“Yes, but you usually wake up.”
“What’s up, Elk?” he asked, annoyed.
“Well, it’s Thanksgiving.”
“We don’t celebrate that.”
“Oh,” I replied. “Sorry, yeah, that’s probably a human thing, right?”
He seemed to soften a little bit when I said that. “Yes, it is. We have nothing like that here but we can do something if you want?”
“Tell me there’s somewhere we can get a turkey.”
He smirked. “A live one?”
Trying hard not to roll my eyes. “Yes, let’s loose a live turkey on the grounds.”
“Dangerous, Elk. We do have wild dogs on the property. You’ll cause chaos.”
“We do?”
“In the woods,” he said casually. “They keep away from us, but they go crazy at anything not super.”
I’d been in those woods late at night and had no idea. That was frightening..
“So what do you really want to do today?” Luther asked me.
“I don’t know. I got a letter about an end of year blowout.”
“Yeah, they do them every year for Christmas.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A party for students and parents. It’s held in the hall and you can take your parents throughout the school, teachers can talk to them. Don’t they do that in normal schools?”
“Not really. We just go on holidays and can’t wait to not wake up early for school the next day.”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “Do you think Ianthe and Dallas would come?”
“Why wouldn’t they? They’re your parents.”
It still didn’t feel real. I didn’t want to admit it but this all felt like a dream. A scary, life altering dream. Even Luther felt like a dream at times. This was a dream I didn’t want to wake up from.
“Do you want me to call them and ask?” he said breaking me from my reverie.
“No,” I smiled at him, loving that he would offer that. “I’ll be okay. I just guess it was a surprise. It might be fun.”
“There’s always drama,” Luther said. “It’s entertaining.”
“Will your parents be there?” I found myself asking before I could stop myself.
His smile had gone and a darkness came over his expression. “No.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t,” he said, pulling me to him. “I just don’t like talking about them.”
“Noted.”
He kissed my lips softly, and I forgot all about turkeys, the end of the year blowout and his parents. This was exactly where I needed to be as I fell against him on the bed and kissed him back.
Chapter Thirteen
Elke
The hall was decorated in a snowy winter wonderland theme, and I saw my fellow students milling about with older versions of themselves. A large table was set up along the far wall with food and drinks. Music was playing over the speakers. Joan was speaking with parents, and smiling, although I knew the last couple of weeks had been particularly hard for her. The Queen was pressuring her for an answer of Ms Cashell’s death and there had been none. Luther had opened up to me and told me he was watching certain people in the school at night, but he never judged someone before they were guilty. He didn’t want me to either.
“Elke,” I heard Ianthe say from beside me. She had a drink in her hand and her long blonde hair was pinned in a messy bun that looked super stylish. Every time I saw her, she had different hair. “You look lovely.”
I looked down at my black skater dress and my black vans and then looked at her long blue dress and wanted to scoff.
“Thank you,” I forced myself to say. “I didn’t know if you were going to come.”
“Of course I would,” she said. “Personally, I hated these things. My parents never came.”
It was hard to think of Ianthe as a kid, I’d been told she was a hellraiser at school, but I’d been so angry about everything that I had ignored the fact that she was going through this change too.
“Can you tell me more about you?” I asked her. “Like where did you go in this school? What did you do for fun?”
She was surprised, but she smiled. “Yeah, well I don’t think it would be wise to tell you what I did for fun as a parent and all that but I can tell you more about me as a student.”
“That would be cool.”
She put her drink down on a side table and we walked out into the school. It was a reasonably cool night, but I’d not taken a jacket and she didn’t wear one either.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard about your parents,” I said as we headed to the pool. “Were they bad?”
“Not all the time, they just…didn’t love each other so they took it out on me and my siblings.”
“I have aunts and uncles?”
“Oh yeah, they are spread out over the world. You also have a couple of cousins.”
An entire new family. Wow. With all of this, I hadn’t even thought of an entire family waiting to be met. It dawned on me I had so much to learn and I’d been focused on Luther and only Luther.
“I heard you were a rebel here,” I said. “Were your siblings like that too?”
“My brother Ike was,” she laughed. “He influenced me to do a lot of what I got caught doing.”
“He’s older?”
She nodded. “Yes, we are a year apart, closer than any of our other siblings.”
“How many do you have?”
“One older brother, two younger brothers and two sisters.”
“Wow.”
“Exactly. I never had any privacy, not until I came here.”
“I can’t imagine that, although Dallas did say I had brothers.”
Ianthe paused, and looked at the ground. I couldn’t read what she was thinking. I’d only ever seen her happy and free when I was growing up. But this was another side of her. “Yeah, he has two sons.”
“Did you love him?”
She turned to look at me, almost like she hadn’t thought of the question before. “Yes, I did.”
“Does it hurt you to talk about him?”
“No, not anymore.”
That was a big, fat juicy lie. I think she knew I could tell as well, but I knew it wasn’t a topic I should push. She was opening up, and she was willing to tell me things I needed to know.
“Can I ask you how you met?”
“We met through friends, but he didn’t know I liked him until we were at a party. He was given his engagement by his family and he didn’t want to marry her. I decided I would take his mind off it that weekend before it happened. That was when you were conceived. I guess being there for him was my way of hoping he would rebel against his family and come back to me.”
“He didn’t though.”
“Nope.”
“Why didn’t you know he was my father then?” I asked, entering my room and sitting down on the bed.
“When I realised he wasn’t going to be with me, I was heartbroken and I became a little wild.”
I couldn’t imagine having to see Luther marry someone else. I’d probably do the same, or maybe I’d become a recluse.
“Why didn’t you finish school?” I asked, changing the subject.
She turned to look at me and sighed before she sat down on the bed next to me, “I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being told what to do. I didn’t like that my older brother was kicked out and I was forced to live with the shame of what he’d done.”
“Wait…what?”
“Oh yeah. Ike was wild, he’d gotten a girl pregnant and was banished from the academy. He went on to attend Willows Shadow Academy.”
“Where Dallas went?”
She nodded. “They tried to straighten him out, but he was still too wild. He finally graduated and now he lives in Africa. I never see him.”
I could tell that made her incredibly sad and I felt bad for her. “What about your other siblings? Do you see them?”<
br />
“Not really, some times yeah if I’m in the country they are in we will have an awkward catchup.”
“I don’t get why it’s awkward. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
“My father was abusive, he used to beat my mother in front of us and threaten to do it to us as well if we didn’t keep our traps shut. I was glad to be rid of him when I got here. Ike and I were close. My other siblings were close with each other, but not Ike and I. You see, they aren’t my father’s children. They were offspring of my mother and her various dalliances with other council members for Oracles. I told you my father was not a practicing Oracle. He never could manage it and it made him drink. My mother sold her craft to humans as a psychic and was quite popular. He hated that she made more money.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died, of alcohol poisoning a few years after Ike moved to Africa.”
“I’m sorry, your childhood sounds horrendous.”
She shrugged, but I could tell it had been hard for her. It made sense to me that she didn’t want the responsibility of a child if she didn’t know what it was like to be a child.
“What about these cousins of mine?” I asked, eager to know more about them.
She chuckled. “So, Ike has a son but we don’t see him at all. I think I last saw him when he was four. He’d probably be about twenty now. My younger brother Indigo has two girls, I’d say they were in their early teens, but they live in France. My sisters Isabeau and Irina both live in Germany and they have a girl and boy each, but I don’t know their ages and have never seen them in person.”
“So likely I won’t ever meet them.”
“I’m sorry, honey. You’ve been scorned with a horrible family past. Maybe Dallas’ side can be more comforting.”
“It’s okay, up until a few months ago, I never thought I’d have a family again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault you had a bad upbringing. I’m glad you told me.”
“I will tell you anything you need to know, this is your family too.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
She nodded, but I could tell she was waiting for a question she didn’t want to answer.
“Why did you become wild? Were you trying to forget who you were?” I asked her. The thought had crossed my mind a time or two but I didn’t want to lose myself.
“At first, that was the reason, but soon after I realised that doing drugs and drinking stopped my visions. It made it so my powers couldn’t manifest and I wasn’t emblazoned with the pain or the nausea that comes with never being able to figure out what I was seeing. I don’t suggest it though.”
“I don’t blame you, the pain is killer.”
“You’ve had visions?” she asked me.
I nodded. “Yeah, actually one of them was of Ms Cashell, but then when I ran to tell someone, they said she was already dead.”
Ianthe got off the bed and started to pace my floor, thinking hard. It made my heart race a little.
“What is it?”
“What do you remember from it? Even the smallest detail? Smells, sights?”
I thought back to it, her worried face looking up at me, the feeling of someone watching, the bad feeling when the shadow came into view.
“She was looking at me, as if she knew I was there watching, and her eyes were panicked. She wasn’t moving but her eyes were, and there was a shadow, and I don’t know how but it felt male but I didn’t see who it was.”
“Anything else?”
“I mean yeah, there was this…feeling when I saw the shadow, a bad gut feeling, like I was going to be sick but I wasn’t.”
“Have you experienced that before when you met someone?”
I shook my head. “No, never. Why?”
“Trust your visions, Elke. I know they hurt, but you can look past the pain eventually. There are ways to master the pain, I learnt that the hard way. That feeling you got, that is your senses telling you something. If you get it again outside of a dream, you may have discovered Ms Cashell’s killer.”
Panic filled me. “You mean he could be here?”
“Maybe,” she said. “You always have to be alert though. Here or outside of the academy. It’s a feeling you need to learn to harness. Being an Oracle is all your sight and your senses.”
I tried to take in what she was saying but it was a lot. I could figure out who killed Ms Cashell?
My dorm room door opened and I saw Luther standing there, worried. He saw Ianthe and then me and relaxed.
“Luther, what’s wrong?”
“I couldn’t find you and then you weren’t at the party.”
“She’s perfectly safe with me, Luther.”
I saw the way my mother looked at him, suspicious and a little tense. It was obvious she didn’t like him.
“I didn’t know she was with you,” he shot back, equally unimpressed with her. “Come get me later, Elk, and we’ll have dinner.”
I nodded and he backed out of the room.
“Elk?”
“Yeah, he calls me that,” I smiled. “So…don’t like him, hey?”
“Was I that obvious?”
“Only a little. You don’t even know him.”
“I know enough about his family.”
“That’s like someone judging you for your parents.”
She paused, tense, and then she relaxed. “You know, you’re right. I’m sorry. If he is good to you, I am okay with him.”
“He’s the best,” I said, smiling. I could never stop myself when it came to him.
“Just be careful, love. He may be charismatic and loving now, but he does have big shoes to fill and he won’t be allowed to stay up here for long.”
I frowned as she looked around my room, on my desk at my trinkets and notes. “What do you mean?”
“He hasn’t told you?” she hesitated before she paused at a photo of me and him in front of the woods. We were both laughing, a rare photo since we both hated them.
“Told me what?”
“He’s the heir of the throne to Hell, Elke. He won’t be able to stay up here forever. He will have to take a Queen down in Hell and rule it just as his father does now. Eventually, he is going to break your heart, I just don’t want you to get too invested in him, that’s all. We rarely marry our high school sweethearts.”
My heart pounded against my ribcage, and my stomach dropped making me quite nauseous. Was that why he pushed me away?
“I’m sorry, honey. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish you never got your heart broken. I wish a lot of things, but you need to know the seriousness of why he’s up here. He’s rebelling against his parents but he can’t do it for much longer. Lucifer has been meaning to get him back for a while.”
“How do you know this?” I asked, almost sure she was trying to break me from him for a personal reason.
“It’s not a secret,” Ianthe said. “Most people know, that’s why he’s in sanctuary here because they can’t come here unless invited.”
“Let’s go back,” I said. “I’m sure they want us in the hall since that’s where the party is.”
Ianthe nodded and followed me out of the room. We didn’t talk on the way back, and I still felt nauseous. Why did I have to find out everything about Luther from someone else? My heart was breaking in half. He was going to leave me.
I was going to be broken hearted in an academy that I knew hated me and then I would truly be alone.
I bit back my tears and put on a brave face as we entered the hall. Excitement was everywhere as students ran around crazily with their parents trying to keep up. I stood at the back with Ianthe, silent.
She was trying to protect me. I could see that, but it still hurt. I felt sick to my stomach. As I looked around, I saw Tiger looking sullen as her mother I assumed, stood by her, looking proud and bitchy.
“Is that Tiger Lily’s mother?” I asked Ianthe.
“Yep. Dayna. Entitled bitch that s
he is. I’m surprised she didn’t put her in Willows to be honest.”
“She probably wanted her to be close to Stig.”
“Good point,” she said. “Dayna came here too, she was in my class. Her family are pure breds, one of the most highest ranking wolf families. She was engaged to Micah when she was about four. I’m pretty sure she would be securing the same deal for Tiger.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s an outdated tradition, one I hated myself.”
“Did your family try to do it to you?”
“Tried being the keyword. They tried with Ike too.”
“I feel bad for her. She’s a mega bitch but I can see it’s because she has high expectations of her.”
“She’s the only child too,” Ianthe said. “I highly doubt before he disappeared that he slept with Dayna.”
I’d known Tiger’s father was missing but didn’t know the backstory of it.
“They didn’t love each other.”
“Well let me put it this way, Micah loved those of his own gender, and Dayna is a prude.”
I clasped my hand to my mouth to stop myself from laughing. No wonder Tiger was so highly strung.
“Everyone assumes he’s dead.”
Ianthe moved in front of me. “Honey, that man isn’t dead. He just wanted to escape an entirely too horrible marriage and family life. Micah wasn’t very family oriented.”
I caught sight of Luther standing by the teachers and higher students who were primed to be teachers when they graduated. Luther was talking with the headmaster and it seemed quite tense. I wonder if there was something else he was keeping from me.
Of course there was, an evil little voice said in my head. Feeling of being unworthy came to the forefront and that horrid burning started in my eyes. Tears were threatening.
I just prayed I could make it through the night without giving Tiger a reason to spread rumours about me throughout the school.
Luther
I stood at the doorway to the food hall where the students all recovered from the late night party with their parents. Most of them were exhausted and shovelling food into their mouths, but when I saw Elke wasn’t there, I became concerned. She’d not shown up to dinner last night after the party like we’d planned. It could have been out of sheer exhaustion of spending all night with Ianthe or maybe Ianthe warned her away from me. The best solution would be to wait and let her come to me but I had a niggling feeling I needed to seek her out.
All Hallows' Eve (Ravensbane Academy Book 1) Page 11
