Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance) (36 page)
She opened the door to Jewel Jones, flushed pink under her white-blonde hair. Her ice-blue eyes were rimmed with red.
“Sadie.” Her lower lip trembled. “I burned Pippa’s letter.”
She froze on the spot. No wonder Jewel hadn’t given it back. Just for an instant, she waited to let the pain of betrayal wash over her, but it didn’t come. Pippa’s letter, which had seemed so important, the whole impetus that had brought her to Strange Academy, that had changed her life. It seemed that the life was far more important than the object. And Jewel was more important than the letter.
“A couple of weeks ago I would have been bothered, but dying gives you a new perspective on material things,” she told Jewel, leaving out the part about her new powers and the fact that she was having regular conversations with the deceased. “Iced tea?”
A few minutes later, they sat at the round dining table sipping cold, sweet tea. Misery hovered around Jewel.
“Why did you burn the letter?” Sadie asked.
Jewel stared into the black-rimmed tumbler of iced tea. “Because she didn’t write me one.”
The thought of a witch being jealous of the ignorant, willfully blind, fish out of water who had arrived at Strange Academy in November made Sadie laugh aloud.
“I want to help these children the way she helped me,” Jewel said. “But it’s not me, is it? It’s you. Since the night of the storm, you’ve changed. You faced death.”
Great,
she thought.
Jewel can see the change, but Gray can’t.
“I see things more clearly now. You’re not Pippa. Don’t spend the rest of your life trying to be someone you’re not. She didn’t write you a letter because you don’t need one. You’re not Pippa’s apprentice anymore. It’s graduation day.”
Jewel sniffed. “I should leave Strange Academy?”
“Can you stay here and not live in Pippa’s shadow?”
Jewel shot up from the table so fast she nearly knocked her head on the amber-teardrop lamp. “I have to think about this. I’m sorry I burned your letter.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Pippa left me lots of things.”
*
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*
Two hours later, Sadie answered another knock on her door. William Sweetwater, escorting a UPS guy with a letter.
After she read the letter, she packed her suitcase.
Late-afternoon rain sheeted down the car windows, blurring Sadie’s view of the trees towering over narrow laneway leading away from Strange Academy. The storm had come on suddenly, forcing her to fight through a crowd of sopping students coming in the Strange Hall doors as she tried to go out.
She closed her eyes and slumped her forehead on the steering wheel. After seven months of abandonment, her ancient box-on-wheels Jetta had started with a single turn of the key. It was almost magical.
“Hello, Sadie.”
She wasn’t surprised by the voice speaking from her passenger’s seat. But she was surprised it was male. “Hello, Quinlan. I expected Pippa.”
“Since I founded this place in 1318, as the sign you’ve been staring at for two hours says, I have seniority.”
“There’s no plaque for the sign,” she said distractedly.
“By the way, your first day, in Dr. Cross’s office, I was the one who made you hear through the door. I have some power when I’m around my portrait.”
“You wanted me to hear Gray’s insults?”
Quinlan was in senior citizen mode, appearing seventy years old, but spry for his age. Not hard when your real age was ten times more.
“She wanted you to fall in love with him. I just wanted you to stick around. I know you pretty well, and I figured if you knew someone didn’t want you here, you’d stay. It worked, didn’t it?” Quinlan’s eyebrows came together in concern. “But now that everyone wants you here, you’re sitting in your car with the engine off, looking at the Strange Academy sign. I assume you remember that if you drive past it, you’ll forget everything.”
“I e-mailed Chloë an apology. My only regret is I won’t remember who she really is.” She had other regrets, too. Leaving Carmina, Regina, Nikkos, Henry, Sterling. A list of regrets. She'd thought about trying to send herself some notes about what she'd learned at the academy, but no doubt her email was being filtered and the Metas would find a way to go through her stuff when she left. They were superheroes after all.
She wouldn’t regret leaving Gray. A hole in her mind was better than a hole in her heart.
“Sadie, none of us saw the letter the UPS guy brought you.”
She laughed through her dark mood. “Even ghosts have their blind spots.” She reached for the business envelope sitting on top of her hard-sided powder-blue luggage on the back seat. As she unfolded the thick cream paper for Quinlan, she ran her finger over the embossed tower in the golden seal.
“‘The University of Copenhagen offers you a position to pursue your Doctorate of Literature.’ And a note from the president about how interesting he found your master’s thesis. Probably means they’ll offer you a professorship. That’s terrif—” Quinlan’s face fell as he realized the implications. “Oh.”
“It’s everything I’ve ever wanted,” she told him.
“Then why have you been sitting here for two hours waiting for someone to talk you out of it?”
“How can I stay here?” She rubbed at the growing headache in her temples. As the rain outside subsided, the pain built. “He’s everywhere I look. Even the damn photocopier will remind me of him. I’m not strong enough to stay and I’m not strong enough to leave. Why can’t I just have some self-respect and turn that key again?”
The air around Quinlan shivered. The old man with gold-flecked eyes turned into a five-year-old kid with gold-flecked eyes. “Maybe this isn’t about self-respect. Being a university prof seems empty next to teaching these kids, doesn’t it?”
“Including Gray’s kid.”
“Okay, then leave.” Little Quin’s shoulders sagged comically as he gave a great adult sigh. “But before you do, there’s something you should know. About Sterling.”
Ah, Sterling. She should have helped him, poor kid. It was what Pippa had wanted. “I think I’ve already figured it out,” she said.
“That he got the worst phone call of his life?”
She snapped to attention. “What phone call?”
*
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*
“I wanna play Half-Life,” Sterling demanded.
Gray swallowed the sour taste left in his mouth by his nephew’s whine as he tossed the keys he’d just used to open his apartment door on the table. “After you finish your homework.”
Sterling’s lip sneered as he folded his arms over the fierce-looking Chinese dragon on his t-shirt. Gray was developing a foul mood to match Sterling’s. He tried to shrug it off, but the kid’s snarking was getting to him.
Sterling narrowed his eyes and threw his heavy knapsack on top of his keys, guaranteeing a gouge in the antique tabletop. His stress knot flared.
“I’m talking a shower. Do your homework.” He unbuttoned his shirt.
When he got the bathroom door shut behind him, he tossed his shirt onto the blue bathmat and leaned over the marble countertop. His reflection looked scruffy and worn, as if spending time with the kid could give him five o’clock shadow at three-thirty.
Either Sterling is pushing your buttons on purpose,
he told himself,
or you need to kill something.
The crack of glass interrupted him. He didn’t hesitate, racing toward the source of the shattering noise.
What the hell? Sterling stood in front of the plasma TV, fists balled at his sides. The cracked screen fizzled with electricity as neon gas leaked out in small waves. In the center of the damage was a black Xbox controller.
Sterling lifted his obnoxious chin. “It wouldn’t load.”
His swelling stress knot grew to the size of a small planet. Too angry to trust himself, he clamped his jaw.
When he heard a knock on the door, he was half annoyed and half grateful for the interruption. He strode over to open it.
“Hi.” Behind Sadie, the statue of Thalia smiled.
Her hair was wet. She’d been caught in the recent storm. A white strand stuck to her cheek, winding a path from her temple to her pointed chin. Her black t-shirt scooped low.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“The crash was nothing.”
Please, please, come in and take care of this,
he pleaded silently. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Can I say hi to Sterling?”
Confusion drew his eyebrows together. “How did you know he’s here?”
Her voice lowered, softened. Dark eyes searched his face openly, making him oddly uncomfortable. “Have you made any life-altering decisions lately?”
He tried to keep himself from inhaling her citrus scent in the very public hallway. “Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Fine.” Sadie sighed. “Can I come in?”
He hauled her inside before someone caught them together. Once inside, she ignored him, walking straight toward Sterling, who was still frozen in front of the sparking screen.
“Hello, Sterling.”
Sterling’s head bobbed down between slouching shoulders. She turned Sterling to face her. Gray’s throat caught. The kid’s lip trembled in misery.
“I thought so.” She wiped a thumb through the track of his tears. She pulled Sterling into a hug. His self-control broke and he sobbed into her shoulder. She patted his hair, telling him it—whatever “it” was—would be okay.
“It’s not so bad,” Gray said. “I can get a new TV.”
“No. I—” Sterling collapsed into tearful hiccups. Humiliation radiated as he tried to rip out of Sadie’s hug.
“Shhh.” She pulled him to the leather couch, where he curled into a fetal ball with his head on her thigh. Gray felt like he was watching a movie dubbed in Swahili, with no subtitles.
“His dad called.” Sadie stroked Sterling’s hair. “The divorce is final. If you feel like breaking the rules—”
“I’m going to get Argent,” he said, standing.
The scene of Sadie running her hand over Sterling’s back stuck in his mind while he pulled an instantaneous transportation spell out of his apothecary cabinet. He tried to picture April comforting their child this way. He couldn’t.
*
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*
Less than an hour later, Gray used the spell to create a portal in Argent’s dorm room doorway, so they could both return to Strange Academy. With the time change, it was midnight in Switzerland, but Argent had been sitting awake.
Through the portal opening, he saw Sadie sitting with Sterling at the dining table. The kid tapped a yellow pencil with a gnawed eraser on a sheet of math problems. Her hand hovered protectively on the back of his chair.
Her gasp of surprise at his sudden entrance shot a dose of cocky pride straight into his veins. The admiration in her eyes made him want to strut around the room.
His sense of superiority didn’t last long. Argent ran to Sadie, who hugged him like he was her own nephew. He stood useless at the door. Redundant. Again.
All his life, he’d had a potion to solve every problem.
Where’s the magic to fix this one?
he wondered. She pushed Argent’s glasses up his nose. Then again, maybe he was looking at it.
He escaped into the kitchen, away from the pain his brother’s disregard for rules caused, damn him. He gripped the countertop. Dom was probably celebrating with the tart he thought he was in love with while his kids were miserable.
Gray closed his eyes and let his forehead fall into the cupboard door. The resulting thump echoed in his ears.
You’re breaking the rules, too,
whispered an evil voice in his head.
It’s Sadie,
he argued.
It’s different.
Yep,
said the voice.
She’s a Non, Dumbass. It’s worse.
But I love her.
Dom loves his mistress,
said the voice.
But I love her.
Gray’s thoughts had the tone of a whiny child grasping at his favorite toy.
“Of course you’re still brothers,” Sadie was saying when he returned to the living room. “The divorce doesn’t change anything.”
He set a tray in front of her and the boys. Coffee for himself and Sadie, soda for the twins, and brownies for everyone. He might be emotionally useless, but he knew chemistry. Caffeine to keep the adults awake. Chocolate to release endorphins into the bloodstream. Sugar to perk the boys up.
In tandem, the twins reached for brownies.
“The magic circle,” she asked. “The one you make before you cast a spell—what’s it for?”
“It protects you from evil spirits,” Argent said.
“When you’re inside, they can’t get in,” Sterling said.
“You two need to make a magic circle of your own,” she told them. “Keep your relationship inside it. Don’t let anything else get in.”
His heart started to pound as she took the twins’ chocolate-stained right hands and joined them.
“Nothing else matters.” Sadie’s voice took on an ethereal quality. She wove a web of words tangling the boys up together. The boys looked at each other as if they were seeing something for the first time. “If you don’t do this, other things will keep you apart. If you do, you’ll always be together.”
In the frozen moment of silence after she stopped speaking, Gray wondered why she was looking at him.
*
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*
“Your lover—” Aunt Pippa said, as Sadie tossed her skirt into her closet, adding to a mound of discarded black clothes “—is about to open your door and throw you down on the bed.”
“What?” She was pulling her black t-shirt over her head when a sudden pressure in her ears signaled the truth of Pippa’s prediction. The dark shirt blinded her. She struggled to free herself and look into smoky eyes.
Her t-shirt twisted around her head. She struggled but couldn’t escape. He’s holding it, the alumnus, she realized. She was totally exposed.
She imagined what her body looked like to him, with the black of her thong riding low beneath her flat belly, its ribbon bows at her hips, and her pinned arms raising her breasts high. He must have appreciated the sight; a masculine chuckle filled the dark space. Rough hands slid down her ribcage, then curled under her black lace thong to cup her buttocks. She shivered, knowing he could do anything he wanted to her.
