The last part of me wondered if this had anything to do with my mother. But I pushed those thoughts aside.
Suddenly, while I was still walking along Main Street, I thought I heard a growling behind me. The black dog was there again. I gasped. I was positive my heart had just stopped beating.
My hope of avoiding him was dashed. I didn’t want to sprint all the way home. I didn’t want to show fear. But I was so scared I wanted to scream.
I looked behind me and felt like I was plummeting from the very top of a roller coaster, all fast panic and rolling stomach. There in the shadows was a pair of red eyes looking back at me.
Then they were gone.
Probably just a trick of the light. Right?
“I’m not crazy,” I said to myself. “I am NOT crazy.” I walked faster. “Don’t be afraid,” I ordered myself. For what it was worth.
I was almost relieved to have the mist come. It wasn’t exactly warm and comforting, but somehow I felt like it shielded me from the dog.
Only two more blocks.
I heard a snarl.
Despite my instincts telling me to stay calm, I started to run.
“Hi Charlotte.”
So much for good intentions. I staggered to a stop.
Standing in front of me was Cale Marks. He was a guy I’d known for most of my life until last year, when he graduated and left for college. No one in town had heard anything from him since. I remembered him as a nice guy who played a lot of sports.
He reached out and took my arm to steady me. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but I thought his face looked strained. He had a shock of red hair that was currently falling into his eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles across his nose.
“Hi Cale,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I looked over my shoulder. The mist was clearing a little. I didn’t see any sign of a massive dog.
“How are you?” Cale asked, still holding my arm.
His touch was distracting. “What?” I asked. “Oh. Fine.” Looking at him I knew I should ask some penetrating question about the last year, like how was school or where had he gone, but all I could think of was that my friend Katie had a massive crush on him and was heartbroken when he left. I had to admit, he was attractive in a boy-next-door sort of way. I decided I liked the boy-next-door sort of way better anyway.
“Can I walk you home?” he wanted to know. He finally let go of my arm, leaving a warm spot where his hand had been.
“How did you know I was going home?” Typical me, arguing with someone who was offering to do what I had been wanting all evening.
He shrugged. “Nothing’s open. You live like a block from here. Where else would you be going?”
Good point.
“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t sure about having Cale’s company; we’d never really hung out in school, but at this point I would take what I could get.
“So, where have you been this last year?” I asked, remembering that I hadn’t even seen him around at Christmas.
He coughed. “Went to private school in Vermont.”
“How’s that?”
“Great, actually,” he said. “It’s been really eye-opening.”
“Like, academically?” I shifted so that I could see his face better as we walked and so that I wouldn’t be tempted to constantly look over my shoulder.
He grinned. “Yeah, that’s part of it, I guess, but also there’s a lot of…diverse people there.”
“I bet there’s a lot of argyle too,” I muttered.
“What’d you say?” he asked, leaning towards me so that he could hear.
“Nothing,” I said, looking off into the distance and trying to act cool.
“How have you been?” he asked, trying hard to continue the conversation.
I was getting the distinct feeling that he was waiting for something, but I had no idea what.
“Do you have somewhere else to be?” I asked.
“You like asking lots of questions, huh?” he observed.
“I like information,” I told him. “It helps me function properly.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you have trouble functioning properly?”
“Only Sunday through Saturday,” I said under my breath. But to him I said, “Sorry. I won’t ask so many questions.”
“No, you should,” he said. “It’s nice to have someone be curious. Besides, I was actually hoping to see you at some point while I was home.”
“You were?” I asked, shocked. Cale hadn’t said two words to me for the entire time we were in school together.
“Yeah,” he said. “You were always nice to me and I was hoping to run into you. You were always nice in general, actually.”
“I’m only nice to people I don’t know,” I informed him. “Just give it time.”
That made him laugh again. “Oh, I see. So you’re really a tough girl?”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Don’t mess with me.”
“You realize you’re only like five feet tall?” Cale asked, still smiling broadly at me.
I smiled back. “Yeah, but it’s not the size of the dog in the fight….” My voice trailed off. I’d been enjoying the banter with Cale but had reminded myself of the dog I’d been “seeing.” More and more I was thinking that it was some stupid illusion.
Seeing the sudden strain on my face, Cale asked me what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said. The uneasy feeling I’d been having returned. We were now on my street, the one that didn’t have streetlights. I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. Over and over again I told myself that it was no big deal, that I hadn’t even really seen anything following me. Who had black dogs with red eyes following them anyway? No one.
“Sorry if I’m a little distracted,” I said to Cale, feeling awkward and like I’d been bizarre the whole time.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Cale, smiling. “It’s part of your charm.”
We had almost reached my house when Cale said, “Hey, Charlotte?”
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath like he was about to say something, but instead just let the air out slowly. “It was great to see you.”
“Yeah, um, you too,” I said. I couldn’t wait to get inside my house. Cale hesitated for a second, then wandered off down the street.
Before I could dash inside I heard a low growling noise behind me and froze. I didn’t dare look around, but Cale was gone, not that he would be much help against the flesh eating monster I imagined to be hiding just behind the bushes.
Slowly, I turned around. For some reason, actually seeing the massive black dog standing there, foaming at the mouth as it glared at me, was not as terrifying as thinking it was following me but not being sure. Now, instead of being crazy I was just about to be murdered by a massive animal. It was a wonderful improvement.
The dog’s belly was almost touching the ground. Every muscle in its body looked coiled, ready to spring free. I recognized that position. I saw it all the time on TV. It was what an animal did before it leapt forward. The big black dog was about to attack.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Running away seemed impossible. It was clearly faster than I was, and there was nowhere I could run to anyhow. In my mind I calculated the distance from where I was standing to the front door of my house; I would never make it inside.
All this went through my head in the split second before the dog launched himself towards me. But just before he plowed into me, the swirling mist came back in full force, slamming around me, blocking my view. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe, I smelled the faint stench of something tangy and heard a high faint screeching noise.
I tried to shove my way through the mist. No way was I just going to stand there and get torn into tiny bloody pieces.
Through my confusion I could tell that the dog was now preoccupied. He was snarling in front of me, but it wasn’t at me. It was like he had completely forgotten I was there. He seemed to be trying to nip at something tha
t he could never quite get his jaws around.
Meanwhile, the mist, which had been getting thicker around me, suddenly cleared enough so that I could see the dog, with a last ditch effort, spin and come towards me. He took me, and apparently the mist, by surprise as he hit me and knocked me backwards onto the porch.
I felt my head hit one of the steps, and my vision flickered out. The last thing I noticed before I blacked out were shapes crowding around me and someone, who sounded a lot like Cale, asking if I was all right. I tried to answer, but I couldn’t.
Then there was nothing.
Chapter Three
When I woke up I knew three things. First, my eyes were too tired to open, but I had to open them anyway. Second, I was in a very comfortable bed, which meant that it wasn’t my bed. Third, I was surrounded by the smell of lavender. My room did not smell like lavender.
“Are you awake?” a light female voice asked me. I felt what could only be a finger prodding me in the shoulder.
My gray eyes snapped open and I tried to sit up all at once. “What?”
“Morning,” said the girl sitting at the bottom of my bed. She was so small that her feet dangled over the edge. Her skin was pale and she had spiky blond hair and luminous violet eyes.
I was in what looked like a small, undecorated dorm room. The walls were white, and next to the single window there sat a desk, a dresser, a chair, and a mirror, and of course there was the bed I was lying in. A bright light was filtering through the spotless glass. I stared around the room and then back at the girl.
“Where am I?” I demanded, pulling the covers more tightly around myself, as if they somehow offered protection.
The girl’s purple eyes brightened with surprise. “You’re in the Infirmary at Public,” she said.
“I’m in an Infirmary?” I squeaked. “What happened? What is ‘Public’?”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “You hit your head, so you had to visit the Infirmary first. Actually, you’re really late. All the other Starters got here a week and a half ago. And Public is a college, Paranormal Public University. I don’t know why they brought you here so late, though.” She frowned a little.
Something about that amount of time sounded familiar to me, but my addled brain couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
I reached up and felt the back of my head where I remembered hitting it against the steps of my house, but all I could feel was my brown hair.
“They healed you really fast,” said the girl. “The nurses here can heal anything. When students get hurt playing Dash they come here and by that night they’re as good as new again. I’m SO excited you’re here.”
I rubbed my head. I had no idea what was going on, except that this girl was way too chipper. “But I already have a college to go to,” I protested.
“I’m Sip, by the way. It stands for Sipythia Quest, but no one calls me that. And yeah, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy, but I’m really not.”
She was right about how I was looking at her, so I tried to stop. I looked down at my small hands instead. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Charlotte. Charlotte Rollins.”
“Oh, I know,” said Sip, grinning.
“What is this place?” I asked again. I felt like I was swimming against a tidal wave. All I wanted to do was crawl back under the covers and fall asleep and wake up on the day I was supposed to leave for college for real.
“Paranormal Public University, like I said,” she repeated. “It’s a school for… paranormals. You know, vampires, pixies, mages, and the like.”
“Paranormals don’t exist,” I told her, crossing my arms over my chest. “There’s no such thing as a vampire.” I was determined for all this to be a very bizarre dream.
“Of course we do,” she said, laughing. “You don’t think that every person who wrote a book or made a movie about us got it wrong, do you? And that all the history books are wrong? Of course not. Your mother was one,” she pointed out. “Your mom was a mage from Airlee Dorm. I’m in that house. It’s mostly mages, though there are some werewolves and dream givers as well.”
My first surprise was that she had mentioned my mother. It added legitimacy to her claim, but being reminded of my mother hurt. My second surprise was that this tiny girl was a paranormal. She looked perfectly normal. But something about what she had said sounded familiar.
Suddenly it snapped into place. I had always wondered if this would happen, but I had tried to block it away most of the time. What I had wondered was whether my dark secret would be uncovered. Mom had always been honest with me when I was little, telling me that she had magic. She’d even shown it to me a couple of times. But for some reason she wouldn’t discuss with me why she never had anything to do with the magical community. We were sectioned off in the normal world. Every time I asked, she would change the subject. Then she died and left me alone with my awful stepdad.
When I started high school and gave no signs of magic, I decided that my mother had been crazy. She had shown me her own magic, but maybe I had imagined that, and since she was dead there was no way I could ask her. I had gone about living my ordinary life assuming that paranormals and magic didn’t exist. You can’t miss what you never had.
My stepdad hated any talk of magic or paranormals. He thought my mom was being crazy and said that she was filling my head with nonsense. My mother said that men secretly value “rationality” above God or sports. She could never mention any of it around him, so all she would do is tell me little bits in secret. She tried to pretend that she hadn’t told me she was a mage. I had never known what parts to believe and I was afraid of my stepdad. I hated it when he yelled.
Once my mother died, living at home was pure misery. My stepdad had never wanted me around to begin with, and he also had my little brother to take care of. My brother was his biological child, whereas I was not. He basically pretended I wasn’t there. I think I reminded him too much of my mom and I don’t think he could handle it. He never got over losing her.
If my father had been alive my stepdad would probably have tried to send me to him. But since he wasn’t, it was easier to just tolerate me and hope that I would disappear eventually.
If my father had been alive a lot of things might have been different.
“My mom told me she was a mage,” I said, still looking down at my hands. It was the first time I’d said it out loud; I had never dared before. Somehow, saying it was freeing. It sounded right and it was a relief to talk about my mom. “At the time I didn’t really believe her. She didn’t say much about magic, so I figured she was kidding.” But a part of me had always hoped that she wasn’t.
“I understand,” said Sip, nodding. “And the professors here think you’re a mage, too.”
“But I’ve never done any magic,” I protested. I tried to remember movies where I saw kids waving their hands while silver fire poured out or whatever. None of that had ever happened to me. I had never moved things with my mind or made stuff disappear.
“You just haven’t been trained,” Sip assured me. “It will come, with time and the proper professors. Your mom had magic, so there’s a good chance that you do too.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed her, but I didn’t argue. I liked the idea of following in my mother’s footsteps.
“So, what now?” I asked. “I mean, I should probably head home soon.” Not that my stepdad misses me, I thought to myself, but I still had packing to do for college. “But maybe I can visit again?”
Sip was shaking her head. “You got here late, so you have a lot to do. Classes start tomorrow, and tonight is the Demonstration. Starters demonstrate their paranormal abilities for their dorms. Besides, you need to see the campus. We can do that now, I guess. There is SO much for you to do! Basically, you aren’t going home.”
“But what about my college?” I demanded, panic starting to rise in me.
“You’re still going to college,” Sip pointed out. “The subjects you’ll be taking in the fi
rst semester will probably just be a little different than at your other school.”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked. “About all this?” I waved my hand to include the Infirmary room, but I really meant the whole paranormal/magic completely changing my life plan thing. I was supposed to start normal college. I had packed for it. There was nothing normal about Paranormal Public University.
Sip grinned. “Not technically. Untrained paranormals are dangerous. The professors don’t take kindly to rogue mages. Besides, you’ll like it here. I promise.”
I thought that might turn out to be true. Being about to start paranormal college was way more exciting than starting normal school. Besides, this couldn’t be worse than what I was leaving. My stepdad wouldn’t even miss me and Ricky was already more mature than I was.
“So, I’m staying here? What about my stepdad? My brother?” I wanted to know. This all sounded well and good, but I wasn’t sure it could really happen. Sure, my mom had told me about magic, but when she died the idea that I might be a mage had died with her.
“You need to be trained,” said Sip gently. “I’m a Starter too and we are going to be roommates. That’s why I’m here now. They wanted you to see a friendly face and get to know someone.” Sip was a friendly face all right. I’d bet she could sell coal to miners.
She continued, “I know it can be hard, but your stepdad has already been told that you left early and will call when you have a chance.”
That might be what someone told him, but he wouldn’t believe it. He’d know the truth, and what was worse was the fact that he’d be happy to get rid of me. He’d be much better off with just himself and Ricky anyway, I thought.
Suddenly it hit me: I wouldn’t be going home that night or any night soon. No more stepdad ignoring me, no more brother who got everything he wanted. I was sad, but I wasn’t that sad.
I started to smile.
Then I took a deep breath. This was crazy. I knew this was crazy, but somehow all the bad feelings I’d had for the past couple of weeks were gone. With every breath I took I felt more relaxed and happy than I’d felt in years, at least since I lost my mom. It felt good to be doing something my mom would want me to do. I’d been so busy with school and avoiding my stepdad that I hadn’t had much time for anything else.
Paranormal Public (Paranormal Public Series) Page 2
