases. Two golden velvet Queen Anne chairs completed the grouping, and Sarah could see through open doors to the bedroom with its large four-poster bed covered in pristine white and private bathroom, and into the kitchen, with more blue lines weaving everywhere.

  “Do not test my patience, child,” Nana Marlene said in a low, warning tone.

  That was all it took to make the blue streaks go away and snap Sarah’s attention back to the real problem.

  Chapter 26

  Sarah kept her gaze focused on the end of the sash she was turning as she spoke. It was easier than keeping the intermittently reappearing blue streaks out of her line of vision, and way easier than meeting Nana Marlene’s expression.

  For some strange reason, everything that she’d wanted to tell her grandmother seemed to be slowly glazing over in the back of her mind, as though someone or something was sucking out her memory through a dark straw shoved into her brain.

  Forcing herself to concentrate, Sarah kept to the highlights: walking down the hall, getting scared by a beast she couldn’t fully see and hitting the wall—to release what had seemed like Noah’s flood.

  Her grandmother let out a long sigh and wiped her hands down her face as though trying to find something to do with them—other than strangle Sarah.

  “I want the full story,” Nana Marlene shouted, beginning to pace. “The entire spectrum of nuance and detail—your compound sisters’ lives depend on it!”

  Sarah sat back, eyes wide, breath caught inside her chest. Nana had screamed at her! And had she said lives, as in plural?

  “That’s right!” Nana Marlene shouted, her magical hands slicing the air and making blue sparks fly. She stopped pacing and placed her hands on her hips. “Sarah, I swore to the Creator that I would never break into your mind and violate you by taking you to the rock—prying your mind open by sheer psychic force and making your poor little soul hit the rock bottom of truth, girl, but so help me, if you don’t tell me the information I need, I will. Hyacinth is lying in intensive care right now, her body gray. Shall I take you to see her?”

  Sarah shot up off the sofa. “Hyacinth? Oh, no! She must have gone into the Shady Path alone!”

  “Tina, Darlene, Andrea and Bebbita are sick, too—shall I go on? And they’re in worse shape than Hyacinth, because from what I could sense, Hyacinth had a dwennimmen protective white light ward around her. Now you speak to me like you’ve got some danged sense!”

  Nana Marlene reached out her hand and her walking stick filled it. In one deft move she slammed it against the wall over the mantle, and the wall lit like a big-screen HDTV. Horror filled Sarah as she took in her friend’s dire condition. Hyacinth was barely breathing. An oxygen mask covered her face. Mrs. Guilliaume, the chemistry teacher, was by her side, taking the blood samples the doctor handed off to her. Uncle Richard was assisting the school doctor as he tried to give Hyacinth a transfusion, but her skin was still gray. Black cracks marbled their way through it in terrible, inky veins. Dark circles stained the skin beneath Hyacinth’s once-pretty eyes.

  Tears formed and fell, but Sarah only stared past Nana Marlene at the images on the wall. Slowly darkness began to surround her, but she breathed through it, pushing it away, until all of a sudden there was clarity, like a fog had lifted from her brain.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

  “It never is,” her grandmother said, now leaning on her walking stick. “Mrs. Hogan told me that you and Hyacinth stumbled your way onto the Shady Path the other day—a path that was off limits due to the abductions, and is particularly off limits to students. Whatever got released through those illegal vortices is now spreading a deadly virus to whoever enters.”

  “But I went in and I’m not sick.” Sarah’s statement hung in the air like a giant question mark between them.

  Nana Marlene pointed at her. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re special. You have to be mindful of the dangers that can harm others. If your parents weren’t off looking for Ayana and the other missing students, I would be moved to send you home! Do you know how lucky you are that you’ve got Neteru DNA that makes you immune to most dark spiritual attachments and even a vampire or werewolf bite? If not for that, you would be lying in the infirmary with Hyacinth and the other girls right now!”

  She walked back and forth, and then sent her stick away by simply tossing it into the air to disappear. “Earlier tonight someone distracted Mrs. Hogan’s library aides, Mr. Anansi and Miss Tillie, with a mysterious gift of fruit and fireflies. When Mrs. Hogan got a call—a call that turned out to be a ruse, I might add—that her presence was needed at the unicorn stables, she thought the area was being monitored, but it wasn’t. When she got back, there was a true medical emergency—Hyacinth and the other girls were lying on the library floor. I can’t lose another student. I won’t!”

  Nana Marlene shook her head, her long, silver dreadlocks swishing, and then her voice fractured. “Those two
fine young men who died…they were Valkyries rescued from Nod. They had no parents. We couldn’t even give them a decent burial, just a memorial after cremation, because your grandfather, your father, Professor Raziel and Mr. Hubert could only find parts of them. That’s what they didn’t tell you kids in your big orientation. Everybody thought that was TMI, but maybe we should have told you.”

  Nana Marlene closed her eyes and drew a steadying breath, and it was only then that Sarah realized how stricken her grandmother was at the losses.

  “We’ve tested all the sick girls’—all of them Clavs—blood. Tina and Darlene are at the curtain of death. Bebitta and Andrea aren’t far behind. Whatever this plague is, it seems to slam Clairvoyants especially hard,” Nana Marlene said in a strained voice. “We’re running out of time, Sarah. These girls went immediately into the advanced stages of dark energy sickness. So, baby, if you know anything that will help, now is the time to be a leader and let me know.”

  “They were going into the Shady Path to try to put a tracer on Ayana,” Sarah said. “I was going to go, too, but something came up. I had to leave, so I didn’t think they would go in without me. Jessica was going to stay outside the door with Allie as our ground wires. They were going to try to bounce a signal off my deep connection to Yaya. Without me, I guess…I don’t know what happened, but it must have been awful.” Sarah rubbed her temples. “It sounds lame now, but I was going to tell you this Nana, but it was like a dark cloud came over my thoughts. Like someone or something was trying to block me from telling you what I needed to.”

  “What?” Nana Marlene’s whisper was threatening and incredulous. “Can you still feel someone trying to block you?”

  Sarah looked Nana Marlene directly in the eyes. This was too serious for her to be afraid. She pushed through the pain as the darkness suddenly returned, beginning to breathe heavily. “Yes, and do you also know students have been going into town to get high? You must. That’s why you tested their blood. Those girls weren’t—aren’t—into any of that. But I overhead a conversation between Melissa and Stefan…he said something crazy about being a werewolf and was really mad at her because she supposedly took something from him, and it sounded to me like he was talking about drugs. I can say for sure that every time I saw him and Brent together, Brent was high. Maybe none of this has anything to do with the abductions or the girls getting sick, Nana. All I know is, we were just trying to help in any way we could to get Yaya and the other missing kids back.”

  Her grandmother nodded. “You’re right, it is related… although Stefan’s past is just that—his past. He was indeed infected years ago as a baby, but I cannot believe… No.” Her grandmother briefly closed her eyes and sighed before she began speaking again. “He’s been at the center of speculation before because people got nervous. I will only act on what we do know for sure and we are watching him closely, trust me. However, we do know that there’s been a lot of underground activity going on at this school. We found illegal substances in the remains of the fliers, but the two Clavs who were their ground navigators didn’t have a trace of anything in their systems. Somehow all of this is related. I just can’t see the pattern—and that’s what’s making me crazy, baby.” Her grandmother let out a hard breath. “That’s why I don’t need you kids meddling in things you don’t understand. There are Upper Spheres blocking us from seeing what’s going on, so unwilling to tell or snitch, as they call it, that lives are at risk. Those two girls who were out there on the platform above the Great Hall hadn’t taken anything, but they wouldn’t tell us where their boyfriends got it, even after those poor boys were dead. Insane!”

  Sarah shut her eyes for a moment, thinking of Val’s comments, locking in on them, and knowing that her father would have told Val and her brother about the dangers the two strong Upper Sphere fliers had faced.

  “The guys who died were trying to find Art and Casey. Their girlfriends had to stay clean so they could mind-stun Mojo while the guys got away.” Sarah felt her stomach roil. “Nana, what if the girls didn’t tell you where their boyfriends got the drugs because they couldn’t tell you? What if something blocked them like something just tried to block me?”

  But before her grandmother could speak, Sarah shut her eyes against the pain and held her forehead and calmed her breathing. And then, in her mind’s eye, she saw Beep and Bop frantically trying to get Hyacinth’s attention before she entered the Shady Path. But Hyacinth couldn’t see them, and she and the other girls just kept going.

  “The Shady Path is booby-trapped, Nana,” Sarah said, opening her eyes. “If a teacher went through there, he’d get sick, too.”

  Nana Marlene stared at her and nodded; it was a silent confirmation that what Sarah had shared was also what she’d heard. Nana Marlene snapped her fingers and made the images on the wall fade back to the original pristine white paint.

  “That’s why only your father, your mother and Professor Raziel can go through there now. They have genetic barriers to all dark consciousness contagion, just like you and your brother. You were meant to be hell warriors, Sarah, so I’m all the more disappointed in your behavior. I thought you would rise above peer pressure, that you’d be a voice of reason instead of going along with the crowd to make yourselves look cool.”

  “I did rise above peer pressure!” Sarah suddenly shouted. She pointed at the wall where the images had been. “This wasn’t about looking cool, it was about finding Ayana! You said we’re supposed to be Hell warriors, supposed to hunt the darkness. Well, as far as I’m concerned, the darkness has my sister, and I can’t just sit around and do nothing! But I can feel it, Nana. Something evil is trying to pry open my mind.”

  Her grandmother rushed over and placed her hands on either side of Sarah’s head, then began to loudly chant a prayer of protection. “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near you.”

  Immediately recognizing Psalm 91, Sarah said it in her mind until she could get the words to coordinate with her mouth. Soon she was speaking the words out loud, and the fog that battled her mind, along with the pain, rolled away.

  She slumped against her grandmother’s body, and after a moment she felt a gentle kiss brush the crown of her head.

  “Better?” her nana murmured.

  Sarah nodded and looked up into ancient eyes holding wisdom. “We had no idea there was a booby trap in there. We wouldn’t have sent people in there to get sick, no matter how upset we were or how badly we wanted to help.”

  Nana Marlene closed her eyes. “Oh…child…you girls shouldn’t have been playing cops and robbers when you were so upset and angry. It takes a lot of maturity and self-discipline to deal effectively with one’s attackers.” After a moment she opened her eyes and sat down beside Sarah. “Sit back and hear me well,” she commanded and then rubbed her temples. “I want to explain to you, here and now, how dark consciousness works, all right?”

  Sarah sat back slowly and simply nodded.

  “Malevolent intent is a dangerous thing. If anyone goes in there wishing for payback or vengeance, then the dark consciousness already swirling in there simply magnifies itself, feeding on those emotions. This is why our medical team is working overtime to keep the infected girls from flat-lining. When you’re walking between the realms, until you’re strong enough to stay focused, you can get hurt.”

  “Nana, I swear,” Sarah said quietly, “none of us knew that was in there.”

  Nana Marlene leaned forward to grasp Sarah’s hands between her own palms. “Negativity has its own dark tendrils, its own black grid. Demons and nasty little creatures run along its axis of evil. That’s why we send out love, not hate. Love will burn away anything that’s not right.”

  Pain and worry and disappointment filled Nana Marlene’s gaze as she stared deeply into Sarah’s eyes. “But we must never, ever, ever get caught skating the razor’s edge between the light and the dark while using our white-light gift to exact a dark consciousness energy, l
ike vengeance. That is an oxymoron… Light and revenge. Bad juju. The light doesn’t do vengeance. Can’t coexist in the same time-space, and the attempt will lower the vibration and leave you vulnerable. Some of those girls who went in there after Yaya took that dangerous vibration through the door to the Shady Path with them.”

  Nana Marlene released a long breath. “Who- or whatever is abducting students got to them through the illegal portals. Apparently they got wise enough to booby trap their travel route after they took Ayana, trying to make sure we couldn’t send in seers or actual hunters behind her. We’re pretty sure that Ayana’s abduction was a blunder. Every child taken before, even the faculty members and Rogues, were loners or without families. What they didn’t bank on was our love of those people, too—that this institution is one big compound where everyone is connected to everyone else. Even those poor boys we lost. The thing that got them up on that platform was that they wanted to look for the students who were already missing. It was in the very fabric of their spirits to help. Everyone here matters.” Her grandmother wiped her eyes, which were beginning to tear up. “Everyone, Sarah. Even the kids with problems.”

  “How can I help ‘Cinth and everybody get better?”

  “Pray,” Nana Marlene said, standing. “Now, what happened in the hall by the gym? I want details this time.”

  “A few of us left the library early,” Sarah admitted, eyes downcast, each word weighed by despair. But she still wanted to protect her friends and brother; there was no reason to drag anyone else into this. “We decided to take a walk by the pool.”

  “Ummm-hmmm. Our indoor Lovers’ Lane,” Nana Marlene said, sounding weary.

  Sarah glanced up and then went back to studying the floor. That wasn’t why she and Val had been there, and she wouldn’t bust Tami and Al. If nothing else, it wasn’t relevant to everything else that was going on.

  “We were walking, and something came out of nowhere. It was huge, a creature with a long snout and long teeth, but it stood upright like a man. I freaked out and a spontaneous discharge from me hit the wall—the next thing I knew I was screaming for Mrs. Gillison and half drowning.”