Academy of the Fateful (Cursed Studies Book 3)

by Eva Chase

  As I reached the mansion’s front door, I picked up my pace. I didn’t know how many other ghosts might be wandering, waiting for me, but Sylvie was definitely out there somewhere. Without even glancing toward the gate in case she was still nearby and my attention caught hers, I hurried across the lawn toward the woods.

  A few other students had come this way and fallen before they’d reached the trees. A couple of the bodies sprawled under the faint glow of one of those ghostly presences. Over by the empty swimming pool, where I’d made my failed attempt at starting a vegetable garden to spite the school’s love of destruction, one dark shape lay on its own. Fainted because of the shriveling of their rose, or left in that state when they hadn’t passed whatever test an apparition had inflicted on them? Were they even still alive?

  A lump crawled up my throat, but I jogged onward. I already had enough people to worry about saving without taking a detour along the way. It wasn’t as if I could do anything for that poor soul no matter what they were suffering from.

  I plunged into the woods, not bothering to worry about the twigs crackling under my feet. “Cade?” I called out. “Cade!” It hadn’t been clear whether my brother could recognize me or my voice while he was in his beastly form, but I had to try whatever I could. There was a lot of forest to cover if I wanted to find him.

  Late at night, he normally stuck to the deeper woods, far beyond any light or noise from the rest of campus. The cool spring breeze licked over my cheeks as I hurried onward. I kept my ears pricked for any sound of movement in the forest around me, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded large enough to be Cade’s beast.

  The minutes slipped by me with the thump of my heart. It felt like I’d been searching forever when my eyes caught on a hazy spot of light in the distance. Hustling toward it, I braced myself for whatever might await me.

  Slumped on its side against a tree trunk lay a dark furry body: big as a bear with a wolf’s muzzle, lips lined with curving teeth that interlocked in a terrifying fashion. I’d only seen Cade’s monstrous form once before—it hadn’t gotten any more pleasant. And now it was lit with an eerie light seeping from the ghostly man that leaned over the beast. Even out here in the forest, even though he was looking far more animal than human, the school’s new spirits had tracked him down.

  Who knew how long Cade had been grappling with this apparition—or how much longer he’d have before he met a worse fate?

  I didn’t let myself think, just stepped forward and shoved my hands into the ghost’s back. My fingers clenched at the tingling that spread over them. I threw my consciousness forward into the connection between the ghost and my transformed brother.

  The impression of falling didn’t get any pleasanter with practice. I tumbled down through the vague darkness and slammed to a stop on a thinly carpeted floor. It was the floor of a living room in a house I didn’t recognize, with a fraying flower-print couch by one wall, a tiny flat screen TV across from it, and a scratched up dining table filling the far end of the room. The smell of stale potato chips lingered in the air.

  Cade stood in the middle of all that, his hands clenched and his muscles flexing, so close to how he’d looked in my memory of the alley with Richie that my pulse stuttered. The man I’d seen in the ghost that’d come for him kneeled hunched on the carpet in front of my brother, his graying hair and mustache drooping as much as his shoulders were. A red blotch marked his cheek—where Cade had already hit him?

  “It’s okay,” the man said in a ragged voice. “You have no idea how sorry I am. I’ve been carrying around the guilt for almost twelve years. I know I should have done so much better by you. I was a wretched excuse for a father. Do what you have to do—I don’t blame you at all.”

  A strangled sound of frustration worked from Cade’s throat. “You don’t get to apologize,” he snapped. “You can’t make it better. I was just a little kid, and you treated me like a punching bag.”

  This was his birth father, I realized. The memory didn’t make any sense to me, though. Almost twelve years, his dad had said—but Cade had told me he’d been taken from his birth family and placed in foster care when he was six. That was fourteen years ago, and as far as I’d been aware, he hadn’t seen his parents since then.

  But apparently he had. Apparently he’d tracked down his dad when he was around eighteen without telling even me about it. Tracked him down and… gotten into a fist-fight with him?

  Although this didn’t look like an equal fight any more than his beating of Richie had. If anything, this was worse. His dad wasn’t even trying to get away.

  “I know,” the slumped man said now. “So if you need to do this, go right ahead. Lord knows I deserve it.”

  Cade’s stance wavered. He looked as if he might have drawn back. Then, quick as lightning, he punched his dad across the temple so hard his dad’s head jerked to the side, body swaying.

  “You fucked up my entire life, you asshole,” Cade gritted out through clenched teeth. He drove his knee into the older man’s jaw, and then slammed both hands down on the side of his head so his dad collapsed right onto the floor. “Don’t try to tell me what’s okay. Don’t act like you’re such a fucking martyr. Stop hiding behind this pathetic act and show me the shithead I know you are!”

  As he jammed his foot into his dad’s ribs, I sprang forward. I couldn’t stand to watch any longer. I had no idea how well this echoed what had happened in the past, but presumably it hadn’t gone better than this. And Cade was being sucked into the same anger that must have gripped him back then.

  I flinched as I grasped his arm, wanting to help him, wary of how he’d react to me at the same time. “Cade. Stop. It’s not real. You’ve got to stop!”

  Cade stumbled backward, staring at me. “Trix? What the hell—how are you here? You weren’t here.” Some of the color drained from his face, leaving it pale between the ruddy splotches of anger.

  “It’s me—really me,” I said. “It turns out I can step into these visions even when they’re gripping other people. I came so I can help you. Everything on campus has gone crazy. And I mean even more so than usual.”

  He blinked, his jaw working. “I— You— What am I supposed to do with this prick?” He swung his arm toward his dad, who was still lying crumpled on the floor in a daze, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Cade’s chest heaved with strained breaths. “I guess I should have laid into him even harder the first time.”

  “No.” I squeezed his arm. “Roseborne is trying to make us face up to our mistakes. The reasons we ended up here. For you…”

  For him, it was clearly that anger. The anger I hadn’t known he’d let loose to this extent. I’d thought his attack on Richie in the alley had been an anomaly. But he hadn’t run into his dad in his dad’s own house by accident. He’d come here—he’d planned to beat him up?

  “He deserved this,” Cade said, as if he could tell where my thoughts had led me. “The bastard even said it himself.”

  “He doesn’t deserve anything from you,” I said. “Not even your anger. You should just cut him out completely, forget about him.”

  “You don’t know—the nightmares I still had, for years and years—and the social workers told him, they told him and Mom that they’d have to take me away if the two of them didn’t shape up, and he didn’t care, he didn’t even try…”

  Cade swiped his hand over his face, his expression so fraught it wrenched at my heart. I tugged him to me, wrapping my arms around him. A shudder passed through him. After a moment, he returned the hug tightly.

  An uneasy itch ran over my skin at the thought of the ways the gesture of affection could be misinterpreted, of how he’d built off of similar moments in the past, but right now, my brother needed me. I could focus on that. On all the moments when his embrace hadn’t meant anything more than getting me through some horrible event. We stood by each other. That was what we did, more than anything else.

  “Let go of that anger as much as you can
,” I said. “That’s the only way you’ll get out of this place. Help him up, show that you can manage that without hurting him any more, and then walk away. I think that’s all it’ll take.”

  “I don’t want to help that asshole. Let him get his own self up.”

  “Cade…” I pulled back to look him in the eyes. “Is this really who you want to be? Someone who goes around beating people into a pulp?” That wasn’t the guy I’d thought I’d known.

  He gazed back at me, his mouth twisting. “You think I deserve what they did to me. Is that really all you see, after everything we’ve been through?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t think letting out this kind of rage is good for anyone, you included. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  I swallowed hard. “This isn’t really about that. I know more about what’s going on right now. I can see the way out. Don’t turn this into some kind of statement of loyalty or who loves who more. You know I love you. I can still think you’re heading the wrong way.”

  Something shifted in his eyes like a scudding cloud. Maybe he could tell I was talking about more than just this specific moment. “Trix,” he said, his voice even rougher than before, “you’ve got to believe me, I’ve always been looking out for you, no matter what else was going on—”

  I stepped back before he could keep going. Those tendrils of guilt were already creeping through my chest with every word. I couldn’t let him distract me, wrap me up in his intentions, like he had so many times before, whether he realized what he was doing or not.

  “We’re not getting into that right now,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “You need to settle this with your dad so we can escape this vision before it turns into something worse.”

  “Trix—”

  “Cade. We can talk about the rest later.”

  For a second, he all but glowered at me. But only for a second. Then he strode toward his dad and grabbed the guy’s hand. With a yank that wasn’t exactly gentle, he guided the older man to his feet.

  “She’s right,” he said tersely. “I shouldn’t have gone looking, shouldn’t even care what you did to me after all this time. I don’t need this kind of trouble. You live your life, and I’ll live mine, as far as I can get from you.”

  Without waiting for his dad’s response, he swiveled on his heel and stalked back to me. He motioned for me to follow him down the hall to the house’s front door. The set of his shoulders suggested he’d only walked away under a sense of duress. I had to hope it’d be enough.

  I grabbed his hand. “When we’re back in the real world, come with me to the school building. I can help you if you get sucked into another of these visions, but it’s easier if we’re all together.”

  Cade’s head snapped toward me. “Who the hell is this ‘all’?”

  A sense of resolve rose up inside me. “You were wrong,” I said. “There are other people who care about me and stand beside me. It’s not just you. If you really care about me and not only about keeping me on some kind of leash, you’ll stand with all of us.”

  The last words were just falling from my mouth when the scene around us whirled away. I found myself stumbling on the forest floor a couple of feet from where Cade’s beast was just lurching onto its feet.

  We locked eyes through the darkness. I held out my hand, ignoring the abrupt racing of my heart. My brother was inside that beast, no matter how horrific it looked.

  “Come with me,” I said. “Please. Even like this.”

  The monster didn’t move. Then it lunged at me with a gnash of its interlocking teeth, so close its rancid breath stung my cheek. A yelp I couldn’t restrain hitched out of me.

  I scrambled backward. The thing that was Cade and yet not slashed its claws across my foreleg, drawing an immediate searing pain through my skin. With a howl that reverberated through the forest and right down to my bones, it whipped around and charged off between the trees.

  Chapter Five

  Ryo

  It’d been easy enough to tell Trix she should go see if her brother needed help. Hanging around waiting for her to get back was a hell of a lot harder.

  Thankfully, Elias appeared to feel the same way. I hadn’t wanted to urge him to get moving or to leave him alone after the way he’d collapsed downstairs, but he’d recovered enough that after a few minutes, he pushed himself to his feet. He gripped the bed’s headboard and then let it go to stand without support.

  “We can’t just sit here waiting for her and Jenson,” he said. “There has to be something constructive we can do.”

  “Sounds good to me.” I glanced toward the door Trix had slipped past. “Do you have any specific ideas?” I was man enough to admit that leadership skills came to him way more naturally than they did to me—and I’d happily follow that lead.

  Elias frowned. “Maybe we should gather together more than just the four of us and Cade. We can’t shield ourselves from these ghosts or whatever the school is sending at us, but with large enough numbers, we might be able to… distract them, or divert them?”

  “Sounds worth a try.” I motioned toward the door. “Should we see who we’ve got to work with?”

  We went down the hall, Elias walking steadily if carefully, and knocked on the other bedroom doors. “We’re meeting in the second floor hall in ten minutes,” Elias told the guys who’d had the same idea of escaping up here as we had. “The things coming after us now, they can go right through walls. Hiding isn’t going to protect us.”

  At one of the rooms, he didn’t need to add that last part. The guy inside was braced rigid by the foot of his bed, staring at his fallen companion, who was slumped in the grips of a ghostly form. Even after witnessing the act twice before and with people I cared about more, the sight made my skin crawl.

  “If he hasn’t come out if it in ten minutes and you’re okay with leaving him, come down and talk with us,” Elias told the other guy. “We’ll try to work out some ideas for making them back off even after they’ve got a hold on someone.”

  The guy nodded with a nervous purse of his lips, but he looked grateful just to know he wasn’t alone. We’d all experienced plenty of awfulness here at Roseborne, but none of us could have predicted the turn the college had taken in the past hour.

  When we’d reached the second floor, I stopped to peer out one of the small windows that overlooked the front of campus. More of the ghosts or whatever they were stood out with their pale glow against the growing darkness. The mist Trix had mentioned glowed too, still seeping off the rosebush along the wall. As I watched, another translucent figure and yet another formed from its haze.

  They brought on memories of things we’d done wrong, Trix had said… Who exactly had that guy been who’d grabbed her? Or the girl who’d come at Jenson?

  Who would I find myself facing first?

  That question sent a shiver down my back. I tore my gaze away.

  A few of the ghosts were roaming near the classrooms. One of them vanished right through a doorway—after its intended target? We really weren’t safe anywhere unless we could come up with a working strategy for either dodging or repelling them.

  “Should we check on the girls too?” I asked Elias.

  He paused and then nodded. “I think they’ll forgive the intrusion, considering the circumstances.”

  We tramped up the stairs on the other side of the building and repeated the same process we had in the male dorms. At first glance, the last room, at the end of the hall, appeared to be empty. Then a body stirred beneath the blankets on one of the beds. I recognized Violet Droz’s billowy hair before her face turned to reveal the patchwork of raw scars that covered half of it. They looked even more stark than usual against the sallow shade the rest of her skin had turned.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, her voice not much more than a croak. I didn’t remember her seeming at all weak before tonight. Her rose must be faltering fast like Elias’s had—and unlike him, she hadn’t bee
n able to bounce back as well.

  Did she have any idea at all what was happening outside this room?

  “Things have gotten… stranger than usual,” Elias said. “In a way that we suspect is putting us all in immediate danger.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Trix did something crazy, didn’t she?”

  A jolt of defensiveness shot through me. “She was trying to get us out of here. And she might have gotten us a lot closer than we’ve ever been before.”

  Violet groaned and let her head fall back onto her pillow. “She should have just let me die, if that was where I was headed.”

  Let her die? What had Trix done for her? “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “She didn’t tell you? I thought—I just wanted to stop this place from messing with me anymore. It’s all connected to the roses… I cut mine. Meant to snip it right off, but it didn’t quite work. Of course she had to find me and replant the damn thing.”

  From the slant of her mouth, I wasn’t sure she really did regret getting Trix’s help. That’d been a hell of a statement she’d tried to make. Obviously she’d been in a pretty bad state even before total chaos had descended on the campus.

  “There are things like ghosts—people from our lives before Roseborne, wandering around,” Elias said. “If one reaches you, it whisks you away somehow, into one of the bad times you experienced before.” He glanced at me. Neither of us could fully explain what we hadn’t yet experienced ourselves.

  When I shrugged as a way of saying I didn’t have anything to add, he turned back to Violet. “Apparently you have to make some kind of amends to get back out. But we’re working on a plan for stopping the ghosts from getting to their targets in the first place. Are you strong enough to make it downstairs? We could bring some blankets so you could lie down on the floor there. You’d just be safer if you have people around to help.”