Chapter Twenty-Six Dis-Assembly
Iwhirl around again, trying desperately to figure out where the sound is coming from. But, again, there’s nothing but trees. Nothing but shadows.
Until something else darts by my face, so close that the cold of it burns against my temple.
The static buzz gets worse, more discordant, as an ancillary sound tries to break through it. I listen closely, hoping something will help me figure out what’s going on. But then the extra sound disappears just as quickly as it came, and it’s plain static again.
My jog turns into a full-blown sprint through the piney undergrowth, my breath coming in choppy pants and pure adrenaline rushing through my veins. But I’m still not fast enough, because moments later there’s a quick flicker by my left ear.
It disappears as quickly as it comes, trailing that strange sparkly substance I saw in the dungeon. I give the glimmer a wide berth, but another flicker flashes right in front of me.
I have one second to register a large guy in a suit before I’m running through him.
I brace for the icicles, but they don’t come. Instead, that weird feeling happens again, where everything inside of me feels like it’s speeding up and slamming against the inside of my skin.
I jerk my arms close to my body, wrapping them around me as I force myself to keep moving, keep running as another sound breaks through the static.
This time it’s loud enough for me to realize it’s a scream before the static swallows it again.
My stomach is jumping now, and cold sweat mingles with the rain on my skin as I push forward. I’m almost there.
This time it’s a laugh that breaks through, a full-blown cackle that feels like it’s directed straight at me—and mocking my hopes of safely getting out of this hellscape.
When an entity moves past me now, it does more than just slide across my arm or face. It wraps itself around me, spinning me around—once, twice—before undulating away, trailing more of the stardust.
I swallow a scream, but that doesn’t matter because the whole forest suddenly fills with screams breaking through the static all around me, until the sticky air turns into a cacophony of pain and terror that I pull deeper inside my lungs with every inhalation.
The moans turn to laughs—fast and high-pitched and terrifying in a way that has my already upset stomach pitching and rolling inside me.
It’s just the ghosts, Clementine. No big deal. They won’t hurt you, not really.
Another eerie wail, another screeching laugh, break through the discordant buzz that fills the air. Another slither of something—this time against my bare knee.
Cold, followed by more agony. Bigger needles this time, jabbing into me over and over again.
This cut and run is something new and absolutely terrifying.
The pain is worse, yes, but it’s so much more than that.
It’s the constant static creeping inside my head.
The tortured screams that come from nowhere and disappear the same way.
The targeted attacks I can’t run away from no matter how hard I try.
All I can do is push through and try not to falter. But it’s easier said than done.
This time, when the cackles break through the noise, they’re a chorus instead of a single vocalization. They echo around me, filling the air—and my head—as they reach inside me and grab on with razor-sharp claws.
Agony explodes inside me at the first scrape, and that’s it. That’s. It.
Ghosts, flickers, whatever the hell these things are, I’m getting the fuck out of here. Now.
I race through the forest, my feet flying over the uneven terrain as terror turns into a wild beast within me. Only the faster I run, the louder the static—and the shrieks—get. Soon they’re all I can hear as my feet hit the ground over and over again. But then the cold comes back, and so does the strange feeling that I’m ruthlessly being turned inside out. Pain blossoming wherever they touch as the edge of the forest beckons.
I push forward, determined to make it through the sensory assault, determined to make it to—
I scream as pain—bitter and cold—slams into my back like a fist. I have one second of shocked disbelief as the subsequent agony ripples from the back of my head to my heels. And then it’s punching right through me, swallowing every ounce of me for one second, two—turning me into something that doesn’t even feel human anymore—before exploding out the front of me.
I stumble, my breath bellowing in and out like a train whistle. I bend over to brace my hands on my knees as I try to catch my breath and figure out what just happened to me.
But what’s left of my fight-or-flight instinct takes over, and my body propels itself toward the last line of trees in front of me. The moans turn to high-pitched screams all around me, but I don’t stop. I can’t.
I run as hard and as fast as I can, throwing myself out of the trees like a running back throws himself at the goal line, desperate for a win. As I do, one last flicker appears in front of me. I arch backward, determined to avoid it, but it’s too late. I fall straight through a tall, scary woman dressed in black lace. As soon as I touch her, she wraps herself around me, holding me tight as she somehow turns my insides into a vibrating mass of knife-edged molecules.
Desperate, terrified, I wrench myself through—and away from her. Then I use the last burst of strength I’ve got to twist in midair before slamming to the ground and rolling, just as I finally break through the tree line.
The moment I clear the forest, there’s silence. The static stops, as do the screams, the laughs, and the strange vibrations inside of me. The pain vanishes with them, so quickly that everything feels like nothing more than the product of my overactive imagination.
I’m trembling as I push to my feet, stumbling several steps away from the forest while my breath lodges in my throat and my heart continues to beat like a metronome at high speed. I shine my flashlight at the forest, but I can’t see anything move—not even the leaves or branches. The rain has stopped, and even the wind has died down for the moment.
Weird. Very, very, very weird.
I turn the light on myself, searching my chest, my hands, my legs—everywhere I felt pain slice through me—but there’s nothing new there. No blood, no bruises, not even any new tears to my shirt. Nothing that wasn’t already there from before. It’s as if everything that just happened…didn’t.
But it did happen. I know it did. I heard it. I felt it, on my skin and deep inside myself. Something was in that forest, something I’ve never felt or heard or seen before.
I suck air into my lungs and tell myself that it’s over. That whatever just attacked me isn’t going to come after me again. But saying that and believing it are two different things, and I keep glancing over my shoulder at the trees as I suck in huge, noisy gulps of oxygen.
Determined to get myself as far away from here as I can, before whatever that was comes back, I turn left and half run, half stumble along the rocky path that borders the teachers’ quarters. And I don’t stop until I finally make it to the round, six-story-tall former hotel annex that is now the residence hall for underclassmen.
I take a few seconds to get my breath back, then scan my eye and head inside, bracing myself for whatever I’m going to find.
“There you are!” Luis pounces on me the second I walk through the door, his silver eyes flashing. “Where have you been?”
“Later,” I answer out of the corner of my mouth, because he’s not the only one whose attention I’ve attracted. My mother is watching me from her spot at the center of the common room…and she doesn’t look happy.
Then again, neither does anyone else in the building.
The hallway finally ends in the center of the building, where the main floor common room is located. Because the building itself is circular—a common design in hurricane-prone areas in the late 1800s—each of the six floors is built around a central room, with the student dorm rooms forming a full circle around it.
On the upper floors, that central room is divided into study rooms, a small library, a TV room—though the TVs have long ago been stolen out of all of them—and a small snack kitchen. But down here, on the first floor, the room has pretty much been left alone since it functioned as a room for guests who actually paid for the privilege of being here.
The pale-blue paint from its heyday is chipped and peeling.
The lobby chairs and sofas are stained and torn in some places, lopsided in others.
And, like the rest of the school, half of the lightbulbs are burned out. Here, the dead bulbs are ensconced with stained glass lampshades depicting sea creatures. Somehow the remnants of over-the-top resort decorations just make the building look even sadder and more neglected.
A vibe that’s only helped along by the eerie dimness that fills the place, along with the strange darkness from outside leaking in through the hallways that bisect the circle.
In preparation for the meeting, my uncle Christopher has had the furniture moved against the walls and filled the center of the room with enough chairs to fit the whole student body. Most of the chairs are full by now—I’m definitely late to the party—and the whole place is filled with a restless energy that has my nerves on high alert.
Because this kind of energy almost always leads to trouble, even without the threat of a major storm hanging over the island. Something that is proven out by the harried way my aunts and uncles are running between groups of students, trying to catch things at the skirmish level before they develop into full-blown wars. My mom—who has changed into a tracksuit the same bright red as my uniform shorts—stands in the center of the room watching the clock and waiting for it to count down to the exact second she can begin the meeting.
Apparently, keeping the peace while also crowding a couple hundred paranormals with control issues, bad attitudes, and a penchant for violence into a tight space isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not to mention it’s a full moon tonight, which always makes the student body act wilder than usual.
“I got us seats over here,” Luis hisses, handing me a towel to dry off as he leads the way to two chairs that are as far from my mother—and the other students—as we can get.
But before I can take more than a few steps in that direction, my aunt Claudia comes rushing toward me. “Clementine, thank goodness you’re here!” she calls, her normally high-pitched voice made even more so by the stress of the situation.
Her blue eyes are twice their normal size, and her towering red bun quivers a little more with each second that passes. But before I can say anything, Caspian appears out of nowhere, in full-blown super helpful nephew mode. “What can we do, Aunt Claudia?” he asks.
“Oh, you dear sweet boy.” She pats his cheek, then points to Uncle Christopher, who is currently standing in front of a pissed-off mermaid who is shouting at two even more pissed-off fae. And while they’re currently keeping their cool—barely—Uncle Christopher is trapped. Because the second he walks away, someone is getting punched. And once that happens, anything goes. “Why don’t you go see what can be done with that…situation?”
But Caspian’s already gone, racing toward his father to see how he can help. He weaves through the crowd like someone who’s been doing it his whole life…because he has.
On the other side of the room, Uncle Carter is locked in a battle of his own—with what looks like a newly formed pack of wolf shifters, all of whom are circling him like they’re about to go for his jugular.
“Clementine, sweetheart—”
I sigh. “On it, Aunt Claudia.”
“You aren’t really getting in the middle of that, are you?” Luis asks, alarmed, as I head toward my uncle. “Those guys are bad news.”
“What am I supposed to do? Let them eat him?”
“One bite and they’ll spit him out,” he says with a shrug. “Plus, if they nibble on him a little, maybe he’ll figure out that it’s not a lot of fun and think twice about sending you into the menagerie again.” Part of me agrees with Luis, but still, responsibility—and my mother’s eyes—rest heavy on me, so I make my way to Uncle Carter. But by the time I get close to him, he’s got one wolf on the ground and has already set his sights on a second. Wolves may be tough, but my money is on a pissed-off manticore any day. Especially when the wolves can’t shift…
I head back toward Luis, but before I can get there, my grandparents float in.
“Someone’s got to help with this mess. These kids are looking feral.” Grandpa Claude drifts by me. “Look out for the angry vamp at four o’clock. She’s spoiling for a fight.”
A glance over my shoulder tells me he’s talking about Izzy and, well, he’s not wrong.
“I’m more worried about the dragons in the corner,” Grandma says as she hovers beside me. “When I went by there earlier, they looked like they were up to no good.”
“I don’t know why Camilla thought an assembly was a good idea right now.” My grandfather shakes his head.
“I’m going to go check on those leopards,” my grandmother answers. “They look like they’re going to be a problem.”
I jump out of the way as she passes to avoid the painful chill that accompanies any ghost’s touch—even hers. After what just happened in the forest, that’s the last thing I need.
And end up crashing straight into someone’s back.
“Sorry,” I start, automatically looking up. “I wasn’t…”
My voice trails off as I realize that I’m not going to have to find Jude after all. Because he’s just found me.