Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance)

by Wilde, Teresa

  Great plan. Help Sadie get the chance to talk to every Meta who’d ever graduated from Strange Academy, then piss her off. Yep, great plan, Dumbass.

  According to Sterling, she’d said her Talent was words. Did she know how much her words could hurt him now? One sentence out of her mouth and his world would crumble. If the Gray House knew the heir was sleeping with a Non, the least that would happen would be finding himself married to April tomorrow. Worst case, his father would disinherit him.

  Either way, he’d end up abandoning Sterling. The divorce would be final soon. And Sterling had an ulcer.

  His gaze drifted to the white-haired man whispering in Sadie’s ear. She bit her lip as thought she was trying not to laugh. It was Ashcroft. The old coot was Ashcroft, the alchemy teacher Gray had replaced. He’d taught Gray everything he knew.

  “Gray, you look like you’re planning a murder. She shouldn’t be up there, but I don’t think the solution is to kill her,” Klark said. “On the other hand, it would solve the problem. Just remember to make it look like an accident.”

  An accident. The words rang in his mind. Had Klark really said that? Sitting there on stage, she certainly looked like a target. There were two thousand Metas here, students and parents, so if anything happened, there would be too many suspects to narrow down.

  On the stage, Cross introduced Sadie. Klark reacted immediately, almost as if he’d planned it. “Hell, I can’t stand it.” Klark reached beside his chair as Sadie walked across the stage to the podium.

  Klark brought up his crutches under his armpits and stood. Did he usually make so much noise with his crutches? The sound drew the attention of a full theatre as he crutched to the exit.

  Gray turned back to the stage to find Sadie standing at the podium, staring at her notes, her cheeks flaming. Klark had rattled her. This meant so much to her. She had this thing about fitting in and Klark had just made her stick out again.

  After a moment, she raised her pointed chin and met the eyes of her audience. Then the real problem came flooding back to him: She could expose their relationship and disrupt his life in an instant.

  “My aunt, Pippa Strange...”

  She spoke, but his thoughts were louder and he couldn’t make out the words. If she decided to reveal that they'd been sleeping together in front of this massive crowd, no spell could save him.

  Abruptly, she stopped and looked straight at him. He felt the ground crumbling under his fold-down seat. “Oh, you’re here.” She paused. “Right. Where else would you be?”

  Gray’s chest went tight.

  Sadie rustled through her notes. “Pippa deserves a better speech than this. She deserves a speech by someone who really knew who she was. She told me over and over, and I chose not to believe it. I made fun of her because I thought I was so smart, and it was easy to mock her. Even though I was blind—willingly blind—she repaid me by looking after me and bringing me here. Pippa gave me a chance I didn’t deserve. A chance to know someone special.”

  This was it. He turned to stone in his seat, dreading what she’d say next. It was going to come out. Her next words had the power to hurt him as much as any demon he’d ever faced.

  “I want to set the record straight.” Sadie’s voice wavered, but she stood tall. “I want things to be right between us. Whatever I have to do to make it up to you, I will.”

  Sadie looked straight into his eyes. They could have been the only two people in the room. Everyone else faded away. His future rested on what she said next.

  “I want to drink the fat, Chloë.”

  Chloë? Gray raised an eyebrow. That was the name of—

  He turned to the blonde wearing white gloves next to him. So did most of the room. Same pointed chin as Sadie.

  Chloë. Sadie’s sister.

  *

  ***

  ******

  ****

  *

  Just get me off this stage, Sadie prayed to her legs when the applause from the final speech ended.

  Her limbs took the hint and didn’t give out as she stood from her chair. Ignore the fact the audience is staring at you and the way their eyes make you feel very small, she told herself. Good.

  Now it’s just five paces to those velvet curtains. Make it there and you’re practically back to Strange Hall, she lied.

  She didn’t make it. A hand caught her above the elbow. Attached to it was a white-haired man.

  “Well, my dear, you’ve made this the most interesting Alumni Day in living memory.” Humor sparkled in Mr. Ashcroft’s eyes. Sitting next to him for the last hour and a half had taught her what a wicked sense of humor the retired teacher had. He’d ignored all the speeches and spent his time whispering scandalous stories about former students into her ear.

  Mr. Ashcroft had distracted her from thoughts of revealing her relationship with Gray to the audience. Bad thoughts. As much as it hurt her, she saw Gray’s point. She couldn’t fault him for wanting kids with superpowers in a dangerous world.

  Hell, there was even something admirable about a guy who put his family before his own feelings.

  No doubt Mr. Ashcroft had another scandalous story now. So, a Non walks into a school assembly... “Thanks. I guess.”

  “I’m going to find my replacement and see if I can make him blow his stack. He blew up enough of my chemistry equipment.” Mr. Ashcroft offered his arm. “Would you care to join me? One of the benefits of being old is meddling in other people’s affairs without fear of retaliation.”

  “Pippa would agree with you.” She sighed. “I should find my sister. I only hope my speech worked.”

  Deep vertical age lines appeared on either side of his smile. “Unless she’s made of stone, your speech worked. Perhaps I’ll see you next year?”

  She swallowed a rueful half-snort. “Oh, they’re never letting me on this stage again.”

  “Very true, very true.” Mr. Ashcroft chuckled, strolling across the darkened backstage, toward the door below the red emergency exit sign. “Well, I’m off to hunt Lorde Gray.”

  “Wait.” Her head spun with unconnected bits of information. “You taught Gray?” Sadie rushed to catch up to Mr. Ashcroft, pushing the stage curtain out of the way.

  But the person standing there wasn’t Mr. Ashcroft.

  “Hunt Lorde Gray?” the woman said. “Good luck to him. I tried it when I was younger. He told me I wasn’t his type. What eighteen-year-old boy tells a girl she isn’t his type?”

  “Chloë,” Sadie said.

  Her older sister scowled at her.

  Chloë Quinn stood several inches taller than Sadie, and even higher in her gleaming patent leather heels. To Sadie, Chloë had always seemed so put together. If she thought about it, Chloë’s blonde hair and emerald-green eyes made her feel, well, brown. So she didn’t think about it.

  Behind the Chanel armor was another Chloë, the one she remembered from her childhood. A little girl who got headaches if you grabbed her hand without warning her first. Then her sister hadcome to Strange Academy, she realized for the first time. They must have trained her here, taught her what she needed to know to use her gift. Little Sadie had cried when Chloë went away, not understanding why her older sister had to go. Her five-year-old brain knew one thing: If you were different, they sent you away.

  She blinked her suddenly hot eyes. That was when she had vowed to be like everyone else. To always fit in.

  Chloë rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t going to forgive you right away. I wanted you to grovel. It wasn’t about you calling me a faker at Pippa’s funeral, you know. It was about you calling me a faker since you were sixteen years old. But now your eye is twitching. Come here.”

  She fell into Chloë’s open arms. “I’m sorry.” She choked between words, her eyes hot with happy tears.

  After a while, they stepped apart, and she saw Chloë’s face was as leaky as her own.

  “Jerk,” Chloë said.

  She nodded. “I know.”

  Chloë pulled a sti
ff white handkerchief from the purse that matched her shoes and dabbed her mascara. Sadie wiped her own eyes with her hand.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Here.” Chloë handed her a tissue. “That may have been the best job of drinking the fat I’ve ever seen. Wish I’d brought a video camera.”

  “I’ll say it again whenever you want. Just call me.”

  Chloë smiled wryly. “Careful. I’ll hold you to it.”

  “How’s Moira? How’s Mom? How’s your work with the police? Tell me everything. I miss you guys so much.” She knew she was rambling but didn’t care.

  “Get your coat, twerp. Let’s go for a walk.”

  A glow of happiness warmed her at hearing the nickname that had plagued her childhood. They walked to the lobby together, catching up on little things. Sadie’s struggles with her classroom. Chloë’s recent cases.

  The April day was unseasonably warm and most of the adults walking the paths through the Quad left their coats open, while telling the student they’d come to visit to button up.

  “I haven’t seen this many adults in one place since September,” Sadie said.

  “There’s going to be a thunderstorm,” her sister said.

  Sadie blinked. “Uh, okay.”

  “Your niece told me to tell you about it.”

  “Should clear up the last of this snow.” What little was left was packed into dirty piles of melting ice.

  “I’m not joking. She can tell the weather twenty-three days in advance, anywhere in the world. I’m just a psychic—”

  Sadie snorted.

  Chloë smiled ruefully. “My Talent is pretty basic. But can you imagine having three weeks’ notice for a hurricane? Your niece will save hundreds of thousands of lives someday. She also sent you this.”

  She unfolded the paper Chloë handed her. It was waxy-stiff with enthusiastic crayon drawing.

  The dark scene on the paper seemed to suck her in. She lost awareness of walking down the path.

  Light blue teardrops fell from a deep blue sky. A jagged yellow thunderbolt split the page in half, pointing down to a stick figure lying on the ground. Whoever it was, she wore a triangle skirt and had a line of white hair at her temple. To her left was a smaller, dull-silver figure. Sadie didn’t know if the person was shorter than the girl lying on the ground, in the distance, or if Moira just needed to work on perspective.

  “Does it mean anything to you?” Chloë asked.

  She shrugged, but she couldn’t shrug off the dark mood the picture evoked. “She has your talent for art.”

  “I can only draw cryptic pictures of the past. She can draw the future.” Pride dripped from Chloë’s voice.

  “Sis, I love you, but if you ever use the words ‘just’ or ‘only’ about your superpowers again, I will slap you silly.”

  Chloë’s smile was brilliant. “You called me a faker at Pippa’s funeral.”

  “My world’s gotten bigger since then. And smaller.” She explained how Christian’s spell meant she could never cross Strange Academy’s magic circle without losing her memory.

  “Bastard,” Chloë spat out. “To think I thought he was cute.”

  She swallowed back her compulsion to tell Chloë about her own crush. “Hey, did you have a crush on every boy in your grade?”

  Chloë’s eyebrows pinched together. “Every boy in my grade?”

  “Christian. Gray.” Her sister lusting after Gray in her youth irritated Sadie more than she liked to admit.

  “No one told you.” Chloë’s smile had a snide edge to it. “I don’t know how to say this. Christian wasn’t in my grade. He was the principal.”

  “But he’s only thirty.”

  Chloë snorted. “He was then, too.”

  Sadie’s heart stopped. “So that explains how he knew Pippa when she was young. Is immortality his Talent?”

  “No one knows. No one asks.”

  “This is the kind of information I could have used in December,” Sadie said. Then she realized where Chloë had led her. “My God, Chloë, what are we doing here?”

  She had avoided the library. It gave her the creeps, like a cursed gray stone tomb. The roof had started to oxidize in green stripes, like liquid pouring down the slant, giving the impression that the whole building was melting.

  “You wanted me to visit the crime scene,” Chloë said. “But the police called it an accident.”

  “It couldn’t have been,” Sadie admitted. “The book that fell belonged on the bottom shelf.”

  “Then how did it fall hard enough to kill her? Some accident,” Chloë said. “And there’s something else. There’s a reason I didn’t come here until now. I was told not to, twerp.”

  Chloë drew a rectangle of paper out of her purse. The envelope was addressed to Chloë in Pippa’s familiar calligraphy. “You weren’t the only one to get a letter.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gray wasn’t sure he heard a knock on his door. He vaulted out of bed anyway, grabbing his silver Maglite from the nightstand. The lights had gone out an hour earlier due to the late-night thunderstorm pummeling Strange Hall. He’d been lying in bed counting seconds between lighting crashes and the thunder after. The worst of the storm was getting closer.

  He’d probably imagined the knock, but it might be trouble. Sadie’s show this afternoon had tied him up in knots; he could use a little trouble.

  Why hadn’t she told everyone about them? It was her chance to break his engagement, and she hadn’t taken it. Maybe she didn’t want to. His stress knot pulsed like a neon light.

  His hand was on the doorknob when the second knock came. He opened it as lightning lit up the hallway.

  He jumped when he saw the seven-foot tall demon glowing white in his doorway. Adrenaline shot through his veins. Not a single potion on you, Dumbass.

  “Gray,” the demon said.

  He lowered the spot of his flashlight into an unflinching human face—and felt like an idiot.

  “Sadie.” And Thalia. The marble goddess standing behind her seemed to grin more than usual.

  Forgetting the haunted statue’s dumb joke, he pulled Sadie inside before anyone saw them together.

  Then the door shut on the world.

  He stepped closer to kiss her, to strip off her black kimono and make love to her until she forgot their fight, but she folded her arms across her chest.

  He’d never seen her like this before. Cold and distant. In some kind of trance. She stood perfectly still, her eyes half-lidded. The light from his flashlight illuminated a face as white as Thalia’s, pink lips drained and bloodless. Oddest of all, her eye twitched in slow motion.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did something happen with your sister?”

  “Yes.” She looked away, as if she didn’t want to see him. “Something happened with my sister.”

  “No one is worth humiliating yourself in public.”

  Another mirthless laugh. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”

  “Don’t twist my words.” He barely got the sentence out through his gritted teeth.

  “Words, words, words,” she said. “No more words.”

  He shone the flashlight in her face. “Are you drunk?”

  “If you don’t like words anymore, how about a picture?” Sadie dipped into her kimono pocket and brought out a paper.

  When he touched it, his hand tingled. Magic? Why would Sadie have it? He focused his flashlight on the picture.

  The drawing leapt from the page. It wasn’t a picture, it was a moment frozen in time. He could have put out his hand and pulled the pieces off the game board. The round plastic disks would have felt cold between his fingers.

  “Tiddlywinks?” he said. “In black and white.”

  “Pippa’s tiddlywinks.” With his flashlight focused on the page, Sadie’s voice wafted out of the darkness. “In gray. Remember playing with them the Christmas you spent with her?”

  His stress knot broke into painful fractures, like a glass bottle thrown again
st the wall. He’d never told anyone about that, and he knew Pippa wouldn’t have said anything. So how could she have possibly found out?

  He strove for a cool tone, but it came out with an edge of desperation. “How do you know about that?”

  “Gray.” There was no emotion in her voice, no warmth in her eyes. “Why did you kill Pippa?”

  “Oh God.” The bottom dropped out of his world. A wave of nausea pitched over him.

  She knew. She reached to her neck and wrenched the cords of the gris-gris off. She dropped it on the floor, where it hit with a plop.

  “Sadie.” He stepped toward her. She stepped back.

  He dropped his hands in resignation. His whole body seemed to deflate. He walked to his dining room table and collapsed on one of the chairs, staring at the floor between his feet.

  She stood over him, her face in darkness, unreadable. The silence was an invisible wall between them.

  “It’s my fault she’s dead,” he said.

  A smaller voice emerged from the darkness. “Uncle Gray?”

  Lightning struck, showing him Sadie’s back, turned on him, and his nephew’s wide-eyed face.

  Sterling. Dear God, he’d heard. He felt the blood drain from his face as chill horror crept over him. Sterling.

  By the time he heard the thunder peal, Gray was alone.

  *

  ***

  ******

  ****

  *

  Sadie’s shoulder banged into the solid oak of the Strange Hall doors. A sickening thud accompanied flinch-worthy pain shooting straight into her bone. But the door gave and she squeezed through. She threw herself into the deafening thunderstorm after Sterling, who had taken off at a sprint as soon as he'd heard his uncle's words.

  The rain instantly drenched her, gluing her hair to her head and slicking her robe to her legs. Why hadn’t she worn something more substantial to confront her aunt’s murderer—like a full suit of armor? Needles of water jabbed into her. Water pounded her skull, echoing in her brain. Chill wind whistled by her ears, drowning out other sounds.