Student Bodies

by Sean Cummings

  “You might have killed Travis, you son of a bitch, but brother, you picked the wrong girl to mess with.”

  Emotional magic coursed through me as I lashed out in a blind fury. A supernatural wind roared up the hallway overturning trash cans and rattling the locks on more than a hundred lockers as I raised my right hand and opened my fingers. My long red hair blew out in every direction as I glared hatefully at the entity.

  “Hexus!” I barked and the torrent of wind swept around my body forming a solid pillar of twisting and churning, super-concentrated air. It screamed down the hall at the creature, colliding against its torso with the force of a wrecking ball. The impact literally lifted the creature off the floor, and it crashed against the brick wall directly underneath a large portrait of the Queen.

  I stomped up to the monster, my Shadowcull’s band humming with magical power and lashed out with a binding so tight that not even light could penetrate it. Malice raced through my bloodstream as I made a fist and squeezed.

  “Now you know how I felt,” I said as I dug my fingernails into my palms, squeezing so hard that blood seeped out from between my fingers. The creature struggled wildly against my power, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t destroy it, Julie.”

  I glanced out the corner of my eye to see Twyla standing next to me alongside the giant bear.

  “Why the hell not?” I snapped. “It damned well tried to destroy me.”

  She raised a hand. “Wait, we need to question it. We need to find out who sent it here and how it managed to wind up in Travis Butler’s locker.”

  The monster stopped struggling. Its shoulders rose and fell repeatedly like it was panting and a small hole appeared on its featureless face where a mouth would normally be.

  Then it started to laugh. It reared its head back and cackled wildly with an inhuman sound comprised of an amalgam of voices that seemed as though they’d just escaped from the high-security wing of an insane asylum.

  “We are one and we are not, Shadowcull. And by the time you find her, we will have become a force so terrible that we will become drunk on the tears of mothers who cry over their dead children. Nobody is safe from us. Not you. Not the Indian girl. Not anyone! But know this, we are coming. Soon we will be here and when we make our presence known a great wail will follow. We will unleash suffering on all the mothers and all the fathers and your kind can do nothing to stop us!”

  The creature’s body jerked violently and I could have sworn that I heard the sound of bones snapping. It started to pound its head against the brick wall with loud, wet slaps. I fought against it, trying desperately to maintain my binding and shocked that it even managed to speak to me, let alone move.

  A current of power rippled across the creature’s body and then it solidified like a shard of ice, shattering into hundreds of fragments of darkness that disappeared like clearing mist.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped as I released my grip. I flipped open my right hand and stared at my palm to see five deep gouges from where my nails had penetrated my skin.

  “Oh my God,” Marcus said as he raced up to me. “Twyla called up a freaking ass-kicking grizzly bear!”

  I spun around to face her and she waved a hand over the bear’s head. It began to shift back into a bloody, pulpy form and then in seconds the golden pool lay at Twyla’s feet. She knelt down and picked up the tiny bead she’d thrown at the mass and quietly slipped it back into her deerskin pouch as the golden pool vaporized before my very eyes.

  “Just what kind of shaman are you?” I asked, panting.

  Twyla stuffed the fetish into the pocket of her jeans and said, “One who needs to talk with her grandfather about what we’ve just seen. Marcus, did you make a video of it?”

  He swiped an index finger across the screen of his phone and then held it out for us to see. “It’s not the best quality, but at least it’s something.”

  I grabbed the phone and stared at the blurry image of a shining mass enveloping my body. It was a close call – too close. If Twyla Standingready hadn’t been there I’d have been killed for sure. I cursed silently at my stupidity in opening the locker without a protective spell at the ready and then handed the phone back to Marcus.

  Twyla nodded and then casually strolled over to Travis Butler’s locker. I took the amulet out of my band and palmed it as I went to look inside. I had expected to see a pile of garbage, as that’s what you see in pretty much every boy’s locker, but instead what I saw was a pair of gym sneakers on the floor, a T-shirt hanging from a hook and some of Travis’s text books stacked on the top shelf.

  And a backpack with the name “Willard Schubert” stitched onto one of the shoulder straps.

  What the hell?

  CHAPTER 13

  We grabbed the backpack and took off out of the school as fast as our legs would carry us. It was shortly after eleven in the morning and the sky was flat and gray giving the snow-covered streets a bleak appearance.

  “My house is only a ten minute walk,” I said. “Twyla, what are your plans? I need to tell my mother what happened here – and we need to find out why Willard Schubert’s backpack was in Travis Butler’s locker.”

  She grabbed one of the straps on Willard’s backpack and gave it a yank. “I’ll take this to my grandfather, ditto on the reasons you used for needing to talk to your mom.”

  I didn’t release my grip.

  “You know something, for a new kid you’re sure as hell pushy,” I snapped. “The backpack comes to my place – you’re welcome to accompany us. After that, we can talk to your grandfather because, at this point, we can use all the help we can get.”

  Sensing an impending cat fight, Marcus intervened.

  “Twyla, what’s your email?” he blurted out.

  “Twylanottwilight. I’m on Gmail, why?”

  He thumbed the screen of his phone furiously and said, “I’m just emailing you a link to YouTube for the video of that thing the pair of you just nuked. It’s a private link so nobody can see it but those people I send the link to. Why don’t you show it to your grandfather and then Julie and I will take the backpack to her mom and maybe we can meet up after to compare notes.”

  She pulled the hood of her winter coat over her head and cocked a wary eyebrow. “Yeah, that works. Um, the creature called you a ‘Shadowcull’. Want to fill me in on what the hell that whole thing is about?”

  I exhaled heavily because I didn’t want to waste a moment’s breath with a complex explanation, so I decided to dumb it down for her.

  “Witch coven special ops,” I answered. “Look, it’s complicated, OK? All you need to know is that I’m one of the good guys. Whoever sent that thing is behind the attack on Mike Olsen. They killed Travis Butler and just took a shot at me.”

  She snorted. “And it would have killed you if I wasn’t there to free you.”

  I forced a smile and placed both my gloved hands over Twyla’s hands. “And for that, I’m more grateful than you can possibly imagine. Look, I might come off as bossy, but don’t take it seriously, OK? You’ve got some magical skills that I’ve never seen before and I’d like to learn more about you and about the kinds of things you can do, but first we need to work together to stop this… whatever we’re dealing with.”

  She chewed her lip and her eyes panned down to the backpack in both our hands. She emitted a reluctant sigh and said, “Alright. I’ll work with you, we’ll talk to your mother and I’ll share the link to that video with my gramps. If this is as big as I think it is, we’re going to need as many magical heads as possible to try and figure out what we’re dealing with.”

  I released my grip on Willard Schubert’s backpack as a show of good faith and handed it to Twyla.

  “Thank you,” I said earnestly. “Let’s get going.”

  We arrived back at my house shortly before noon and I whispered a word of magic to turn off the protective sentinels. We stepped inside, stomping snow off our boots and I bell
owed for my mother.

  “Mom, we need to talk!” I shouted.

  I heard the sound of Mom’s footsteps shuffling down the upstairs hall. She took three steps down the stairs and a look of shock or surprise washed over her face as she saw Twyla.

  “Welcome to our home and blessed be,” she said politely. “I am very honored to have you here with us. May the divine spirits keep you and protect you.”

  I stared at my mother like she’d just lost her mind when she shuffled down the stairs and immediately took Twyla’s coat.

  “Um, thank you?” said Twyla, sounding somewhat embarrassed.

  A loud slapping sound came from the kitchen followed by a low grumbling growl. Betty the Dog appeared in the kitchen doorway and cocked her head sharply to the right.

  Mom took our coats. “You all must be freezing to death, it’s minus fifteen this morning. Why aren’t you at school?”

  “School is canceled for the day,” I said feeling slightly drained. “There was a memorial assembly for Travis Butler.”

  Mom gestured for us to follow her to the kitchen. Marcus, Twyla and I took a seat at the table as she plugged in the kettle. Betty plodded up to Twyla and warily sniffed her hand.

  “Your dog is very cautious,” said Twyla as she scratched behind Betty’s left ear. The Great Dane’s tail clumped loudly against the linoleum and then her right rear leg started to twitch as she pressed her enormous head in against the girl. “And very secretive, too. You can come out and join the conversation, ancient spirit, I’ve got no plans to harm you or this family.”

  Betty licked Twyla’s hand and then promptly sneezed sending a spray of dog snot all over her sleeve. “All and good, then,” Betty rumbled. “Something has happened this morning. I can smell the malice all over you three.”

  I grabbed Willard’s backpack off the floor and placed it on the kitchen table. “Yeah, the condensed version is that I thought Twyla might be the bad guy. We sorted that out quickly enough. We wanted to check out Travis Butler’s locker, so we sat behind a veil and waited for the school to empty. I’d just opened the locker and bam! I got nailed by some kind of malice-covered creature. Twyla manifested a freaking grizzly bear and freed my sorry ass. And by the way, just how the hell did you do that, Twyla?”

  She reached into her pocket and placed her small pouch of beads on the table. “I have a spirit guardian. When I was singing in the hallway, I was calling to him. He always comes when I sing, though he’s often headstrong and difficult.”

  I snorted and pointed to Betty. “Sounds like someone I know, maybe they’re related. Does it… he, have a name?”

  She shook her head. “To name my spirit guardian would imply that I own him. You can’t own a friend. He is simply called dlézi – our word for bear. He has been paired with me for only about a year now.”

  “I thought you were Sarcee,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course you would. You probably think that I live on the rez and that I’m a burden to the taxpayer, too. That’s how most white people look at us. The Sarcee are actually called the Tsuu T’ina Nation. My people migrated from their nation a long time ago. You’re wrong just like ninety-nine percent of all white people, but I won’t hold that against you. Anyway, enough about me, what we witnessed in the hall was a thousand degrees of evil.”

  “Yeah… that thing decided to monologue about a ton of bad stuff that’s about to happen,” Marcus interjected.

  The kettle whistled loudly and Mom poured steaming hot water into three mugs. She opened a can of hot chocolate powder and doled out heaping teaspoons into each mug, then she stirred them quickly and gave the three of us one each.

  “What did it say?” Mom asked, taking a seat. She was still wearing her housecoat, but at least she didn’t look as tired as she had last night.

  Marcus coughed as he fiddled with his phone and then slid it onto the table. A video screen popped up showing the tar creature struggling against my binding. It was more frightening to look at the second time – maybe the adrenaline rush had blinded me to the sheer menace the creature gave off, but its voice was unforgettable:

  “We are one and we are not, Shadowcull. And by the time you find her, we will have become a force so terrible that we will become drunk on the tears of mothers who cry over their dead children. Nobody is safe from us. Not you. Not the Indian girl. Not anyone! But know this… we are coming. We are coming sooner than you think and when we make our presence known a great wail will follow. We will unleash suffering on all the mothers and all the fathers and your kind can do nothing to stop us!”

  Betty stood the Great Dane’s body so that she could lift her front paws onto the kitchen table. Her massive head appeared between her two giant forepaws and she watched the video closely. Together we stared at the tiny screen as the tar creature shattered into menacing shards and that’s when the video abruptly ended.

  There was an awkward silence for about fifteen seconds as Marcus grabbed his phone and then Twyla spoke up. “We went back to Travis Butler’s locker and found this backpack, only it didn’t belong to Travis. It’s some kid named Willard Schubert. I don’t know if it means something, but we can’t rule anything out. Maybe Willard Schubert has some magical qualities.”

  I shook my head. “Not a chance. He’s just a face in the crowd at school.”

  Marcus chimed in. “He’s got something to do with this, Julie, remember what he said about Travis during the assembly? Good riddance?”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. “Well, he’s definitely got a lot of animosity toward Travis.”

  “And he was at the McDonald’s the morning Travis died. Maybe he’s like Marla Lavik, you know? Maybe he was messing with magic and things got out of control.”

  I took a sip of my hot chocolate and looked at the backpack. It was clear that Willard Schubert was involved in all of this; the question was just how deep a hole he might have dug himself. He didn’t give off anything resembling a magical signature, so there was no way possible for him to conjure up an enthralment spell unless he was in possession of something so powerful that it compensated for his lack of skill.

  I pointed to the backpack. “Open it up,” I said firmly.

  Twyla reached over and grabbed the thick black nylon strap attached to the zipper. She gave it a sharp tug and then opened the bag. The four of us stood up as Twyla held it open to see inside.

  And what we saw took even me by surprise.

  Instead of text books and binders, the bag contained only a single ream of photocopier paper. I pulled it out and placed it on the table. The top sheet said three words:

  Homo Fag Bag.

  I pulled the first sheet off to find the same words printed on the next sheet underneath, and the one after that. I split the pile in half and saw the same three words in the middle of the pile, so I lifted a corner and ran through all the sheets with my thumb.

  Each page.

  Three bitter, hateful words.

  Homo Fag Bag

  Marcus grabbed a sheet and waved it in the air. “OK, even if Willard Schubert is gay, this is some seriously hateful stuff. What kind of über-jerk would print off five hundred sheets of paper with the words ‘Homo Fag Bag’ written on each page?”

  I shook my head. “Clearly Travis Butler wasn’t the saint everyone made him out to be. We need to track down Willard Schubert, because he’s the key to unraveling what the hell is happening right now. I know he didn’t kill Travis, but he’s involved in this somehow.”

  Twyla got up and headed back to the front door. I followed close behind and watched as she slipped her feet into her winter boots. “This is a lot to take in,” she said grimly. “I need to talk with my grandfather and see what he knows about this thing that attacked you. It could be an evil spirit for all we know.”

  I handed Twyla her winter coat. “Do you think it might be a demon? Do the Tsuu T’ina even have demons?”

  “Yes, and flushing toilets, too,” she said sourly. “Look, my gr
andfather will help us figure this out. He’s very connected to the spirit world.”

  I’d put my foot squarely in my mouth again and was embarrassed at my lack of knowledge about anything that wasn’t white and middle class. “Shoot, I suck for saying that. I’ve never known a native person before. Listen, let’s meet up at school to figure out our next move. I’ll email you my cell number and maybe we can text if we find anything out tonight.”

  “Alright,” she said as she waved to everyone still in the kitchen. “Thank you for the hot chocolate, Mrs Richardson.”

  Mom dashed down the hall and said, “It’s bitterly cold out Twyla, why don’t I drive you?”

  She shook her head and said, “It’s alright. I need some time to think all of this through. I’ll take the bus. It stops right in front of my house.”

  Mom stuck out her hand. “Alright, dear. Be safe, OK?”

  “I’ll do that,” replied Twyla, and she headed out the door and into the cold.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dead in the water, that’s what I was. I knew there was a connection between the attack on Mike Olsen, the murder of Travis Butler and the thing that attacked me at school. Everything pointed to Willard Schubert. And that ream of paper?

  Homo fag bag?

  Everyone at school knew that Willard had been the target of bullying and we’d all turned a blind eye to it, but I couldn’t imagine that someone would do something so nasty as to print off five hundred sheets of paper with such a hateful message.

  Like, why?

  Why Willard Schubert, of all people? He was the lowest living organism at Crescent Ridge High School. Period. So what the hell did Mike and Travis plan to do with all those sheets of vile, evil crap? Were they planning to distribute them to everyone at school? That didn’t make sense; they’d wind up being reported by someone with even half a heart.

  I headed back into the kitchen and took a seat next to Marcus. I gave Betty a good scratch behind the ears as Mom sat down opposite me. The look on her face told me that she clearly wasn’t happy about Marcus being there, but I figured that our truce would hold out long enough for everyone to put their thinking caps on.