“Now is not a time to dawdle, Ms. Rollins,” said the President, not unkindly.
I’d been standing in front of the water, rubbing my ring. The President must have thought I looked like a lunatic.
“You shouldn’t be outside by yourself anyway,” she chided as I made my way toward her. My legs didn’t want to move. I felt like I hadn’t walked in years, but I had to put one foot in front of the other. Time had stopped for the few seconds I had gotten to be with her again, but now reality was returning. I had to force myself to go back to existing in the ordinary world, from which she was long gone.
The President stepped out of my way to let me into her building. We made our way through the rooms until we reached the door of her office at the back. I was moving slowly; I spent too much time here. The Infirmary was one thing, I was a teenager at school, and it made sense that I’d go there sometimes. But the President’s office implied that I was getting in trouble. And now that I had a chance to look up into the President’s face, I realized that this time I was in fact in trouble. A lot of it.
Before I could sit down she said, “You purposefully started a fight with Camilla.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew there was nothing I could say in my own defense; I would just have to take my punishment. I had decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let Camilla push me around, just because I hadn’t learned magic yet and just because I was friends with Cale. She did not have the right to harass me.
“Ms. Rollins, I have given you every latitude. I have allowed you to remain here for an entire semester, no matter the cost to my personal reputation, on the assumption, no, that’s not right, with the certainty that you would work hard. I asked the very best student at Public to assist you.”
I thought that might be going a bit too far, but she was pacing around her office wringing her hands. “I found a tutor for you, and I have it on good authority that he has worked with you faithfully. And you repay me by attacking a student at the school dance, unprovoked.”
I was unprovoked like a bear whose children are in danger is unprovoked, I thought bitterly. But the President continued. “Not just any student, but Camilla Van Rothson, whose father happens to be a prominent donor to this institution. Is this how you repay my kindness? We are in the middle of demon attacks, and all you can think about is yourself.”
I tried to protest, but she cut me off. “I therefore have your punishment,” she said, glaring at me from behind her desk. “And again, as you have been all semester, you are fortunate that I am not expelling you. Attacking other students on school grounds, or truly anywhere, is disgusting behavior of the first order. I will not tolerate it. Just imagine what damage you could have done if you could actually do magic!” She sat down in a great whoosh of her robes.
The President was really on a roll this morning.
She was giving me the weirdest look, like I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what. Finally I said, “You were going to punish me….”
“Don’t be a smartass,” she ordered, sitting back in her chair. “I believe that you cleaned Astra for a few Saturdays,” she said. My heart sank. I felt like I’d been cleaning it since I got here. It was the cleanest dorm on campus. “You are to continue to do so until further notice. Keller, of course, will be there to assist you.”
I wondered why she was always throwing me together with Keller. I didn’t understand his behavior toward me; most of the time he was cool and indifferent, but every so often it seemed like he might actually like me. That had all probably changed after what had happened last night. I was snapped out of my thoughts by the sound of the President’s voice.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
As I was leaving I passed Professor Anania. She barely acknowledged me as she rushed into the office. Just before the door slammed shut I heard her exclaim, “There’s no sign.”
Once I was outside again, the air felt less stuffy and I could breathe easier. Since my anger had been about to boil over, it was good that she had dismissed me when she did. She might actually kick me out of Public if I lost my temper with her, and I still didn’t want that.
It was late morning now and I figured my friends were probably at breakfast, so I wandered that way. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the calm pond. My mother’s appearance there only a little while ago already felt like a dream. Most of all, Charlotte, you must stay safe. You of all people. Must. Stay. Safe.
Professor Anania had reminded me that there was a hellhound somewhere, and since apparently no professors had seen it and forced it to leave, there was a good chance it was still lurking on the grounds.
The breakfast attendant just shook his head at me and said, “You keep eating each meal twice, pretty soon that ring isn’t going to fit on your finger.” To my own surprise I found myself wishing he was right.
I spotted Lisabelle and Sip, sitting by themselves in the corner with their heads bent together.
“What is it?” I asked, reaching the table. Now that I was closer I could see that they looked worried.
Lisabelle looked up at me. She wasn’t worried. She was angry. “The President wants to see me again,” she said. “They think I know where the hellhound is.”
My stomach tightened. My own morning was forgotten in fear for Lisabelle. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m a darkness mage. Because no one remembers seeing me last night until I pulled you out of the tent,” she answered bitterly.
“But you were there,” I protested. “Weren’t you?” With a twinge of fear I realized that I hadn’t actually seen her. I’d been so preoccupied with fighting the pixies that I wasn’t sure.
“Yeah,” said Lisabelle. “I wouldn’t miss watching you make a fool out of yourself for anything.”
“She had to stand up for herself,” said the ever-practical Sip. “She can’t let Camilla push her around.”
“Fine,” said Lisabelle. “Whatever. I have to go.” She pushed away from the table and picked up her tray.
“Don’t do anything rash,” Sip advised.
Lisabelle glared at her. “I haven’t done anything at all. And all the while they keep blaming me because there are hellhounds still loose on the grounds.” She stormed off.
“How long do you think she’ll be gone this time?” Sip asked, looking after her. She pursed her lips.
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
Once Lisabelle was out of sight, Sip turned to me and said, “What did the President want with you?”
I told Sip what had happened, but left out the part about my mother. Somehow that was private. And since that ghostly figure had told me that someone close to me couldn’t be trusted, it seemed safer not to tell anyone, although I was pretty sure about who she was referring to: Zervos.
“What now?” Sip asked.
I shrugged. Everything felt like it was spinning out of control and going wrong, but I felt powerless to stop it.
“Now we study for mid-semester exams,” I guess.
Sip dropped her fork with a clatter. “Oh no! I had almost forgotten about those!”
Chapter Twenty-One
The next week went by in a blur. It didn’t take long for Lisabelle to come back from her talk with the President. All year I had thought that she had a temper and was quick to anger, but that was before I saw her that Sunday afternoon. Now I realized that up until then she had been remarkably calm – for Lisabelle.
When she walked into Sip’s and my room she was livid. She’d been put on dorm arrest. The only time she could leave Airlee was to go to class, and then she would have to be escorted by a professor or the President herself. When Lisabelle had demanded to see the proof of her involvement with the demons and therefore a justification for why she was being treated like a prisoner, the President had just laughed.
After the dance the paranormals were even colder to each other. In some classed they silently competed to see who could answer the questions first. In other cla
sses all students refused to answer any of the questions in a bid to get each other in trouble. The professors would eventually get fed up and start yelling. At lunch there was jostling and at times downright violence. One werewolf got a black eye from a vampire, and a pixie’s bag of magical dust went mysteriously missing.
My relationship with the pixies had gone from bad to worse. They now hated me with an unbridled passion that they made no attempt to hide. I couldn’t walk past one of them in the halls without being attacked. They tripped me, used pixie magic to disorient me, or just screamed at me. The one time a pack of them caught me alone I ended up with a split lip.
After that, Lisabelle and Sip took to walking on either side of me. I was lucky. Everyone, except maybe Keller, was afraid of Lisabelle. If the pixies saw that she was with me they would veer off in a different direction. If Lisabelle noticed, she would usually send a tendril of black magic snaking after them. “It’s the little pleasures in life,” she would sigh.
When I wasn’t with Lisabelle I was usually with Keller. The next week we had mid-term exams, and since I could hardly afford to fail, he had decided that he would tutor me every day. Twice. We would meet once before breakfast, and once again after dinner. He had decided to focus on the first half of my studies, the non-magical half, in an effort to make sure that my overall grades were good enough that they couldn’t expel me.
Exams meant that all week the whole campus was tired. Even Dash was canceled because all the exams were scheduled for Friday and Saturday. The professors were giving us Monday off, which meant that we had a long weekend, but we couldn’t take advantage of it, because of the exams. The campus was subdued. Between the fear of the hellhound and the late nights spent cramming, no one was getting much sleep. The only benefit was that the pixies were too tired to spend much time tormenting me.
Finally, on Wednesday night, I had had enough studying.
“This is stupid,” I said, pushing my Intro to Para Studies textbook away. Keller pushed it back toward me.
“You need to work harder,” he informed me. “And not complain.”
He sat back in his chair and eyed me. The first floor of the library was filled with students, but since that was the floor where talking was allowed, no one looked up to silence him. Despite all our time together, he had been cool toward me since the dance. I always insisted we meet in a public place. I don’t know why, but meeting in one of our dorm rooms felt too intimate. He had suggested meeting at Astra, the elemental dorm, but I’d realized from Saturdays spent cleaning there that the place made me uncomfortable and somehow sad.
On top of everything else I hadn’t been sleeping, and I thought Keller could tell. Lisabelle now slept on the floor in our room. We wanted to give her an alibi in case there was another hellhound attack, but it meant that one of us always had to be awake. One night, when I was particularly tired, Keller touched my shoulder after we finished studying. “Be careful, Charlotte,” he said quietly into my ear. Then he walked away.
I had put my hand up to my shoulder where he touched me before I realized how silly I must look. Sometimes Keller would touch me and I would hardly notice. Other times he would touch me and I had a hard time not rubbing the spot where his hand had been.
Lisabelle, Sip, and I still hadn’t figured out who had let the demon in or why it was there. Lough had heard rumors that the demons thought there was one last elemental and would stop at nothing to find him or her, but that didn’t explain the demon’s presence at Public. There were definitely no elementals at Public.
Lisabelle, though, was a powerful darkness mage, and we were sure that the demons would like to get her on their side.
The worst part about midterms was that we still had class. Walking into Professor Korba’s class the day after Keller’s warning, I almost screamed when he said that we were visiting not only Cruor, the vampire dorm, but also Volans, the pixie dorm.
“Since Professor Zervos has returned, we can no longer visit dorms during his class period. So, I have made room for it in my schedule.”
Lough’s hand shot into the air. “But we don’t have the same students in this class.”
Professor Korba raised fine eyebrows. “Yes, Lough. It’s a good thing you pointed that out. Otherwise we accomplished professors, with decades of experience under our robes, might have missed that fact.”
A dull red color spread across Lough’s face.
“Professor Korba made a joke!” Lisabelle murmured to me. “I didn’t know he had it in him.”
First, Cruor. I knew that since it was called blood dorm, it was going to be gruesome. Add to that the fact that the vampires were fearsome and violent, and I would have preferred to stay miles away. But Professor Korba was having none of our protests.
Luckily, since this was a first-session class, all the vampires were still in their coffins. Even though the vampires didn’t hate me like the pixies did, I still thought it would be better not to get on their bad side, and since it seemed like all I needed to do to get on someone’s bad side was show up, I felt lucky they were all still under the sun.
Cruor was the only dorm that could be seen from the Tower. I liked to think it was so that the professors could keep a close eye on what was going on there. Since the vampires were in their prime at night they had a lot of time on campus when the rest of us were sleeping.
And it wasn’t just the vampires themselves who were formidable. They also kept dangerous pets. Their strix were fast and unforgiving. Commonly known as owls, they were bred to inflict maximum damage. Their cages were kept in a barn-like building at one end of Cruor, and if you passed there at night you could hear them cooing and rattling around. I always walked faster after that. Most students did absolutely everything they could to avoid passing Cruor at night.
The dorm itself was a miniature castle made of black glass, complete with a drawbridge, moat, and walls of black stone. The drawbridge, which the professors insisted always stay down, hung over black, limp water. Dead fish floated on the surface. Several students gagged and were forced to cover their noses as we passed. Inside, the courtyard wasn’t much better, and that was because the courtyard was a graveyard. I gulped. Cruor wouldn’t have made it onto any college tours, that’s for sure.
Lough raised his hand as we walked.
“Yes, Lough,” said Professor Korba, walking along with his back to everyone. “Yes, those are real gravestones.”
Lough lowered his hand.
Lisabelle, who had been first in line, fell back to walk next to me. Putting her lips close to my ear she whispered, “This is a powerful place. Demons would live here happily.”
“That’s great,” I told her. “Thank you for sharing.”
I knew Lisabelle was conflicted about her life at Public. Her parents were steadfast supporters of paranormals, but a lot of darkness mages couldn’t say the same. They were already on the demons’ side. I knew Lisabelle felt that pull, and being treated like a leper since she arrived probably wasn’t helping.
“When are you going to take your Starter test?” I whispered back to her, realizing that she was the only other Starter who hadn’t taken it. Well, she and Lough.
Lisabelle gave me a pitying look. I hated that look. “I actually took it before I got here,” she told me. “My parents spent a lot of time training me, since they knew no darkness mages were professors here. I just got it out of the way before I came to campus.”
Lisabelle said that like it was no big deal. I knew that to every other paranormal it wasn’t, but being reminded of it filled me with jealousy. I didn’t have much time to dwell on my frustrations, though. We were entering Cruor.
Cruor wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting, mostly because I’d been expecting blood soaking the walls and dead bodies hanging from the ceilings. In reality, the only signs of death were the gravestones. I tried not to think about how those people had died.
As I walked through the glass front door I was still feeling cold, so I rubbed my arms
for warmth, but I still felt chilly. The room beyond was massive. Unlike Astra, where you entered an ornately decorated hallway, in Cruor you entered a living room. Everything in the room was black except for the sofas and chairs, which were red. There was also a massive red rug in front of an empty fireplace. The room smelled slightly of something tangy. I hoped it wasn’t blood. On the walls were black frames, but no pictures.
“Lovely,” said Lough, coughing. Professor Korba swept around to face us. He was shorter than everyone else there, even Sip, but he commanded attention when he wanted it.
“This is Cruor,” he told us. “It was the second of the paranormal dorms built on this campus. We have discussed vampire powers, their ability to shift into mist, command strix, and drink blood. We have also discussed that they can protect themselves from sunlight for short periods of time, which allows them to attend classes here. It is, in fact, the first thing a vampire learns. Can anyone tell me anything else about them?”
“They are one of the five powers. They are a key part in counteracting demon magic, because vampires share some of the same darkness powers,” offered Lisabelle.
“Exactly. Fallen angels are all white, bright magic. Alone, they could never defeat demons. But with the combined strength of the other paranormals, the demons can be defeated.”
“I hear Keller did a pretty good job against the one that attacked Charlotte,” said Lauren Bells.
Professor Korba nodded. “Keller is talented and the demon was alone. It is kind of you to reference the accomplishments of another paranormal.”
We continued to explore the dorm. Disturbing didn’t even begin to describe it. The halls were painted black. At first I’d been relieved that there wasn’t any blood spattered on them; somehow I thought that was an improvement from the bodies I’d been imagining. But I soon realized that my first impression was wrong. Around every dark corner a creak or a whistle made me jump. I was positive that some of the older vampires, or worse, Professor Zervos, were just waiting to come out after us.
Paranormal Public (Paranormal Public Series) Page 18
