Shadow Walker (Neteru Academy Books) (44 page)

Then, barely visible in the shadows, the jaguar form morphed into a man who straightened from the beast’s crouch to stand in front of the light. She couldn’t see any detail, only his silhouette, but something familiar arrested her. Long dreadlocks swept his shoulders, and her fear became relief.

“What are you doing out alone like this, Sarah?”

“I—”

“Your grandmother is worried sick. Go to her quarters—immediately. Titan Troy will escort you while I try to find the intruder of whom you spoke to Mrs. Gillison. This academy is on complete lock-down until further notice.”

Then her grandfather was once again a hunter of the night who took two graceful bounds and was gone.

“Stay at my flank, Miss Rivera,” Titan Troy ordered.

She did. His massive size was a great comfort as they passed shadowy corridors and disorienting blue streaks of energy began to blur her vision. She kept up with his impossibly long strides only by taking two steps to his one, not wanting to be even a few feet away from his thickly muscled arm and gleaming blade.

She was soon panting, and disoriented with it. Her head was spinning from the bisecting and intersecting blue lines that crisscrossed the opening of every corridor they’d passed. Occasionally she’d see the transparent image of a person at the end of a line—or maybe it was the beginning of it. She couldn’t tell. These weren’t ghosts; that much she was sure of, because the people she saw were very much alive, despite their transparency.

It was as though she could see where everyone in the entire school had walked that day. Close to nausea she trailed her hand along the wall to ground herself, but that only seemed to annoy Titan Troy. He frowned and halted abruptly to issue her a sidelong glance of disapproval, which was enough to make her hug her sopping wet sweater and quickly start walking again.

Maybe she’d hit her head when she was caught in the rapids? It didn’t really matter. All she knew was that being ill was not going to help her cause with her grandmother.

Titan Troy raised his huge fist to pound on the door of her nana’s private suite, but Nana swung open the door before he could make contact.

“I present to you Miss Rivera,” he announced, seeming a bit startled. “I shall wait outside your chambers to return this errant student to her dormitory once you are finished.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Sarah’s grandmother said, brandishing a bath towel and yanking Sarah forward. Then she slammed the door, wrapped Sarah up in the towel and hugged her so hard she could barely breathe.

Kisses pelted Sarah’s wet hair. Headmistress Stone had transformed into Nana Marlene. Sarah clung to the familiar warmth for a moment, soundless tears soaking into her nana’s thick, white embroidered robe.

“Don’t you ever, ever,
ever
frighten me like that again, Sarah Rivera, or I will zap you into tomorrow with my walking stick. Do you hear me, child?”

Her grandmother held Sarah away from her, tears in her wise old eyes and emotion in her voice, as a small purple disc began to glow in the center of her forehead as it scanned Sarah’s entire body.

“In your own words,” her grandmother said, hands still trembling, “what happened?” She took the towel, not waiting for an answer, and began helping Sarah out of her wet sweater.

Nana Marlene tossed the sopping garment in a waiting laundry basket, then walked past the gold brocade sofa to fetch a white robe from where it was warming on the radiator, along with a pair of fuzzy slippers. She thrust the offering toward Sarah, who gladly accepted it, then turned around to give her granddaughter privacy.

“Strip,” Nana Marlene ordered. “Quickly.”

Sarah followed her directions and dropped the rest of her wet clothes in the basket. The warm robe and slippers felt so good that all she wanted to do was curl up on the couch like a lazy cat.

But Nana Marlene spun on her and, with an outstretched arm and a pointing finger, issued a one-word command. “Sit.”

Sarah did, quickly and quietly, the sensation of being in a safe haven immediately evaporating.

“Talk,” Nana Marlene said, her gaze hardening by the second, now that the shock of potential peril had worn off.

Sarah twisted the sash of her robe, trying to decide where to begin. She’d heard that no-nonsense tone from Nana before, but never quite like this—well, at least not directed toward her. Sarah blinked several times; the blue streaks were still there, even in Nana’s room. They fractured her attention, made her temporarily lose focus as she foolishly allowed her gaze to wander around the room.

The effect was disorienting but also eerily cool. Ferns were everywhere, and blue streaks went from each plant to a back room and returned, as though marking the trail of whoever tended the plants.

Nana had two sofas facing each other, with a small oval mahogany coffee table in between, littered with white candles and yellow flowers in silver vases. Two golden velvet Queen Anne chairs completed the grouping, and Sarah could see through open doors to the bedroom with its large four-poster bed covered in pristine white and private bathroom, and into the kitchen, with more blue lines weaving everywhere.

“Do not test my patience, child,” Nana Marlene said in a low, warning tone.

That was all it took to make the blue streaks go away and snap Sarah’s attention back to the real problem.

S
arah kept her gaze focused on the end of the sash she was turning as she spoke. It was easier than keeping the intermittently reappearing blue streaks out of her line of vision, and way easier than meeting Nana Marlene’s expression.

For some strange reason, everything that she’d wanted to tell her grandmother seemed to be slowly glazing over in the back of her mind, as though someone or something was sucking out her memory through a dark straw shoved into her brain.

Forcing herself to concentrate, Sarah kept to the highlights: walking down the hall, getting scared by a beast she couldn’t fully see and hitting the wall—to release what had seemed like Noah’s flood.

Her grandmother let out a long sigh and wiped her hands down her face as though trying to find something to do with them—other than strangle Sarah.

“I want the full story,” Nana Marlene shouted, beginning to pace. “The entire spectrum of nuance and detail—your compound sisters’ lives depend on it!”

Sarah sat back, eyes wide, breath caught inside her chest. Nana had screamed at her! And had she said
lives
, as in
plural
?

“That’s right!” Nana Marlene shouted, her magical hands slicing the air and making blue sparks fly. She stopped pacing and placed her hands on her hips. “Sarah, I swore to the Creator that I would never break into your mind and violate you by taking you to the rock—prying your mind open by sheer psychic force and making your poor little soul hit the rock bottom of truth, girl, but so help me, if you don’t tell me the information I need, I will. Hyacinth is lying in intensive care right now, her body gray. Shall I take you to see her?”

Sarah shot up off the sofa. “Hyacinth? Oh, no! She must have gone into the Shady Path alone!”

“Tina, Darlene, Andrea and Bebbita are sick, too—shall I go on? And they’re in worse shape than Hyacinth, because from what I could sense, Hyacinth had a dwennimmen protective white light ward around her. Now you speak to me like you’ve got some danged sense!”

Nana Marlene reached out her hand and her walking stick filled it. In one deft move she slammed it against the wall over the mantle, and the wall lit like a big-screen HDTV. Horror filled Sarah as she took in her friend’s dire condition. Hyacinth was barely breathing. An oxygen mask covered her face. Mrs. Guilliaume, the chemistry teacher, was by her side, taking the blood samples the doctor handed off to her. Uncle Richard was assisting the school doctor as he tried to give Hyacinth a transfusion, but her skin was still gray. Black cracks marbled their way through it in terrible, inky veins. Dark circles stained the skin beneath Hyacinth’s once-pretty eyes.

Tears formed and fell, but Sarah only stared past Nana Marlene at the images on the wall. Slowly darkness began to surround her, but she breathed through it, pushing it away, until all of a sudden there was clarity, like a fog had lifted from her brain.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“It never is,” her grandmother said, now leaning on her walking stick. “Mrs. Hogan told me that you and Hyacinth stumbled your way onto the Shady Path the other day—a path that was off limits due to the abductions, and is particularly off limits to students. Whatever got released through those illegal vortices is now spreading a deadly virus to whoever enters.”

“But I went in and I’m not sick.” Sarah’s statement hung in the air like a giant question mark between them.

Nana Marlene pointed at her. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re special. You have to be mindful of the dangers that can harm others. If your parents weren’t off looking for Ayana and the other missing students, I would be moved to send you home! Do you know how lucky you are that you’ve got Neteru DNA that makes you immune to most dark spiritual attachments and even a vampire or werewolf bite? If not for that, you would be lying in the infirmary with Hyacinth and the other girls right now!”

She walked back and forth, and then sent her stick away by simply tossing it into the air to disappear. “Earlier tonight someone distracted Mrs. Hogan’s library aides, Mr. Anansi and Miss Tillie, with a mysterious gift of fruit and fireflies. When Mrs. Hogan got a call—a call that turned out to be a ruse, I might add—that her presence was needed at the unicorn stables, she thought the area was being monitored, but it wasn’t. When she got back, there was a true medical emergency—Hyacinth and the other girls were lying on the library floor. I can’t lose another student. I
won’t
!”

Nana Marlene shook her head, her long, silver dreadlocks swishing, and then her voice fractured. “Those two fine young men who died…they were Valkyries rescued from Nod. They had no parents. We couldn’t even give them a decent burial, just a memorial after cremation, because your grandfather, your father, Professor Raziel and Mr. Hubert could only find parts of them. That’s what they didn’t tell you kids in your big orientation. Everybody thought that was TMI, but maybe we should have told you.”

Nana Marlene closed her eyes and drew a steadying breath, and it was only then that Sarah realized how stricken her grandmother was at the losses.

“We’ve tested all the sick girls’—all of them Clavs—blood. Tina and Darlene are at the curtain of death. Bebitta and Andrea aren’t far behind. Whatever this plague is, it seems to slam Clairvoyants especially hard,” Nana Marlene said in a strained voice. “We’re running out of time, Sarah. These girls went immediately into the advanced stages of dark energy sickness. So, baby, if you know anything that will help, now is the time to be a leader and let me know.”

“They were going into the Shady Path to try to put a tracer on Ayana,” Sarah said. “I was going to go, too, but something came up. I had to leave, so I didn’t think they would go in without me. Jessica was going to stay outside the door with Allie as our ground wires. They were going to try to bounce a signal off my deep connection to Yaya. Without me, I guess…I don’t know what happened, but it must have been awful.” Sarah rubbed her temples. “It sounds lame now, but I was going to tell you this Nana, but it was like a dark cloud came over my thoughts. Like someone or something was trying to block me from telling you what I needed to.”

“What?” Nana Marlene’s whisper was threatening and incredulous. “Can you still feel someone trying to block you?”

Sarah looked Nana Marlene directly in the eyes. This was too serious for her to be afraid. She pushed through the pain as the darkness suddenly returned, beginning to breathe heavily. “Yes, and do you also know students have been going into town to get high? You must. That’s why you tested their blood. Those girls weren’t—
aren’t
—into any of that. But I overhead a conversation between Melissa and Stefan…he said something crazy about being a werewolf and was really mad at her because she supposedly took something from him, and it sounded to me like he was talking about drugs. I can say for sure that every time I saw him and Brent together, Brent was high. Maybe none of this has anything to do with the abductions or the girls getting sick, Nana. All I know is, we were just trying to help in any way we could to get Yaya and the other missing kids back.”

Her grandmother nodded. “You’re right, it is related… although Stefan’s past is just that—his past. He was indeed infected years ago as a baby, but I cannot believe… No.” Her grandmother briefly closed her eyes and sighed before she began speaking again. “He’s been at the center of speculation before because people got nervous. I will only act on what we do know for sure and we are watching him closely, trust me. However, we do know that there’s been a lot of underground activity going on at this school. We found illegal substances in the remains of the fliers, but the two Clavs who were their ground navigators didn’t have a trace of anything in their systems. Somehow all of this is related. I just can’t see the pattern—and that’s what’s making me crazy, baby.” Her grandmother let out a hard breath. “That’s why I don’t need you kids meddling in things you don’t understand. There are Upper Spheres blocking us from seeing what’s going on, so unwilling to tell or snitch, as they call it, that lives are at risk. Those two girls who were out there on the platform above the Great Hall hadn’t taken anything, but they wouldn’t tell us where their boyfriends got it, even after those poor boys were dead. Insane!”

Sarah shut her eyes for a moment, thinking of Val’s comments, locking in on them, and knowing that her father would have told Val and her brother about the dangers the two strong Upper Sphere fliers had faced.

“The guys who died were trying to find Art and Casey. Their girlfriends had to stay clean so they could mind-stun Mojo while the guys got away.” Sarah felt her stomach roil. “Nana, what if the girls didn’t tell you where their boyfriends got the drugs because they
couldn’t
tell you? What if something blocked them like something just tried to block me?”