Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance) (32 page)

“Get your coat, twerp. Let’s go for a walk.”

A glow of happiness warmed her at hearing the nickname that had plagued her childhood. They walked to the lobby together, catching up on little things. Sadie’s struggles with her classroom. Chloë’s recent cases.

The April day was unseasonably warm and most of the adults walking the paths through the Quad left their coats open, while telling the student they’d come to visit to button up.

“I haven’t seen this many adults in one place since September,” Sadie said.

“There’s going to be a thunderstorm,” her sister said.

Sadie blinked. “Uh, okay.”

“Your niece told me to tell you about it.”

“Should clear up the last of this snow.” What little was left was packed into dirty piles of melting ice.

“I’m not joking. She can tell the weather twenty-three days in advance, anywhere in the world. I’m just a psychic—”

Sadie snorted.

Chloë smiled ruefully. “My Talent is pretty basic. But can you imagine having three weeks’ notice for a hurricane? Your niece will save hundreds of thousands of lives someday. She also sent you this.”

She unfolded the paper Chloë handed her. It was waxy-stiff with enthusiastic crayon drawing.

The dark scene on the paper seemed to suck her in. She lost awareness of walking down the path.

Light blue teardrops fell from a deep blue sky. A jagged yellow thunderbolt split the page in half, pointing down to a stick figure lying on the ground. Whoever it was, she wore a triangle skirt and had a line of white hair at her temple. To her left was a smaller, dull-silver figure. Sadie didn’t know if the person was shorter than the girl lying on the ground, in the distance, or if Moira just needed to work on perspective.

“Does it mean anything to you?” Chloë asked.

She shrugged, but she couldn’t shrug off the dark mood the picture evoked. “She has your talent for art.”

“I can only draw cryptic pictures of the past. She can draw the future.” Pride dripped from Chloë’s voice.

“Sis, I love you, but if you ever use the words ‘just’ or ‘only’ about your superpowers again, I will slap you silly.”

Chloë’s smile was brilliant. “You called me a faker at Pippa’s funeral.”

“My world’s gotten bigger since then. And smaller.” She explained how Christian’s spell meant she could never cross Strange Academy’s magic circle without losing her memory.

“Bastard,” Chloë spat out. “To think I thought he was cute.”

She swallowed back her compulsion to tell Chloë about her own crush. “Hey, did you have a crush on every boy in your grade?”

Chloë’s eyebrows pinched together. “Every boy in my grade?”

“Christian. Gray.” Her sister lusting after Gray in her youth irritated Sadie more than she liked to admit.

“No one told you.” Chloë’s smile had a snide edge to it. “I don’t know how to say this. Christian wasn’t in my grade. He was the principal.”

“But he’s only thirty.”

Chloë snorted. “He was then, too.”

Sadie’s heart stopped. “So that explains how he knew Pippa when she was young. Is immortality his Talent?”

“No one knows. No one asks.”

“This is the kind of information I could have used in December,” Sadie said. Then she realized where Chloë had led her. “My God, Chloë, what are we doing here?”

She had avoided the library. It gave her the creeps, like a cursed gray stone tomb. The roof had started to oxidize in green stripes, like liquid pouring down the slant, giving the impression that the whole building was melting.

“You wanted me to visit the crime scene,” Chloë said. “But the police called it an accident.”

“It couldn’t have been,” Sadie admitted. “The book that fell belonged on the bottom shelf.”

“Then how did it fall hard enough to kill her? Some accident,” Chloë said. “And there’s something else. There’s a reason I didn’t come here until now. I was told not to, twerp.”

Chloë drew a rectangle of paper out of her purse. The envelope was addressed to Chloë in Pippa’s familiar calligraphy. “You weren’t the only one to get a letter.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Gray wasn’t sure he heard a knock on his door. He vaulted out of bed anyway, grabbing his silver Maglite from the nightstand. The lights had gone out an hour earlier due to the late-night thunderstorm pummeling Strange Hall. He’d been lying in bed counting seconds between lighting crashes and the thunder after. The worst of the storm was getting closer.

He’d probably imagined the knock, but it might be trouble. Sadie’s show this afternoon had tied him up in knots; he could use a little trouble.

Why hadn’t she told everyone about them? It was her chance to break his engagement, and she hadn’t taken it. Maybe she didn’t want to. His stress knot pulsed like a neon light.

His hand was on the doorknob when the second knock came. He opened it as lightning lit up the hallway.

He jumped when he saw the seven-foot tall demon glowing white in his doorway. Adrenaline shot through his veins. Not a single potion on you, Dumbass.

“Gray,” the demon said.

He lowered the spot of his flashlight into an unflinching human face—and felt like an idiot.

“Sadie.” And Thalia. The marble goddess standing behind her seemed to grin more than usual.

Forgetting the haunted statue’s dumb joke, he pulled Sadie inside before anyone saw them together.

Then the door shut on the world.

He stepped closer to kiss her, to strip off her black kimono and make love to her until she forgot their fight, but she folded her arms across her chest.

He’d never seen her like this before. Cold and distant. In some kind of trance. She stood perfectly still, her eyes half-lidded. The light from his flashlight illuminated a face as white as Thalia’s, pink lips drained and bloodless. Oddest of all, her eye twitched in slow motion.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Did something happen with your sister?”

“Yes.” She looked away, as if she didn’t want to see him. “Something happened with my sister.”

“No one is worth humiliating yourself in public.”

Another mirthless laugh. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”

“Don’t twist my words.” He barely got the sentence out through his gritted teeth.

“Words, words, words,” she said. “No more words.”

He shone the flashlight in her face. “Are you drunk?”

“If you don’t like words anymore, how about a picture?” Sadie dipped into her kimono pocket and brought out a paper.

When he touched it, his hand tingled. Magic? Why would Sadie have it? He focused his flashlight on the picture.

The drawing leapt from the page. It wasn’t a picture, it was a moment frozen in time. He could have put out his hand and pulled the pieces off the game board. The round plastic disks would have felt cold between his fingers.

“Tiddlywinks?” he said. “In black and white.”

“Pippa’s tiddlywinks.” With his flashlight focused on the page, Sadie’s voice wafted out of the darkness. “In gray. Remember playing with them the Christmas you spent with her?”

His stress knot broke into painful fractures, like a glass bottle thrown against the wall. He’d never told anyone about that, and he knew Pippa wouldn’t have said anything. So how could she have possibly found out?

He strove for a cool tone, but it came out with an edge of desperation. “How do you know about that?”

“Gray.” There was no emotion in her voice, no warmth in her eyes. “Why did you kill Pippa?”

“Oh God.” The bottom dropped out of his world. A wave of nausea pitched over him.

She knew. She reached to her neck and wrenched the cords of the
gris-gris
off. She dropped it on the floor, where it hit with a plop.

“Sadie.” He stepped toward her. She stepped back.

He dropped his hands in resignation. His whole body seemed to deflate. He walked to his dining room table and collapsed on one of the chairs, staring at the floor between his feet.

She stood over him, her face in darkness, unreadable. The silence was an invisible wall between them.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” he said.

A smaller voice emerged from the darkness. “Uncle Gray?”

Lightning struck, showing him Sadie’s back, turned on him, and his nephew’s wide-eyed face.

Sterling. Dear God, he’d heard. He felt the blood drain from his face as chill horror crept over him. Sterling.

By the time he heard the thunder peal, Gray was alone.

*

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*

Sadie’s shoulder banged into the solid oak of the Strange Hall doors. A sickening thud accompanied flinch-worthy pain shooting straight into her bone. But the door gave and she squeezed through. She threw herself into the deafening thunderstorm after Sterling, who had taken off at a sprint as soon as he'd heard his uncle's words.

The rain instantly drenched her, gluing her hair to her head and slicking her robe to her legs. Why hadn’t she worn something more substantial to confront her aunt’s murderer—like a full suit of armor? Needles of water jabbed into her. Water pounded her skull, echoing in her brain. Chill wind whistled by her ears, drowning out other sounds.

Unfortunately, she could still hear her thoughts. You’d better be right behind me, you big alumnus. Maybe if she hadn’t taken off the charm...

Sadie whirled, scanning for Sterling. What was wrong with her? A guy told her he murdered her aunt, and she wanted him at her back?

She pushed her emotions down. Her perceptions had betrayed her again. She’d thought he was a hero. She’d fallen in love with him.

And he’d better catch up soon, or she was going to kill him.

She cringed at the stupidity that cursed her to willful blindness when it came to men.
Pathetic,
she thought. Or perhaps it was pathetic fallacy: when the weather in a piece of literature reflected the feelings of a character. If this were a Shakespeare play, then someone around here would be insane.
Maybe it’s me,
she thought.
Maybe that’s what falling in love with your aunt’s murderer did to you.

“Sterling!” She screamed across the Quad as she ran. The hard rain drowned the sound of her voice. Where was he? She saw nothing but blurry stone buildings. Every noise was just another bucketful of rain pouring out of the sky.

“Gray.” She could barely hear herself. “If you have ever been even the tiniest bit heroic in your life, you will get your ass out here.”

I see things in men that aren’t there,
she thought bitterly.
Understatement of the century.

She shook off the thought. It didn’t matter. Only Sterling mattered. Between the darkness and the rain, he might as well have used a spell and vanished.

Even with the panicky adrenaline pouring through her, she remembered her niece's drawing of a thunderstorm. Of a woman in a skirt lying on the ground.

Still no sign of Sterling. Her heart pounded. She pulled a sticky string of hair out of an eye twitching madly.

“Sterling! Come back! Everything’s okay,” she lied.

She scanned the campus.
There
. A shadow moved toward the open soccer field. She ran across the Quad after it, abandoning the paved paths, but Sterling sprinted forward. Her soaked robe slapped her pumping legs.

Her foot slipped on a hard, cold pile of ice, the remnant of a snowdrift melted into a solid mass. Her ankle twisted, making her cry out in surprised pain. Her slipper flew off. She kicked off the other one and ran on.

The air grew dense, as if in warning. She ignored the warning and was five feet away from the bronze bell in the center of the Quad when a bolt of electricity flared from the sky. The brightest flash of light she’d ever seen. The loudest bang she’d ever heard. The greatest fear she’d ever felt.

And then it was gone, making the darkness even darker.

She ignored the residual brightness burned on the inside of her eyelids. She ignored the ringing echoes deep inside her brain. She put the fear in a little box and closed it up tight. She had to protect Sterling from this storm.

She ran past the buildings into the wide soccer field. She hurried by the lightning-rod goalposts. She looked across the flat grass, still dead from winter, toward the tangle of forest beyond the field house. If Sterling ran into the woods, she would never find him. Where was Gray?

“Sterling!” The kid was fast. “I have to sign you up for track and field.”

She whirled around, scanning the field.

Sterling stood there. How had he gotten behind her? He had a hard look on his face, his hands molded into fists at his side, rain dripping down his Roman nose.

She should have thrown her arms around him and told him it would be all right, but the hard set of his mouth warned her off.

“He didn’t kill her.” His voice cut through the storm.

“I know.” The words slipped out easily.
I do know,
she thought in wonder.

Sterling searched her face. After a moment, he nodded and turned back to campus.

She followed him. They could talk when they were inside. Besides, she was waiting for a thunderbolt of clarity to tell her why she’d told Sterling that Gray didn’t kill Pippa, when he’d confessed to it less than an hour ago.

Sterling seemed not to notice the bone-freezing cold, but walked straight on. The winter-frozen ground was thawing in the rain and cold mud squished between her toes.

Still no sign of Gray.

The air around her seemed to grow dense. The familiar sensation choked her with fear. Her ears pressurized. This time, she didn’t ignore the warning.

“Sterl—” She never finished commanding the boy to run. A hideous crack deafened her. Her world was consumed in brilliant blinding light. Millions of volts of electrical current shot through her body. Her heart stopped.

She was dead by the time she hit the ground.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I killed her.”

Ice knifed Gray’s heart at his nephew’s words. He grabbed Sterling by the shoulders, trying to jostle the blank stare off his face.

“Sterling,” he said. “Where’s Sadie?”