Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance)

by Wilde, Teresa

  Well, I couldn’t drink legally for another five years, and pork wasn’t my favorite. My fighting skills consisted of giving my twin brothers double-headlock noogies, so I might have an adjustment period. Maybe I could get used to it. I admit the idea of a hall full of hot warriors had some appeal, as long as they showered.

  “—and you will have the honor of serving at their feet,” Brunnhilde finished.

  I blinked at her for a while, waiting for her to clap me on the back and let me in on the joke. The straight line of her mouth never twitched upward.

  A vision of eternity stretched before me. My future set in stone. Forever. Nothing would cease, nothing would end.

  And I was a beer wench.

  “Is it too late to convert to Hinduism?” I asked.

  “Enough!” Brunnhilde’s cry reverberated down the corridor of skyscrapers. I imagined windows breaking all the way over to State Street. “You’ll go to the hall of Asgaard. But I can’t take you there.”

  “Whew,” I said, a little relieved. “Anywhere else. Really.”

  Brunnhilde stuck out her chiseled jaw. “I cannot take you there yet. I have forgotten my pen.”

  Two: Carpe Crastinum

  Before I could ask Brunnhilde why she needed a pen, an ambulance pulled up, sirens screaming over the hushed whispers of the crowd.

  “We go,” Brunnhilde said. “Before you’re tempted to—”

  “No.” Something in the area of my middle clenched. “Maybe they’ll save me.”

  Brunnhilde pursed her lips. “They won’t.”

  “They could,” I insisted.

  The circle of gawkers parted to let the paramedics through. Maybe I had time. I’d only been dead for ten minutes. I felt a vague achy sensation I didn’t have words for and could only guess was hope building up in my heart—well, not my heart, I suppose. Whatever ghostly organ moved my emotions around now.

  “Your name was at the top of my list, Gunilla Merit Boatman. You won’t live. There’s danger in thinking otherwise.”

  I ignored her. “Maybe I’m just in a coma.”

  The EMS guys carried themselves with professional urgency as they knelt by my side and focused on me. Yes, they could save me, I decided. I felt a supernatural pull toward the body lying on the pavement. I should stay with it. That was my body. That was me.

  “Seldom are the cows jumping in the apple trees to snatch pears,” she informed me. I figured she meant it was impossible for them to bring me back. “You may choose to remain. But I warn you—”

  “Shhhh. They’re going to save me. I know they will.”

  Brunnhilde’s spear rattled against her massive shield, but I concentrated my—I don’t know…my energy, my chi?—on reaching toward my body. I had to find a link to my old self, something I could hang on to at any cost.

  The red-haired EMS guy started CPR chest compressions, while the one with the Celtic knot tattoo around his arm whipped out a stethoscope and pressed the instrument to my wrist. I knelt beside Celtic Knot, watching with fascination as he worked. Prickles of sweat appeared on his forehead.

  When I thought I saw a tiny hint of a breath lifting my ribcage, I felt a thrill of power.

  “They won’t save you.” Brunnhilde’s voice turned soft. “We must go. This is your chance to leave. If you stay, you’ll remain tied to this life forever. You will never know your After.”

  Forever. Her speech finally sank in. “If I stay and they don’t save me, I become a ghost?”

  “You may walk the paths of the living if you please. But you’re dead and will remain so.”

  No, she had to be wrong. The EMS guys worked until their armpits grew dark with the sweat of it. As long as they fought, I had to fight with them.

  There was so much I hadn’t done. Too many things to count.

  Italy. I’d always wanted to go to Rome, ever since Farfar and I watched Roman Holiday together. I wanted to wear big sunglasses and a scarf and order pasta at a sidewalk café near the Spanish Steps before jumping on my vintage Vespa to zoom through cobblestone streets with the sun on my face.

  I’d even thought about taking Italian at the University of Illinois. But I’d worked so hard to graduate early, and what did you do with a degree in Italian once the holiday was over? No, too risky.

  Instead, I’d registered for economics with a statistics minor from the University of Chicago, maybe some sociology on the side. I was due to start this fall. My studies were targeted directly at a job in the insurance industry. More practical. A degree to make sure I’d never end up an unemployed drain on Mom.

  I’d stayed home from the prom to study project management. My best friend Ami had begged me to go. She’d brought a dress to my house, night-black with a single sophisticated ruffle waterfalling from the vee of the bodice. I’d refused to try it on.

  That was a couple of months ago. Since then, she'd only called once. Last week she'd left a message. I'd been too nose-down in my job to call her back. Now I never would.

  I'd never do a lot of things. I thought could learn Italian after I'd accomplished my goals. Every chance I'd ever had to seize the day, I'd put off, telling myself I'd seize tomorrow.

  If I went with the Brunnhilde clone, I’d close the door on those deferred dreams. On the upside, Valhalla beat spending eternity as a ghost in capris with striped socks and sneakers.

  Something glinted at me, bright against the asphalt. A sunshine-gold chain snaked across my body’s sunken chest and linked into the divot in my collarbone. I put my hand to my ghostly neck; of course the other end of the chain led there. Its coldness numbed my hand.

  The delicate thing linked me to my body. Brunnhilde lowered the massive axe-topped spear she carried and slipped the blade under the chain, ready to cut. One twist of her weapon would sever my last tie to the material world. Panic clenched inside me. Eternity in Valhalla. No going back. Never seeing my family again.

  No more Tic Tacs.

  “Decide,” she said.

  I hesitated. Brunnhilde didn’t.

  She let the chain fall off the axe blade—intact—and turned away. She whipped the spear back and flung it, flexing her brawny bicep. Just when I thought it would split the head of a granny clutching a purse covered with plastic daisies, the spear hit an invisible something and stuck there, vibrating in mid-air. Granny didn’t even notice, adjusting her glasses as she shuffled toward the accident.

  Brunnhilde grabbed the end of her weapon and pulled downward. Space carved open on the blade of the axe, and I saw a glimpse of light and movement that didn’t fit the Chicago cityscape.

  Another dimension... or something. Maybe Valhalla? Was I seeing the secret of the universe—what happens to us after we die?

  I got a little rush from knowing I could answer the question people had asked for thousands of years. And yet... I’d decided to stay here.

  The chain connecting me to my corpse sparkled in the sunlight, clean and shiny. The paramedics hadn’t stopped; the redhead had stuck in an IV, and performing CPR had slicked the tattooed guy’s hands with red. But my body’s lips had turned a bloodless grey-blue.

  Brunnhilde was right. I was dead. Now, I’d spend forever shackled to my lifeless body. The gold chain no longer felt like a lifeline—more like an anchor weighing me down.

  Without warning, an intense pressure washed over me. I felt compressed, like an eardrum in a plane losing altitude fast.

  I scanned the streets. Everywhere I saw sunshine and light, and people hustling back to the office. But a strange sensation slithered over me, like the build-up of background music in a scary movie just before the killer jumps out.

  A noiseless rumble began somewhere underneath me, deep below the asphalt of the Chicago streets. The pressure intensified, squeezing me in a fist. I hugged myself, but I might as well have been hugging air.

  A hot wind blew, seeming to swirl around me like a twister. I didn’t feel the heat on the skin I no longer had, but deep inside the core of my being. The intensity
of the sensation made me tremble inside.

  Three blocks down South Michigan, an incongruous green-bronze pebbled mountain oozed up from the ground. It superimposed itself over the street and the office blocks, as well as the cars being rerouted around my corpse.

  The supernatural mountain flicked open. It wasn’t a mountain at all. It was a massive inhuman eye, copper and dark gold, with a slit black pupil as tall as me. What I'd though were pebbles was really the mottled olive skin of a lizardy eyelid.

  Steadily, the eye steered closer, like an alligator under water stalking a hapless duck.

  The air swirling around me turned into rush of wind blowing toward the eye, trying to draw me along.

  I screamed like a horror movie heroine.

  No one noticed. No one saw the eyeball but me—meaning the eyeball had shown up to look at me. I had no clue why, but as sure as I was dead, I did not want to that thing looking at me.

  The small part of my mind not paralyzed with terror realized eyes are attached to mouths. Usually with teeth. I had to get out of there, even if it meant—gulp—Valhalla.

  “Wait!” I yelled to Brunnhilde.

  She didn’t hear. She pulled each side of the rip she’d made in reality, wrenching the hole open. I shouted again, with no more luck. She stepped halfway through the wormhole and her leg disappeared.

  Something inside me, where my stomach used to be, tightened up. The eye closed in, covering a block in an instant. And I knew it would be unhealthy to stick around until it arrived. But the chain still shackled me to my body.

  I tried to breathe deeply to steel myself for what I had to do. Then I remembered I didn’t have lungs anymore.

  The back of Brunnhilde’s iron helmet ducked into the portal. My heart would have been tripping, if I’d had one. No way would I get to her in time unless I moved my butt. Probably not even then.

  Trying not to think about the consequences of this bad, bad idea, I bent down, planted my foot on the golden chain and stood up as fast as I could.

  It snapped so easily, my last tie to life on Earth. A few links tinkled toward the ground, but I didn’t have time to watch them fall. I took off at a run in the direction I’d last seen the Viking.

  She’d disappeared, except for a gold braid hanging suspended in the air. Calling up everything I’d learned from Miss Wilson’s gym class in tenth grade—the last time I’d done anything athletic—I made a leap for the shank of hair slipping through the portal. My finger closed around the braid and held on for dear, er, life.

  My entire being—I can’t call it my “body”—prickled as I flew away from everything I’d ever known, straight toward the Other Side.

  Buy Over my Dead Body now.

  About the Author

  Teresa Wilde wrote her first novel in twelfth grade—a craptastic plot-hole-ridden mystery she wrote after reading too much Agatha Christie.

  She wrote her second novel in creative writing class in university. It was a YA about a bridesmaid. Everyone else in the group tried to write serial killer novels. She was the only one who finished the assignment. She got a 95.

  After that, she forgot she was a writer for a while and remembered again later. Writing has taken her some amazing places, including Montréal, Ecuador and Regency England.

  Strange Academy is her third first novel.

  She's currently working on a Regency Urban Fantasy and a new sheikh story, as Teresa Morgan.

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  Copyright 2012, Teresa Wilde