by Jade Alters
Pacts & Promises
The Broken Academy
Jade Alters
Contents
1. Yellow Tape
2. An Overdue Verdict
3. A New Memory
4. Wine Run
5. The Council
6. A World of Rock
7. Olive Branch
8. Descent
9. Deep Water
10. Broken Bridges
11. Open Books
12. The Mystic Core
13. Forbidden Truth
14. Mastery of Form
15. Under the Full Moon
16. The Forgotten City
17. Trial of Blood
18. The Price
19. Revelation
20. Dawn
21. Circle of Fiends
Epilogue
Afterword
Also by Jade Alters
© Copyright 2019 – Starchild Universal Publishers Inc. All rights reserved.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.
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Yellow Tape
Emery,
Pleasanton, CA,
Montrose Place
It’s not something I ever expected to see or something I ever want to see again. I never would have guessed what it actually was if I wasn’t here on assignment from the Dragonlord. All the makings of a human body rearranged in such a way that it doesn’t remotely resemble one. My hand glides up over my mouth automatically. Four others behind me do the same. Only Fey Deller seems unaffected to the uninitiated. Helena and I could both detect the subtle twitch of her cheeks. She’s as sickened as the rest of us - Hoster, Rock, and myself. We’ll be lucky if we get around it without one of us losing more than just our lunches.
We stay well off the road on the sidewalk, on the other side of the yellow tape. None of us says a word just yet. We all know the detectives from San Francisco PD can’t see, hear, or sense us in any way. Not with the trick I double-wrapped us in before we ever left the Training Zone outside the Academy. The silence and distance are more for our own mental protection. It helps, somehow, to keep the mangled, misarranged segments of Deborah Holeset separate from us. It lets us all pretend, for the moment, that it doesn’t exist. After all, that’s not exactly why we’re here, anyway. The detectives can take care of poor Deborah, but, if we’re lucky, they’ll never find the murderer. That’s our part to play.
“Jesus H, Murphy, put it down,” one of the detectives gags at another. The man named Murphy lowers what might be a finger back into the pile once called Deborah. Now, the piece more resembles a sun-baked branch with earthworms spun around it. Murphy winces as he reaches into the fleshy pile to set down another evidence marker. A crime scene photographer lights the streets of the quiet suburb with the flash of his powerful polaroid. Even the woman on the other side of the lens gulps down mouthfuls of nausea between each snap of the scene.
“Well, we need to figure out something,” says Murphy when he can breathe again. Most of the evidence markers they’ve set up looks to be an attempt to reassemble Deborah’s body. They’ve identified the finger, half of a leg, and what appears to be a spilled-over rib cage and a spinal cord. They are all tangled up in a knot that in no way indicates it had ever been a whole person. Everything else is missing.
“Coyotes?” says Murphy’s disgusted partner.
“I wish,” Hoster mumbles behind me. I can’t help but agree with him. Hell, I’d take rabid grizzly bears over what we hidden six know actually did this.
“You’re screwing with me, right?” Murphy manages to scoff even in the face of gruesome madness on the ground before him. “Sure, the geography’s right for coyotes - all the fields and forests around. But, in a quiet neighborhood like this? There’s no way even a whole pack of them would have been able to do this to her before her screams called out some neighbors. This wasn’t reported until someone found it, walking their dog. No one heard a damn thing.”
“So, it happened fast,” bounces back Murphy’s partner. “Wolves?”
“There are a few around, sure, but… I don’t know. There’s food for them outside these suburbs. I can’t imagine they’d come snack on a poor woman like this without a damn good reason…” Murphy calculates. It’s people like Murphy that necessitate us being here. This is hardly an isolated incident, and as soon as the Norman media picks up on that, they’ll have a very long thread to pull to unveil the mystery. A thread that leads to the supernatural. To the Broken Academy.
And the attacks aren’t limited to the city anymore. Pleasanton is an otherwise quiet town on the outskirts of the San Francisco bay. It was only a matter of time before someone like Murphy came along. Now we just have to beat him to the punch.
“Come on,” I wave the group on behind me. The Council’s private task force. The new ASTF. “Before these guys stumble onto something bad for all of us.”
“I’m all for it,” Rock answers, though his calloused hand points out at something contradictory. A single scrap of crimson is painted across the pavement from the disassembled Deborah. It arcs out about three feet from the end of her spine, where her head was presumably torn from her throat, then ends. “But there’s not exactly a trail.”
“You… you think they ate the rest of her ri-right on the spot?” Helena shudders.
“It seems likely,” Fey Deller says. The words sound eerily distant in her musical Fey tone. I put a hand on my chin, unintentionally mimicking Murphy’s perplexed pose. I come to a solution a bit quicker than he does, however. I turn back to Hoster.
“This only happened a few hours ago,” I vocalize as the thought crosses my mind, “Can you see if there’s any sort of spiritual resonance? Like you did when you tracked me to Six Rivers?” Hoster chews his lip as he looks down at the mass of flesh and bone. He takes a high, idle step forward over the yellow tape the detectives have boxed the scene off with.
“Scuse me,” Hoster mumbles as he slips between Murphy and his partner, so quietly that I can’t be sure if it’s a joke or an instinct. Hoster takes a knee where he would appear in every crime scene photo were he not hidden by my trick. He takes a deep breath, winces with his face turned away from Deborah, and reaches for the least moist part of her remains. His finger inches through the air towards the mess so painstakingly slow, I almost can’t watch. Then he dimples what’s left of Deborah’s leg. Contact lasts hardly an instant before Hoster recoils. “Ice cold.”
“We’re supposed to know what you mean?” Rock digs in. Not this again. The two of them haven’t been on the best terms lately. The emergence of ASTF operations like this seems to have activated some sort of biological clock in both of them, in different ways. But this is hardly the time to make decisions about who enters my body.
“It means,” Hoster drolls, tauntingly slow, “That Deborah’s spirit is long gone. The second she died, probably.” Then Hoster’s face scrunches up, more serious. More horrified. “It must have been… instantaneous. There’s nothing here. Not an echo. Not a whisper.” He takes a cautious step back towards us but accidentally kicks a meaty section from between Deborah’s ribs. “Shit!”
“Hey, watch it,” Murphy chides his partner when he sees the rib cage rock near his feet.
“Watch what?” his partner asks. Hos
ter freezes a few inches from them, at the same time that the rest of us do. We hold our breath, though we know the detectives can’t feel or hear it.
“Ah, nothing,” Murphy waves off, and we all breathe easy.
“Wait a second,” Hoster mutters. He stops mid-way back to us and about-faces. He leans down low next to Murphy’s partner, over the shredded ribs.
“Think you’ve done enough,” Rock simmers. Helena slaps his chest to silence him before I have the chance. I recognize a realization in Hoster’s eyes when I see it.
“What is it?” I ask. Hoster bends over, much closer to Deborah’s remains than before, to pinch something stuck in the meat of her ribs. “Hey, be careful,” I warn him, when he begins to tug on whatever he spotted. It’s a white shard, hardly different from the misaligned bones jutting out from every side of the mass.
“Trust me, you’re going to be glad we found this before them,” Hoster answers, “If I could just… dislodge it… without… damn, it’s stuck.”
“I can get it,” Fey Deller volunteers. She steps forward as Hoster shuffles back behind the yellow tape. My mint-skinned roommate kneels to sprout two thin vines from a single fingertip. They twirl around the white shard and cut down noiselessly into the flesh around it. Murphy and his partner go on deliberating about what wild beast could have done this. The crime scene photographer snaps away at the other side of the meat pile without any inkling that she’s documenting a supernatural evidence extraction.
“What is it?” I crack as Hoster returns to my side.
“Not totally sure, but when I kicked it just now… I felt something,” Hoster explains, “Energy. A lot of it, for something so small.” By the time his explanation is over, Fey Deller slides the ivory shard out at last. She steps back from the detectives before one of them can bump into her. She climbs over the yellow tape to show us a wicked yellow-white fang in the palm of her hand.
“Oh God…” Helena grumbles, two hands wrapped around her stomach. I’m sure it’s doing triple backflips just like mine, at the same exact thought. This thing bit into Deborah’s ribs so hard it left a tooth behind, and she didn’t even scream. Every one of us turns half away, keeping one hesitant eye on the tooth. All of us but Hoster. He breathes deep, forces himself to face it, and lays two hands over it. Eyes closed, he hones in on the echoes of energy left behind by the culprit. The murderer. The Fiend.
“Oh… oh… my…” Hoster grunts as his skin turns a new shade of pale.
Hoster,
Pleasanton, CA,
“Sweet fucking flies on shit,” I shudder to myself. It’s all I can do to keep sane as I watch the scene play out. The untimely death of Deborah Holeset. Or rather, the feeding of the thing that got her. I’m not sure which perspective would be worse to see it from, but my money's on the one I have now. At least for Deborah, it was over fast. I give in to the memory and experience it as if I am the Fiend myself.
I come through the trees on the fringe of the neighborhood, which aren’t all too much taller than I am. I don’t know when the last time I’ve eaten is, but I am goddamn hungry. The second I get a whiff of it, it’s all I can focus on. Food. The strength of the scent means it’s outside, alone, vulnerable. My yellow-tinted vision gives me a perfect view of the street, despite how dark it is outside. Then I see her. Sweet salvation. A meal. She’s all I see while the rest of the world shoots by in a blurry tunnel. In an instant, I’m in front of her.
Her eyes light up with… something. With so little time, she can’t even decide what to think of me. A full two heads taller than her, lankier, naked, and made of solid gray muscle. I doubt she even gathers that much before I crane my neck over, opening my jaw so wide it splits the opposable seams on the side of my skull. For a second, I feel her entire head inside my closed mouth. I feel her quickened pulse through the gums of my fangs as they close completely around the base of her neck.
She doesn’t make a sound before she no longer can. I rip her head right off her body and toss it to the sidewalk. I turn my head to take a massive chunk out of her midsection before the rest of her even falls down. As it does, so do I. I hunch over the top of her twitching frame, tearing chunks free and tossing my head back to swallow them. Somewhere in my ravenous feast, that loose tooth that’s been annoying me finally stops aching. I don’t even notice where it comes out. I can’t focus on that anyway. Not when I’m so damn hungry, and the food is running out so quickly! I try to savor it, but I can’t. I just have to eat it. As fast as I can. So I can find more. So I can finally be satisfied.
When all that’s left are the sharp parts that hurt to swallow, I follow the arc of blood on the street to her head. That undecided, final surprise is permanently petrified onto its face. As much as I want to mash it up and eat it now, I know I might need it later. I’ll be even hungrier. So I scoop it up in a few long fingers and zip off across the nearby lawns. I shoot through a thicket of trees to an adjacent block in a flash. There’s a manhole on the street. It’s not a great ordeal for me to slip a long finger down the hole in the side of it and flip it open.
I hop down inside, turn a few random, moist, stony corners, and close my eyes. Maybe I won’t be so damn hungry if I sleep for a little. The darkness lingers and remains. I feel my fingers uncurl from around the matted hair of the snack I brought with me. Now that I’m still, I really am quite tired. It’s dark. So dark.
I turn my head to vomit.
“Hey! In the bushes, where they won’t find it!” Emery scolds me. She grabs one of my arms, Rock the other, while I struggle to clamp my mouth back shut. I don’t even have time to register where, or who I am before the stomach acid climbs up into my jaw. Emery and Rock, amazingly, get me to the bush just before my legs give out. I spew what remains of all three meals from inside me into someone’s ornamental shrubs. Even when Emery’s trick leaves with us, the detectives shouldn’t find it.
“What in the hell did you see?” Emery asks once the last bit of it drips from my lips. I give my face a good wipe before I dare try to answer. All that grounds me back in my own body is her hand on my back. It slides up and down, warming me right through my shirt.
“More than I wanted to,” my voice scratches its way up my throat. I give a feeble attempt to clear it before I add, “The thing is… in the sewers. The next block over.”
“You’re sure?” Rock challenges. His voice isn’t entirely without empathy. It is, however, spiked with a heaping dose of doubt. I do my best to steel my nerves before I answer. He’ll sniff out the slightest crack in my armor. I can’t fight half as well as he can, or compete with most of his shifting abilities - I can at least try to keep a straight face while I track down our target.
“I’m sure it slept there,” I explain, “I saw it go down there, and closed its eyes. Then, nothing. That leads me to believe it’s still there.”
“They sleep?” Helena shivers.
“Apparently,” I tell her, “That much I’m sure of. It… it wanted to rest.”
“Then…” Emery breathes deep. Even her hands shake at her sides. Whether or not the Fiend is still there, this will be the closest we’ve ever gotten to tracking one of them down. “Let’s go.”
Emery,
Pleasanton, CA,
Sewers
At least it won’t see us either, I try to console myself as Rock pulls the manhole cover back over the opening we came through. I won’t let this trick down until I have to. True to Hoster’s diagnosis, it was still flipped open when we traced the path he’d seen in the Fiend’s memory. For a few horrifying seconds, darkness blots out everything. Then Helena generates enough heat in her palms to strike a flame. Red-orange light jumps out to every wall of the tight, stony sewer corridor. I put an encouraging hand on Hoster’s shoulder in front of me. It makes him jump before he realizes what it is.
“We’re right behind you,” I assure him. He lets out a long, shaky sigh, then takes his first step forward. I retreat to the third position in line, behind our human torch, Hel
ena. Fey Deller and Rock bring up the rear behind me.
Runoff seeping through the soil and stone overhead coats every surface with a reflective glare. Hoster tenses up at the sight of his own shadow at each corner. He traces the path of his memory, turn for turn. I can hardly blame him for being so uptight. He’s the most physically vulnerable of any of us. But I try not to speak words I don’t mean anymore. I will be right behind him, and I’ll be damned if any Fiend is going to take down a member of the ASTF. Hoster peeks around the edge of a cracked, gray-blue wall and jumps yet again.
“My God,” Rock growls when he sees it was another false alarm. He trudges past Fey Deller, me, and Helena, to shoulder around Hoster. “If you’re just going to jump at every scurrying rat, let me-
Rock’s sentence ends in the sharpest gasp I’ve heard from him. His chest visibly tightens up while Hoster reels back a step. Neither he nor Rock had noticed the thing that shocks them now, with Helena’s firelight behind them. Something is broken on the floor, the size of a basketball, and white. It takes me a few extra seconds to register the shape of it since such a huge piece of it is missing. I know only by the hair still clinging to one side of it that it’s a skull. Rather, it was. Now it’s just an empty bowl made of bone.
“Th-thi-thi-this…” Hoster stammers. While my eyes are just as wide as his, I steady him with a hard slap on the back. It seems to jumpstart his system. “The Fiend didn’t eat her head before it fell asleep,” he tells us.
“So the damn thing is awake, walking around in here somewhere?” Rock blurts.
