Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance) (11 page)
Five steps to the front door. Time slowed.
Invisible chains dragged at her heels. It was like swimming through Jell-O. Every step closer took more effort. Every step closer slowed time. Her eardrums threatened to burst from the pressure. The force field.
An inch. She was an inch from the door. Time stopped.
I’ll stay like this forever
, she thought. Reaching for the handle, never opening the door. Every part of her body strained forward, willing herself to touch the brass door handle.
Go back
, the voice insisted.
Sadie gritted her teeth.
No! You won’t stop me!
The tip of her finger touched brass. Time returned to normal. The pressure in her ears disappeared. Sadie threw herself up the four steps, past the unmanned circulation desk and stopped, in the center of the library.
Heavy breathing echoed in the domed room. Someone was here. Then it stopped abruptly.
She realized she was holding her breath. And then she realized what she was hearing was herself, breathing loudly from her sprint.
Her nervous laughter echoed, too. She was alone in the gray winter light filtering down from the ring of windows far above her head. Shelves of books fanned out on every side. The monstrous silence pressed on her and Sadie swallowed a sob. Pippa had died here. It wasn’t fair. This place killed her.
But how did you investigate a murder? The library was a labyrinth. All she knew was Aunt Pippa was found lying on the floor with a gash in her head made by
The Atlas of Ancient and Medieval Architecture
. Miss Marple made it look so easy.
Wait. She ran to the wooden card catalog—shouldn’t it be on computer?—and rifled through the index cards.
She followed the numbers to the right aisle in the stacks. 685—Leather, fur, related products. 697—Heating, ventilating, air-conditioning. 716—Herbaceous plants.
720—Architecture.
The massive shelves looming over her seemed to hold secrets they wouldn’t share. Aunt Pippa had loved books and the fact that one had killed her was the ultimate betrayal. An accident, the police said. It fell, they said.
Where was Gil Grissom when you needed him?
Sadie looked for the book, not even sure what she’d do with it. She fingered the spines as she leaned lower. Finally, she got on her knees. And when she came to 720.894 CAN, there was an empty space three inches wide.
No. No. It had to be here. She started pulling books off the shelf. But she knew. Christian wouldn’t leave it on the shelf. Had she really expected to find the murder weapon using the Dewey Decimal system? How stupid could a girl get?
She folded herself onto the floor, defeated.
If her sister were here...Sadie’s eyes grew hot. Chloë would use her so-called psychic powers. Chloë was the one who should be here. But Chloë had refused. And then Sadie had screamed.
Fraud. Faker.
In front of everyone. At the funeral.
She’d be lucky if her sister ever talked to her again, much less helped her solve a murder Chloë didn’t believe in.
There was nothing left. Gray had won. She’d leave. Just start driving and not stop.
Knowing it was pointless, she wrenched down a last handful of titles. A face appeared in the gap between the books.
Sadie screamed.
When her heart stopped pounding, the pale girl peeked around the corner, big eyes glancing through her bangs. “Carmina! What are you doing here?”
“Please don’t leave Strange Academy.” Carmina’s round eyes went glossy with tears.
Sadie pulled Carmina to her chest, letting the girl sob into her shirt. “You’re the only one like me, Miss Strange.”
“What do you mean?”
Despite their mutual misery, she smiled at the combination of Carmina’s hiccups and her Slavic accent. “Everyone else is...extraordinary. But you are like me. You’re my friend.”
Her stomach plummeted. Most of the teachers had a special bond with a couple of students. The administration even put a lot of research into assigning students a particular faculty advisor long before they arrived. Aunt Pippa’s advisees had all been assigned to other teachers. Sadie had breathed a sigh of relief when she found out.
But here was Carmina, and Sadie hadn’t done anything to make her feel welcome. She was as bad as the snobs around here.
Well, no more, she vowed. Carmina would have a friend.
“But you’re wrong. You are extraordinary, Carmina.” Black eyes wet with tears shone up into hers. “You have great powers of persuasion. You just convinced me not to leave.”
*
***
******
****
*
Gray didn’t feel bad at all. He was happy Sadie was gone. He wouldn’t miss anything about her. Not her sharp tongue. Not the way she treated him exactly like—no, worse than—everyone else. Not the way she filled out her repressed librarian suits.
He flicked on the lights in his classroom, and the twelfth graders followed him, laughing at their fire drill adventure.
“She hiked up her skirt to here—” a boy gestured to a girl who gazed at him with twinkly eyes “—and ran into the library. It was so funny.”
“Settle, people,” he growled, filled with sudden irritation.
The kids did as they were told. They always did, of course. “Who remembers what we did last class?” The question was less a test for them than a reminder for himself.
A hand shot up at the back of the class. He struggled to remember the name of the kid with blue hair, and gave up.
“Temporary reanimation,” he said.
“Then get to it.” Gray’s shrug sent a wave of pain from his stress knot down his spine.
Nothing to do with Sadie
, he told himself,
or the fear in her eyes. Fear of me
. Well, she’d called these kids monsters.
How many Nons would have tried to put out a fire that size
? he wondered.
He got up and wandered between the science desks as the kids fired up their Bunsen burners. As he approached Irina Love, her back stiffened. “How are you doing?”
“Fine, sir,” she said, but gnawed on her lip.
“Did you remember to make your counterspell first?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Very important with animation.” He smiled at her. Of course, he didn’t tell his classes about the blank counterspell in his desk drawer. In case of an emergency, he could add a sample of any potion and it would become the counterspell.
As he walked away, her back loosened.
It was just respect
, he told himself. She wasn’t nervous of him.
“Sir? I think I’m ready,” the Leaving kid said. Gray knew his parents from the incident with the time rift on the Oxford University campus.
“Cast your magic circle, then.” Leaving shoved his Coke-bottle glasses up his nose before pouring some golden dust out of a vial. The dust settled into a perfect circle around the dead frog on the desk.
Gray poked the air above the circle with a finger and was rewarded with a painful zap shooting to his elbow. “Not bad.”
Leaving puffed up a little.
“Have your counterspell handy—reanimation spells are notorious for going wrong.”
Wham! The door banged open.
“Gray.” Sadie’s pointed chin aimed at him in defiance.
Her eye makeup had run a little, making dark eyes darker. She looked like a Goth out for Halloween in a librarian costume.
Something in his chest thudded. “You didn’t leave.”
She seemed to become aware of the students. She laughed nervously. “Oh, you have a class. Guess the periods changed. I’ll come back some other time.” And then her jaw dropped. Gray followed her line of sight straight to Leaving’s desk.
A drop of animation spell hovered on the lip of his beaker, just above the dead frog. The moment froze. Sadie’s interest. Leaving’s fear. His own panic.
The drop fell. The potion contacted the gray frog and its skin bloomed, a perfect healthy green. The frog, temporarily returned to pseudo-life, wiggled and righted itself.
The room went silent. Just to be irritating, the idiot frog gave the loudest croak in creation.
She turned to the chalkboard, where he’d written the homework assignment for the previous class in hieroglyphics. At least she couldn’t read hieroglyphics.
“Grade 5 Alchemy. Chapter Seven: Transmutation of Base Metals to Gold,” she translated.
“Fuck,” said Gray, before he could stop himself. Were hieroglyphics important in comic books or something?
A dozen teenaged heads swiveled toward Gray.
Fix this
, they silently pleaded with him.
He squared his shoulders.
“Leaving, you’re in charge.” Gray vaulted over a desk and shoved Sadie out the door.
*
***
******
****
*
“You’re doing magic in there.” Her calm tone made Gray’s stress knot pulse. Why wasn’t she hysterical?
“Nah, couldn’t be.” His mind spun, searching for the solution to this problem. “You must be dreaming.”
“I dream about Aunt Pippa, not the students doing magic.”
Gray slipped a vial out of his inside jacket pocket and pressed it into her hand. One sip and this would all be over. Just like before. If she could forget their first kiss, she could forget anything. First kiss? Only kiss, he corrected himself. “Why don’t you drink this? You’ll feel better.”
She took the vial, barely noticing it. “Is your class the only one?” Sadie rapped her foot on the floor of the hallway distractedly. “No, all the kids here are...extraordinary.”
“Aren’t you thirsty?”
“This makes so much sense. Things Jewel said...The way you freaked out when I called them monsters...Count Burana...” Sadie gave a nervous laugh. “You know, this is funny, but at times, I thought he was...”
“He is. Drink up, now.”
“And my aunt who thought she was a witch?”
“Was a witch.” Gray popped the lid from the vial. One drop. Just one drop would fix both her brain and his clamped stomach. “Why are you still here?”
“Carmina convinced me to stay. I came here to tell you.” Gray’s gaze followed her hand, which she waved around, seemingly unaware of the vial. Her eyes widened. “Carmina. Is she...”
“Not yet.”
Sadie slumped against the wall. “Aunt Pippa really was a witch. Which means...” Her face went white.
“Don’t faint and hit your head.” He moved closer, ready to steady her. “Head wounds bleed like a sonovabitch.”
The hand without the potion in it flattened against him, just above his belt. Her fingers burned through his silk shirt. “The letter. I got a letter from her the day she died. But if she was a witch, then she could have known she was going to die. A witch could, right?”
Her eyes searched his, looking for the truth. He nodded.
“So no one killed her,” Sadie concluded.
“You thought someone did?” He pulled away.
She nodded. “I thought everyone was hiding something. But it was just the magic.”
Just the magic. Her reaction was nothing like he expected. Nothing. Her entire world had just changed; she should be freaking out. Instead, she asked about people. Burana. Carmina. Pippa. Her eye wasn’t even twitching. “You’re taking this very well.”
She absentmindedly raised the vial to her mouth and tipped it. He tensed, but just before the first drop reached her tongue, she pulled it away. “Dammit! All these kids have magic?”
“Not all. I guess some of them, you’d call them mutants. Genetic anomalies.”
“But you’d call them ‘Metas.’”
“Short for Metanormals.”
“Superheroes,” she said. “And I’m a...Non? Is that the word for normal people?”
Gray nodded.
“No wonder I suck teaching here. I’ve been in the hole since day one. They should have a teacher like them.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying for the last month.”
She lifted the vial to her lips and paused. “I suppose you really are the most extraordinary chemistry teacher in the world. Are you a wizard?”
She’d forget this anyway, he told himself. Why did he feel a pang of regret? “I prefer mage.”
“Well, Mr. Mage, I suppose it never occurred to you—” The sentence died on her lips. For the first time, Sadie looked at the vial in her hand. She stepped back, and he winced at her wide-eyed fear. “Are you trying to poison me?”
A million things added up in Sadie’s head. Why hadn’t she seen all this before? It was so obvious. How could she have imagined this was an ordinary school hallway, with ordinary lockers lining the walls? Why hadn’t she sensed the air of specialness at the school? What was wrong with her perceptions—couldn’t she see what was in front of her?
No wonder Gray treated her like an idiot. A chemistry teacher? Ha! Maybe, just maybe, he really was the most extraordinary chemistry teacher in the whole wide world.
He gestured toward the vial. “It’s not poison. It’ll just erase your memory. Perfectly safe. Drink up.”
The smell wafting up from the vial was oddly familiar. Something grassy, herbal.
“No way,” she told him. “Period
.
Is the silver coat you wore when Count Burana came to see me your superhero costume? Do you wear tights under it?”
“Listen very carefully.” He enunciated every word. “I have never—ever—owned spandex in my life. Not ever. And stop calling us superheroes. The word is Meta. And a few extra pockets for spells doesn’t make it a costume.”
Her own real-life superhero. Sadie’s heart pounded. No. Gray wasn’t hers. He didn’t even like her. Seeing the glass vial in her hand drove that home. “I won’t drink it, Gray. It’s my decision.”
He looked at the potion. Then he looked at her. She met his gray eyes and her heartbeat zoomed. He had eighty pounds on her. Hell, he was a wizard. He could dump it down her throat. Poof. Instant zombie. Or whatever. Her flight reflex kicked in, but his long legs versus her high heels? No contest.
Was he a good wizard or a bad wizard? Sadie felt her eye twitch. She drew in a breath. The tension in the hall gathered and hovered between them. They both knew he could force her.
A fierce, frozen moment passed.
“Your eye is twitching,” he said blandly, and looked away.
