by Jade Alters
I round the portal to take aim at him with my spike-bow, but it dissolves in my gasp. I snap. I rub my hands together. I reach out for light waves, anything! But I get nothing. The portal is sucking in all the light at my disposal. And that’s not all it wants. Silvery vines of flesh spin out from within it, growing across the grass of our own Realm. They seize Gray Fiends. They seize Academy and Kyrie survivors. They seize members of the Lotus, who frantically try every tool at their disposal to dispel it. But the things on the other side of that portal, the things who want them, aren’t the variety of monster they’re accustomed to dealing with. Everything the vines of flesh touch, they drag to the blue-darkness of its depths.
I sidestep one silvery, twisting arm after the next. I have to get to Heren. Then I see him. He’s a few feet off from Stephanie, Cece, and Dorian, huddled together on the ground. Heren’s chest slides backwards against the grass while a silver hand tugs him into the blue void. I see him get a grip on his metal X. He draws it up to cleave the arm.
Heren slices and flails. He wrestles his way free of the portal-being. He stands and turns, only to be met with the bottom of my shoe, flat on his chest. I kick him back with all the strength I have left. Heren stumbles back into the waiting grip of four more silvery arms. He still has his X, but they’ve got his arms now. He fights so hard his hood comes down. So that I can see the first note of fear in those perfect blue eyes as they’re swallowed by a blue so much deeper. I watch him go with a wild ferocity in my eyes, right up until something yanks my ankle out from beneath me.
“Emery!” Darius cries out. His hand slaps down into mine. He clenches my wrist with one hand and digs the other as deep in the bloody soil as he can. But, inch by inch, the silver hand pulls us in. Darius fights hard enough for both of us the whole way in. “No! God… damnit! Come on!” I’ve never heard such passion in him. “Please… no…” he begs.
But the arms pull. Warmth flees the air around us. Light fades away. The last thing I glimpse is a hundred bodies trailing behind us, being pulled into the growing void. Lotus, Academy, Kyrie, Fiend, it doesn’t matter. The portal expands until it swallows us all.
Then, just as abruptly as it appeared, it closes.
Epilogue
The Broken Academy, Administrative Wing
Everything is blue. Such a dark blue. Silver knots of flesh twist around with so many parts, they can just barely be identified as bodies. They coil around hundreds of other bodies - human, at least in part. Some living. Some dead. Some Dragon, some Vampire, Fey, or Demons. I don’t know how or why, but I know they’re here for a reason. To be separated. To be sent. I round up all the ones in the robes, the only ones still fighting, and I take them down, deeper into the blue. I leave the Fiends for the silvery inhabitants of this odd place. They can rip them to as small bits as they like. For the others, I open another window.
I toss them out somewhere familiar. Though I don’t know exactly where we are, I know it’s safe. A gorgeous carpet splits the long hall of offices. It’s some kind of school. I know I was here, once, but I can’t remember why. I float along the ceiling of the long room, watching bodies tumble out of the deep blue window. Some are in worse shape than others. Luckily, it seems like some of those others know how to fix it. People rush around the second they’re free, propping up the wounded to be bandaged.
I wait until the last of them tumbles out of the blue window to let it close. I float down behind them, watching. The injured crowd limps, drags, and plods around the new space with a sort of alarmed curiosity. Questions bounce off of every wall in a confused chaos, the likes of which I’ve never seen. But then, I don’t remember much of anything I’ve seen. Suddenly, I was in that grassy field and… these people needed help.
“What the fuck was that?” a hundred people ask in different words.
“Is this… the Academy?” some wonder.
“That portal… did you make it?” a Vampire asks a Magician.
“No, that wasn’t a trick…” the Magician answers. Then, a dark-skinned girl with jet black hair rises to her feet just below me. I was beginning to think I was invisible, until she looks right up at me. A smoky blue wisp, as far as I can tell.
“Hoster?” she whimpers. Hoster. It… certainly sounds right. A slender, rough-looking Vampire takes her hand and looks up at me, too.
“That you, Q-tip?” says the Vampire. Now why does that sound familiar? Did I… know them? Are they why I knew what to do? It hurts to think of it, so I don’t, for too long. I shoot through the wall to watch from the safety of secrecy. The girl’s hand shoots out after me, all the way to the wall.
“That portal… Darius, that’s the portal Hoster and I opened together two years ago,” the girl tells the Vampire. “It has to be him.”
“Then… we owe him a drink, if he ever figures out how to build himself a body,” says the Vampire, Darius. The girl takes a loose step towards the wall between us. I float back another inch, deeper into the office of overgrown plants I somewhat recognize. But Darius stops her with a hand on her shoulder. “Emery. You might have to give him a minute. Even if it is Hoster, the guy we knew couldn’t open up windows to God-knows-where-that-was. He’s probably… different.” The girl named Emery lets her hand fall, along with her head.
“Emery…” I say, though no one can hear my voice. The name strikes a certain cord. Emery and Darius… I must have known them. I float a few feet away, always just on the other side of a wall. I watch all the people I saved help each other.
“I’ll be alright,” says a tan man, a Dragon from what I saw, to his daughter. He cradles the gaping hole in his chest where a piece of steel like a railroad spike had been minutes ago. Now it lays in a puddle of his blood on the floor. His daughter seems far from convinced. He can’t get her to unlatch her arms from around his neck. The two of them have someone glowing blue, someone like me, with them. I steer clear, to avoid being spotted.
“That was incredible, Helena” a Shifter says to a Witch. He holds each of her tiny hands in his huge, calloused ones. A few feet away, a Fey with a gnarled scar over her eye and down her cheek to her chest, tightens leafy bandages around an older Dragon woman’s arm. She, along with a highly-decorated Shifter, Magician, and Witch, chatter for a second, before announcing,
“For now…The Academy is an open sanctuary. Any… who fear the hand of the Lotus… may stay. We’ll find rooms for you all.” I let out a long breath of relief. At least I put everyone in the right place, even if I don’t remember why.
I fall back from the wall, floating gently through the air. After ripping that portal open twice, I could use some rest. Can I even rest? I suppose it’s a good time to find out.
“I knew you had more spirit than any of us,” a voice echoes through my mind. I jump, as much as a smoky blue wisp can jump. I spin around to find another shimmering blue being, in some way, like me. I know she can see me from the perfect positioning of her eyes. Her soft, young face is vaguely familiar. “But I suppose even someone like you isn’t immune to the memory loss. You don’t recognize your own grandma?”
“Grand… but you’re so young!” I marvel. She's in her early twenties at the latest!
“Right now, sure,” chuckles the woman. She floats over towards me and, for a second, I see wrinkles ripple through her face. I see gray ripple through her yellow hair. “I can be any age. Why would I want to hobble around looking like an over-ripe prune?”
“So-so you’re my…” I try to fathom. “But why can’t I remember?”
“Oh boy,” the woman shakes her head. She floats around in a little circle, guiding me away with the natural inclination to follow. “You’d better come with me.”
“Why? To do what?” I ask. My apparent grandmother turns halfway back to give me a face that’s both grim and fearless at the same time.
“I know this is all so confusing right now, but I need you to trust me. There isn’t time to ease you into this. If you and your friends are going to stand a chance aga
inst the Lotus…” she says. The name triggers an instant pang of panic deep in my gut. Lotus. “We have work to do.”
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed Pacts & Promises. Stay tuned because the final book from The Broken Academy Series will be coming out in the near future. I promise that it will be a good one, so I urge you to sign up to my mail list if you haven’t already!
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Also by Jade Alters
Other Books in the Broken Academy:
Power of Fire
Power of Magic
Power of Blood
Bonds
The Mates & Magic collection :
The Sharing Spell
The Spell’s Price
Backfired Magic
You might also be interested in some of my other collections :
The Descendants
Shared by the Four
Desired by Four
Fate of Three
Fated Shifter Mates
Mated to Team Shadow
Mated to the Clan
Mated to the Pack
Protected by the Pack
Claimed by the Pack
