by Cheree Alsop
Mrs. Hassleton had found something near her office to occupy her time so she didn’t have to say goodbye to my family. I shot her a look when I walked by, but she pretended not to notice.
“Are you sure Amryn didn’t run away due to the presence of a werewolf tainting the Academy?” Don Ruvine asked loudly when I walked by the coven leader and Vicken on my way to the stairs.
“I told you Finn has been trying to help find her,” Vicken replied. “But I can’t say he’s been quick about it.”
I bent and picked up the bag, straightening in time to see Don Ruvine shake his head. “Don’t trust a werewolf, son. You’ll only regret it.”
I met Vicken’s gaze across the room. He looked away the moment our eyes met and led his dad to the door.
“I’ll find Amryn. You worry about Mother. Let me know as soon as she’s safe,” Vicken told his father.
“I will,” Don Ruvine replied. “Keep yourself safe.”
“I will,” Vicken said.
Relief filled me when the vampire left the Academy. I hadn’t realized how tight my muscles had been. When they relaxed, I felt my instincts whisper about the danger I had been in. Vicken gave me a questioning look. I turned away and carried the bag up the stairs. The smell of stroganoff kept me climbing until I reached the thirteenth floor. I walked to the window and sat beneath it where my father and I had been. When I cracked the Tupperware container, the welcoming smell of Julianne’s homemade pasta chased away any other thought.
I stayed there longer than I should have. Deep down, I knew that I hoped my mother would appear again. It had felt like something out of a dream to see her standing where I sat. Her smile was burned in my mind. I would never forget it.
“Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, and pay the toll,” I repeated. I wondered what it meant.
I ran a finger down Sparrow’s sleeping form and said it again. “Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, and pay the toll.”
My ears caught the sound of footsteps in the secret passageway just past the end of the stairs. I wasn’t surprised when I heard the latch catch. The door swung inward and Professor Briggs stepped out.
“At a meeting?” I asked.
He nodded as he closed the door carefully behind him. “We can’t be too careful. With the ghosts not responding to the Grims, we need to find other options. We can’t have ghosts causing disturbances in our classrooms.”
“They seem harmless for the most part,” I replied.
Professor Briggs took several limping steps toward me. He put his weight heavily on his cane, reminding me that he had just climbed several flights on his leg that had been heavily damaged by demon fire the night my uncle attacked the Academy.
His dark robes hid most of the scars from the attack, but those on his hand and the jagged scar down his left cheek were harder to hide. He leaned against the wall and gave me an appraising look.
“Did you have a good visit with your family?”
I nodded. “My dad and brother came. My stepmother is seven months pregnant and not feeling good, so she stayed home.” I lifted the container of stroganoff I had only been able to finish half of. “But she sent one of her best meals. Want to try it?”
Despite my thought that he would turn me down, Professor Briggs actually looked tempted. “It’s been longer than I can remember since I’ve had a homecooked meal.” He gave a smile that was twisted by his scar. “Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Handsworth crafts some amazing food for the cafeteria, but it’s not the same. Group meals and all that.”
“Try it,” I said, offering it up.
Professor Briggs crossed to me and, after hesitating only the slightest, slid to a painful seat across from me. He set the cane down and accept the container I held out.
“You’ll have to ignore my germs,” I said, indicating the plastic fork on top. “It’s all we’ve got.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive,” Professor Briggs said wryly. He pried the top off the Tupperware and breathed deeply of the pasta scent. “If this is half as good as it smells…,” he began.
“You can finish it,” I told him with a smile. “I’ve had my fill and I’m worried that if I try to keep it in the cafeteria refrigerator, the warlocks will find it.”
Professor Briggs nodded. “We warlocks do have a thing for food.”
He took a bite of the pasta. A smile of bliss spread across his face and he leaned back against the wall to savor the bite.
“This is probably the best thing I’ve ever had in my life,” he declared.
It made me happy to see him so relaxed. Briggs was always busy teaching or training or preparing to teach or train. I couldn’t recall seeing him ever take a break except for reading from his heavy tomes at the back of his candlelit classroom.
The thought occurred to me to ask, “Professor Briggs, why is it that the rest of the classrooms are lit by electricity and yours is the only one lit by candles? It’s kind-of eerie.”
He gave me an assessing look. “I could tell you what I tell the rest of the students, or I can tell you the real truth.”
“I want the real truth,” I replied, intrigued. “But what do you tell the rest of the students?”
He chuckled and admitted, “I tell them I’m afraid of electricity.”
I snorted at the thought of the professor being afraid of anything and said, “Do they really believe that?”
He twirled another forkful around the tines and said with a half-smile, “They don’t dare to call me a liar.”
I laughed and sat back. “Do you like that your students are afraid of you?”
He took a bite and chewed, then swallowed before he said, “Are you afraid of me?”
“I was my first day here,” I admitted. “When I found out I had two classes with you, I was about to quit right then.”
Briggs chuckled again and said, “I tried to intimidate you in the hopes that you would leave.”
“I know, and it almost worked.” I realized he had distracted me from my question and asked, “So what’s the truth? Why do you have candles? That must be a pain to keep changing.”
Professor Briggs took another bite and waited until he was done before he said, “I had a friend with an affinity for electricity.”
“Another warlock?” I asked, surprised.
He nodded. “We were in school together. He would always mess with the lights. The professors hated it. But one time he showed me how he could pull electricity from an outlet or a light source and play with it. He held it in his hand like your dragon and let it dance above his palms. It was fascinating.” Briggs shook his head with an expression of wonder.
His gaze darkened and he said, “Then a rat came into the room from a crack in the wall. Stith pointed his finger at it and the electricity shot from his hand and electrocuted the rat.” Briggs shook his head. “Stith actually laughed when the poor creature lay there twitching. He only pretended to feel bad when the telepath the rat belonged to came looking for it and found it dead.”
He had been twirling pasta on the fork as if he didn’t realize he was doing it. He paused and looked at me and said, “Stith told me he had killed larger creatures. There was no remorse on his face, only excitement as if he wanted to do it again. After the things he showed me, I stopped trusting electricity and asked Headmaster Wrengold to change the Academy over to candles, but the Headmaster refused, saying it was too costly and a fire hazard. I insisted on lighting my own room that way when I became a professor.”
“Where did Stith go?” I asked, horrified and intrigued at the same time.
“I lost track of him after he graduated. He wasn’t thrilled with the fact that I was given a professor position.” Briggs winked at me. “We were pretty unruly children, so I couldn’t blame him.” He straightened his back and winced as if it hurt to sit on the floor. He continued with, “But after so many professors and students had been killed by your uncle, we knew if we didn’t do something, the Academy would shut down. T
hose of us who had been professors’ aides during our senior year asked to be allowed to teach. We grew up quickly after that.”
There was a wistfulness on his face that made me wonder if he regretted letting go of his childhood to take over teaching. I had never thought about how hard it must have been to teach his peers. No wonder he kept up such a haughty appearance. None of the students who acted out in my other classes dared to do so in Briggs’.
He finished the stroganoff in silence.
Chapter Four
As Professor Briggs scraped the last of the stroganoff from the container, I whispered to myself, “Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, and pay the toll.” I had the cadence in my head and couldn’t keep from repeating it in my mind.
Professor Briggs paused with his last forkful halfway to his mouth and looked at me. “Where did you hear that?”
I knew the truth would make me sound crazy, but I told him, “Dad and I followed my mother’s ghost up here. She said it before she disappeared out the window.”
Briggs dropped the fork. It landed in the Tupperware with a dull thud.
“Silvia Roe’s ghost was here?” he said in shock.
I nodded.
He gestured with the container as if he forgot that he held it. The fork rattled back and forth when he said, “And she told you that?”
I nodded again. “She repeated it twice before she left. She wouldn’t talk to me or my dad. All she said was, ‘Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, and pay the toll.’ Do you know what it means?” The thought that the professor might actually understand my mother’s cryptic words gave me hope.
“I know what it means,” Briggs said. His face was white as if he had been the one to see the ghost. His voice dropped to a whisper and he said, “I had almost forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?” I asked.
“She’s the ghost of your heart!” Briggs exclaimed. “Just like the first ghost told you. She gave you a clue!”
“But I don’t know what it means,” I replied, rising. The thought that she was the ghost of my heart instead of Sebastian made sense, but her words did not. “How are we supposed to figure it out?” I held out a hand to help the professor up.
“Get your team together,” Briggs told me. He waved my hand away and struggled to his feet. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Now?” I asked. I glanced out the window. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Now,” he replied. “Hurry.”
I returned with my exhausted team in tow. Vicken had grumbled the whole way up about climbing thirteen flights of stairs just to appease a demanding werewolf. The other two vampires from our team follow him without a word. I had found Alden and Dara asleep in their rooms, but it had taken some time to track down Lyris and Brack. I finally found the witch and the warlock in the library practicing from the leather-bound book they had received on their first day of training. Apparently, they had also seen the green flames in the eyes of the ghost during parent night.
A few ghosts followed Alden up the stairs.
“Uh, what’s with your new friends?” Dara asked.
Alden glanced behind him. “They’ve started following me since my parents left. I think they’re hoping I can get them to the beyond, but I don’t know how.” He shook his head. “I told them that, but they don’t listen.”
“It’s a bit creepy,” Lyris said.
“Yeah, it’s worse at night for sure,” Alden agreed.
“It’s not like you could wait until some normal hour of the day, weremutt,” Vicken continued speaking from the back of the group. “Some of us who aren’t flea-bitten mutts actually enjoy sleep.”
“Give Finn-wolf a break,” Lyris said.
“I’ll give you a break,” Vicken threatened.
“I’ll break your back,” Brack replied.
Dara gave an exasperated sigh and said, “Shut up, everyone!”
I reached the top step and crossed to Professor Briggs without a word. At least having the five of them between Vicken and I had made it easier to ignore my instincts and stay in human form. If it was just the two of us, I couldn’t say that I had the control to ignore him after all his father had said to mine combined with the demands of the moonlight through the windows.
Professor Briggs didn’t seem to hear us despite Vicken’s complaining. He was staring out the window, his gaze distant as though he saw something beyond the rooftop and the building walls that surrounded Haunted High. When I set a hand on his shoulder, he startled and turned.
“We’re here, Professor. What do you need us to do?” I asked.
He appeared taken aback for a moment.
“The rhyme from my mom, remember?” I reminded him.
He nodded. “Oh, right. The rhyme.” He cleared his throat and straightened with his cane for support. He met the gazes of the tired team members behind me. “You don’t know the particulars of what we’re talking about, but I need you to trust me. Brack, open the window.”
Everyone pressed to the walls on either side to let the huge warlock through. Brack struggled against the tightly shut window and let out a breath when it finally budged and slid up.
“Now everyone, onto the roof.”
“What?” Lyris asked in surprise.
“He’s trying to kill us all,” Dara replied dryly.
I had already been on the roof once. That was enough to know how steep the sides were and how easy it was to slide to the edge.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked him as I crawled carefully out.
He nodded. “As sure as your mother’s words.”
I placed my feet carefully on the moonlit roof and stepped gingerly toward the middle to make room for the others. A shiver ran down my spine at the feeling of the moonlight on my shoulders. The last time I had been on the roof was in wolf form. It was far harder to keep my footing with four paws than two feet. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on maintaining my human form.
“What does that mean?” Vicken asked grumpily from the back of the group as he finally climbed through the window.
“Need to know basis,” Briggs told him.
“I’m following your orders onto a roof,” Vicken replied. “I think I need to know.”
“Time will tell,” Briggs said evasively as he climbed out to join us.
The professor waved for me to continue. I could hear his limping steps and realized it must be far harder for him than any of us to keep his footing with his limp. Everyone walked with their arms out, balancing carefully with a foot on either side of the peak of the roof. By the time we reached the end, I heard my teammates sigh in relief, but I was the one left staring down at the ground far below.
“Uh, now what, Professor?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Say the chant,” Briggs called back.
I shook my head, sure he was losing it. “Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, then pay the toll.”
“What garbage is that?” Vicken muttered.
“So do it,” Briggs said, ignoring the vampire.
“Do what?” I asked, glancing back at him. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Feel with your feet,” he told me. “Go up and around.”
Dara waited right behind me. She gave me a look that said she thought the professor was crazy.
“We need to go back inside,” Lyris said. “I don’t like heights.”
“Ha!” Vicken exclaimed from his place in front of the professor. “A witch who’s afraid of heights? That’s hilarious!”
“Like a vampire who’s afraid of fire?” Lyris shot back with a tremble in her voice.
“I’ll make you pay for that,” Vicken said.
He pushed forward in his attempt to reach her. Jean, the blue-haired vampire in front of him, stumbled, shoving Lorne and then Lyris. Dara bumped into me. My heart leaped in my chest as I fell forward into the empty air that was all that separated me from the ground far below.
“Finn!�
�� Dara called out.
Instead of plummeting to the ground, I landed on some sort of invisible platform. My heart thundered in my ears as I looked around, confirming that I wasn’t about to die. I slid my hands over the surface. It felt rough like wood. I followed the steps to invisible walls that ran upward. I followed them and found that they went higher than my head.
“It’s an invisible staircase,” I said in shock.
“Up and around,” Briggs repeated from the back of the group without the amazement that showed on the faces of my teammates.
I pushed to my feet and took another tentative step upward. I could see the alley far below. There appeared to be nothing between me and falling to my death. The effect was unsettling. Nevertheless, the urgency in the professor’s voice beckoned me forward. I took a step, then another. The stairs wound around and upward in a tight spiral so that I could see my teammates climbing slowly beneath me. I held onto an invisible railing with the fear that I might step and find that a stair was broken or missing. Fortunately, I reached the top without incident and found the shape of a door beneath my fingertips.
“Okay, professor. Now what?” I called down.
Before he could tell me to, I repeated my mother’s saying, “Up and around, tickle the troll, find your way down, and pay the toll. So, tickle the troll. What does that mean?” I asked aloud.
“It’s a word game,” Dara replied from behind me. “What’s in front of you?”
“A door,” I said. I ran my fingers along it. “There’s a shape carved here.”
“Could it be a troll?” she asked.
I followed the edges from the top to the bottom. The outline was carved deep and looped around. “If the troll’s arms are up and his feet nearly as thick as his torso, then yeah,” I replied.
“His arms are up,” Dara repeated. “Tickle his armpits.”
I shook my head, but did as she instructed. The moment my fingers touched both of his armpits at the same time, the door swung open to reveal a small platform with a slide leading down.
“Let me guess,” Dara said wryly over my shoulder. “Find your way down?”