Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (5 page)

Chapter
Eight

The next morning as I was leaving
the house, I saw Adrian again.
 
I had
just finished locking my gate and mentally prepping myself for a muddy walk to
school, when I turned around and discovered that Adrian had materialized behind
me.

"Crap!" I blurted in
surprise, almost dropping my bag on the sidewalk.
 
“Do you enjoy showing up at inconvenient
times?" I grumbled, in a bad mood thanks to lack of sleep.

"Good morning to you too,
Amber," Adrian responded, ignoring everything I had just said.

"Look, I've got to get to
school.
 
Which you should also be
doing."

"Ah, too bad the rules don't
apply to me now, do they?" Adrian smirked.
 
Yeah, too bad
...

"Why are you even out here,
then?"

"Garbage needed taking
out."
 
He pointed to a trash can on
the sidewalk.
 
"I guess I just have
impeccable timing.
 
But you look tired.
 
Storm kept you up?"

"Is it that obvious?" I
touched my eyes with my hands as if I could pinch the exhaustion away.
 
"I think someone in your house was also
up too, so it's not like I was the only one."

Adrian looked at me confusedly.

I sighed.
 
"I can see your house through my bedroom
window."
 
I said it slowly like it
was super obvious.
 
Hopefully that would
emphasize that I wasn't a stalker.

"Huh, must have just been me
then," Adrian said without blinking.

"But whoever I saw looked a
lot like a woman.” I checked my watch impatiently.

“Definitely not me.
 
Probably my sister.
 
She could pass for a female creature of
sorts.” Adrian shrugged.
 
Ah, sibling
love.

"Probably,” I affirmed.
 
I was relieved that he hadn’t said, “No women
live at my house,” which would have meant that I was crazy or he was
lying.
 
“How old is your sister?”

“Sixteen, I think.
 
Yeah, she’s a year younger than me, and seventeen
minus one equals sixteen.
 
See?
 
No school, yet I still have impeccable
mathematical ability.”

He flashed a heart-stopping,
crooked smile that caught me by surprise.

No, now was not the time to be
distracted.

“Truly remarkable.” I forced myself
to roll my eyes at his sarcasm.
 
Better
to look unimpressed than disconcerted by his mere presence.
 
“I would stay, but if I don’t get to class,
I’m afraid my mathematical skill will never match yours.”

“Well, by all means, go.” Adrian
ushered me ahead with mock urgency.

“Thank you, I’ve been trying to do
that.” I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation before briskly taking
off.
 
Even though I didn’t look back, I
could feel him watching me as I walked away.

***

I listlessly tapped my red pen
against my desk to the beat of “Howl” by Florence + The Machine as I listened
to the dull scratches of Alexis’ pencil against paper.
 
She had forgotten to do her homework last
night, and she was scrambling to complete it before Ms. Garner noticed.
 
She was a brave soul.

“Amber!” Ms. Garner growled from
her desk.
 
A music-like murmur arose from
the back of the class.
 
I strongly
suspected it had originated from Cecelia.

“Yes?” I responded with as much
civility as possible.

“Are you too lazy to correct your
homework, or do you simply believe yourself to be above the menial task of
recognizing your mistakes?” Ms. Garner articulated coldly, her eyes focused on
my idle red pen.

“I’ve already corrected my paper,
Ms. Garner,” I said, waving it in the air like a flag as proof.

“Then why do I see no red on
it?
 
Don’t you dare try to lie to me,
Miss Tesse,” Ms. Garner accused.
 
She was
making quite a spectacle, and seemed to be thriving on my embarrassment.
 
She looked determined to make up for the lack
of red on my paper by creating blush in my cheeks.

I balled my hands at my sides.
 
“You would see red had I actually gotten
anything wrong, Ms. Garner.”

“Mind if I verify that?” Ms. Garner
smiled, clearly confident that I was utterly incapable of doing my homework
properly.
 
As much as I wanted to ensure
her that she would only be embarrassing herself, I kept my mouth closed.

She checked my homework once,
twice, then three times against her copy, her face growing darker each
time.
 
I couldn’t help smirking.

“Must you really feel the need to
flaunt your luck so indecently with that incessant tapping?” she snapped.

“No, no ma’am.”
 
But it was clear that, between the two of us,
I wasn’t the one who needed to work on recognizing personal mistakes.

“If I find you disrupting my class
again, you
will
find yourself in
detention,” Ms. Garner assured me as she readied her book to begin the lesson.

I hadn’t even done anything.
 
I gaped at Spencer in disbelief to gauge his
response and he shrugged back.
 
Meanwhile, Cecelia managed to slip me a nasty look, which I pretended
not to see.
 
What was
her
problem?

“Wow, Ms. Garner really doesn’t
like you,” Alexis whispered to me while Ms. Garner wrote something on the
board.

“Yeah, neither does that Cecelia
girl either.”

“
Still?
 
What did you do to
her?!” Alexis’ eyes lit up.
 
I had
quickly learned that the scent of fresh gossip to Alexis was the equivalent to
the scent of blood to sharks.

“Nothing!
 
I never
do
anything!” I breathed irritably.
 
Maybe I
just had a talent for repulsing people.

Unfortunately, my outburst hadn’t
been very quiet, because Ms. Garner turned around and wordlessly narrowed her
eyes at me.

I was really, really going to hate
this class.

Thanks to Ms. Garner’s sudden
display of concern for the way I used my red pen, she forgot to check that
everyone had completed the homework.
 
So,
at the very least, I could pride myself in the fact that I had saved Alexis
from potential humiliation.

In gym, misfortune struck again
when the coach announced that we would all be playing a “fun and friendly” game
of dodge ball.
 
In what world was
intentionally trying to hit other people with rubber balls fun and
friendly?
 
Those two adjectives
contradicted the very nature of dodge ball itself.

Somehow I ended up in the first
game with Cecelia on the opposing team.
 
Even in her gym uniform, she looked ready for a party, from her
perfectly pedicured toenails to her immaculately straight blond hair.
 
She seemed relatively short surrounded by her
similar-looking friends who, like her, were wearing so much makeup that their
eyelashes looked like blackened brooms.

At that moment, Cecelia was leading
a discussion concerning potential interpretations of the text, “Hi," which
had, from what I could discern, been sent to her by a boy she had just met in
class.
 
Her two friends clung to her
every word and ensured that the boy was definitely in love with her.
 
As they tried to dissect the meaning of
“hi," I suppressed the urge to rain reality on their deluded train of
thought.

Five minutes later, the game still
hadn’t started, thanks to the coach’s inability to locate the dodge balls in
the storage room. Cecelia was still consulting her friends for advice on the
follow-up text.
 
I sighed as she
confidently (and likely inappropriately) decided to reply with “Hey baby."

Cecelia then proceeded to complain
about how she was so fat, and how she would probably be better off without her
lunch.
 
Her two friends fawned over her,
emphasizing that she was the perfect weight and much too pretty to go without a
day of food.
 
I then began to realize
that these three people must have been the shallowest people on the entire
campus.
 
I hadn’t known that girls could
so adamantly declare their flaws in a desperate attempt to fish for
compliments.
 
Hell, I had never done it;
I thought it only happened in
Mean Girls
.

Finally, after a grand total of
seven minutes, the game started.
 
I
wasn’t a very good shot, and most of my balls sailed out into open air without
a specific target.

Two minutes into the game, I
noticed that most of the balls flying at me were coming from Cecelia’s
direction.
 
She was aiming every ball she
caught at my head.
 
Was she intentionally
trying to maim me?

I didn’t have a death wish, so I
let one of her balls graze my arm, allowing me to go directly to the “out”
zone.
 
I liked my head, and I had no
intention of letting Cecelia use it for target practice.

***

Although my dignity remained
intact, the dodge ball match left me sore and livid.
  
That night, just as I was about to go to
bed, I called Matt to thoroughly inform him of the long list of grievances I
held against Cecelia.
 
But he didn’t pick
up. I frowned and threw my phone onto my bed stand.
 
It was unlike him not to answer a call.

I knew that I would never be able
to fall asleep when I was upset, so I took some ZzzQuil before turning off all
my lights and tunneling under my sheets to create a warm, safe little nest for
myself.

Minutes melted into one another,
and I still didn't feel the slightest bit drowsy.

Although I was buried under a
mountain of down comforters, my body suddenly grew cold and tense.
 
Maybe that meant that the ZzzQuil was
working.
 
I pulled the blankets tighter
around my body and tried to lull myself to sleep with the abrupt drop in
temperature.

The temperature fell even further,
and my arms and legs shivered uncontrollably, as if physically trying to shake
off the numb, icy sensation.

Something was wrong.

Panic fluttered in my chest, and I
took deep breaths, hoping that perhaps the feeling was one of those
unexplainable, fleeting experiences that occasionally accompanied
nightfall.
 
All I could do was wait for
it to pass.

A light tapping emanated from
somewhere within my room.
 
My heartbeat
picked up, and I began to quake no longer from the cold, but in terror.
 
The tapping slowly became scratching, growing
louder and louder until I could distinguish the distinctive sound of
fingernails dragging along the walls.
 
I
shut my eyes and tried to block out the noise.
 
My body was frozen with fear.
 
I
didn't know what was happening.

Individual nails scored the ceiling,
the floor, the doors menacingly, mercilessly.
 
I desperately wanted it to stop, but I didn't have the strength to
emerge from my shelter of blankets to confront the tormenting external
nightmare.

Then, in one moment, the night
became silent.
 
Only I and darkness
remained.

The cold sensation
disappeared.
 
I could move again.
 
I breathed a sigh of relief.

What had happened?

Somehow I managed to summon enough
courage to close my eyes and elevate my head into the cool, unprotected
airspace above my bed.
 
I took a deep,
calming breath and opened my eyes.

At the foot of my bed hovered a
grisly skeleton of a face with sickly translucent skin.
 
Its eyes were dark, bottomless sockets and
its mouth had been fixed into a silent scream.
 
For the rest of my existence, the horror of that face would be
permanently seared into my memory.
 
I
could remember feeling my heart stop, not just in terror of the creature in
front of me, but in terror of the unknown.
 
Because I could not comprehend what I was looking at, and I could not
predict its intentions.

Before I could react, its body
tensed and rolled in uneven, unnatural movements as if to spring.

I didn’t even get the chance to
scream.

***

I must have lost consciousness,
because the next thing I could remember was waking up in my bed the next
morning, disoriented and quivering.
 
When
I could finally bring myself to remember the horrors of the previous night, I
screamed shamelessly like a madwoman.
 
Hell, I probably had gone mad.
 
In
that case I was entitled to my hysteria.

Heather sprinted into my room
first, and, upon seeing my expression, the color drained from her face.

“What’s wrong?!” she demanded as
she ran to my side.

"I don't know," I
whispered.
 
"I saw someone -- no
something -- in my room last night.
 
I
don't know, I don't know."
 
I
started to cry.
 
I rarely cried about
anything other than my parents.
 
What was
happening to me?