Shadow Walker (Neteru Academy Books) (26 page)

Allie was drawing more and more attention, which only caused her to become more and more distressed. But a mid-hall collision knocked the wind out of Sarah as the girls quickly rounded a corner on their way to their room. A pair of unfortunately familiar hazel eyes glared at her.

“Watch it, compound brat.” Melissa Gray flipped a silky strand of jet-black hair over her shoulder. “This is the second time you’ve been in my way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to my locker.”

“I see your girl already found hers,” Amy Feingold said, and the witches all laughed.

Tami lunged at Amy suddenly, but Hyacinth grabbed Tami just in time.

“Lemme go!” Tami said, trying to twist out of Hyacinth’s hold. “I need a reason to get sent home anyway.”

“Oh, please, do let her go,” Melissa said coolly. “I’d love to see her get expelled on day one. Maybe she’ll learn how to stay away from other people’s men then.”

“What are you talking about?” Tami said, panting.

That’s right, Tami doesn’t know
, Sarah thought.
I should have found a way to tell her.
But everything had been happening so fast, and there were eavesdroppers everywhere. She’d planned to tell Tami about everything once the four of them were alone.

“Don’t play stupid,” Melissa told Tami, wrinkling her aristocratic nose as if she found Tami distasteful. “You know that Stefan belongs to me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tami said smirking. “Did you remember to tell
him
that?”

Melissa laughed. “Oh, my God, you have no idea, do you?” she said. “Do you honestly think you can handle someone like Stefan Oaphse?” She looked Tami up and down. “ He will eat you alive.”

“You really did this because you have a beef over some guy?” Sarah asked. “And why Allie, if your problem is with Tami? Or me?”

“Oh, I didn’t do anything,” Melissa said, studying her nails. “I think you’re just not popular, brat. You or your stupid crew. It’s too bad, really.” She turned to leave, then tossed a warning over her shoulder. “You know how it is in the world—the weak get picked off first. It’s not my fault that Hyacinth and Allie are your weakest links.”

Sarah was seething now, so furious that she couldn’t even think of a quick comeback. She should have let Melissa drop into the pit in Mr. Everett’s class just to see her piss her pants!

Amy smirked. “Might want to keep an eye on your two klutzy friends there. Never know when something bad might happen to them when they’re all by themselves.”

Sarah wasn’t sure how it happened, but as Amy turned to walk away, the pool of shadow where she had been standing suddenly pulsed and she went down as though struck. Her face hit the floor, and she screamed in pain as blood smeared the gleaming marble.

“Oh, my God! Did you see that?” Melissa shouted, going to Amy’s side.

“Yo, she just fell,” a student in the crowd that had gathered to watch the argument called out.

Amy was sobbing and holding her mouth.

“Ladies, ladies,” Mr. Foggerty, the biology prof, said, coming out of his classroom and waving a long, floppy hand. “What seems to be the trouble? Don’t you all have classes this afternoon? And, heavens, have you been to the pool already?” he said, motioning to Allie. “Why are you all wet and dripping?” He blinked bulbous eyes behind thick glasses, waiting on a response. Squinting at them all more closely, he drew back with a gasp. “That young lady is bleeding… and green slime? Where did that come from? I demand an answer!”

His Upper Sphere students craned their necks to see what was going on as their instructor blinked several times in obvious annoyance when no one answered his questions, bringing his large caterpillar eyebrows together and adjusting his thick bifocals up the bridge of his humongous nose.

“Then if you are all intent on silence, I suggest some of you get that young woman to the infirmary and the rest of you help your friend to the showers. This is a disgrace! Disperse immediately, before I alert Headmistress Stone. This hallway is not for congregating or settling petty disputes—you are disturbing my students. Hurry off.”

He shooed them away as though they were a cloud of gnats and then stepped back into his classroom with a loud “Harrumph!” before he slammed the door.

It was clear that he hadn’t heard the content of their argument and had only witnessed the result—elevated female voices, a cut and green slime. But a bunch of other students
had
heard it, when they’d stopped to hear the commotion in the hall.

Sarah led her group one way—toward the showers; Melissa led hers in the opposite direction toward the infirmary.

A question kept niggling in Sarah’s head. Had Amy Feingold fallen because she’d moved too quickly on a polished floor… or had something else really happened? Had she really seen what she thought she had? Amy had been standing in shadow, and strange things happened with shadows when Sarah was around. That creepy feeling was back, too, as though something was staring at her. A chill raced down her spine.

The moment they hit their dorm room, Allie dashed to her closet. She was so upset she was sparking and had to keep touching wooden objects to dampen the charge.

“Somebody ground her, would ya?” Tami muttered when a stray spark zapped her.

Hyacinth foolishly grabbed Allie’s hand, then jumped back, silky hair frizzed at the ends. “Ow, watch it!”

“Sorry,” Allie said, holding onto a bookshelf and counting to ten, watching dust motes scatter. “But I have to hurry or I’m going to miss the next class—you guys don’t have to wait.”

“It’s just gym, and I’m not going to leave you. I’ll wait—Hyacinth and Tami can go, so they don’t get in trouble, too. But I’m probably gonna get kicked out, anyway,” Sarah said, beginning to pace.

“Get kicked out for what?” Tami put her hands on her hips. “Nobody pushed her. Nobody did jack! She tripped. Maybe she slid on some of that slime bomb they put in Allie’s locker. Served her right, and if they tell, we tell—so it’s a fair guess that nobody is gonna rat. None of us are leaving Allie, and none of us are getting in trouble. We’ll tell the gym teacher that some anonymous person boobytrapped Allie’s locker and slimed her, and we went to help her. We’ve got evidence,” Tami added, waving her arms toward Allie’s dripping clothes. “And plenty of kids saw what happened. A half-truth is always the most convincing lie, and I’m sure that Allie isn’t the first freshman to get pranked by an Upper Sphere, so stop stressing. Melissa’s flunky slipped on the slime, so what? We’re not responsible.”

But Sarah knew in her heart that wasn’t what had happened to Amy. She hugged herself and leaned against a desk, trying to calm down. It totally freaked her out that a shadow had come to life and literally attacked a girl, and she was the only one who had seen it.

“I can’t go back to the Clair-V’s,” Hyacinth said. “Why did you have to try to fight that girl, Tami? Why couldn’t you try to be nicer to them?”

“Them? Them!” Tami shot back, fuming. “Did you hear what that cow said to me? And the worst part was you holding me back when I could have ended all of this by opening up a can of whup-ass on Melissa. That girl has had it coming!”

“And then what?” Sarah said, quickly getting between Tami and the others. “You’d be kicked out of school, or maybe we all would—because if you punched her lights out, her friends would have jumped in, and then we would’ve jumped in, because we wouldn’t let them beat you down, no matter what.”

Tense silence strangled the group for a moment as Tami turned away, still fuming, but seeming somewhat mollified that Sarah and the others had her back.

Sarah went to her to try to calm her down. This wasn’t getting them anywhere, and it was burning precious time. They might have to cut more than gym if Allie didn’t get to the showers soon.

“There’s so much I have to fill you in on, Tami,” Sarah said in a gentler tone, trying to reach beyond Tami’s rage. Although now was certainly not the time to mention that Tami needed to back off Stefan—even if her reason wasn’t because of Melissa but because he was bad news—she did need to catch her friend up on how they could protect themselves from another hallway attack.

“I talked to Ayana after lunch. She showed me a strong white light defense we can use. I was going to tell you guys once we were where the walls didn’t have ears, but the day was going by so fast, everyone was watching us, snickering about us… there just wasn’t time and—”

“Who cares about this stupid school?” Tami finally muttered, cutting Sarah off and glaring at her friends.

“Give it up, Tam,” Allie said in a rare display of anger. “Tell me that just because of a stupid fight with some jealous hater, you honestly want to go back home where there’s nobody left there but parents?” When Tami turned away from her, Allie rounded Tami to get in her face. “And all to maybe get Melissa and her witches sent back to their neighborhood to fight beside their parents without the Academy’s extra training and maybe—”

“And that’s our problem how?” Tami said, throwing up her hands and beginning to pace. “I hope they
do
get shipped back to their sorry sewer-hole compounds and have to take mortar shells and dodge demon—”

“Because the same thing would happen to us,” Allie said pointedly. “Or, more likely, we’d be locked up in the compound, still home-schooled until we were of age. They’re not gonna put Neteru team kids on the front line, so if that’s what you’re hoping would happen, stop dreaming. It’d be six more years at home and not chance of doing anything interesting, meeting anyone interesting, or going anywhere new. Think about it, Tamara Rider. It would just be the four of us girls there for six years—no,
seven
, if you count the balance of this year.”

Allie nodded when Tami’s eyes grew wide with dawning reality. “Yeah. You think about it, Tamara. Watching old DVDs from decades ago… old bands, old cartoons, all the outlawed stuff we’ve seen over and over again until I could throw up. I want to learn the new dances, the latest slang, the newest styles from out in the world. You heard it in orientation—they’re having a dance on Wednesday night. The first real mixer we’ve ever been to, and I want to go! So don’t screw this up, all right?”

When Tami looked away, Allie pressed on with conviction. “I’m pretty sure that I could do the boring time, and probably so could ‘Cinth and Sarah, but can
you
? All you’ve talked about since you got here was this hottie or that hunk—you wanna go back under your dad’s watchful eye and sit at home missing everything?”

Quiet crackled between the four friends. When Tamara didn’t immediately respond, it was obvious the stalemate was over. Sarah stared at Allie in amazement. Of all people, Allie had broken through with an argument that Tami couldn’t beat? The really weird part was, Allie had also broken the code on what was at stake for them all—something she hadn’t been able to define until Allie actually said it out loud. There was freedom here, even in its very strange disguise of onerous rules and regulations.

So, as much as she hated the rules and regulations, as much as she hated the lack of time and personal privacy, as much as she hated the .girls who had it out for them, it wasn’t until she saw a sea of students from all over the world that she’d realized just how isolated they’d been. Curiosity had won out over dread, at least for the moment. With the chance to be around all those kids her own age and older, even the shadows didn’t feel as scary—especially since they seemed to be siding with her.

They might not really want to move forward into this scary void called, the Academy, but they also didn’t want to be left behind back home, to miss the exciting newness of it all. None of them wanted to blow the opportunity of a lifetime on something stupid, and even though no one in her small group had had the chance yet to listen to the school policies on their PIU’s, she was pretty sure that a hallway brawl over some guy they didn’t even know would be frowned upon.

“All right,” Sarah finally said. “One team—us against them.”

“One team,” Tami said grudgingly, and they all placed their hands together in an air pile.

“I’ve gotta show you guys what Ayana showed me this afternoon, so if we’re gonna skip a class, let’s make it worth our while.”

“Can I get a shower first?” Allie said in a forlorn tone.

“Yeah, but hurry back,” Sarah said, glancing at the time on her PIU. “I don’t trust those chicks, now that one of them got hurt. I bet they’ll have an even worse ambush waiting for us now.”

T
o Allie’s credit, she was in and out of the shower within ten minutes, and had wound her hair up into a wet bun and was dressing quickly as Sarah produced the symbols Ayana had drawn.

“We have to be united,” Sarah warned, looking around at her friends’ faces. “We need to call down the white light of protection over each of us individually
and
the group, and then imagine ourselves in a spiral of white light. Close your eyes and make that white light follow you to the center, where all of us meet. Hyacinth can help with the telepathic visuals. Tam, we need your fire of intention, and Allie, we could use your kinetic charge. We put all our hands together, and I’ll say the prayer, okay?”

“Let’s do this thing,” Tami said. “But I sure wish Yaya had given you something to blow them away with.”

Sarah let out a hard sigh. “We’ve been through that a hundred times, Tamara, so quit it. No attacks, school rules. Nobody can fault us for self-defense, but—”

“Okay, okay,” Tami fussed. “Let’s just do this thing.”

“Here’s the other thing… Yaya said we shouldn’t do this when at odds or mad at—”

“Like that’s gonna happen when around here?” Tami just stared at her and Allie and Hyacinth nodded.

“We have to protect ourselves,” Hyacinth said in a quiet rush after a moment. “There may not be an optimal time…. Tami could be right.”

All eyes were on Sarah, and even Allie nodded to agree with the others. Against Sarah’s better judgment, she released a long sigh and let her shoulders slump. “Okay, okay, you guys win,” she said, glancing around the group. “But don’t blame me if anything backfires.”