Now a young college student, Ava meets Caleb Foster, a brilliant and mysterious man who’s supposed to help her pass Physics, but in reality has another mission in mind. What he shows Ava challenges her view of the world, shaking it to its very core. Because Caleb isn't quite what he seems. In fact, he's not entirely human, and he's not the only one.
Together, the duo faces a threat from an ancient race bound to protect humans, but only after protecting their own secrets—secrets they fear Ava may expose. Fighting to survive, Ava soon learns she's not actually normal . . . she's not even just special.
She's a little bit more.
1
He was close.
Ava pressed back against the tree trunk, trying to hold her breath but only able to manage it for a moment or two before her lungs gave out, air sawing out and in again desperately against her will. Rough bark rubbed the skin of her palms where she gripped the tree, scraped her cheek as she turned her head to try and catch a glimpse of him.
Darkness mocked her.
Nothing to see. No one to help.
She eyed the entrance to her dorm frantically, the lit doorway calling out like a beacon on the other side of the concrete bridge.
If she could only get there . . .
If she could only get behind that door—lock it fast—she would be safe.
Safe.
The word echoed through her panicked brain, foreign and twisted.
Could she ever really be safe while he was out there?
“Do it,” she muttered, inhaling sharply as tension rippled through her. “Just go.”
With a shove at the tree, she ran for the bridge, heels clacking loudly on the path as her muscles screamed. She glanced over her shoulder, catching a flicker of movement through the trees.
No!
Ava willed her legs to move faster, arms pumping in desperation—reaching out and pulling at the air, as if she could yank herself forward.
Her breath caught. She could hear him. Footsteps chasing after her.
No—footsteps beside her—now ahead of her.
Where was he?
The better question seemed to be, where wasn’t he?
He surrounded her—harsh breaths and pounding feet—a low, mocking laugh as she leapt from the bridge back onto the path.
Only a few more feet to the door.
Almost there.
She reached out, aching to wrap her fingers around the gleaming brass doorknob.
Then with a blur of movement and a gust of a swirling air, he stood in front of her, blocking the way. Huge, hulking, and shadowed by the darkness, he laughed as she recoiled in fear, falling backward in her haste.
“Did you really think you could escape?” he hissed, reaching toward her.
Fingers ripped the icy ground as she rolled over, trying to crawl away, rocks digging into her knees and her palms, a bit of glass slicing neatly into the meat of her thumb. She winced, lifting it to her mouth to suck the blood, feet kicking back as he grabbed her ankle.
He laughed again, jerking her back with one strong pull and dragging her effortlessly across the ground. He bent down, wrapping a meaty fist around her neck, and she clawed it desperately, unable to breathe.
Lifting Ava off her feet, he glared at her, a flash of light catching his angry, mismatched eyes—one blue, one green.
For a moment, she was almost mesmerized.
Then his lips curled in derision and he squeezed, cutting off the scream curdling in her throat.
Ava awoke with a start, fingers still scraping desperately at her neck, her skin clammy with sweat and fear.
“Ava?” Her roommate, Lucy, sat up in her bed across the room, flipping on the dim light by her pillow. “Are you okay?”
Ava inhaled deeply to get her racing heart under control. “Yeah . . . sorry.”
“Another bad dream?” Lucy sat up, shoving her pale blonde hair back off her forehead. Ava took a moment to resent the fact that even when woken from a sound sleep, her roommate looked impeccable—long, shiny hair which managed to stay untangled even in bed, cornflower-blue eyes, and flawless skin with a touch of pink on her cheeks and lips, even without makeup. It was only the slight crick in her nose that kept her from being too beautiful, too perfect.
And the only thing that kept Ava from automatically hating her on sight when she first met her. Well, that and the fact that Lucy Matthews was arguably the nicest person on the planet. Ava had taken one look at that perfect face, the tall, lithe frame, and automatically felt short and squat. Insecurity set in, even though she’d never been fat, and at five foot four was considered about average height. Ava often saw herself as Lucy’s non-mirror image—Rose Red to Lucy’s Snow White. Not ugly or even unattractive, just shadowed by the near perfection of Lucy’s glowing beauty. But underneath Lucy’s ethereal appearance beat an unselfish heart, and a rather dark and twisted sense of humor. It was only about five minutes after she walked into the dorm room on the first day of freshmen orientation two months earlier that Ava knew she’d met her best friend. Before the heat of summer melted into the cool of fall, she’d been proven right. Everyone loved Lucy. It was impossible not to.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Ava said finally, yawning as the dream finally faded. “Sorry to wake you.”
Lucy shrugged, glancing at her clock. “It’s okay. The alarm was about to go off anyway.” She stretched, slipping out of bed and into her pink fuzzy slippers. “You want to talk about it?”
Ava shrugged. “The usual. Creepy man chasing me in the dark and choking me to death.”
Lucy grimaced. “Why can’t you dream about Duncan Johan like a normal person?”
Ava smiled. Lucy had discovered the BBC series Robin Hood over the summer and was obsessed about the actor who played the title role.
“He’s too skinny,” Ava said, purposely taunting her.
Lucy gaped in shock and threw a pillow at her. “How dare you! You know he’s perfection personified and will one day be the father to my rather gorgeous children.”
Ava giggled, getting out of bed and gathering her things for a shower. “Skinny children,” she said, earning another pillow. “At least that’s one thing about my dream attacker,” she said wryly. “The guy is seriously built.”
“Well, that’s something you look for in a crazed killer, I suppose,” Lucy deadpanned.
“At least he’s nice to look at.”
“While he’s strangling the life out of you.”
“Well, yes. There’s that.” Ava smirked, throwing a towel over her shoulder.
Lucy’s laughter followed her down the hall to the bathroom.
It was almost enough to chase the chill from her skin.
After a long, hot shower, Ava’s nightmare began to fade, and she started to feel a little ridiculous for overreacting to a simple dream, as frightening as it might have been. She dried her hair, applying a little makeup and popping her contacts in with a practiced hand.
Ava swept aside her dishwater bangs and frowned at her reflection, tired eyes staring back at her—brown, boring . . . normal.
She shrugged. Normal was good. Tired, not so much. She really needed to get more sleep.
Dreamless, preferably.
With a defeated sigh and one last brush of lip gloss, she gathered her things and left to start her day.
Ava stopped by the campus coffee shop on her way to physics class and once again wished she could wave a hand to cut a path through the line. She smirked at the thought, one she hadn’t had since she was a child, at least not that often.
There was a time, long ago, when Ava thought she was special. No, not in the of course you’re special, you’re my child way that every parent wished their child would believe, but in a unique, different way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
It started when she was five, and she’d seen a Disney movie about a little girl who could talk to animals with her mind and move things with just a thought. She’d watched in awe as the girl’s dolls danced a
round her bedroom, turning cartwheels and spinning in circles.
Ava was convinced she could do it, too.
For hours, she’d sit staring at her Baby Cries-a-Lot (which she’d inexplicably named Eleanor), willing her to get up and crawl or dance or say “I love you” in a singsong voice like her little friend Samantha’s baby doll. She never got discouraged, convinced that with the right amount of concentration she could make it happen.
Eleanor never danced. The dog next door never stopped barking. The little boy who used to throw rocks at her on the way to school never got the chicken pox.
But she kept trying.
Then, when she was eight years old, something happened.
Ava had been tasked with the job of caring for the classroom hamster, Herman, over the Thanksgiving weekend. Swollen with pride at the honor, she’d carefully carried him home on the school bus, balancing his cage on her lap, his food and toys tucked away in her lunch box. She begged her mother to allow her to keep Herman in her room instead of on the washing machine and gleefully placed him on her little desk after her mom succumbed to her pleading.
She sat for hours watching him run on his little wheel, making sure his water bottle was always full, and cleaning up the wood shavings religiously.
After wolfing down her Thanksgiving dinner, she’d raced up to her room to feed Herman his ration of kibble and nuts.
And it was gone.
Frantic, she’d searched high and low for the little bag of food, digging through drawers, crawling under the bed, even removing every book from her bookshelf and shaking it out in desperation. She’d thrown herself on her bed, sobbing, sure that Herman was going to starve and it would be all her fault.
Looking back, Ava often wondered why she didn’t go to her mother with the problem. Her mom had always come through before—baking last-minute cupcakes for the bake sale, running around town to find all the parts for a science project, even getting her contact lenses so she didn’t feel so self-conscious around the other kids. It was obvious, through the eyes of an adult, that it wasn’t a dire emergency. All it would take was a trip to the corner store for some sunflower seeds, or she could probably find something sufficient among the Thanksgiving leftovers.
But to eight-year-old Ava, it was a catastrophe of monstrous proportions. So, as she huddled on top of her pink and purple comforter, she’d watched Herman run on his little wheel, murmuring over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The hamster had hopped off the wheel, scurrying over to the side of the cage to sit up on his hind legs, beady eyes blinking. Ava had sniffed, staring at the little animal, and felt a strange warmth creeping over her body. After watching him for a long moment, she’d closed her eyes, unsure of what she was doing, but under an odd compulsion to do it.
In her mind, she’d seen the little bag of seeds, floating in a field of blackness. She watched it for a moment, almost smelling the salty tang through the plastic. Without thinking, she’d reached out for it, wrapping her fingers around the bag. Her eyes had flown open, and suddenly, she knew. She’d gotten up from the bed, hurried to the window over her desk, and drawn back the curtain with trembling fingers.
The bag of food sat on the windowsill, as if it had been there the whole time. Even though Ava knew she had checked that very same spot not a half an hour before.
When Ava had breathlessly told her mother about it, when she’d insisted she could make things happen, her mom had just smiled indulgently, patted her head and sent her out to play.
Ava hadn’t lost faith, though.
At least, not for a long, long time.
For years, she’d continued to try to replicate what had happened with the hamster, staring at a fork or a spoon or a book to try and make it slide across the table, picturing an A on her latest book report, or willing John McCaffrey to ask her to the sophomore dance.
It had never happened again, though. And eventually, her memory of the Herman the Hamster miracle started to fade, growing fuzzy around the edges until she began to wonder if she’d imagined the whole thing, after all.
“Miss?” The barista interrupted Ava’s thoughts, an expectant look on her face. “What can I get for you?”
Ava smiled and ordered.
There was nothing wrong with being normal, she decided, even if it wasn’t nearly as much fun.
She sipped her coffee as she wandered through the bustling campus of Allenmore College. Mid-October in northern Missouri was cooler than she was used to, having grown up in the rather temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest, and she reveled in the stray beams of sunlight peeking through the trees and warming her skin as she passed under them. Ava loved college, for the most part. She had found a place there that had eluded her back home.
She’d always felt a bit awkward—which probably contributed to her desire to be some kind of wizardly telekinetic—left out of the popular group, too smart to hang out with the outcasts, too shy to fit in with the brains. As a result, Ava spent the bulk of her teenage years alone, with the exception of her best friend, Arthur, who lived across the street and was as much of a loner as she was. They bonded over a combined love of the classics—both in literature and on television. (Although they differed a bit on what constituted a classic, at least where TV was concerned—Arthur insisting Star Trek in all it incarnations fit that role, Ava leaning more toward sitcoms of the 1960s.) Ava knew they’d made an odd-looking pair—tall, thin Arthur with his dyed-black hair and multiple piercings, and Ava with her sweet, innocent, girl-next-door looks—but somehow, they seemed to fit.
Arthur was the only one who, thanks to a late night confession fueled by cheap wine when her parents were out of town, knew of Ava’s experience with the hamster. To her surprise, Arthur didn’t mock her. Instead, he quoted some statistics about the percentage of the brain human beings used as well as numerous theories regarding what we would be capable of if we could only access the unused portions.
Of course, Arthur was also convinced he saw a UFO while camping with his parents at Yosemite, so Ava took it all with a grain of salt.
Ava smiled at the thought, missing Arthur desperately. He was a genius and, as geniuses often were, was accepted to MIT, leaving Ava to fend for herself at her little liberal arts college in the sleepy town of Witteville. They spoke regularly, exchanged texts and e-mails, but she felt a little sad when she thought about him. The distance between them wasn’t only physical. Ava knew that sometimes absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes absence was just absence, a hole eventually filled by something, or someone, else. She knew in her heart that they were growing up, growing apart. It was a bittersweet realization, and she found all she could do was hope that Arthur had found his place, as well.
Ava gulped down the last of her latte, chucking the cup in the trash as she entered the science building and dodged between bodies on her way upstairs. Whipping off her hat, she swept her static-crackly hair up into a ponytail, securing it with the elastic she always kept around her wrist.
“How do you think you did on the test?” her lab partner, David, asked in a low voice as Ava slipped into a desk in the back. Unlike Ava, David actually understood physics, and it was only because of him that she was passing the class. Unfortunately, your lab partner couldn’t take your tests for you.
Ava shrugged with a frown, and David winced. “That good, huh?”
“I guess we’ll see,” she replied as the professor called the class to order.
Ava tried her best to concentrate during the rest of class, scribbling notes amidst constant worry about how she did on her exam. Once the professor finally handed them back, Ava kept hers facedown on her desk for a long moment, dreading the inevitable.
“Oh, come on,” David said, reaching for the test and pulling on the stapled corner. “It can’t be that bad.”
Ava slapped her palm down over the exam, but David just raised an eyebrow, quirking his lips in amusement, until she huffed in irritation and finally let him pick i
t up. He glanced at it briefly, and Ava couldn’t miss the slight wince.
“What?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
David gave her a wary look and handed it over.
Ava stared down at her physics exam in depressed resignation. At the top, above various red slashes, circles, and angry scrawls along the edge glared a bright red sixty-eight. Sixty-eight percent. Which couldn’t even be stretched to the lower regions of a C no matter how hard you squinted. It was definitely a D. And absolutely not what she needed when she was already in danger of failing physics.
Ava sighed, folding the paper in half and stuffing it in her backpack. David patted her shoulder pityingly.
“Want to go get some ice cream?” he asked.
“Ice cream? Really?” she said sarcastically, but she couldn’t help smiling. Maybe ice cream wasn’t such a bad idea.
“Miss Michaels?” her professor called as the rest of the class rose to leave. “May I speak to you for a moment, please?” He shuffled through some papers while she made her way to the front of the room, casting David an apologetic look over her shoulder. He just mouthed “rain check” as he walked out the door.
Professor Andrews looked up at her over his glasses, his bald head reflecting the lights from the fluorescents.
“I assume you’re aware that you’re not doing so well in my class.”
Ava snorted, despite herself. “Yes, I’m glaringly aware of that.”
His lips twitched slightly. “I understand that in order to keep your scholarship, you must maintain a three-point grade point average. According to the Dean of Students, if you can’t manage to pull at least a C in this class, you will not be able to do that.”
Ava dropped her backpack on the floor, leaning forward on his desk. “I’m trying. Really. I study all the time. I just can’t seem to get it.”
Professor Andrews nodded. “It’s not an easy subject.” He leaned back in his chair. “Is it required for your major?”
“No, I just need a science credit for my basics.”
Magic and Shadows: A Collection of YA Fantasy and Paranormal Romances Page 2