Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance)

by Wilde, Teresa

  He was about to slip into the hallway when someone slammed the door back on its hinges. Instinct had him reaching into his jacket pocket for a defensive potion, taking a crouching stance.

  A redheaded teen girl stalked into the room, waving a piece of Strange Academy stationery. “You did this.”

  “Regina.” Sadie’s voice dripped cold calm. “You’ve made bad choices all year. Now you have to pay for them.”

  “You should have got me an extension for Mr. Day’s paper. This is your fault.” Regina’s lips turned back in a snarl. His senses went on high alert. He inched closer to Sadie.

  “Gotten me,” Sadie corrected, crossing her arms and standing her ground. “You should have gotten me an extension. I promise that if you morph in order to threaten me, you will be suspended.”

  Regina stepped closer. So did Gray.

  Sadie softened her voice. “Regina, I know you can do better than this.”

  Regina’s snarl trembled. Her fierce eyes shut, squeezing out tears. “Everything’s changing all the time. I can’t keep up. Everyone else knows who they are, but I don’t.”

  The door to the hallway slid shut. The breeze again.

  Sadie put her arm across Regina’s shoulders and sat her down at the teacher’s desk. “You’re young. You don’t have to know who you are yet. You only have to know you’re capable of great things. You don’t have to actually do the great things yet, but you have to do your homework.”

  Regina hung her head in her hands, crushing the letter against her skull.

  Watching Sadie made his chest hurt. She cared for these kids, even ones who had nearly assaulted her. No matter what she thought, she belonged here.

  In fact, he could no longer imagine Strange Academy without her.

  “Have you seen Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Sadie asked.

  “Uh, ee-yes.” Regina narrowed her eyes, unsure where Sadie was headed with this. He shared the sentiment.

  “Indiana Jones loses every fistfight. But every time he loses, he gets up again.” Sadie petted Regina’s wavy red hair. “The true test of being a hero is what you do when you lose. You lost this one, Regina. What will you do about it?”

  “Get back up again?” Regina asked, desperate for approval.

  “Don’t ask me.” Sadie shrugged. “It’s your choice.”

  Regina’s lips hardened to a determined line. “Miss Strange, will you be my faculty advisor next year?”

  Both he and Sadie blinked in surprise. Sadie recovered first. “I don’t know if I’ll be advising next year.”

  Regina hung on the edge of her seat as Sadie slid open her desk drawer and took out a thin yellow paperback.

  “Rainer Maria Rilke,” Sadie said. “Letters to a Young Poet. Read it. When you’re finished, if you still want me as your advisor, write a letter to Dr. Cross. He’ll decide.”

  After Regina left, he waited for Sadie to turn away. When she did, he removed the invisibility spell. He opened and shut the door. Sadie turned, her face brightening.

  “Gray.” The iceberg tip of desire in her voice made him want to cross the room and lift her off her feet.

  “What’s with Regina?” He watched her sweetheart ass as she put books on the low shelves under the bank of windows.

  “Something you want to say, Gray? Made any life-altering decisions?”

  Her bizarre questions sent him reeling. They came out of the blue, strange non-sequiturs, yet on another level, he felt he should know what she was talking about. “Altering whose life?”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. When she spoke again, the brightness was gone from her voice. “Regina’s being held back. I have something for you.” She replaced the last book, then went to her desk and opened the drawer. She rummaged around and produced a bottle of black liquid. “It’s a bad luck potion.”

  “My God, Sadie.” Bad luck potions were the nitroglycerin of spells, liable to detonate with the slightest provocation. Any idiot with a chemistry set could make one, and you’d have to be an idiot to do it. She just stood there, vial in hand, unaware of the danger.

  “What?” She shook the spell slightly. “Just take it.”

  “Shhh.” He pulled a silver silk handkerchief out of his inside pocket and approached the potion with all the care of a cop in an explosives disposal unit. The mystic runes woven into the cloth would disable the potion if he could just...

  Only after he wrapped the silk around Sadie’s hand, gingerly extracted the time bomb and placed the parcel on the desk to let the runes do their job did he let himself breathe.

  “Sadie, you don’t have any idea what could have happened.”

  She picked an apple off her desk and sank her white teeth into flesh that crunched as she chewed. “I’ve encountered a bad luck spell before.”

  He wanted to rip into her when he noticed a black spot marring the fruit. Instead, he ripped the apple from her hand. “What are you doing? Didn’t you see this? It’s a choking spell.”

  “Well,” she said calmly. “I wasn’t going to eat that part.”

  He refrained from throttling her. “Sadie, I don’t want to make you panic, but I think someone’s trying to hurt you. These aren’t accidents. They can’t be.”

  “No kidding.” She turned and hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on her laptop. “I’ll be fine as long as I’m not alone with one particular student. I can take care of myself.”

  He plopped himself into her desk chair. It seemed she could. She didn’t need him. That was good, right? “There’s something different about you.”

  She froze in the middle of closing her laptop screen. “What do you think it is?”

  “You handle the kids like a pro. Like Pippa.”

  “Someone once told me there should be a law against comparing me to her. She was a witch, after all.” Sadie had the same expectant look in her eyes she’d had when she asked Gray about the life-altering decision. She wanted something from him and he had no clue what it was.

  “The kids love you,” he said. “I never thought a Non—”

  Before he could finish, she slammed her laptop shut so hard it made him flinch. “Hey, don’t you have to love Mr. Laptop?” he asked.

  She forced a smile. “Mr. Laptop and I are having a spat.”

  “Maybe Mr. Laptop is really bad with the emotional stuff and has no clue what he did wrong,” He ran his hand up her spine. His throat caught at the sensation of the silky material of her black blouse stuck to skin moist from the day’s heat. Touching her was risky. Someone could see them together. It would ruin everything. Wouldn’t it?

  As Sadie’s back arched under his hand, ruin was looking pretty good to him. Fascinated by the velvet softness of her hair on the back of his hand as he caressed her neck, he forgot all the reasons they couldn’t be together.

  Then chalk motes in a shaft of afternoon light beaming onto Sterling’s desk caught his eye, reminding him of his obligation to the Gray House.

  He couldn’t offer her his life, so he gave her the next best thing. “Sadie, I love you.”

  “Come to me tonight,” she whispered.

  His fingers on her neck tightened from a touch to a grip. He twisted her head to look at him. “Ow,” she said. “Stop it.”

  He dropped his hand. “I tell you I love you and you offer me sex.”

  Her face blanked, showing no emotion. It made his tongue go thick in his mouth. Love, he could take. And anger. But not this nothingness.

  “Would you like to hear a story?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Once, a woman loved a man who was planning to leave her. Every day she begged him to stay, putting a little piece of her soul in her words. After a while, the villagers noticed they could see through her body. You are disappearing, they said to her. Don’t put your soul in your words anymore, they told her, but she didn’t stop. He left. She disappeared. The end.”

  He flinched, seeing through the symbolism. “I like the Indiana Jones story better.”

  Sadie leaned on the edge of the desk, not touc
hing him. The white lock in her hair fell forward, a vanilla band against her chocolate hair. She spoke in a voice edged with pain. “You set the rules. ‘Nothing changes,’ you said.”

  “I can’t stay.” His gut writhed, a serpent inside him trying to eat its own tail.

  “I didn’t ask you to. And I won’t beg.” Her slim fingers touched his temple in an intimate gesture between lovers. He almost grabbed her hand, but he was afraid if he did, he’d never let it go. She continued. “Gray, someone told me I’d learn something about you if I asked your name. I know it’s not ‘Lorde with an e on the end.’ That’s your title.”

  He pulled his international driver’s license out of his Gucci wallet, a birthday gift from April. He handed it to Sadie.

  She blinked at it. “Damn. Your name really is Lorde with an ‘e’ on the end. Why does everyone use your full name?”

  “I’ll be lord of the Gray House one day. They’re just anticipating the title. Could have been worse. My brother got ‘Dominus.’” He shrugged. “What did you learn? That I’m telling the truth?”

  Sadie stared at the license. “Your family didn’t bother to give you a name. You’re just a role for them, aren’t you? You fill a space and that’s it.”

  His jaw clenched. He was important, he wanted to tell her. Somehow, it didn’t come out.

  She laughed without humor. “I thought you had a life of privilege. But I’m more privileged than you’ll ever be.”

  *

  ***

  ******

  ****

  *

  “Pippa, I’m losing my faith in him,” Sadie leaned back against the scarlet pillows of her window seat. Monday through Thursday, the Quad was populated with blue-gray tartan, but the dress code was lifted on casual Fridays and weekends. The spectacular June Saturday had sprinkled dozens of students and teachers across campus like decorations on a birthday cake. The Senior Coven was having a witchy picnic near the bell in the center of campus. A Frisbee hurtled toward the head of a goofy-looking boy walking the path with his nose stuck in a thick text, then spontaneously fell at his feet, as if hitting an invisible wall. As he stared at it in confusion, a girl ran up and collected the Frisbee, tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling.

  But her attention drifted to the figures descending the Lost Arts Building steps. The tall one dressed in gray flipped on a pair of sunglasses. The black hair of the shorter one ruffled in the same breeze that blew through Sadie’s window.

  “All you have to do is tell him.” Pippa sounded like a cartoon devil sitting on her shoulder. “Everything would be perfect. Happily ever after. Why haven’t you told him already, instead of sitting here like the Lady of Shalott?”

  “’I’m half sick of shadows,’” she quoted Tennyson. “If I tell him, I’ll always wonder whether he would have married her instead of me. I want Sadie to be good enough for him. I don’t want to have to be MetaSadie.”

  “MetaSadie. Sounds like a superheroine.” Pippa indicated the graphic novel in Sadie’s hand.

  Sadie smiled and put the issue of Witchblade back in its plastic sleeve with the acid-free cardboard. As an undergrad, she’d eaten mac and cheese for weeks to save money for comics. Some had gone up in value, but even at her poorest, she couldn’t part with a single one.

  “What would MetaSadie do, Aunt Pippa? I adore your company, but seeing ghosts isn’t a really useful superpower.”

  “Is that what you think your Talent is? Then how do you explain the fact that Sterling and Argent, identical twins, look completely different to you? No one else can tell them apart.” Before she could come up with an explanation for that one, Pippa’s head jerked up. “I have to go.”

  Then she was gone. But where? Sadie’s speculation was interrupted by a rap at her door.

  She opened the door to Jewel Jones, flushed pink under her white-blonde hair. Her ice-blue eyes were rimmed with red.

  “Sadie.” Her lower lip trembled. “I burned Pippa’s letter.”

  She froze on the spot. No wonder Jewel hadn’t given it back. Just for an instant, she waited to let the pain of betrayal wash over her, but it didn’t come. Pippa’s letter, which had seemed so important, the whole impetus that had brought her to Strange Academy, that had changed her life. It seemed that the life was far more important than the object. And Jewel was more important than the letter.

  “A couple of weeks ago I would have been bothered, but dying gives you a new perspective on material things,” she told Jewel, leaving out the part about her new powers and the fact that she was having regular conversations with the deceased. “Iced tea?”

  A few minutes later, they sat at the round dining table sipping cold, sweet tea. Misery hovered around Jewel.

  “Why did you burn the letter?” Sadie asked.

  Jewel stared into the black-rimmed tumbler of iced tea. “Because she didn’t write me one.”

  The thought of a witch being jealous of the ignorant, willfully blind, fish out of water who had arrived at Strange Academy in November made Sadie laugh aloud.

  “I want to help these children the way she helped me,” Jewel said. “But it’s not me, is it? It’s you. Since the night of the storm, you’ve changed. You faced death.”

  Great, she thought. Jewel can see the change, but Gray can’t. “I see things more clearly now. You’re not Pippa. Don’t spend the rest of your life trying to be someone you’re not. She didn’t write you a letter because you don’t need one. You’re not Pippa’s apprentice anymore. It’s graduation day.”

  Jewel sniffed. “I should leave Strange Academy?”

  “Can you stay here and not live in Pippa’s shadow?”

  Jewel shot up from the table so fast she nearly knocked her head on the amber-teardrop lamp. “I have to think about this. I’m sorry I burned your letter.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Pippa left me lots of things.”

  *

  ***

  ******

  ****

  *

  Two hours later, Sadie answered another knock on her door. William Sweetwater, escorting a UPS guy with a letter.

  After she read the letter, she packed her suitcase.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Late-afternoon rain sheeted down the car windows, blurring Sadie’s view of the trees towering over narrow laneway leading away from Strange Academy. The storm had come on suddenly, forcing her to fight through a crowd of sopping students coming in the Strange Hall doors as she tried to go out.

  She closed her eyes and slumped her forehead on the steering wheel. After seven months of abandonment, her ancient box-on-wheels Jetta had started with a single turn of the key. It was almost magical.

  “Hello, Sadie.”

  She wasn’t surprised by the voice speaking from her passenger’s seat. But she was surprised it was male. “Hello, Quinlan. I expected Pippa.”

  “Since I founded this place in 1318, as the sign you’ve been staring at for two hours says, I have seniority.”

  “There’s no plaque for the sign,” she said distractedly.

  “By the way, your first day, in Dr. Cross’s office, I was the one who made you hear through the door. I have some power when I’m around my portrait.”

  “You wanted me to hear Gray’s insults?”

  Quinlan was in senior citizen mode, appearing seventy years old, but spry for his age. Not hard when your real age was ten times more.

  “She wanted you to fall in love with him. I just wanted you to stick around. I know you pretty well, and I figured if you knew someone didn’t want you here, you’d stay. It worked, didn’t it?” Quinlan’s eyebrows came together in concern. “But now that everyone wants you here, you’re sitting in your car with the engine off, looking at the Strange Academy sign. I assume you remember that if you drive past it, you’ll forget everything.”

  “I e-mailed Chloë an apology. My only regret is I won’t remember who she really is.” She had other regrets, too. Leaving Carmina, Regina, Nikkos, Henry,
Sterling. A list of regrets. She'd thought about trying to send herself some notes about what she'd learned at the academy, but no doubt her email was being filtered and the Metas would find a way to go through her stuff when she left. They were superheroes after all.

  She wouldn’t regret leaving Gray. A hole in her mind was better than a hole in her heart.

  “Sadie, none of us saw the letter the UPS guy brought you.”

  She laughed through her dark mood. “Even ghosts have their blind spots.” She reached for the business envelope sitting on top of her hard-sided powder-blue luggage on the back seat. As she unfolded the thick cream paper for Quinlan, she ran her finger over the embossed tower in the golden seal.

  “‘The University of Copenhagen offers you a position to pursue your Doctorate of Literature.’ And a note from the president about how interesting he found your master’s thesis. Probably means they’ll offer you a professorship. That’s terrif—” Quinlan’s face fell as he realized the implications. “Oh.”

  “It’s everything I’ve ever wanted,” she told him.

  “Then why have you been sitting here for two hours waiting for someone to talk you out of it?”

  “How can I stay here?” She rubbed at the growing headache in her temples. As the rain outside subsided, the pain built. “He’s everywhere I look. Even the damn photocopier will remind me of him. I’m not strong enough to stay and I’m not strong enough to leave. Why can’t I just have some self-respect and turn that key again?”

  The air around Quinlan shivered. The old man with gold-flecked eyes turned into a five-year-old kid with gold-flecked eyes. “Maybe this isn’t about self-respect. Being a university prof seems empty next to teaching these kids, doesn’t it?”

  “Including Gray’s kid.”

  “Okay, then leave.” Little Quin’s shoulders sagged comically as he gave a great adult sigh. “But before you do, there’s something you should know. About Sterling.”