Strange Academy (Hot Paranormal Romance) (34 page)

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You want music? Seventies rock? You
are
delirious.”

“It was you,” she breathed.

His heart clenched. “I know. But I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you because of me from now on.”

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” she stuttered.

Fatigue swept over him. “Stop being nice about this. I put you in danger today.” It was Sterling who had run outside, but the responsibility was his.

Her tension seemed to melt. They lapsed into silence. He hoped her fever was breaking.

“Yes. I guess you’re right,” she said.

Relief warmed him as he stroked her white lock off her forehead. She was going to be okay. “I love you.”

“Me, too.”

He sighed. The words he hadn’t known he wanted to hear. But it wasn’t a sigh of contentment. She still stared, unfocused, at the end of the bed. Did she know what she was saying?

“Sadie, look at me.” He stroked her cheek and turned her face to him.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Remember, damn it.” Irritation made him want to slam his fist into the wall. “I’m the guy you’re pissed off with half the time, and you’re in love with for the other half.”

She looked into his eyes. “You’re all the way through me.”

Did she know what she was saying? He got this odd feeling something was going on he couldn’t quite see. “Same with me, Sadie,” he said anyway.

Her smile was infectious. “You’re a cute boy. I like you.”

“You’ve still got cooties.” He grinned at her as he ran his thumb over her knuckles.

“No,” she said, confusing him. “I’m not afraid. I feel new.”

*

***

******

****

*

There are people trying to sleep,
Sadie wanted to scream, but she didn’t have the strength. Her body felt like an iron anvil falling out of the sky onto a coyote pursuing a roadrunner.

Rain, she remembered. Thunder. Sterling.

Lightning
. It came flooding back, the insane level of pain in every cell of her body. Pippa had warned her. Moira had warned her. Chloë had warned her. How dumb could a person get?

After the lightning, she dreamed of walls made of brick and stone. Walls of wood and glass. Walls of paper and sugar candy. Somehow she’d known the walls were in her mind.
Something there is that does not love a wall/That wants it down
. When the lightning cracked, all the walls in her mind fell.

It took Herculean effort to open her eyelids. Getting her brain functioning was harder. Her own thoughts and feelings were distant to her. Her surroundings felt even further away.

Her bedside clock read 2:37 a.m.

There were twenty or so people standing at her bedside, looking down at her with curious eyes. “She’s awake. Can you hear me, dearest?” yelled a woman who had just come from a dress rehearsal for
A Christmas Carol
, complete with big-arsed bustle.

The noise sent pain through her ears, making her flinch.

The rest—it couldn’t have been a Dickens play, since she noticed an extra from
Hamlet
in a tunic and a Dirty Thirties femme fatale in a veiled pillbox hat—started shouting, nearly bursting her eardrums.

“Don’t yell.” Her dry throat made her voice crackle. “I can hear all of you. But I can only talk to you one at a time.”

The chorus quieted.

“I suppose that’s so,” the Dickens reject said. “Perhaps it’s best we depart and leave you to one you know.”

The crowd parted and a shortish woman around her own age, with her hair and her eyes, stood at the end of the bed. Her yellow flowered sundress blew in a breeze Sadie couldn’t feel. The familiar scent of tea wafted around her.

And Sadie knew, beyond doubt, she was awake. “Pippa?”

Something warm pressed her hand, but it was far away and had nothing to do with her.

“Hello, little Sadie.” There was something
other
about Pippa, but there were no words for it. She didn’t float or suck the heat from the room, but Sadie’s perceptions screamed Pippa was real. So why wasn’t she freaking out?

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’ve always been here.” Some other sounds tried to break in, but Sadie ignored them to focus on her dead aunt. “You just chose not to see me. But the walls you put up were thinner while you were asleep.”

“I don’t understand.” But she felt a
rightness
about what she heard, like when she discovered the truth about Strange Academy.

“I think you do. You used to,” Pippa said. “There’s someone here who hopes you’ll remember him.”

A white-haired man appeared next to Pippa at the end of the bed. He had deep furrows in his ancient skin and kindly brown eyes with fans of wrinkles at the corners.

But she didn’t recognize him. “No,” she said.

“Don’t I look like my portrait?” The humor in his voice belied his fake glower.

Squinting, she noticed the flecks of gold in his eyes and decided maybe, just maybe, he bore a slight resemblance to the scary painting of the school’s founder in Cross’s office.

He flicked out of existence. In his place stood a six-year-old kid with the same gold-flecked eyes. “How about now?”

“I don’t believe it. Quin?” She hadn’t seen her invisible friend since Chloë had left for school. She hadn’t even thought about him since—until telling Sterling about him.

“Actually, the name is Quinlan Strange.” He jumped up on the bed and executed a courtly medieval bow. “At your service.”

“What?” she barely managed.

“Being your invisible friend was the most fun I’ve had in centuries.” His face twitched with the mischief she remembered so well. “Remember climbing the maple in your yard? More fun than watching over this old place.”

“It was you.” The founder of Strange Academy—her ancient ancestor—was her invisible childhood playmate.

“I’m sorry, Sadie.” He looked down at his little hands. “I tried to keep you from repressing your Talent. It didn’t work.”

Talent? “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

Pippa traded looks with Quin. Her voice went soft and quiet. “Sadie, something went wrong when Chloë went to school. You decided being different took you away from the people you loved. So you stopped being different. You’re a Meta.”

She felt something in her relax, a tension she’d been holding inside for years. “Yes.”

Her dreams of Pippa hadn’t been dreams. There had been walls in her mind—what else had the walls kept her from seeing? It explained her perception problem—why she’d seen things in men that weren’t there and why she hadn’t seen the truth about Strange Academy.

She sighed, but instead of releasing air, she felt like she was letting go of an old life. “I guess you’re right.”

Pippa sat at her right hand. The brewed tea scent enveloped Sadie, giving her a sense of inner peace.

“One of my reasons for bringing you here was to open your eyes before your last chance was gone. I’m only sorry I couldn’t do this while I was alive.”

“Me, too,” she agreed.

Pippa blushed a little. “And I’m sorry you had to die.”

Sadie smelled cinnamon. It was familiar but belonged to another world. Something turned her chin. She got a shock when she saw a thin boy in green suspenders standing by her bed. He looked about twelve years old, at the awkward cusp between being a child and being a man.

He was also dead. She knew this because her own arm, which was stretched out as if reaching for something, extended through the boy’s chest. He didn’t seem to notice.

“I don’t know you,” she told him.

“I’m Liam.” His Irish accent spoke of another century.

“You’re all the way through me,” she pointed out.

Liam looked down at his wiry body and her arm in his chest. “Sorry, Miss. Sometimes I forgets me manners.” He took off his Gatsby cap and held it with both hands in front of his chest, revealing outsized ears turning an embarrassed fuchsia.

She smiled. “You’re a cute boy. I like you.”

Liam’s blush deepened to burgundy and he twisted the cap. “I were wonderin’ if you’d introduce me to the dark-eyed miss.”

Before she could figure out whether he was talking about Carmina—and what an underage ghost could do about puppy love—Pippa spoke. “Liam, it isn’t time for her to do things for us. Give her time to get used to all of this.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not afraid. I feel new.”

“All the same,” Quin said, morphing into his older self. “We’ll go. When you’ve been a spirit for six hundred twenty-eight years, you understand the needs of the living are more urgent than those of the dead.”

“There’s one more thing you should know,” Pippa said.

She braced herself for the next life-changing revelation, but a mischievous smile played on Pippa’s face. “Gray’s here.”

Then the ghosts were gone. But they’d be back. Everything had changed. Everything would be different, starting now.

Her heart skipped a beat as her awareness came back to the physical world. “Gray?”

“Sadie.” There was a catch in Gray’s voice.

A thrill shot up her arm when she realized he clung to her hand like a drowning man clung to a life jacket. His smoky eyes were rimmed in red. His black hair stuck out a little on one side. His third button was fastened in the second buttonhole.

He was scared. It was so cute she almost smiled. “I’m okay, it’s over now.” A lot of things were over now.

He leaned into her mouth and covered it with his own. His eyelashes gently caressed her cheeks, contrasting with his raw possession of her lips. She lost herself in the kiss, feeling his exposed emotions. Fear of losing her. Thudding desire. Relief.

He broke off the kiss. “Uh, you do remember me, right?” The desperation tingeing his voice and the tender feel of his protective hands framing her jaw made her ache.

“I remember it all,” she told him. “And I’m pissed. I can’t believe you erased my memory of our first kiss, you alumnus.”

“And she’s back.” He rolled his eyes. “You remember? My spells never wear off.”

Gray,
she nearly said,
I’m a Meta and always have been. Remember when I was unconscious and I told you part of my brain was awake even when I was asleep? It’s awake full time now. Let’s have superhero babies.

But it didn’t come out. “Must have been the lightning.”

“I’ll tell you what happened with Pippa when you’re better.” He took her hand as if it was the only thing rooting him to the world.

“I can guess. You’re taking responsibility for something that isn’t your fault, as usual. Like when you put your own life aside to come here for Sterling. And when you decided to protect Strange Academy from me.”

“Hey.” He looked offended. “I’m trying to admit responsibility for a death here.”

“Sorry, continue with your pity party.”

Gray looked out the window. “I don’t like tea.”

She waited for the rest, but he didn’t speak. “You wanted tea when Count Burana was here.”

“You offered
him
tea.” Gray closed his eyes. “Pippa was my favorite teacher. She treated me like a person, not the high and mighty heir of the Gray House, and I didn’t protect her because I don’t like tea. When I came back here, I put off talking to her because she seemed like an old woman. The day she died, she cornered me and practically begged me to come for tea. I made an excuse. An hour later, Sterling found her dead in the library. I could have saved her life, saved Sterling the trauma.” Gray hung his head in his hands. “If I’d drunk the damn tea.”

She leaned back and tried to figure out how she felt. Was he making her aunt’s death about himself?

“I understand if you never want to see me again,” he said.

Her heart ached. He sounded as vulnerable as a ten-year-old, but was it selfishness or self-sacrifice? Not knowing what to do, she ran her hand up his spine.

There. A lump under his shoulder blade.
Hello, stress knot
.

“Gray, get in here.” She wiggled over in the bed. “The left is your side, after all.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I am not going to Sadie’s classroom, Gray thought as he walked down the deserted Lost Arts Building hallway.

Something had been different about her in the weeks that had passed since the night she’d been hit by lightning. He knew it. All he had to do was figure out what “it” was.

The caustic smell of industrial cleaners and the sound of his own footsteps were all that intruded on his thoughts as he passed rows of dull green lockers. Classes would end in a few weeks, and the hallway would be as deserted as it was now.

Since the storm, they’d grown closer. Or was it further apart? He’d come to her apartment every night. Her door was always unlocked. She was always waiting for him.

I am not going to Sadie’s classroom, he told himself.

He made love to her with consuming urgency, obsessed by the passing of time. He’d stopped wearing his watch, because every tick reminded him of a moment not spent with her. But Sadie seemed not to notice their days together slipping away. It was June. The days were bright and long. He kept his sunglasses in his shirt pocket. Sadie never mentioned his wedding, as if things would go on the same way forever.

I am not going to Sadie’s classroom, he assured himself.

But if he passed by, unintentionally...oh look, there it was.

The door was open a bit and the smell of chalk dust, lemons, and another scent he couldn’t identify drifted into the hall. Dammit. He couldn’t see anything through the crack, except glimpses of her black dress and the white flash in her hair. He thought he saw her nod, but the students in class were quiet. Unless she suddenly had invisible friends, she couldn’t be nodding to anyone.

The other smell. Tea. It smelled like Pippa.

The door creaked open several inches. Funny, there was no breeze. But he didn’t pass up the opportunity. He slipped his hand into his jacket and flicked the cork of his invisibility spell. When his hand faded, he squeezed through the door.

She had the attention of all the kids in the class—they literally looked right through him. Sterling’s pen was poised over his notebook and she wasn’t even writing anything yet. Her back swayed as she swiped the brush over the chalkboard.