The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

I pushed my back against the door and willed it to be stronger. The Null oozed, moving like syrup between me and the wood. The voice was like the ocean, and I was at the bottom of it, being crushed. I would hold it back. Someone had to have got out. I would hold it back until help arrived. If help didn’t, I would kill it by myself.

I wake and the world will sleep.

I searched the eyes of the other students to see if they could hear the words. The ones closest to me were holding their heads with both hands, crumpled on their knees or lying on the floor. The skeletons stood watching me with their empty eye sockets. The power around Fek spluttered, like someone was blowing on a soap bubble, making it wiggle and flex inward.

“Hold it!” I shouted at him.

Ages will pass and not a single moment will touch us.

Lorn whimpered, on his knees on a table where he had scrambled to get away from the skeletons. Frederik stood holding a leg from a chair, a bloody welt running across his face. The blood throbbed bright white in the dark and grey of my vision.

“I’ll do better than touch,” I groaned. “I have stuff to do.”

Your existence is useless suffering before nothing. Follow me where others can’t.

The mold was gaining ground, pushing against me from behind the door. I pushed harder. There was a tidal wave of darkness waiting to engulf everyone. How had it got into the kitchen? It didn’t matter. I would keep it there.

I come. Let us embra—

The world imploded, falling in on itself. A crack rang out from the middle of the Lunch Hall, near the ceiling. The sound was so loud students and skeletons flew aside. A few pieces of white shrapnel hung in the air.

“Sorry I’m late,” a voice said in a dry whisper.

The shrapnel started to draw together, pieces snapping into place like a skull-shaped puzzle assembling itself. The pressure flowing out from it pushed me against the floor, washing away the smell of mold. The weight felt like being embraced.

“The Bursar is going to be livid with me,” Coratorus hissed. The skull floated down, shadows and darkness gathering around it to form something like a robe. The bone of the skull flowed, the cracks disappearing. “A lunch is a moment of rest and recovery. It is not for you to disrupt.”

The voice roared wordlessly in the background, loud enough that it felt like the walls had to be shaking. The students stood frozen in place, mouths hanging open.

The skull hovered closer to me, the darkness draping behind it like a veil. The skeletons it touched started twitching and jerking, strings of the puppets cut and reattached.

“Principal,” I croaked, lifting my hand weakly at them.

“It was too soon,” Coratorus said, eye sockets looking somewhere past and over me. Their voice cut through everything else, even while they whispered so quietly I think only I could hear them. “I’ll take the blame. Your cat is a fine creation.”

“Clickens?” I asked. “Is that really relevant? Now?”

“I thought it a good opportunity to mention it,” Coratorus said, floating over me. An invisible hand picked me up. Their voice went even quieter. “You kept everyone safe. Rest. I’ll take it from here.”

“Couldn’t you handle the rest of it while you’re at it?” I said, leaning on the doorframe. The wood was rotted through and pressed flat under my weight. I shivered as the dark veil flowed over me, feeling like nothing. “It’s up on the mountains. Go get it.”

The voice continued booming, a senseless bellowing that might or might not have contained words.

“No,” Coratorus hissed. “I’ll remedy this oversight by my faculty. Too many were too unprepared. Next time, they can’t be.”

“Oh, there won’t be a next time,” I said, between clenched teeth. The Null left no room for fear, but I was getting angry and the anger was burning away the Null. It wouldn’t have time to come for me. That… goddamn, piss-sucking… I stopped trying to put into words what I felt about the voice. There were no curses virulent enough, not even the ones I had heard back in Tenorsbridge. I breathed in and opened my mouth to roar, but an invisible finger pressed gently on my lips.

“You’ll hurt your throat,” Coratorus said.

I groaned and the groan made their veil ripple.

“The rest will be here soon. I’ll clean the kitchen.” The skull turned away from me and an invisible hand turned me around, pushing me back into the Lunch Hall.

Treache—

The voice cut out as the doorway turned featureless black. Coratorus must have put it up there. The darkness felt like nothing, a void that none of my senses could touch.

The silence after the last word was deafening. It had been shouting the whole time, filling my mind like a thunderstorm booming without pause, every moment another thunderclap. I reeled, pressing a hand on my brow. I flinched at the two missing fingers on the hand. Where were they? The stubs were dark purple, blood frozen. I tested moving them around, wiggling them before my face. Where the hell were my fingers?!

The door on the other side of the hall crashed open. Falar flew in, gaze flicking this way and that. Marcus and Ferne were behind him, Ferne almost as pale as Falar and Marcus holding a staff that trembled with barely contained magic. It wasn’t as bad as the janitor’s broom, but close.

More people rushed in behind them, even the old crone. Grit’s white face shone from the mass of black robes.

“Students! Keep away from the—” Falar shouted, but his voice started to waver. He hovered near the ceiling, frowning down at the students gaping at him.

“It’s already over,” I said, waving at him. “You really whiffed it this time.”

He floated down, toes touching the floor lightly. The floorboards creaked under his weight, bending like he weighed more than a horse. The wood groaned as he walked toward me. “I see,” he said.

“The floating skull handled it. The entity took the kitchen skeletons,” I said, pointing a thumb over my shoulder at the black wall cutting off whatever was behind it. I frowned at the missing fingers.

Behind Falar, the rest of the faculty were going through the hall. Shalameth was telling a bunch of students huddling in a tight clump on one of the tables to get their filthy feet off the table. Marcus and Ferne were tending to the injured. Jextor was shaking Fek’s hand vigorously. To survive an attack by an undead horde only to get injured a moment later, poor guy.

“The kitchen,” Falar said slowly. “It seems we didn’t consider where all the locations physically exist behind the facade doors.” He glared at the black wall with narrowed eyes for a moment. “It sure would be useful if any reliable information existed on where the spaces are!” he roared at the wall.

I grimaced. “The principal said this was an oversight by the faculty.”

“They are on the faculty,” Falar muttered. “This is irrelevant. The damage must be contained. Show yourself to Marcus.” He sniffed, looking over the thick layer of broken bone spread around me. His lips pressed together into a thin line, black eyes bleeding tar on his cheeks. “Good work,” he said, and whipped around.

“Heh,” I said as he walked away. Even through the Null, I felt that. I couldn’t feel anything else. I wiggled the missing fingers around. Damn it, I drew all the runes with my index finger. I’d need it back. “Clickens!”

The cat screamed across the hall, a flying ball of bone and metal wire. A student jumped back on the table to avoid getting hit in the shins. Clickens stopped next to me and butted its skull against my ankle. It made a hard sound like hitting two pieces of wood against each other.

“Find my fingers, will you?” I asked.

“Yeah, one of the white darts.”

He grimaced. “Oof. Normally that would have left you without the whole hand. Reattaching the fingers will be simple. Just hold on for a while longer. Don’t let the Null out, or it will make it difficult to treat the other injured people here.”

“You think I would?” I asked, waving the missing fingers in his face. I was honestly worried about what would happen once I needed to let go. I had balanced the Null pretty well this time, I hoped, but I hadn’t drunk this deep since the time I went after Falar and paid for it. I frowned, thinking of something. “And remember to put the fingers back in the right order,” I said. “I don’t want to find out if it actually matters.”

“They are your fingers, you remember it!” Marcus said, groaning. “Now off you go. Other people need my attention as well. Next!”

I stood and walked away from the makeshift infirmary. They had pushed a dozen tables together and made injured students lie on them. People were mostly chatting happily with each other. I think I saw Lian from the Credit Office on one of the tables. She and someone else had turned toward each other on the table and I suspected they were kissing.

The people who hadn’t got injured were looking paler than the ones who had. Maybe it was easier to think about what had almost happened when ambrosia wasn’t making them giddy and washing away the pain and the wounds.

“Lina!” Grit shouted at me. She, Fek and Minnelil were sitting at the small round table near the corner of the room that was usually reserved for the faculty.

“Hey,” I said, walking over.

“You look awful,” Fek said. “But that’s what you always look like when you go dead.”

I shrugged. “I guess. This enough excitement for you, finally?”

“Yeah!” he said. “Jextor sprained my thumb, but Marcus fixed it already!”

Minnelil rose and frowned at me. She stepped closer, but flinched away, probably from the black fog that kept pouring out of my mouth and nose. “Are you… how are you?”

I sat down on the last chair at the table. “I’ll be rattled once I let myself think about it.”

“I’ll hug you once you do,” she said. “Sorry.”

“No, no. I get it,” I said. I pulled in the Null, tried to keep it from spilling out so much. It felt impolite to spew smoke at the table. I had my hand in my pocket, holding on to the fingers. Maybe showing them would be impolite as well. “Did Fek already tell you what happened?”

“A bit, yeah,” Grit said. “He said the Principal teleported in! That shouldn’t be possible!”

“What?” Minnelil asked, eyes going wide. “I didn’t hear about this. For real?”

“That’s the part that you’re interested in?” I asked. “The thing just came for us, made its way through the wards!”

“Well, yes, but it’s all under control now?” Grit said, waving a hand around the hall. “The teachers handled it and no one died. I bet everyone is going to get credits for surviving an undead attack.”

I clenched my jaw. These people had no idea how the world worked. The teachers hadn’t handled it, and they wouldn’t. Not this time and not the next. I opened my fist before I crushed the fingers in my grip. I would need to be ready.

I would be.