Academy of the Fateful (Cursed Studies Book 3) Read online

  Academy of the Fateful

  Book 3 in the Cursed Studies trilogy

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition, 2020

  Copyright © 2020 Eva Chase

  Cover design: Rebecca Frank, Bewitching Book Covers

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-63-5

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-64-2

  Created with Vellum

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Trix

  Roseborne College was an unsettling place at the best of times. Now, as I stood rigid outside the Victorian mansion’s front door staring out at the havoc I’d unleashed, the campus might as well have been an outright horror show.

  In the fading dusk, several students were tugging at the wrought-iron gate that led to the outside world, but it refused to release anything more than a creak of protest. A faintly glowing mist rolled off the rosebush that clung to the stone wall the rest of the way around campus. Ghostly figures formed from its haze, drifting toward the students by the gate and others scattered across the lawn.

  A girl who’d been scrambling back to the school staggered as her legs wobbled beneath her. They gave out completely, pitching her onto the grass. Her breath was coming ragged. I peered across the lawn toward the wall, and a chill crept up my spine.

  I couldn’t make out much of the roses blooming there—the blooms that were somehow connected to the lives of each student—but in the mist’s glow, one that I caught sight of shriveled tighter. Another let loose a couple of petals to drift toward the ground.

  If a student’s rose died, they died too. From what I’d gathered, that process usually took years while Roseborne’s staff dealt out their tortures. It was speeding up before my eyes. Before, I’d thought there might be some small chance of using my gardening knowhow to strengthen the plant, but looking at it now, I had no hope at all that my skills could slow the flowers’ decay.

  I only had a few seconds to take in that problem before my gaze caught on a sight that made my heart lurch hard. One of the ghostly figures had come to a stop on the path between me and the gate. She turned toward me with a swing of her translucent but distinctive pitch-black hair. A filmy image of Sylvie, my foster brother’s former girlfriend—the girl who’d died because of my jealousy—stared straight at me with kohl-lined eyes.

  Holy shit. I backpedaled instinctively. My back smacked into the door that had closed behind me. Without thinking, driven by pure panic, I fumbled for the knob and pushed inside.

  The situation in the foyer wasn’t much more welcoming. A few students ran by me, pale-faced; another was huddled in a corner, hugging himself. Streaks of ghostly light glanced off the walls with a crackling energy that made the air thrum. In one, I caught a glimpse of the face of one of the eight students from nearly a century ago whose ritual had transformed this institution from an ordinary high school into a college driven by vengeance.

  Their spirits had broken—or maybe been forced—out of the physical bodies they’d constructed to present themselves as the college’s staff, but our tormenters obviously weren’t gone. And who knew what the hell they had in store for us next.

  They’d already unleashed some of that hell on the three guys who’d taken them on alongside me. If I could save anyone tonight, I had to save them. I dashed down the hall to the basement stairs.

  In the laundry room, the person-sized hole I’d opened up in the far wall still gaped ominously. At the thought of the power that had welled up inside me and allowed me to crumble the concrete with my bare hands, my fingers curled into my palms. If I could have used the same trick on the outer wall, we’d all have had the chance to flee the campus right now.

  But I couldn’t. I felt the lack inside me with the same certainty as I’d known I could press through this wall less than an hour ago. The power that had come over me had faded away after the earlier mad rush of it. I couldn’t have shattered a single brick, and I had no idea how to summon the energy again.

  Roseborne’s darkest secrets had waited beyond the opening in front of me—but so did Ryo, Jensen, and Elias, who’d helped me uncover those secrets and defended me while I tried to cut off the staff’s source of power, and who might now be dying because of their allegiance to me. A jolt of urgency propelled me onward.

  I stepped through the gap into the dim room. The light from the sconces along the walls flickered over the battered remains of the twisted rosebush I’d chopped to bits, revealing dark blood stains that marked the concrete floor beneath. Blood stains and the knife that’d opened up veins on eight pairs of wrists nearly a century ago, the blade now stabbed into the floor. I’d seen the macabre ritual the former students had conducted play out in a memory that wasn’t entirely mine. I had some connection to one of those students-turned-spirits: Winston Baker, who might have been my great-grandfather.

  Whatever power I’d temporarily wielded here, that had allowed me to enter this room and challenge his former allies’ domination over Roseborne, I suspected he’d passed it on to me. But I hadn’t been prepared for the chaos those actions would produce.

  Voices—living human voices—carried from the hall beyond the scattered brambles. Dodging the splintered thorns, I hustled across the room.

  Jenson and Ryo had managed to get Elias onto his feet. When I’d last seen him, our math teacher had been slumped on the floor. Elias appeared to be holding most of his own weight now, his well-muscled arms slung over the slimmer guys’ shoulders only for balance, but the hard edges of his face stood out even more starkly with the hollowing of his cheeks and sudden sunkeness of his eyes.

  He looked as though the life were draining out of him—the way my former roommate had looked in the last few days before her rose had crumbled away and her life had snuffed out at the same time.

  “What’s going on up there?” Jenson asked, his normally smooth voice taut with tension. He held his tall frame rigid beside Elias. From what I’d seen, there wasn’t much love lost between the two of them—but he’d stayed to help the other guy anyway. With the way his bright blue eyes rested on me, I knew it hadn’t really been for Elias’s benefit. He’d come down here in the first place, faced the spirits’ hostility and stood with the other guys I’d found myself falling for, because of how much he cared about me. That knowledge came with a bittersweet pang, knowing how far I was from seeing through the coup I’d been attempting.

  “I’m not
sure,” I said. “Things have gotten… pretty wild. I don’t think it’s safe for any of us to stay down here, though. This was the center of the staff’s power—they might still get something out of it.”

  “Getting out of here sounds good to me,” Ryo said with a rough laugh. He ducked his head, the wavering light leaching the color from the vivid green streaks in his black hair. I thought I saw a shiver run through his lean body. Normally Ryo could find an optimistic spin on just about any situation—or at least a way to focus on something more upbeat as a distraction. His rose had been starting to show signs of age the last time I’d seen it, though. He’d been here almost three years. Was he starting to falter just like Elias was?

  My stomach balled into a knot at the idea. I gave a brisk wave of my arm. “Come on. Let’s see how things are upstairs and then decide where to go from there. The—the gate still won’t open. We can’t leave yet.”

  My plan had failed in that one essential way. I’d thought destroying the basement rosebush that fueled the malicious spirits who ran the school would free the students trapped here. From what I’d seen so far, my attempt had only left us trapped with greater horrors.

  The guys moved toward the opening in the laundry room wall with lurching strides. I hung back, watching both Ryo and Elias carefully. When the younger guy swayed a little, I eased closer. “I can help—”

  Ryo shook his head, his jaw tightening, and Elias fixed me with a firm stare that somehow managed to contain all of his teacherly authority even though he couldn’t so much as walk on his own. “We’ll manage. You can make sure the way is clear.”

  There obviously wasn’t any point in arguing about it instead of getting a move on. As we passed the broken rosebush, I snatched the axe I’d used to destroy it off the ground. The tool might not have gotten me the victory I’d been hoping for, but its solid weight rested reassuringly in my hands. A metal blade probably couldn’t do much against the transformed staff or the other apparitions emerging on campus, but it couldn’t hurt to have a weapon at the ready.

  Getting Elias through the hole in the wall took some maneuvering, but we managed without anyone collapsing. Making it up the stairs to the first floor was another trial. I edged along a few steps ahead of the guys, the axe braced in front of me, my muscles tensing at every thump and gasp that carried from above.

  In the foyer, streaks of the thrumming energy that seemed to contain the staff’s essences were still whipping this way and that. As I waited for the guys to climb the last few stairs, one bolt of light slammed into a girl’s ankles as she darted by and sent her tumbling to her knees. I thought I could make out a faint murmur of laughter in the air.

  I couldn’t worry about her or anyone else right now. Keeping the three guys behind me safe was a big enough challenge on its own. I bit my lip, debating my options, but as unnerving as the scene in front of me was, what I’d seen outside had been even worse. And Elias wasn’t in any shape to run. He needed to rest.

  I made the best I could of the options available, all of which were bad. With a jerk of my hand, I directed the guys to the grand staircase in the middle of the foyer.

  “Upstairs to the dorms. I don’t know what all we’re dealing with, but we can barricade ourselves in there against any physical threats for as long as we think we have to. Elias needs to get off his feet and recover.”

  If he even could recover more. If his rose didn’t simply keep leaching his life away by the minute. I swallowed thickly.

  None of the guys argued. By the time we’d made it to the second floor, my suggestion was starting to look not so bad after all. A few students lingered in the hall outside the classroom doors, but neither hostile spirits nor misty ghosts showed any sign of making their way this high up. Maybe we’d be okay up here until whatever was going on across campus died down.

  Assuming it did die down on its own.

  We shuffled past the closed classrooms and up the stairs to the boys’ dorm. The bedroom where Elias and I had cuddled on his bed just a few hours ago was empty. I grasped his arm as the other two lowered him onto the mattress. He flopped down with a ragged exhalation of relief, but it looked as if a little color had come back into his face. Maybe he was stabilizing?

  Ryo dropped onto the edge of a neighboring bed. Jenson peered out the door, shut it, and dragged one of the other beds to block it from opening. I stayed on my feet, too keyed up to consider sitting.

  Jenson leaned against the headboard of the bed he’d blocked the door with, crossing his arms. “What the hell is going on out there? What’s going on with him?” He motioned briskly toward Elias.

  “Everything went so crazy when you took down the bush that I couldn’t make a whole lot of sense of it,” Ryo put in.

  I paced from one end of the room to the other. “I don’t know exactly what happened. It seemed like when I chopped through the base of the bush, all the energy that was sustaining it—and I guess sustaining the teachers and the dean too—exploded. I think they leapt in and… absorbed that energy somehow? They dropped the physical bodies they’ve been using. I guess those adult bodies were always just a front for the spirits of the eight students from the portraits.” I paused. “In the middle of it, I had another memory from way before—I saw the eight of them in the basement, cutting up their wrists. They meant to die, but they woke up some kind of dark power by making their suicides a sacrifice.”

  Take our blood and theirs, the boy who’d seemed to be the leader—Oscar Frederickson, who’d positioned himself as Roseborne’s dean in the present day—had said. Who were the theirs? The students whose faces had been crossed out in the 1927 yearbook I’d found?

  What had Oscar’s eight done to them?

  “Can this get any more fucked up?” Jenson muttered, in a tone that clearly said he doubted it. He couldn’t state the sentiment outright. Roseborne laid a curse on all its students as a punishment for their past crimes, and Jenson’s was that he couldn’t speak the truth. At best, he could use only questions and commands to get his thoughts across.

  Elias shifted on his bed and pushed himself upright. He swiped his hand over his face, which definitely looked less haggard than before, if still more strained than I’d have preferred. Good. If he was recovering, at least some of his weakening must have been because of the spirits’ attack rather than anything permanent happening to his rose.

  “The rosebush in the basement served some function,” he said. “Do you think the staff—these spirits or whatever they are now—can really carry on like they did before?”

  “I can’t see Roseborne going back to having classes and all that,” I said. “The spirits have dropped their facade now. Maybe they’re just making the most of this last burst of power before it seeps out of them, and we’ll get out of here once they fade away.”

  “Or maybe they’re strong enough to hold onto that power even without the basement rosebush,” Ryo said quietly. “There’s still the bigger one outside.”

  “Yeah.” I hugged myself. “And it’s not just those spirits we have to deal with. I took a look outside—I think the roses on the wall are shriveling faster. That would be why you’re feeling weak all of a sudden.” I tipped my head to Elias. “Also… there was this haze coming off the bush, some of it gathering into the forms of people. Like ghosts. I don’t know how they appeared or what they’re here for, but I don’t see how it can be anything good.”

  “Agreed,” Elias said grimly.

  Ryo got up to walk over to the bedroom window, a small square high on the far wall. It gave a view over the back of campus, dark now with the thickening dusk. He peered out and returned to us, frowning.

  “I can’t see much out there, but there’s no action around back right now. I guess we can hole up in here and see if everything settles down by the morning. If it doesn’t… then it’ll be obvious we have to figure out another approach.”

  Jenson’s mouth slanted at a wry angle. “Does anyone know techniques for banishing ghosts? If they don’t
take off on their own, I’m sure handling eight decades-old spirits plus all these new ones will be a real piece of cake.” He made no effort to disguise his sarcasm.

  I looked at the axe I’d left by Elias’s bed, but I couldn’t chop up a being that was made of light or mist.

  “Not really my area of expertise,” Elias said.

  “We’ll figure out something,” I said, ignoring the sinking sensation in my chest. We had to figure out something… I just had no clue what or how.

  In the momentary silence that settled between us, the door knob rattled. Jenson flinched, springing away from the bed-turned-barricade. He spun around to stare at the bedroom door like the rest of us were. My fingers itched to grip the handle of the axe.

  “We’re using this room,” Elias called out. “Take one of the others.”

  The person on the other side didn’t answer. The knob clicked again, and the door jarred against the bed. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I leapt forward instinctively to grasp the bed frame, to ensure it stayed in place—and a filmy figure slid straight through the solid wood of the door.

  Narrowed eyes regarded me from a sour face with a nub of a chin. Richie. My pulse hitched, my feet freezing in place for one fatal second. The ghostly image of the guy I’d once watched beaten into a coma flung himself across the bed and dug his translucent hands into my chest.

  Chapter Two

  Trix