Paranormal Public (Paranormal Public Series) (24 page)

“Nice one,” said Sip.

“Sorry,” said Lough, poring over page after page of some writing I couldn’t read.

“What are you looking for?”

“The Power of Five,” he said.

“The one where a member of each paranormal type has to use their power to make it strong?” I asked. I’d been hearing about it all year, and about how the powers had weakened after the last elemental was killed, which reminded me….

“How did the last elemental die?” I asked. “Does it say that in there?”

“No,” said Lough. “Only very important people know that. And none of us qualifies as a very important person.”

“The demons must have targeted whoever it was, though,” I mused. “Why? Why not pixies? Or vampires?”

“That’s easy,” Sip answered. “There were never very many elementals. And since they did all sorts of crazy things with their magic, they tended to die at a higher rate.”

“Charming,” said Lough.

“Anyway,” said Sip, glaring at the interruption, “the best way for demons to break the paranormals’ power is to break The Power of Five. Killing the elementals did that easily.”

I didn’t like that at all.

“Look at this!” cried Lough. He was pointing to a paragraph. I leaned over the yellowed page and squinted at the ornate writing.

“The lighting in here isn’t very good,” Sip commented.

Lough snorted. “You could put that stuff under flood lights and still not be able to read it.”

“True,” said Sip. “Nothing gets past you!”

Lough grinned.

“Read it,” I urged, still staring at the page.

Lough read: “The Power of Five: Requires a vampire, a pixie, a werewolf, an elemental, and an Airlee mage to combine the ultimate powers. This magic has only been invoked a handful of times, each time when paranormals were fighting demons and hellhounds. The latter are particularly difficult to fight against, because as animals they are affected differently by the magic of the Power of Five. However, the werewolf powers combined with the other four defuse even hellhound magic. Each time the Power of Five was invoked, the demons were successfully driven back. The demons have tried, unsuccessfully, to break of the Power of Five.”

“Unsuccessfully, until now,” added Lough.

“What do you mean?” Sip asked. She’d sat back in her chair to listen, but now she was leaning forward eagerly. The dim light cast shadows over her pale features.

“Well, the elementals are gone, because of demons. The Power of Four isn’t anywhere near as strong as the Power of Five.”

“How does any of this apply to Lisabelle?”

“The demons are trying to break onto campus to find whatever they are looking for. Probably to further help them destroy the paranormals’ combined power. Lisabelle is in trouble because they think she’s the one who let the demons onto the grounds,” said Lough.

My stomach twisted.

“They don’t think it’s Zervos?” I asked. I felt sure that it was. I felt it in my bones. It had to be Zervos. He was the one letting a demon onto the campus. He was evil. There were too many coincidences. There was the night he found us outside the President’s office, and the way he had been so conveniently around when I was attacked. It only made sense that he was a spy for the demons.

“It’s Lisabelle,” said Lough. “They think the demon spy is Lisabelle.”

Sip and I tried to stay up until Lisabelle came home, but by two o’clock we had reached the conclusion that she wasn’t coming home that night. I had images of her locked under the dining hall in a dungeon that smelled of dirt and dead rats. That the Tower was so modern there probably wasn’t a dungeon under it, but I wasn’t going to let rational thinking get in the way of my imagination, which had Lisabelle chained to the wall and not given water for days. I shuddered every time I thought about it.

There was no sign of her the next day. I saw Keller but he avoided me, and he missed our usual training session. I wanted to ask him what had happened after he’d been taken away, but the one time I got close he was with a group of his friends and turned his back on me.

With Professor Zervos still absent, we met Professor Korba at Airlee. It was odd heading back to my own dorm to go to class, but Professor Korba was waiting for us outside, as promised. Once everyone arrived he led us inside. Keller stayed as far away from me as possible, and since Camilla was doing the same thing they ended up close to each other. I felt hot anger when they started to chat and Camilla giggled, but I wasn’t sure why.

We wandered through the floors. Airlee was the newest of the dorms and had the least interesting artifacts in it. The only thing it had going for it was that because it was the newest dorm, it had the newest furnishings, including large screen TVs in every common room. If I hadn’t already lived there all semester I might have been impressed. Because Airlee was so new, the walls weren’t filled with massive glass cases full of priceless magical artifacts like they were in Astra.

“The Airlee Dorm is truly the most important,” said Professor Korba. He was droning on as we walked through halls I’d seen every day since I’d been at Public. I kept trying to catch Keller’s eye, but he was studiously looking anywhere and everywhere else.

“Because it promotes collaboration between different paranormal species,” Korba continued. “Why is that good?”

Lough, as usual, raised his hand.

Professor Korba nodded to him and Lough said, “Because otherwise you end up like the pixies? Stuck up and friendless?”

Professor Korba frowned as everyone in the class burst into laughter. Camilla’s face reddened with rage. “Jokes are all very well and good, Dream Giver, but perhaps there are more concrete reasons.”

“Because we have to protect ourselves against the demons and that means sticking together,” he said.

“Very good,” said Professor Korba. “Now, since you are one, maybe you would like to give us a demonstration of the skills of dream givers.”

I didn’t know much about dream givers. They barely sounded real to me, maybe because I didn’t consider dreams themselves to be “real.” I had only seen Lough perform once, at the Demonstration on our first night, and he hadn’t done much of anything, just sort of closed his eyes. The professors had nodded, so they must have been impressed, unlike how they felt about me.

“Yeah, Lough,” Sip encouraged. “Let’s see what you can do! Just stay calm!”

Lough blushed. “I’m about as calm as a hailstorm,” he mumbled.

Coughing and shaking his head, Lough closed his eyes. All the rest of the students gathered in a circle around him. All eyes were fixed on his face.

Out of nowhere I heard a wail. It was a woman’s voice. Somehow it was familiar, but I hadn’t heard it in a long time. I looked around frantically, but I didn’t see anyone around. My vision was blurred, as if I’d just had water thrown in my eyes.

I could sense that other students were upset, but I wasn’t really sure how. I could feel Sip next to me, trembling. The woman’s voice came again. This time I shuddered. With a start, I realized who it was.

The voice was my mother’s, and she was screaming for someone to stop hurting her. She was in pain. “No!” I screamed. “Stop it! You’re hurting her.” When I yelled, my mother’s scream and my blurry vision vanished. I was glaring at Lough. So was everyone else in the class.

Professor Korba had a thoughtful expression on his wise old face. Lough’s round cheeks were red with embarrassment. My eye’s locked with Keller’s. He didn’t look away.

“I’m sorry,” Lough stammered out. “I didn’t realize I could do that. I was just trying to….”

“You were trying to what?” Sip snapped. “Frighten us all to death?” Some of the other students nodded.

“I didn’t realize I could do that!” Lough protested. “I’ve never done it
to
people before. Well, if you don’t count middle school, but middle school sucked. Universally. Everyone hates middle school.”

“Shut up,” Sip snapped.

“Sip,” said Professor Korba sternly. “Lough is a Starter, and although he is a very powerful Starter, we cannot expect him to have ironclad control on his magic just yet.” He spoke quietly and reassuringly. Other students start to calm down, but I couldn’t seem to. My shoulders were tense, and I could feel a throbbing at my temple. I was very, very angry.

Without meaning to I said, “How did you put my mother’s voice into my head?” My eyes were locked on his.

“I, what?” he asked. “I just asked for a memory. I just wanted to have you all dream a memory. I didn’t mean for it to be bad.”

But judging from everyone’s face, all the waking dreams had been bad.

“We have to work on your control, is all,” said Professor Korba. “Just imagine how formidable you will be when you can
choose
to anger all of your classmates by forcing them to relive their worst memories. Come along.”

And with that he swept out of Airlee Dorm. The rest of us followed. No one looked at Lough.

I dropped back to walk next to Sip. “Are you alright?” I asked.

Sip nodded. “I’m fine. He didn’t mean to do it. How are you? You heard your mother?”

I grimaced. I didn’t want to talk about it, but this was Sip, my first friend at Public. “I don’t know what he shoved into my head. It’s not something I remember as actually happening.”

Sip nodded. “It probably didn’t,” she said reassuringly. But I wasn’t so sure.

“How did Lough not know he could do that?” I asked as we headed to our next class.

“He’s just starting. He’s still probably developing and learning and trying to get his range. A lot of us with magic go through that. It’s not like vampire or werewolves. True, vampires have magic they can develop, but if you’re a vamp you’re a vamp, you know?”

“Oh sure,” I said almost laughing at the way Sip always managed to say something as if it should be obvious.

My laugh stopped as Camilla trailed past us. She had time for one venomous glare before she disappeared down the sidewalk. There was no sign of Keller.

By the end of the day all I wanted to do was go back to my room.

Sip slammed into the room a minute after I got there. “How can everyone act like everything is fine?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “They can do what they want. They’re in charge. It’s the powerful and the powerless. What are we going to do?” I plopped down on my bed. Sip was in such a rage that she threw her books.

Breathing hard, she came to a stop in front of me.

“We go to the President,” she said. “Tell her it wasn’t Lisabelle’s fault.”

“Don’t you think Keller already told her that?” I asked. I refused to think that Zervos had said anything in Lisabelle’s favor. He would throw his own mother under the bus if it served his purposes.

“I don’t know what Keller would say,” said Sip. “I can’t read him.”

No one can, I thought.

There was a soft tap on the door. Sip flew to open it, and on the other side stood Lisabelle, looking a little pale but otherwise defiant. She swept into the room and sat on the bed while the two of us gaped at her.

“You’re here,” said Sip, still holding the door open.

“Excellent observational abilities,” said Lisabelle. She looked calm for someone who had basically been arrested in class for performing an exercise that the Professor of the class had told her to perform.