Student Bodies (11 page)

“Kind of,” I said as Marcus and I walked over to the corner and then sat down on the cold tile floor. He locked his fingers around mine and gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “It's not real invisibility. It's more like a spell where you're controlling the light particles all around you. You basically command them the hell away from you and poof! You're veiled.”

She cocked a wary eyebrow and pulled the bottom of her hoodie down past her waist. She sat down on the floor next to Marcus and then drew her knees up to her chest as I raised my magic and whispered, “
Obscondus Occultus
.”
Magical energy hummed all around us as the veil shrouded our bodies.

“Don't worry,” Marcus whispered. “Julie and I are always hiding behind these things. You know, the last time we did the girl's bathroom looked like someone had detonated a bomb inside after we were through.”

“Nice,” said Twyla. “Your girlfriend uses her gift like a battering ram.”

I ignored her comment and glanced at my watch. It was 10.20am and there was nothing I could do to get everyone out of the school that wouldn't invite the unwanted attention of the staff, so we sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity as the occasional student walked down the stairs, completely oblivious to our presence. After more than forty minutes of waiting, I dropped the veil and poked my head in through the doorway again. The hallway was empty, so I motioned for Twyla and Marcus to follow. As soon as the pair emerged through the doors I threw Marcus a smile.

“Can you keep an eye and an ear out for anyone that might be coming? Travis Butler's locker is at the end of the hall so give us a holler, OK?”

Marcus made a big show of taking a noble-looking bow and he said, “Always the glamorous stuff I wind up doing. Your wish is my command.”

Then he dropped to one knee and kissed my hand, the sweetie.

Twyla stuck an index finger in her mouth and made a gagging sound. “You two done yet? We need to get a move on.”

I placed a hand on Marcus's cheek and beamed at him. “Be right back, OK?”

“OK,” he said, grinning.

Twyla and I strode down the hall and I noticed her looking at the ceiling. She spun around on her heels and walked backwards as she gazed at the ceiling in the other direction.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

She spun around again and said, “How old is this school? There's no security cameras that I can see.”

“Old enough,” I replied as we approached Travis Butler's locker. There was a big pile of flowers on the floor and dozens upon dozens of cards taped onto the locker itself. They'd be delivered to his parents, but all the messages of condolences in the world wouldn't bring back their son or take away the pain they must have been going through.

I took hold of the combination padlock and shut my eyes for a moment thinking that maybe his psychic imprint might have been left on it somehow, but I came up short. I wasn't about to waste any time trying to pick the lock, so I gave it a tiny squeeze and whispered a word of magic. The lock opened with a sharp snap, so I pulled it out of the clasp and grasped the locker's pull-handle.

“Julie, don't!” Twyla shouted, but it was too late. No sooner had I pulled open the door than a billowy black mist of supernatural fury poured out of the locker. It enveloped me before I even had a chance to raise a dome of protective magic and instantly I could feel hundreds and hundreds of icy fingers clawing their way across my chest toward my throat.

I gasped as I tried to reach for my amulet, but every muscle in my body was frozen and that wasn't the worst of it. Not even close.

I felt my feet leave the tiled floor. The magic that was covering my body slowly raised me up and spun me around like I was puppet. I bobbed up and down inches off the floor and stared helplessly at Twyla.

“Julie!” Marcus shouted in a panicked voice. I could hear the sound of his feet pounding against the floor when Twyla opened her mouth and bellowed a warning.

“Marcus! Stay right where you are,” she barked.

There was a loud squeak that echoed down the hall so I knew that Marcus did as he was instructed.

“What the hell is that
thing
?” he said in a terrified voice.

I looked across the corridor to see Twyla begin chanting something that was clearly aboriginal. She held out her fetish and began to shake it as her voice rang out in a clear soprano voice so sweet that it was unlike anything I'd heard in my life.

The phantasm gripped me tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs as a set of claws wrapped around my neck. They squeezed and I felt my windpipe close. The pressure inside my skull was so intense I thought my eyes were going to pop out.

“Twyla, help her!” Marcus cried out. “Jesus, it's covering her entire body!”

And that's when my eyes bore witness to something that told me Twyla Standingready wasn't just an average run of the mill practitioner.

Her body suddenly became encased in unnatural light and I felt a wave of heat wash across my face. Strands of yellow and golden magical energy radiated out from her chest and onto the floor forming a pool at her feet. She sang louder now, shaking her fetish furiously until the pool of liquid gold suddenly turned into the color of blood. A shape began to push up from the pool, growing larger and larger, until it was taller than Twyla. She stepped back and then reached into her fetish, pulling out a single bead, which she threw at the bloody, pulpy mass. In less than a second the mass began to morph into something I'd only seen on National Geographic Television, the zoo, or the safety of my mother's car the last time we drove into Banff National Park.

The massive grizzly reared up onto its hind legs and roared in a voice that shook the hallway. Its fleshy lower lip vibrated wildly as it bared its teeth and lunged at me, wrapping its huge, hairy forelegs around my body.

And then it began to squeeze.

“Don't move, Julie!” shouted Twyla. “Don't even breathe! Marcus, if you've got a phone then record this,
now!
”

Through the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Marcus as he fumbled through his backpack. He held his phone in front of his face and there was a bright flash.

The grizzly squeezed me so hard that it forced out the breath I'd been holding in my lungs for the last fifteen seconds. Supernatural energy sizzled across my body in short but intense jabs of heat. I couldn't breathe in and I shut my eyes tight, determined not to panic as the giant bear hugged me harder and harder. It roared as it struggled against the malicious entity that had seized me and just as I was about to black out, I fell to the floor, landing in a heap.

I gulped in a mouthful of air and stared in utter horror as the grizzly fought a violent battle with the entity. The mass that had poured out of Travis's locker was covered with a black, tar-like sheen. It stood on two legs and looked to be human in shape, only it was as big and muscular as the Incredible Hulk.

It swung wildly at the grizzly, staggering the bear for a moment. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my amulet, slipping it into the recess in my Shadowcull's band. I stood up and roared at the entity.

“You might have killed Travis, you son of a bitch, but brother, you picked the wrong girl to mess with.”

Emotional magic coursed through me as I lashed out in a blind fury. A supernatural wind roared up the hallway overturning trash cans and rattling the locks on more than a hundred lockers as I raised my right hand and opened my fingers. My long red hair blew out in every direction as I glared hatefully at the entity.

“
Hexus
!” I barked and the torrent of wind swept around my body forming a solid pillar of twisting and churning, super-concentrated air. It screamed down the hall at the creature, colliding against its torso with the force of a wrecking ball. The impact literally lifted the creature off the floor, and it crashed against the brick wall directly underneath a large portrait of the Queen.

I stomped up to the monster, my Shadowcull's band humming with magical power and lashed out with a binding so tight that not even light could penetrate it. Malice raced through my bloodstream as I made a fist and squeezed.

“Now you know how I felt,” I said as I dug my fingernails into my palms, squeezing so hard that blood seeped out from between my fingers. The creature struggled wildly against my power, but it wasn't going anywhere.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Don't destroy it, Julie.”

I glanced out the corner of my eye to see Twyla standing next to me alongside the giant bear.

“Why the hell not?” I snapped. “It damned well tried to destroy me.”

She raised a hand. “Wait, we need to question it. We need to find out who sent it here and how it managed to wind up in Travis Butler's locker.”

The monster stopped struggling. Its shoulders rose and fell repeatedly like it was panting and a small hole appeared on its featureless face where a mouth would normally be.

Then it started to laugh. It reared its head back and cackled wildly with an inhuman sound comprised of an amalgam of voices that seemed as though they'd just escaped from the high-security wing of an insane asylum.

“We are one and we are not, Shadowcull. And by the time you find her, we will have become a force so terrible that we will become drunk on the tears of mothers who cry over their dead children. Nobody is safe from us. Not you. Not the Indian girl. Not anyone! But know this, we are coming. Soon we will be here and when we make our presence known a great wail will follow. We will unleash suffering on all the mothers and all the fathers and your kind can do nothing to stop us!”

The creature's body jerked violently and I could have sworn that I heard the sound of bones snapping. It started to pound its head against the brick wall with loud, wet slaps. I fought against it, trying desperately to maintain my binding and shocked that it even managed to speak to me, let alone move.

A current of power rippled across the creature's body and then it solidified like a shard of ice, shattering into hundreds of fragments of darkness that disappeared like clearing mist.

“What the fuck?”
I gasped as I released my grip. I flipped open my right hand and stared at my palm to see five deep gouges from where my nails had penetrated my skin.

“Oh my God,” Marcus said as he raced up to me. “Twyla called up a freaking ass-kicking grizzly bear!”

I spun around to face her and she waved a hand over the bear's head. It began to shift back into a bloody, pulpy form and then in seconds the golden pool lay at Twyla's feet. She knelt down and picked up the tiny bead she'd thrown at the mass and quietly slipped it back into her deerskin pouch as the golden pool vaporized before my very eyes.

“Just what kind of shaman are you?” I asked, panting.

Twyla stuffed the fetish into the pocket of her jeans and said, “One who needs to talk with her grandfather about what we've just seen. Marcus, did you make a video of it?”

He swiped an index finger across the screen of his phone and then held it out for us to see. “It's not the best quality, but at least it's something.”

I grabbed the phone and stared at the blurry image of a shining mass enveloping my body. It was a close call – too close. If Twyla Standingready hadn't been there I'd have been killed for sure. I cursed silently at my stupidity in opening the locker without a protective spell at the ready and then handed the phone back to Marcus.

Twyla nodded and then casually strolled over to Travis Butler's locker. I took the amulet out of my band and palmed it as I went to look inside. I had expected to see a pile of garbage, as that's what you see in pretty much every boy's locker, but instead what I saw was a pair of gym sneakers on the floor, a T-shirt hanging from a hook and some of Travis's text books stacked on the top shelf.

And a backpack with the name “Willard Schubert” stitched onto one of the shoulder straps.

What the hell?

 

CHAPTER 13

 

We grabbed the backpack and took off out of the school as fast as our legs would carry us. It was shortly after eleven in the morning and the sky was flat and gray giving the snow-covered streets a bleak appearance.

“My house is only a ten minute walk,” I said. “Twyla, what are your plans? I need to tell my mother what happened here – and we need to find out why Willard Schubert's backpack was in Travis Butler's locker.”

She grabbed one of the straps on Willard's backpack and gave it a yank. “I'll take this to my grandfather, ditto on the reasons you used for needing to talk to your mom.”

I didn't release my grip.

“You know something, for a new kid you're sure as hell pushy,” I snapped. “The backpack comes to my place – you're welcome to accompany us. After that, we can talk to your grandfather because, at this point, we can use all the help we can get.”

Sensing an impending cat fight, Marcus intervened.

“Twyla, what's your email?” he blurted out.

“Twylanottwilight. I'm on Gmail, why?”

He thumbed the screen of his phone furiously and said, “I'm just emailing you a link to YouTube for the video of that thing the pair of you just nuked. It's a private link so nobody can see it but those people I send the link to. Why don't you show it to your grandfather and then Julie and I will take the backpack to her mom and maybe we can meet up after to compare notes.”

She pulled the hood of her winter coat over her head and cocked a wary eyebrow. “Yeah, that works. Um, the creature called you a ‘
Shadowcull
'. Want to fill me in on what the hell that whole thing is about?”

I exhaled heavily because I didn't want to waste a moment's breath with a complex explanation, so I decided to dumb it down for her.

“Witch coven special ops,” I answered. “Look, it's complicated, OK? All you need to know is that I'm one of the good guys. Whoever sent that thing is behind the attack on Mike Olsen. They killed Travis Butler and just took a shot at me.”