by Blair Drake
“Why would I? You said she’s a freshman. Her room is clear on the other side of the building. I told you before, I’m not sticking around the Cliffs for a freshman. I’ll never get out of here,” he’d said.
“Come on. She came out of the headmaster’s office just as we were heading down there. You didn’t see her? What are you blind? She was right there. Totally fine.”
But again, Reese hadn’t been listening. Not really. Reese had grabbed the railing as the next gust of wind knocked him off balance and turned to look at the girls on the rooftop deck. They’d been huddled together, but none of them seemed to be struggling because of their slight size. Instead, they’d been focused on a dark cloud circling in the distance and growing bigger.
The wind growled out as if it had been warning them of the impending storm.
“What is that?” Annalise had cried out, grabbing her best friend.
“It’s…a storm,” Reese had said. But he wasn’t completely sure that’s what it was at all.
“It’ll be okay,” Headmistress Lalane had said.
Reese sure hadn’t believed her. Not with that black wall of clouds howling at them like an angry dog. If that had been a storm, it was the most badass storm he’d ever witnessed in his seventeen years.
The sky had grown darker, and the clouds seemed to be snickering at them with sick amusement as they all stood like idiots on the rooftop watching the storm come closer.
“There’s no turning back,” Lalane had said to them. “Don’t fight it. There’s no going back.”
One of the other girls, Natasha, shook her head and cried. “I want to go back in. Please! I don’t want to stay here anymore!”
Reese remembered the black clouds swirling above them. They almost looked as if they were arms reaching down, getting close enough to grab them and pull them up to the sky. No wonder Natasha and the rest had been scared. Who else had been there? Rebecca? Dylan? Elijah? There were more. And they’d been scared. All of them.
And Reese had been scared, too. At the end anyway. The dark swirling clouds had gotten closer, reaching down to the rooftop deck. The sky had grown darker and then something reached down and blasted them until he’d fallen back.
That’s when he’d realized Jasper was gone. What the hell was happening to everyone? What was that thing that had come at them from the sky?
The air had changed as if somebody had put a vacuum hose in front of them and put it on full blast, sucking the air away from them. The sudden panic enveloping him had become so strong, Reese had felt like baby wanting to run for his mother. But his mother wasn’t here. George had seen to that. George had made sure there was no way Reese could ever flee to his mother if there was anything wrong.
And he wasn’t a baby. He was almost a man. And men didn’t cry to their mothers because a storm frightened them. But he had been frightened. He remembered that now. As he felt the gritty dirt from the concrete floor biting into his palm, he remembered. He’d felt Jasper’s hand gripping his arm like a vice, as if his friend needed Reese’s weight to hold him in place. And then Jasper’s hand was no longer gripping his.
Reese had closed his eyes as wind and rain pelted him. He’d tried to force his eyes open to see what was happening, but he couldn’t keep them open long enough to make out the figures in front of him. He’d looked up and blinked wildly. He’d only saw enough to know that the clouds had been swirling directly above them. Angry. Dark. Almost hateful.
And then he was alone. He couldn’t see it, but he knew Jasper was no longer there. Annalise and the others were gone, too.
Reese’s heart had pounded in his chest. He’d fought to move. Everything happened at rapid speed. It occurred to him that maybe not everyone had fled at all. Maybe one by one the clouds above him had reached down from the sky like fingers in the tornado and grabbed each of them, pulling them off the rooftop.
Yes, he’d felt his feet lift off the deck boards. None of the kids were there any longer. The screams had stopped completely. Everyone had disappeared. He’d been lifted and then he’d fallen. He remembered his hands and arms flailing about, grabbing at air and finding nothing for his hands to connect with.
He’d been falling a long time. Time stood still like the second hand on the old watch he always wore. Just when he’d thought he couldn’t breathe anymore from the air being swirled around like a vortex, Reese felt himself falling faster, afraid he would hit the jagged cliffs below the school that had given the school its name.
Steep panic had paralyzed him. He’d really believed he was going to die on the rocks below the school he hated being at so much. He’d stopped fighting and wondered if he’d die alone today.
It still seemed so vivid. All of it. Had that really happened? If it had, he should be dead. The fall off the roof of the Gray Cliffs Academy into the rocks below should have ended it all. But somehow, Reese Calamita was still alive and sitting in the basement of the school.
His body had hit the cold, hard ground with a thud on a surface he hadn’t been expecting. Concrete.
He had no idea how far he had fallen or in what direction, but he’d landed hard on his side. A sharp pain started in his shoulder, traveled down his arms to his fingertips, and through his back and rib cage before the pain spread out through his body and faded. The fierce wind that had swirled around him, practically knocking him off his feet, had abruptly stopped, but his lungs still felt robbed of air and his face and hands were wet.
Blinking to adjust his eyes to the sudden change of light, Reese carefully put his weight on his elbow and then pulled himself up to a full sitting position, dragging air into his lungs as he moved until he felt lightheaded. Had he really fallen off the roof? He’d felt himself in the air as if he’d been lifted by a tornado. No, he couldn’t have fallen. He would have ended up on the concrete floor of what looked like a long, dark tunnel in a basement.
His body shivered in a way Reese couldn’t control, almost as if the wind that was no longer in the room needed to finish passing through him in order for him to stop shaking.
He imagined something his mother used to say when he was cold as a kid about someone walking over his grave. He hadn’t understood it then and he still didn’t understand why his mother chose to say something so creepy to him. Especially since he had feared so much after his dad had left them.
When Reese had been on the roof, the air had been nearly uncontrollably freezing towards the end. It was still cold, but this air was different. This kind of cold went straight to his bones.
He kept his body still, moving only slightly so he could see his surroundings. The pungent smell of musty earth and stagnant water assaulted his nose as he eased himself up from the ground. But he could see no dirt or plants anywhere around him. Just cinderblocks and cement.
“A basement. Who knew?” he said.
Reese blinked hard, trying to get his eyes to focus. He didn’t recognize anything. Since when did the school have a freaking dungeon? If he’d known it was here, he and Jasper would have cut class long ago to explore.
Panic slapped up against his chest. Jasper. Where had he gone? And the girls. Where were they?
He spun around and blinked again, trying to see if someone else was there in the basement with him. When he couldn’t see anything, Reese took a few steps, and looked around, although he wasn’t exactly sure which way to go. Reaching up, he rubbed his forehead with his fingers.
He heaved a heavy sigh, glad that he could finally breathe in and out again without feeling like his lungs were constricted. It didn’t really matter how he’d gotten off the rooftop deck. He was here, and he needed to find a way to get out.
A low hum filled the space around Reese, getting louder, and then fading. He glanced down at the gold school pin they were all required to wear on their school uniforms, and then touched it. It was cold and slightly bent, most likely from when he’d hit the floor.
“Cheap piece of metal,” he mumbled. He unfastened it and dropped it into his bl
azer pocket. That’s when he felt something else in his pocket, and he remembered. Headmistress Lalane had walked by each of them while they’d been in the headmaster’s office, and slipped something into his pocket. Yeah, he remembered that. He hadn’t thought about it much at the time, although he’d been curious. But then they’d suddenly been on the rooftop and everything happened.
He’d forgotten all about Lalane’s odd behavior that morning until his fingers felt the cold, hard surface in his pocket. He learned too late that the item was another pin until he grabbed it with his fingers and it pricked him as he pulled it out of his pocket.
“Damn!” he said through his teeth as he inspected his finger. It was just a finger prick and a bead of blood. He’d live.
He turned the pin around in the palm of his hand. It had some of the same features as the pin he’d always worn on his uniform. But this one was a little different. There was a brown stone in the center of it.
Just as Reese was about to discard the pin back in his pocket, the pin began to vibrate, startling him. His eyes widened as the stone changed colors and then lit up, getting brighter and then fading as if it had a pulse. It was freaking glowing like it was alive! He carefully touched his finger to the stone. But something moved behind him and pulled his attention away.
“Jasper?”
He turned to look in both directions. In the years he’d been at the Gray Cliffs Academy, there’d been plenty of rumors about whippings, vanishings, and general weird stuff. It was usually because someone had crossed Headmistress Lalane in some way.
She wasn’t that bad. At least, Lalane didn’t bug Reese as much as she did some of the other kids. The headmaster, well, he was something else. There was definitely something stuck up his butt. The man had had it in for Reese since the day he’d arrived at the Cliffs.
A noise down the tunnel pulled his attention away from his thoughts for the second time. There was something out there. He looked around again but still saw nothing but concrete.
It had to be one of the other kids from the rooftop. If the wind had blown him off, then it must have done the same to one of the others. It didn’t explain how he ended up here, but if he had, then someone else had to as well.
As he walked toward the place where he’d heard movement, he realized the pain he’d felt on impact when he’d hit the ground was gone. Strange. When he’d injured himself in track, it usually lingered at least for a few days. But now he felt no pain.
Why had they even been in the headmaster’s office? And then the rooftop deck? That was usually off limits to students, not that he and Jasper hadn’t tried to get up there before. They’d spent a week in detention the first year they’d been at the Cliffs for making it halfway up before getting caught. But he had been standing on that rooftop deck next to Jasper. The girls had been there and they’d been crying. Lalane… Yeah, she was there too, and she had said not to fight it. Is that what she’d said? What the hell did that even mean?
And now he was here, wherever here was.
The tunnel seemed to go on forever without an end in sight. He wasn’t even sure if he was going in the right direction, but it didn’t matter. He could only walk so far before he hit a wall, right?
“Hey, Jasper,” he called out as quietly as he could to be heard but not to draw any more attention to himself in case the headmaster was within earshot. He didn’t really want to be found down here and bring any attention that might keep him from graduating. George’s head would explode if he didn’t graduate after he’d spent so much money sending Reese to the Cliffs.
He stopped and listened. Silence. Reese had expected his voice to bounce off the concrete walls even a little when he’d called out to Jasper. But it was almost as if… He reached up his hand and slowly moved it towards the wall. Just before he made contact with the concrete, he heard a sound that had him spinning around.
Something scraped against the concrete. Out of the darkness, he saw a figure coming toward him. Whatever it was, it moved slowly. Blood pumped through his veins and pounded against his eardrums. With every breath he took, he waited. Was that Lalane? No. The figure was too small. Shorter. And as her face came into view, Reese realized it was a girl. She appeared younger than he was by a couple of years. He’d never seen her before.
She was probably a freshman who’d gotten lost using the stairs. He didn’t know many of the freshman. When Reese left the Cliffs, he was making a clean break, not lingering back to hang with a younger girlfriend who’d keep him chained here forever. But if she was down in the basement, she’d be able to tell him how to get out.
He spun around again to see if anyone else was around. No one was with her.
The panicked look on her face made his heart pump furiously. With each beat, the room became a little brighter, although he wasn’t sure where the light was coming from, until he could see the girl fully. He felt the pin in his pocket vibrate again, pulling him from her probing gaze to look at it. Pulling the pin out, he saw that it was glowing again. This time it looked like a blue flame.
He shoved the pin in his pocket again and turned his attention to the girl. “Hey, how’d you get down here?”
“You shouldn’t…be here,” she said, her eyes never leaving his. Blue. It was hard to see, even with the brighter light, but her eyes looked blue.
“Yeah, I know. Cept’ I can’t figure out exactly how I got here. Where are the stairs?”
She continued to stare at him without looking away even once, which freaked him out a little.
“How do you get out of here?” Reese asked again, hoping she’d stop staring at him as if he had a giant zit on his nose.
She offered him a crooked smile and it was incredibly cute. He couldn’t believe he was even thinking that about a girl so young. Definitely, a freshman, he decided. Certainly too young for him even though he knew some of the other guys dated freshman girls. It wasn’t like he was ancient, being that he was going to be eighteen in another month. He didn’t need the strings when he was so close to leaving.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said again.
“Yeah, I figured that out on my own. What are you doing down here?”
“Surviving.”
What the… Her words were clear enough but he couldn’t tell if she was teasing or if she was deranged. There were enough people in his life that were deranged. He’d seen lots of weird shit. Especially since he’d come to the Gray Cliffs Academy.
“Yeah, okay. Aren’t we all?”
Reese turned to walk away towards the light and the sounds that he heard coming down from the concrete tunnel. He felt a cold hand gripping his upper arm. No, it was both hands. And when he turned to her, he saw terror in her eyes.
“Dude, what you doing?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “What’s a dude?”
He hesitated a moment because he couldn’t tell if she was kidding him or not. She must’ve fallen. Had to. Probably knocked her head against this concrete and now she was delirious or something. Reese didn’t remember seeing her up on the rooftop deck but she may have been there.
He started to turn again but then thought better of it. What if she had hit her head? He couldn’t leave her here alone. It was wasn’t freezing down here, but it was cold enough that if she passed out, she might not make it through the night. What kind of shit would he be to leave somebody like that behind?
“I’m going to take a walk down this way to see if I can find a set of stairs,” he said.
She shook her head. “There aren’t any stairs. At least none that will take you out of the underground.”
“Underground?”
“It’s where we are.”
She hadn’t hit her head. She was just nuts. “Okay, I’m game. What the hell is the underground?”
“It’s where we are. It’s not safe for you to go down that way. Alone. I know you think you can get help there or maybe escape, but—”
“Escape? Who said anything about escaping? I just need to get t
o class before I end up with another detention. I don’t need that trouble so close to graduation.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
She was serious. “Yeah, okay. Point taken,” he said. “I’ll just be heading off in this direction. You can come with me or you can go back to doing…whatever it is you were doing before I got here.”
“Don’t you get it?” the girl snapped. Her sudden anger had him taking a step back.
“Whoa. Calm down.”
“There are no stairs. The only way out of here is a portal. And we’re a long way from that.”
Her voice bounced off the walls around them. As soon as she heard how loud it was her body shrunk down a few inches, and her arms came up over her face.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Someone will hear.” He studied her expression. She was genuinely afraid. “You okay?”
“I told you. You don’t belong here.” Her voice was nearly inaudible now. Not really a whisper, but a quiet tone that was meant just for him to hear.
He pointed his thumb back to the tunnel “I know that. That’s why I’m trying to get back to class. I was supposed to meet Headmaster Auster and Ms. Lalane. You know, the headmistress?” he clarified when she looked up at him with wide eyes filled with confusion. “I’m sure you already know that. If I’m suddenly gone, she’ll find me. She always does. It’s never pretty. But…you’re probably not one of those students who pushes the limits with Lalane so you probably don’t know that.”
With both hands cupping her cheeks, the girl shook her head slowly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I do know that if you go down that way, the concrete path leads to the city. It’s not safe there. Endel never lets me go down there unless there is a good reason.”
“End…who? Is that your dad?”
“He’s…” She seemed to search her mind for the right word. It had Reese wondering who this Endel person was. He’d never heard of anyone named Endel at the Gray Cliffs Academy. Maybe he was a custodian he’d never met. Anything was possible. He’d never seen this girl either. Where had she been all this time?
