The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

I stood, toppling the chair back. Fek shivered on the other side of the table. Clickens screeched, claws snapping out and digging into the floor.

“It’s here,” I gasped. “Everyone—!”

Screaming drowned out my voice. Skeletons spewed out from the back door. They loped, running using their arms and legs equally. They radiated raw hate that I felt all the way to the other side of the hall, cold and hard, laced with rot. It felt necessary that the skeletons would be shouting and screaming, but they didn’t. The only sound was the clicking of their bones on the floor. Nearby students were stumbling to get out of the way, but most people farther away didn’t seem to grasp what was happening.

Some were standing and pointing at the skeletons, smiling or brows furrowed. One guy next to us shrugged and kept talking to the girl opposite him.

“Fek!” I shouted. He snapped his gaze to me, eyes wide. “The same runes as in the corridor! Do it! Hard as you can!”

“Right,” he said, starting to draw.

I wasn’t sure if it would work or what it would do to the skeletons, but it was the best I could come up with. He had been drawing the runes over and over for two days, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to try the fire rune instead.

“Come on,” I said to Clickens. It screeched and clambered up my robe. It pawed at the air, like it was trying to swat the moldy air away from itself. The metal wire made a constant high-pitched whine, pulled taut.

The first student got grabbed. Two skeletons tumbled her over, crashing into her back when she was trying to run away. Bony fingers wrapped around her face from behind and she screamed.

“Go,” I hissed, and stumbled back a step as Clickens launched off my shoulder. It flew through the air like an arrow, skull pointed forward.

I drank in the cold and the pressure from the air. Those goddamn idiots. “Let us worry about it,” Jextor had said, but this was even worse than what I had anticipated. Another lesson learned. Color bled out from the world as the Null reached my eyes. The entity hissed at the back of my mind.

Clickens crashed into the student and the two skeletons. The one was still grabbing her face. The other’s fingers were tipped with red and dripping blood. It had punched them through her robe, but I didn’t know how deep it had got. She was still screaming, so it couldn’t be that bad.

The Null made everything sharp. I didn’t fear it, not anymore. Not while I was already swimming in it. The students were bright white. The blood in the air shone with light. Clickens was black against the dark of the skeletons, pulling them apart with a sound of a sawmill, steel cutting into something hard, but softer.

More students went down, pulled by the skeletons. White darts of power slammed into other skeletons, splintering them and making the hall rain bone. Some other people knew how to handle themselves too, it seemed.

“Handle the rest,” I hissed to Clickens as I ran past it. The student was crawling away, robe wet with blood and dusted white with bone.

Clickens tilted back like a spring coiling, then launched off to the side. I didn’t watch where it went. The sound of cracking bone was enough to know it understood.

The door was still spilling out more skeletons and more mold. The air rippled from the weight and the cold. I stepped to block their path.

All the skeletons turned their skulls toward me.

“That’s right,” I whispered with a voice that would cut glass.

The first skeleton jumped at me with its fingers outstretched. I grabbed its skull with the palm of my hand and clenched my fingers into a fist. What was left crashed into my legs. The skeleton’s arms kept swinging around, so I stomped my foot on its spine. The collarbones snapped and the arms slid across the floor to the sides.

“It’s me you want,” I said.

Bony hands grabbed onto me and I broke them. There were so many and I could only reach so few, so I grabbed a nearby table. Sturdy and long, it could have seated ten students. The skeletons clawed at my back, bones shredding my robe. The wood groaned as I swung the table around myself, holding on to its edges. The table plowed through them, crashing through the brittle bones. Continuing to swing the table would have pulled me with it, so I let it go.

It took down maybe a dozen skeletons, bowling them aside and crushing them against the wall. I should shut the door. The skeletons were nothing. The screaming was a constant din. A white dart hit the wall before me, cracking a hole the size of a skull in the wood. I hoped no one would hit me by accident.

I waded through the undead, throwing them aside, letting them break themselves against me. The entity screamed with cold rage. I could almost make out the words, even though I didn’t want to. My hands were almost white. I closed my fingers into a fist before my face and they creaked.

A skeleton was stepping in as I kicked the door shut. The crunch might have been sickening, but a lot of things were crunching at the moment. A pelvis shattered as I trod on it, crushed by my boot.

I turned around to lean my back against the door. I hoped it was a sturdy one. The hall was in chaos. There were still a lot of skeletons loose, even as Clickens was taking them down one at a time. It was playing with them too much, jumping on the bones and scattering them before finding the next skeleton to pull apart.

“Focus,” I shouted at it. Two skeletons stumbled back from me, one going down. I should be careful. Falar had said that I could damage my voice doing that. He kept shouting all the time himself. Where the hell was he?

Fek blazed in the far corner of the hall, white beyond white. Looking at him burned my eyes, but I looked anyway. A handful of students huddled around him. A girl was hanging on his leg. They were surrounded by a circle of bones. One skeleton lunged toward Fek and lost its form, falling as a collection of discarded bones, its strings cut.

I whipped my leg up, snapping a kick at a skeleton that came too close. Took off its skull and half of the bones on the top part of its spine. I really should start to learn about the names. It was hard to focus when the Null made everything sharp and flat at the same time. The students kept shouting and I wished everyone would quiet down. A white dart sputtered and flew erratically through the hall.

I slapped it aside as it was about to hit my face. It blew off two of my fingers. Should find them before they got lost. Marcus had talked about stitching back Fek’s fingers, so maybe he could do it for me too. The door rattled behind my back, but it didn’t feel like the skeletons were about to break through. The mold was a more pressing issue. It licked the door from the other side, getting its rot inside the wood. I felt it, the tendrils pressing through, reaching for me and making the wood wither and turn to a honeycomb of rot.

I reached back. I had made myself cold, I had made Clickens. I could do the same to a door. My veins were made of frozen steel. The Null flowed easy and free. There was no need to be careful.

A skeleton punched me in the stomach and broke its arm. It pulled back the splintered bones, readying to stab them into my face. Let it—

Clickens went through the skeleton like a crossbow bolt through an apple. A loose tooth snapped into my eye, making a clinking sound.

“Good cat,” I whispered, focusing on the door again. The room was filled with darkness and I breathed in, pulling it into myself. I squeezed the mold together and it sat like a rock in my lungs. I clenched my chest and turned the rock into gravel. Something snapped, probably a rib. Shouldn’t do that again.

The pure Null flowed out from my hands, making the muscles ripple. Where the wood had turned soft and porous, I filled it with nothingness colder than ice, harder than steel. A skeleton had dug its fingers through the softened wood, trying to get in from the kitchen.

YOU.

The word blasted through the air. All the skeletons stopped mid-motion, turning slowly toward me and the door. Frederik slammed one on the skull with a chair.

I come for you.

“You can try,” I hissed, straining against its push. The mold pulsed, like tidal waves crashing against the door that felt suddenly paper-thin.

I come for all of you.