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

The dorm bedroom around me and the ghostly figure in front of me fell away. I seemed to fall—plummeting a long, long way into blurred depths with nothing to grasp hold of, my stomach dropping even faster. Then I jarred to a stop. My feet smacked against rain-glossed concrete in a narrow alley beside an apartment building.

  Damp air and the hazy glow of distant streetlamps seeped through darkness that closed around me. A faintly rancid scent reached my nose from a dumpster farther down the alley. My heart skipped a beat. I hadn’t been standing exactly here when I’d been in this place in reality—this wasn’t the angle of my memories—but I knew exactly where I was.

  It wasn’t hard to guess why that spectral impression of Richie would have brought me here.

  The second that thought passed through my head, footsteps pounded across the concrete toward me. I pressed myself flat against the brick wall, the rough texture prickling against my skin through my shirt. It all felt so real. But it couldn’t be, because everything playing out around me had already happened a year ago.

  Richie dashed into view, his dark hair flopping lank across his eyes, which were wide with panic. Cade barreled after him, just a couple of steps behind. My foster brother caught Richie by the wrist and hauled back so hard that Richie’s feet tangled under him. The other guy would have fallen if Cade hadn’t wrenched him back into balance. Richie let out a hiss of pain.

  “I don’t know what you’re going on about, you maniac,” he snapped, flailing to try to free himself from Cade’s grasp at the same time. “I didn’t even talk to Sylvie the other night. Why the hell would I bother? Just because I thought she was a bitch doesn’t mean—”

  Cade slammed his fist into Richie’s face, cutting off the rest of that sentence. I flinched at the crunch of the smaller guy’s nose breaking. My brother’s narrow face was hard with anger, his light gray eyes flashing, the wiry muscle that filled out his frame coiled for another blow.

  “I know you sent her that message,” he said, his voice as harsh as his expression. “Who the hell else would have? Who the hell else would have been talking shit about her less than a week after she died?”

  He swung again, clocking Richie in the jaw. Richie tried to shove him back with one hand while pawing at his bleeding nose with the other. My breath stayed locked in my throat, my chest aching for air.

  This was when, in the real past, I’d come running after Cade and witnessed the rest of the fight. He’d been driving us home and parked with a screech at seeing Richie heading along the sidewalk. I hadn’t known—I hadn’t really thought he’d go anywhere near this far—

  But I knew now. This fight, if you could call it that when Richie barely landed a single blow on Cade in return, ended with the guy battered and unconscious in this alley and then in a coma for weeks afterward.

  I couldn’t watch it play out all over again. Last time I’d stayed cringing in the shadows, knowing the only thing I could say that might end the beating was the last thing I wanted to admit. I’d been willing to let this guy take the fall for my crime. Even if Richie had been a jerk to me too over the years, even if he’d said crap about Sylvie, he didn’t deserve this.

  In the past several days, I’d found the courage to confess to the real Cade; I’d confessed to Ryo, Jenson, and Elias. I was stronger now.

  I pushed myself away from the wall toward Cade and grabbed his shoulder. “Stop! Richie didn’t hurt Sylvie. He didn’t set anything up. It wasn’t him.”

  My foster brother shoved the other guy to the ground and spun, his chest heaving. “What the fuck are you talking about, Trix?”

  His hands were still fisted, the knuckles splotchy, white marked by smears of blood. His eyes practically blazed with a silvery fire. My back stiffened automatically.

  Cade had never hurt me, not really. Not the way he’d laid into Richie. But in that moment as my pulse stuttered in my chest, I couldn’t deny that there was another reason I’d hesitated to intervene.

  I’d been afraid of him—not just of his disgust but of his rage, that he might turn on me this time. It wasn’t normal, was it, to be terrified that one of those fists might swing at my face if I said the wrong thing? It wasn’t normal that Cade had chased after a guy and beaten him into a pulp while he barely defended himself. Cade hadn’t even had solid proof that Richie had anything to do with Sylvie’s death.

  Maybe Roseborne’s spirits turning him into a literal beast as his punishment had been a little fitting after all.

  Feeling the heat of his body and the flexing of his shoulder muscles beneath my fingers, the dank alley smells filling my nose and Richie’s groan vivid in my ears, I had trouble remembering that none of this was real. Or at least, it wasn’t happening now. He couldn’t really hurt me in this memory brought to life… could he?

  Pain twined through my chest with that question. How had we gotten to the point where I was this scared of the guy I’d counted on for so much, even in a conjured impression of the past? Whatever else Cade had done, he’d protected me plenty too. I’d built my whole life around the future we’d meant to forge together as friends, roommates, and as close to siblings as two people who didn’t share blood could be. He’d made mistakes, and he’d pushed me in ways he shouldn’t have, but he was still the brother who’d taken me under his wing when I had no one.

  Without the vehemence he brought to both his anger and his affection, would he even have been able to keep us together all this time, stepped in to shield me when I’d needed it, and convinced our last set of foster parents to let us stay on after we’d aged out of the system? I’d loved the boldness in him even if it’d made me nervous sometimes. He just felt so much and so strongly that sometimes he overwhelmed the people around him, probably without even realizing it.

  Holding on to that faith, I barreled onward with my confession. “I know Richie didn’t do it because it was me. I sent Sylvie that text. I wanted to freak her out—it was just supposed to be a prank—it was stupid. I never meant for her to get hurt the way she did. If I could take it back, I would. But if you’re going to be angry at anyone, it should be me. You can’t take it out on him.”

  Richie was staggering to his feet. He shot me a disbelieving but maybe slightly grateful glance and half loped, half limped back toward the street. Cade just stared at me.

  “No.” He shook his head, slowly and then more sharply. “Why are you trying to defend him? He deserves all the hell I can rain down on him. I know you’re tougher than this, Trix. Don’t let me down by getting all soft.”

  He moved to charge after Richie, and I clutched his shoulder, grasping his arm with my other hand at the same time.

  “I swear to you, I’m telling the truth. I wouldn’t throw myself under the bus for Richie just for the hell of it. I mean it.” Maybe I had to tell a little more truth before it would sink in. “I was jealous of her because you were spending so much time with her, because it seemed like she mattered more to you than I did. That doesn’t make what I did okay—it’s still awful—but that’s why I wanted to freak her out.”

  Cade swung back around, his expression even wilder than before. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing at the betrayal etched on his face. “Don’t do this, Trix. Don’t tell me this shit. I don’t want you to mean it.”

  Some part of me wanted to erase the revulsion I’d provoked, to pretend I’d made it all up. Richie had gotten a good head start by now. I’d saved him. Why should I have to face any more of this imaginary Cade’s reaction when the real one had already told me he understood?

  Because it didn’t matter what anyone else said. I knew I’d fucked up. Until I owned that fact all the way through, how could I really say I was sorry for it?

  The words came out quiet and strained but clear. “I wish I didn’t mean it either. It is true, though. You can’t blame anyone but me. So… do whatever you need to do.”

  I let go of him and stepped back, my arms falling to my sides. My spine went rigid in anticipation of his possible retaliation. Cade turned all th
e way to face me, his jaw working. I could have run—my muscles twitched with the urge to—but I held my ground.

  I blinked, and that ground dissolved beneath my feet, the darkness and the brick walls wisping away too. The world spun around me in a blur so dizzying my guts flipped over. Then I was stumbling forward onto the bed that was pushed in front of the dorm bedroom door, banging my shins against the frame. My fingers curled into the thin blanket.

  “Trix!” Ryo was at my side in an instant. His arm slid around me as my own arms wobbled in their attempt to hold me up. “Are you okay? What did that thing do to you?”

  My voice came out hoarse. “I ended up in—sort of a vision. A memory. A time when I screwed him over—the guy who came for me.” I wet my lips, gradually regaining control over my trembling body. “I did better by him this time. I guess that’s why I was able to come out.”

  The ghost-like figure of Richie that had sunk its hands into my chest had vanished. For good or just for the moment? It’d come straight through the door. That meant we weren’t safe here. I wasn’t sure we’d be any safer anywhere else on campus, but the makeshift barricade I was bracing myself against felt abruptly flimsy.

  “I can’t get it off him,” Elias muttered somewhere behind me. The tension in his voice made my nerves jump. I pushed myself upright and swiveled around.

  While I’d been gripped by Richie’s “ghost,” another filmy figure had come calling. Jenson lay sprawled on the floor between the beds, the translucent form of a teenaged girl leaning over him. Her hands had plunged into his chest the way Richie had done to me. Jenson’s eyes were closed, his eyelids twitching, his mouth pressed into a tight line.

  Elias had pushed himself to the edge of his bed and was swiping at the ghostly figure. His hands passed right through her without making her so much as quiver. Ryo gave me a quick sideways hug and went to join him, but his attempt to catch hold of her was just as futile.

  “How long has she had him?” I asked, stepping toward them with a stutter of my pulse. “How long was I out of it?”

  “You were stuck there fifteen minutes, maybe twenty?” Ryo made a grimace as another grab at the girl failed. “We were all trying to get it off of you, and this one came seeping in and went straight for Jenson.”

  “He looked like he recognized her,” Elias said grimly.

  Considering my experience, that wasn’t surprising. I was going to guess that all the apparitions wandering the school were people from our pasts—people we’d rather not have to face. What was this girl making Jenson live through?

  There might be more coming for Elias and Ryo—the image of Sylvie I’d seen by the gate might be coming up here for me. It was too much of a coincidence to think these two had just happened to end up encountering us while none that weren’t associated with us had ventured this far. They knew how to track us down.

  “They’re drawn to us somehow,” I said. “Staying here isn’t going to protect us.” Maybe if we simply kept on the move—but we couldn’t move Jenson anywhere while he was trapped by this thing, and no way in hell was I abandoning any of my guys.

  I sucked in a breath, a tickle of the eerie energy that had flowed through me when I’d broken the basement wall rising up again. The ghostly figures were part of Roseborne’s power, and so was I, thanks to my connection to Winston Baker. I hadn’t been able to break out of Richie’s hold without playing the game the vision had seemed to demand, but maybe I’d be able to challenge the others.

  “Let me see what I can do,” I said, waving Ryo to the side.

  He moved and watched me with obvious concern. I willed the sense of power inside me into my hands. When I pushed them into the filmy impression of a girl, a chill tingled over my skin.

  She didn’t react any more than she had for the guys—but a sudden spiraling sensation washed over me, as if I were standing on the verge of a steep cliff, the wind buffeting me nearly to the point of toppling over the edge.

  Jenson was down there. Down in the abyss of whatever memory this girl had stirred up. And I was struck by the certainty that I could follow him if I chose to.

  I glanced at the other two. “I’m going to try to help him get out,” I said, and shoved my hands deeper, throwing myself into the dizzying momentum, wherever it would lead.

  Chapter Three

  Jenson

  Three years after graduating, I hadn’t expected to ever find myself back at my old high school. Somehow, after the second spectral being to pass through the bedroom door had flung itself at me, here I was, standing in stark early spring sunlight by the equipment shed at the edge of the field, a lit cigarette poised between my fingers. The sharp nicotine scent prickled into my nose. On the opposite side of the squat concrete building, shouts rang out from an impromptu lunchtime football match.

  This was where I’d always slipped off to when I’d taken a smoke break. The butts littering the patchy grass showed I was far from the only one. I didn’t even like cigarettes all that much—I generally inhaled as little of the smoke as possible—but they added to the rebellious mystique I’d cultivated with my social circle here, and they made a convenient excuse to remove myself when I wanted a breather from the joking and jockeying for attention.

  I wasn’t alone now, though. Even if this day was pretty similar to plenty of other days when I’d stood here, the glimpse I’d gotten of the spirit-thing’s face had told me what to prepare myself for. I’d barely registered my surroundings when Penny Bryant marched around the shed and came to a halt a few feet away.

  It was weird, seeing her from the perspective of years later. When this moment had happened in reality, she’d been sixteen and I’d been seventeen, and pursuing her had felt totally normal. Looking at her now that I was twenty-one, I winced inwardly at the thought of seducing a girl who was basically a kid. Not that I was planning on coming on to her all over again.

  She would have let me—seventeen year old me as I must have appeared on the outside in this dream or whatever the hell it was, anyway. I could see it even more clearly than I had back then, when I’d mostly been irritated by her interruption. Her dark blue eyes locked with mine in an accusing stare, framed by the smooth chestnut waves she always left in an artfully mussed state, but her body leaned just a little toward me. Her lips parted with a subtle flick of her tongue over them.

  I’d hooked her right through to the gut, and she’d have taken sweet-talk over any kind of apology in an instant if I’d offered it.

  “So, this is how it’s going to be now?” she said in the arch voice she put on to pretend nothing really affected her. “You’re going to act like you hardly even know me?”

  In the actual past, I’d shrugged and said some bullshit about how she shouldn’t have expected anything more, that we’d never been chummy when everyone was hanging out together, that it wasn’t like we’d ever made anything official. As if I hadn’t kept my flirtation on the down low specifically so that no one would realize I’d played her, and so she’d feel too awkward to confront me about it with anyone else looking on.

  Taking up the quest of winning her over had been a risk as it was. I didn’t normally dirty the waters within my main social circle. They were my proof that I was liked and a generally good guy, the basis of a reputation I could rely on if I wanted something from anyone else at school or on the fringes of our lives. But Penny…

  She’d kept her distance from the moment she’d first started hanging out with our group. She’d rolled her eyes at my self-deprecating jokes and brushed me off if I tried to shoot the breeze with her. And the part of me that was bored and restless being at school couldn’t resist a challenge that great.

  It hadn’t been all that hard, really. Most people were drawn to anything that let them feel special. I’d never made a move on any of the other girls in the group, but I started finding moments where I could offer a comment here or there apart from the others, where I could catch her eye and create an inside joke between just the two of us. Slowly but surely
spooling out my fishing line, adding a compliment here, an apparently longing glance there, a subtle touch, all building up the idea that I was falling for her and couldn’t stop myself. That she was the exception, the one girl I’d let my guard down for and show my softer side to.

  Of course, I’d never really let down any guard. It’d all been another layer of the practiced persona I’d cultivated over the years. The whole time, I’d had the end goal in sight: the thrill of getting her under my thrall, of convincing her to make herself totally vulnerable to me.

  Three days before this confrontation, she’d let me into her house, her bedroom, and her bed; I’d gotten her off and enjoyed myself plenty too, and then any interest I’d had in continuing the charade had shriveled up like the aging roses along Roseborne’s wall. Since then, I hadn’t talked to her one-on-one, hadn’t answered her calls or even met her eyes other than in passing.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” I asked her now, wondering if her answer would even mean anything. The beings that ran Roseborne College hadn’t brought the real Penny here. Her response would just be whatever crap they or my own mind made up.

  “You told me you wanted to be with me. That you couldn’t stop thinking about me.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “You said you’d wait as long as it’d take. So how can you just…” She trailed off as if she didn’t know how to finish that question—or couldn’t bear to.

  Fresh irritation jabbed through my chest at her tone, both demanding and pleading. “I got to be with you. Funnily enough, that was all it took to stop thinking about you. I said I’d wait as long as it took, nothing about what I’d want after that.”

  Her flinch doused my annoyance with a splash of guilt. It wasn’t real, I reminded myself. And—what I’d just said was true, wasn’t it?

  Here in this weird blend of memory and dream, I’d been able to say something directly honest for the first time since I’d entered Roseborne. Both irritation and guilt fell away under a wave of exhilaration.