Smoke and Mist (The Academy Book 1)

by Kate Hall

  Another sob breaks out of Sarah, and the lack of air makes her choke. This time, when she heaves, nothing comes out of her. She wishes she could stop crying, but she’s in so much pain that she can’t stand it, and her death is going to be terrible. Nobody is coming to save her.

  She can’t stop thinking about it. The pain that she’ll feel when Helen carves those ghastly symbols into her flesh, the stinging of knowing that nobody is coming to save her. It takes a few minutes for her to sense that she’s not alone—not just in the van, Helen’s predatory essence emanating from the front seat.

  This in her head. There’s something else there, just the hint of the unfamiliar. It’s like how she felt when the dragon in the forest called to her, or Hawthorne at the zoo, or the unicorn in the woods, or even Arthur. This one, though, is more subtle. Quieter, somehow. Focused.

  Human.

  Once she snags its presence, she focuses on it, away from the dull pain in her muscles, from the cold metal floor, from the pool of fluids that she may never be able to get away from. She moves toward it, picturing herself holding a red thread to the source. The further she walks along that thread, the less she can hear the highway passing beneath her, and the more the pain fades.

  She walks until she’s completely enveloped in the darkness, where nothing can hurt her. She turns to look back where she came from, and the thread pulses with a heartbeat—her heartbeat, grounding her to her body—all the way back and back and back into the darkness. When she faces forward again, Elizabeth is standing only a few feet away. Close enough to touch.

  “Sarah,” she says, her voice quiet, not a whisper, but a distant call even though she’s right here. It’s eerie, like listening to a horror movie from the other room. “I need you to open your eyes.”

  And, because Elizabeth tells her to, she can. When she forces her eyes open, she can see everything around her once again. Her senses are back full force, but that means the pain has returned, every ounce of it beating through her body. She forces herself to a sitting position, just enough that she can see out the passenger window. All she has to do is find some sign that indicates where she’s being taken. Anything that can be used to find her.

  In the distance, flying so far away that she only spots it when it passes in front of the moon, is a dragon.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Gabby

  WITHIN MOMENTS OF DISCOVERING SARAH’S disappearance, Gabby is helping set up a scrying bowl on the open floor of the newer living room. Along with police, Alex and Mark are searching the forest for any sign of her, casting spell after spell in an effort to track her. They’re supposed to call when they get anything, even a hint of where she could have been. So far, nothing.

  She fills a deep wooden bowl with a thick, dark liquid that Elizabeth has in her closet. “Are you sure this is safe?” Gabby asks. Her voice shakes despite herself. Scrying is something that requires a lot of skill—it’s banned from being taught to anybody under the age of twenty-one.

  Elizabeth ties her hair up in a loose bun. Wearing holey sweatpants and a workout tee, she doesn’t look like a psychic about to perform a spell—if anything, she looks like an Instagram star preparing a gross type of facial soup in her pajamas. “Relatively.” The liquid sloshes around as she moves it closer to her. “I mean, so long as I’m grounded, my soul shouldn’t wander too far to come back.”

  That is not even a little bit reassuring.

  There are no other options. Everyone else had been killed without anybody noticing, and Gabby had been targeted in her bathroom with her parents closeby. The police shouting spells into the woods will do nothing unless their plan is to find Sarah’s body after she’s been killed.

  After giving Elizabeth a leather watch strap to bite down on, Gabby takes her hands and closes her eyes.

  “Just a warning,” Elizabeth says, “I can’t control a lot of what’s about to happen. You might put up a shield. Just in case.” She doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t explain what could happen.

  “But you’ve done this before? Properly?” When she shrugs noncommittally instead of a reply, Gabby mumbles a spell for a physical shield as well as a mental one. Better to be safe.

  Alex comes in, the door clicking shut behind him. His comforting campfire scent is immediately recognizable, although now it’s mixed with the cool pine of the forest. “Sit,” Elizabeth says. “And listen hard.”

  “Listen? For what?”

  But before he’s even finished asking, Elizabeth’s emotions snap right out of Gabby. They’re just gone. As if she isn’t even there. Gabby opens her eyes to make sure she is really holding Elizabeth’s hands. The sight before her sends a chill down her spine. Warm, electric Elizabeth is near unrecognizable, her eyes open, pupils completely dilated—Gabby can’t see a trace of her green irises. Her jaw is slack, but the rest of her body is rigid as a board.

  Alex joins them on the floor, his stress driving into Gabby’s mind. She grits her teeth, and he rests a hand over Elizabeth’s, his eyes fluttering shut.

  “Tell me what you hear,” Gabby says, but her voice is too spooky for her liking, like they’re in a horror movie. Someone always dies in those. She clears her mind of all thoughts about death.

  The room is silent for what feels like an eternity, but the clock on the dresser only ticks thirty seconds. Like he’s been struck by lightning, Alex jolts up, his hand still clutching Elizabeth’s. “I see her,” he whispers.

  At that moment, Mark walks in the room, his hair ruffled and clothing scuffed with mud and thorns. “What do we know?”

  Alex’s voice is distant. He’s talking to them, but not looking at anyone. His eyes flick behind his lids. “She found her. We have to go. Now.” He speaks the words to a tracking spell over and over—seven times total.

  Mark carries Elizabeth outside, and, although the SUV is bigger, he puts her in the passenger seat of the much faster Pontiac. Alex slides in lithely behind her, so Gabby scoots behind the driver’s seat.

  An officer stands in front of their car, holding a hand up. He can’t be more than twenty-two, and his eyes betray his fear. “We can’t let you leave until we’ve searched the premises,” he says, his voice shaking.

  “Move or I will move you,” Mark replies, his voice deeper and more serious than it’s ever been. Gabby can’t imagine that he can actually do anything about the officer. Nobody would choose to be a math teacher when they could pick something magical. He revs his engine. Thunder crashes overhead, although it isn’t raining. “Tell your captain to do whatever he can to get us out of the city as fast as possible.” A blue spark leaps out of his fingers, and Gabby’s eyes widen.

  The cloud cover has begun to dissipate, the full moon just visible through the trees. Still, lightning crashes into the wide oak tree that hovers over the yard. The officer scrambles out of the way, and the car peels out of the driveway, slamming Gabby against the back of the seat.

  “I’ll be in trouble for that later,” Mark comments, and Gabby slams against the side when he turns out of the driveway whilst going far too fast.

  Alex mumbles directions, his fingers digging into Elizabeth’s shoulder. He curses every time they make a wrong turn, and Gabby braces herself along the backseat. How Mark hears Alex over the roar of the engine is beyond her, but he doesn’t take any turns that Alex doesn’t tell him to.

  The interstate is practically empty this late, so the car flies along the dark lanes.

  “A long drive home,” Alex mumbles. “She said it’s a long drive home. What does that mean?” It seems like he’s speaking to himself, and Mark ignores everything he’s saying. Alex’s fingers nervously snap on his free hand, pulling up a flame as though he’s clicking a lighter. If she’s not careful, Gabby will get burned.

  In that moment, she has an epiphany. She Googles Helen Jackson on her phone, but, for the first time since they’ve started researching, she makes sure to subtract the word “missing” or “wanted” from the results.

  Instead of
hundreds of news articles from the past few weeks and a few from six years ago, only a couple sites come up. The main one is a social media page that has been inactive for years. Jackson Equine Training Center. The logo is the silhouette of a unicorn, its head held high and proud, a spiral horn protruding from its forehead. When she clicks it, the last post sends her heart racing.

  The photo is a selfie of a woman with wild red hair and a huge grin, her arm around a ten-year-old girl. The child is unmistakable—Sarah. She was so small, so carefree. Completely different than the anxiety-ridden teen that Gabby knows now.

  Can’t wait for my favorite niece to come visit! I’m sure she’ll be a better trainer than me when she’s older!

  She clicks the About section, and there, in tiny plain letters, is an address in Arkansas a few hundred miles away. She pulls it up in her phone’s GPS, and when Alex’s next instruction confirms her suspicions, she speaks up.

  “I know where she’s taking her.”

  Elizabeth still stares off into space, her body not reacting to any of the movements of the car, but Alex gets even more tense.

  “We have to hurry,” he whispers, his eyebrows bunching. Mark speeds up, the needle climbing into the triple digits. When they aren’t making a wrong turn every twenty miles, they get further a lot faster. Somehow, nobody pulls them over. Gabby whispers a thanks to the police captain, although there’s no way he can hear her.

  When the tank runs empty, Mark is hesitant to stop, but they’ll only end up stranded if he doesn’t fill up the car. Based on Alex’s barely intelligible muttering and his pained expression, they’re gaining on Sarah and Helen anyway.

  Not fast enough, Gabby thinks, but she won’t say anything negative out loud. Alex isn’t the only one familiar with faeries and speech-based magic. She knows just how powerful words can be when spoken aloud. She won’t give her fear anything to grasp onto.

  Mark fills the car as quickly as he can, the gas station sitting right next to a Waffle House that smells like it’s been doused in oil and cigarette smoke and sadness. The lights of the gas station are too bright, like it’s trying too hard to act like daylight, although with a quick glance around, the area they’re in looks like a place that may try to rob them. While the gas station is modern, the surrounding buildings are outdated and dim. Mark is clumsy with fear, and, even inside the car, Gabby can smell the gasoline that splashes across the ground when he pulls the spout out too early.

  It isn’t until Mark is back in the car that Elizabeth screams.

  An instant later, Gabby’s nails dig into Alex’s arm as she holds on for her life, the pain digging into her arm.

  Chapter Forty

  Sarah

  SARAH KEEPS HER EYES FROM FOCUSING, AND she doesn’t look around when the van pulls to a stop and the back door opens. The sky is utterly black, and the lights of the van are off by the time Helen gets around to opening the back door, but she still recognizes her surroundings instantly. The barns may be crumbling, and the house may be a rotting husk, but she knows.

  The scent of the outside air brings her back. The midnight cold, the absolute stillness, and something new that takes her a moment to place.

  Rot.

  There is something decaying about this place, something that had once been very much alive. Not a creature, but an energy. The emptiness of the world around her presses in, like all the warm magic has been sucked away and replaced with this dark, throbbing energy that sticks to her clothes, a burr that just works its way in the more she tries to shake it off. It’s stronger here than anywhere she’s been. Her ears pop at the rapid pressure changes as the darkness pulsates around her.

  Helen wraps a talon around Sarah’s ankle, the closest part in reach, and yanks her out. Sarah lets out a cry as her head slams on the bumper and then the ground, and the wind is completely knocked out of her so she can’t breathe again. Still, she’s careful. She doesn’t look in Helen’s direction, and she keeps her focus soft as to not arouse suspicion. Helen has to think that she’s still blind. They’ll be here soon. She just has to last a little longer. A couple hours at most.

  “Get up,” Helen orders. She doesn’t say it again while she waits for Sarah to clamber to her feet unsteadily. She doesn’t have to fake her disorientation—her head throbs, and a wetness drips onto the ear that hadn’t been in the puddle of bile earlier.

  As soon as she’s steadied herself enough to stop swaying, Helen grabs her by the wrist and drags her over to the barn. She almost thinks that she’s going to take her inside and let the building collapse on top of her, but she stops short and tosses Sarah to the ground like a rag-doll.

  Sarah doesn’t fight.

  She knows she should. Logically, she should try to hold Helen off for as long as possible, to increase her chances of being rescued. Right now, though, she’s just tired. Her eyes are wide open, but her entire body is painful and heavy and it doesn’t seem worth it. Even if she gets away, Helen will come back for her. “She who intervenes must be the last to die,” Helen says once again. “You stopped me from completing my ritual. Now, it’s finally your turn to die.”

  Even if Sarah goes back to St. Louis, there will still be two dead girls and one who will never be the same, and it’s her fault.

  No, it would be easier to just die for this. Her head throbs and she moves to the edge of unconsciousness. Does she have a concussion? Does it matter?

  When the knife buries itself into her skin, everything becomes razor-sharp.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Gabby

  GABBY BELIEVES THAT PAIN THREE TIMES REMOVED shouldn’t be so bad. That it should be dulled down through the filters of each person that it passes through, like water being cleaned until everything dangerous has made its way out.

  Pain is not like water, though.

  It’s electricity, zipping through each host without pause until it makes its way into her. She grabs the first thing she can get to—Alex—and holds on to keep from losing herself in the agony. Other than a scratch on her cheek, she wasn’t hurt when Helen’s darkness showed up at her house. Now, she feels every ounce of the pain that she would have—worse, still, knowing that this isn’t her pain to claim. She isn’t the one who’s dying.

  She keeps her jaw clenched shut, but she can’t help but let out a thick groan every time the invisible knife returns.

  Elizabeth has stopped screaming, but Mark hasn’t started driving yet, too concerned for his wife’s well-being. The plethora of emotions from everyone in the car floods through her along with the pain, and all she wants is for it to go away. She wants to stop feeling everything around her so acutely.

  With the next strike of the invisible knife, she snaps. She just can’t take this anymore. A yell leaps out of her, a warrior cry, and she forces everything out of her mind. Anything that doesn’t belong to her is destroyed by a fire that rampages through her, taking down anything in its path. She isn’t just a vessel for other people’s emotions. It isn’t her job to feel everyone else’s pain or happiness or anything else for that matter. Not if she doesn’t want to.

  For the first time in her seventeen years of life, Gabby’s mind is completely her own. A landscape ravaged by flame and hurt. Her entire life, she’s been forced to work herself around the emotions of everyone else, to be careful. No more.

  Although distant, the fire still rages inside her, pushing against the emotions still trying to invade. She won’t let them in.

  “Get in the fucking car,” she growls. Now that she has a moment to herself, she’s filled with red-hot anger. Anger at her life, at her anxiety. Mostly, though, her anger is for Helen. How dare she destroy so many lives? How dare she take Gabby’s best friend away from her.

  She sets her phone in the holder on the dash so she can watch the GPS. Elizabeth has gone from screaming to whimpering, and Mark moves her to the backseat so that Alex can sit up front.

  It’s a good thing her sister taught her to drive a manual last year. The instant the doors a
re closed, she burns out of the parking lot, jumping on the interstate and heading south. The car jets past the few cars and big rigs plowing down the interstate this late at night. No, not late at night. When she checks the time, it’s early in the morning. She speeds up, her foot to the floor.

  When they finally arrive, the property is only vaguely the same as the photos online. The front gate, once turquoise with swirling metal leaves and vines, is brown with age, overgrown with thick foliage. There’s no longer a metal sign hanging overhead that announces where they are, although a large hunk of crumpled metal is lying on the ground a few yards away. The car dies the moment they get too close, the engine simply cutting out as the steering wheel jerks out of her hands. The silence is deafening. She has to muscle the car to the side and slam her foot on the brake for it to manually stop.

  Elizabeth shakily climbs out of the car, her eyes distant but pupils no longer dilated. “I lost her,” she whispers. After a moment of wallowing in the silence, she holds her hands up in front of the gate. “There’s a barrier. Something strong.”

  “Can you get past it?” Alex asks, eyes locked on the gate and voice hard.

  Tears fall silently down Elizabeth’s cheeks. “No.”

  Gabby shudders, nausea churning inside her. Her hands are clammy. After an hour and a half of keeping everything out, she’s can barely hold herself together, and little things start to seep in. Alex’s guilt, Elizabeth’s pain, Mark’s anger.

  “We have to,” she says, setting her jaw. She turns to them and keeps her ton authoritative. “Okay, so everyone has to take one side of the barrier and throw everything you’ve got at it. These types of things are generally big circles, right?” She pauses, chewing her lip. Then, she says, “Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes snap up to her, her mouth making a little “o” at Gabby taking charge.