Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance) (26 page)

“Is this Miss Strange, then?” he asked, in his polished copper baritone—the kind of voice that made you feel clumsy for saying “uhm.”

“Thank you so much for calling.” Something in Mr. English’s voice made her want to tell him the truth. It might have been the fear that he would see right through her anyway. “I have to admit that this call isn’t about ordering books for the library.” She retrieved her keys from the door and kicked it shut. Privacy. She didn’t want anyone else overhearing this phone call.

“I suspected not,” he admitted. “I believe I would do the same in your shoes. In truth, I’m glad you contacted me. Your aunt spoke of you. She cared for you deeply. I would have introduced myself at the funeral if I’d been able to attend.”

He went on to explain that he’d experienced the symptoms of a stroke, but that the tunnel vision and garbled speech had finally been identified as the precursors of a vicious migraine. His voice filled with genuine regret for having missed the funeral. She thought back to her behavior of that day, screaming at her sister, and decided it wasn’t such a bad thing. Apparently the Metas had held their own memorial a week later.

As they talked, she gave up any idea that he might be deceiving her. In fact, she tucked her legs up under herself on Pippa’s brown-swirled couch, enjoying the conversation. He gave no sign of being anything less than honest. In fact, she felt a genuine regret growing in her chest. It would have been nice if Pippa had been open about their relationship. She could have known Mr. English in a happier time.

He explained that they had never hidden anything, but that living under a microscope at Strange Academy had made things difficult. Neither he nor Pippa wanted to get married, which meant they couldn’t move in together, not at a school. But she got a sense that they’d both been happy with the situation. And she thought she heard a twinge of pain in Mr. English’s voice as he remembered his loss.

She ended up not even asking him about the day of Pippa’s death. This man had done nothing wrong. She knew it without a single whiff of suspicion.

“Do you think you’ll come back?” she asked. “I would love to meet you in person.”

“I believe I will. Perhaps in the fall. I’m not sure I’m ready to retire quite yet.”

Now it was her turn for regret. If he came back in September, she wouldn’t be there. They would never meet. She drew in air and tried to give her voice an even tone.  “Well, finding her must have been quite a trauma. It would be hard to come back.”

The silence on the line lasted for several heartbeats.

When he spoke again, his words were framed with hesitation, caution. “Who told you that I found her?”

“No one,” she admitted. “I assumed that it was you. But you weren’t the one.”

She heard him take a breath, as if to fortify himself. “I wish I had found her. It was a student. Unfortunately, quite a young student. His name is Sterling Gray.”

Her stomach filling with acid, she nearly dropped the phone.

Chapter Nineteen

In the dream, Gray fought a losing battle against exhaustion. His knees ached from hours of treading a black sea that stained his skin. Every muscle felt like a chemical burn.

He stopped his frantic movement. For an instant, he floated. He breathed great gulps of citrus-scented air into starved lungs. He lay on his back and saw a dream sky, with the sun shining in a field of blue on one side and a white moon dominating a star-flecked night on the other. He gave himself up to the peace buoying his body on the calming waves.

It didn’t last. Something plunged him into the dark water. Gasping sent salt water blazing into his lungs. He looked up to see the water’s surface receding. He strained toward it uselessly as he plummeted further into the depths. He fought the pain in his limbs and tried to kick his legs, but couldn’t.

He looked into the inky depths. A woman dragged him down. The woman’s brown hair parted and he recognized her face.

A sound broke the dream. He jerked awake and gasped for air. He put his hands to his pounding temples to keep his brain from exploding.

The cell on his bedside table rang again. He ignored it. The sweat on his naked back caught the draft from the window. Dull morning light inched through the frosted pane of glass.

He let himself fall onto the pillows of his bed. His empty bed. The pristine one-thousand-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets grated his skin in a way Sadie’s cheap duvet never did.

The phone rang again. This time, he picked it up. Before he even got it to his ear, a familiar voice raged at him. “You didn’t spend Christmas with April.”

“Why, hello to you, too, Maman. Happy New Year.”

“Don’t ‘Happy New Year’ me. You not gonna love this girl if you don’t spend time with her. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you as happened to me and your father.”

“When we’re married, I’ll spend time with her.” He thought of the cold waters closing over him and tried to untangle the twisted sheets from his legs. Maybe that was the problem.

“What’s the problem?”

Shit, had he said it out loud? “Everything’s fine between me and April.”

“You don’t want to marry her.” His mother’s soft Haitian accent cut right through him; he was a little kid again. He wanted to tell her all his problems, but this wasn’t a skinned knee they were talking about.

“Sure, I do.” He winced at his own lie.

“No, that’s why you put this off. Your younger brother, he been married for a long time, but not you.”

The comparison between him and his brother brought his stress knot back with a vengeance. “In case you’ve forgotten, Dom won’t be married much longer.”

His mother sighed. “You’ll be married forever. Rules break for your brother, but not you. That’s why I want you to love April.”

“It’ll be fine, Maman. I’m the responsible one, remember? I’ll take care of the Gray House and everything will be fine.”

“Plenty of people to take care of the Gray House. But who takes care of you?”

He remembered Sadie sitting naked on his back, pushing on his stress knot with all the strength of her slim fingers. “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

“Sure,” his mother said.

After he put the phone down, he showered off the dried sweat. When he was dressed, he checked his reflection. In a three-hundred-dollar gray shirt and handmade silver silk tie, he looked like a man in control.

He packed his black alligator case with the spells he needed for his first classes of the New Year that would change his life. At the end of term, he’d go back to his job cleaning up other people’s messes. By the end of the year, he’d be a husband. And maybe even a potential father.

It was all set. One question remained. Why hadn’t it been Sadie pulling him into the black depths?

Since childhood, he’d studied the coded Hermetic imagery that ancients like Jabir and Robert Bacon used to record formulas. But this dream didn’t require interpretation.

Everything would have been so much easier if it had been Sadie dragging him down. But it hadn’t been. It had been April.

In a few months, he would marry his fiancée and be tied to her forever. And she was killing him.

With his coat and game face on, he opened the door of his apartment and walked out.

Right into a Greek goddess holding a severed head.

*

***

******

****

*

“I thought you left me,” Sadie said to the person sitting on the end of her bed. “School’s been back in session for weeks.”

“Maybe you left me.” Another ten years had melted off Dream Pippa’s face since Sadie had seen her over a month ago, just before Christmas. Her old woman softness had disappeared. She tucked the skirt of her yellow sundress over smooth legs, cocked her head to one side, and smiled a wide smile at Sadie. She seemed more solid, too. The late January moonlight streaming through the round window at Sadie’s back didn’t bounce right through her. In fact, she had a thin shadow.

“But I wanted to talk to you.” Sadie’s voice came out too harsh, making her wish she could snatch back the accusation. “Even if you aren’t really Pippa.”

Pippa kept smiling, but her brow knitted as she looked from Sadie into the night-dark room. Sadie breathed in the brewed-tea scent hovering around her aunt.

“Did you? You weren’t so angry you couldn’t stand the sight of Metas, even me?”

Her throat closed.

“Belief is a powerful thing, little Sadie. Believing is seeing. Especially when you’re a Meta.”

“But I’m not,” she pointed out.

Pippa reached out, as if to stroke her hair—then, seeming to remember she couldn’t, put her hand down. “And you’ll never let yourself forget it, will you?”

“Gray won’t let me forget it.” Her voice cracked. “He hasn’t even spoken to me since New Year’s. Three weeks. I see him in the hall all the time. I stand across from him at the weekly staff meeting. He looks right through me, like I’m—”

“A ghost?” A little smile played at Pippa’s lips. “Do you want him to look at you?”

The lump in her throat kept Sadie from answering.

“Do you love him?”

“No.” Sadie gazed into the shadows gathered in the corner of her room. “Why would you ask?”

“All your life, you’ve been drawn to men with strong personalities—what’s the word you use?—alpha males. But it’s gone all widdershins because they were strong in the wrong way. I thought perhaps Gray was who you were looking for.”

“I’m not going to throw my heart again to a man who doesn’t deserve it. I’ve learned my lesson.” She pushed a wild strand of hair off her face. “Please help me, Pippa. Don’t just ask me questions.” She felt a little crazy asking her own subconscious for help, but she was desperate.

“What if the questions are helping you?” Pippa asked.

She gritted her teeth. “That was a question.”

“You let Gray take control. Just like you’ve done before.”

“It’s what he wants.”

Pippa rested her chin on her hand. “Are you sure keeping your relationship a secret is what he wants?”

Wasn’t it? Sadie tamped down on the slight hope opening in her heart. “He always does what he wants.”

“Interesting
perception
. Do guys who do what they want usually have stress knots?”

“I’m here to solve Gray’s stress knot problem? Why not hire a massage therapist?”

“You’re here for many reasons. One: These kids need you.”

Was Pippa joking? Misery choked her. “Carmina isn’t talking to me. She just sits there and frowns at me. The others use the time to catch up on their homework. But Carmina glares at me for the whole period like I’ve betrayed her.”

“Gee, I wonder why.”

Sadie drew her hands into the sleeves of her dumpy plaid pajamas. She wished these dreams of her dead aunt were a little less realistic. She could do without the nighttime chill. “It’s because I didn’t stop Gray from getting her suspended.”

“Wrong,” Pippa accused. “And you know it.”

Sadie exhaled. “It’s because I...”

Pippa filled in the blank. “Gave up.”

“I did. But I have nothing to teach.”

“Why did you come here?”

Sadie snorted a laugh. “To investigate your murder.”

“I wasn’t murdered.” Pippa took a yellow ribbon from her straw sunhat between her fingers. “But you looked for clues.”

“Yeah, I’m a real Nancy Drew. So far, all I know is that the book couldn’t have fallen on you by itself and that Mr. English didn’t do it. What were you doing that someone wanted to stop?”

Since she’d figured out that the book couldn’t have fallen by itself, Sadie’d taken all the precautions she could, making sure not to go out after dark or to stay where there weren’t a lot of people around. She’d been through Pippa’s books and found nothing.

The e-mail she’d sent to Chloë asking for her help getting back Pippa’s notes—removed by Christian—had gone unanswered.

She’d thought about letting Jewel Jones in on her suspicions and had even gone as far as asking her for coffee to have the conversation. At the last minute, with the words on her lips, she’d asked Jewel for Pippa’s letter back instead. Jewel had danced around the subject awkwardly.

And Sadie’s B.S. detector had made her keep bringing it up. Now Jewel was hiding something, too.

“I wasn’t doing anything.” Pippa threw the ribbon over her shoulder. “Sadie, these children will deal with mysteries all their lives. Teach them your curiosity. They don’t want you to give up. They just want to make sure you’re someone worth listening to.”

“Teach curiosity? I can’t even control my classroom. I just want to solve your murder, and I can’t trust anyone enough to ask them what you were doing that made you a target.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Pippa snapped. “Stop letting people beat you just because they’ve got superpowers.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. “But they’ve got superpowers.”

“If I might paraphrase Morpheus from
The Matrix
,” Pippa said, “‘Stop trying to control your classroom and just control your classroom.’”

“Maybe it would help if I knew kung-fu.”

Pippa ignored her. “As for Gray, you haven’t asked the right question. Don’t you wonder what his real name is?”

*

***

******

****

*

Sadie ran her finger down the cracked red spine of
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
and laid it on her desk. With Pippa’s accusation of giving up playing on a repeating loop in her brain, she couldn’t escape into Poe’s creepiness. The slap of leather hitting wood made several of the fifth graders look up.

She stared at the empty desk behind Sterling. Carmina’s behavior had gotten worse in the last week. Chewing gum. Passing notes. Yesterday, writing on the desk. Challenging her authority. Sadie had ignored it.

And now, Carmina wasn’t even here.

Acid rose in her stomach. Why was Carmina doing this?

Sunshine warmed Pippa’s classroom. Sadie shoved back her chair—the new one rolled easily and didn’t even smell like arson—and looked out the windows. Snow frosted the staid buildings with birthday cake icing.

Pretty. But she wasn’t fooled for a second.