Academy of Shifters: Lost Alumni, page 1
Lost Alumni
By Marisa Claire
Academy of Shifters Copyright © 2020 by Torment Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Academy of Shifters: Lost Alumni
Marisa Claire
www.tormentpublishing.com
www.marisaclaire.com
Printed in the United States of America
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chapter One
Chapter Two
CHAPTER ONE
“Hey, Poodle!” Laith’s voice boomed over the chaos. “Wrong way!”
I turned, squinting under the impossibly bright lights beaming down from the airport ceiling. A river of grouchy travelers flowed around me, buffeting me back and forth as I swam upstream. Even when I broke into a run, no matter how fast my legs pumped, my feet seemed to be treading water.
Frustrated, I called out Laith’s name, but it slipped under the garbled sounds rolling around and over me—engines firing up, speakers crackling, families screaming at each other to hurry—and vanished like I’d never opened my mouth at all.
“Remi!” He sounded annoyed now. “Don’t you recognize me?”
I plunged ahead, pushing people out of my way. A small child tumbled to his knees, and when I paused to apologize, he looked up at me with my brother Rahm’s swollen red eyes. Cordelia Gladwell scooped him up in her arms and barked at me to watch where I was going. Then they both shifted—her into a majestic white wolf, him into a squirming gray cub.
“Remi St. James!” Laith hollered. “Are you going blind?”
I stumbled backward, scanning the pushing, shoving mass of people for a glimpse of the two wolves, but they were gone. A finger tapped me on the shoulder and I whirled, expecting to finally see my boyfriend’s handsome face—but the face peering down at me was not handsome. Not anymore. It was barely even a face. Puffy green skin crowded the empty black holes where his eyes should have been, and when Oberon Gladwell spoke, his voice came through the ragged hole in his throat.
“Remi, you got our message about the moonstone!” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Excellent work! Thanks to you, this year’s crop of shifters is safe and sound at my school.”
I cringed away from the talking corpse. “It’s not your school—”
He threw back his head and guffawed, shreds of skin fluttering around his neck wound. “Don’t be silly. You can take the Gladwell out of the Academy, but you can’t take the Gladwell out of the Academy.”
“Huh? That’s the same—”
“It’s all the same, Remi. Now, let’s discuss your courses for this term.” He gripped my shoulder and tried to steer me away.
“You’re not my advisor.” I pushed his hand away. It broke off at the wrist and plopped onto the floor.
“Dammit, Remi.” He sighed and bent down to retrieve it. When he did, I could see his vertebrae poking through the back of his burgundy blazer. “I needed that.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, backing away as the zombie Chancellor tried to fit his hand back onto his jutting stump. “I, um… gotta go.”
I bolted in the direction I had last heard Laith’s voice, but the airport kept filling with people and animals. Wolves and bears and cougars and… hyenas. So many hyenas, following me with their desperate eyes—and then with their feet as well. As they fell into formation behind me, the pads of their paws thumped louder and louder on the tile floor until they sounded like jackboots marching on a street.
A hand closed around my ankle, and I fell, only to find myself standing upright in the same place. Victoria grinned up at me. The upper half of her body protruded from the floor, dressed in army green fatigues. Her beautiful, jet-black hair floated in waves around her head as though falling and rising on a tide. She waved cheerfully.
“The mission isn’t going so hot,” she said, still grinning. “I’m going to need you to get out of here.”
“But Laith!” I shouted over the din.
“Who?” Victoria laughed, cupping a hand over one ear.
“Laith!” I screamed.
“Oh, do you mean The Enlightened One?”
“What? No!” I shook my head. “Laith! My boyfriend? Used to be your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend?” Victoria wrinkled her nose. “Gross. I would never have one of those.”
“Right, right. But you were just pretending, remember? To protect him from Dean Mardone?”
“Oh, yeah.” Her lips trembled. “Such a shame.”
“Victoria,” I sounded out each syllable slowly, “do you know where Laith is?”
She shook her head. “No, but I think that guy is looking for you.”
I followed her pointing finger to a man standing on a table in the food court, swaddled in thick orange robes and draped with beaded necklaces. His shaved head gleamed under the stark white lights as he led a ring of bowing supplicants in a monotonous chant.
“Laith?” I gazed up at the man’s smooth jaw. Suddenly I was standing right at his feet.
He lowered his head and peered at me with those hazel eyes that could make my heart melt. Golden flecks sparkled in his irises as his mouth shifted into a crooked grin, one corner pulled slightly between his teeth. Even with the baldness and the beads, that look was an electric jolt to my core.
He stretched his arms wide. “Remi, my child!”
I recoiled. “Whoa, what?”
Laith floated off the table and landed lightly in front of me. He took me by the shoulders and kissed both my cheek as chastely as one would kiss a—
I yanked away, my face scrunching up in disgust. “Did you just call me your child?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, gesturing to his entourage. “That is how a monk greets everyone.”
“A monk?” I repeated stupidly, as though the robes and baldness hadn’t already confirmed it. “But… what about us?”
He tilted his head and flattened his mouth into a sympathetic half-smile. “There are other fish in the sea, Remi.”
His followers picked his words up as their next chant. He nodded along as though listening to a great song on the radio. Then he winked and shifted into an enormous gray catfish that went shimmying away on its belly.
“Indeed.” The air inside the terminal chilled with the arrival of that crisp British voice. An arm slid around my shoulders, turning me toward the last face I ever wanted to see again. Daniel Helms flashed his boyish dimples. “There’s still time to land a better catch, love.”
“No!” I shrieked, throwing myself backward. “Laith!”
Helms pulled me against him. The airport blurred as he swept me into a waltz, and suddenly our feet were gliding inches above the polished hardwood floor of the Great Hall. We were alone. Not a single hyena or catfish in sight.
“We could have done this the easy way, darling,” he purred into my ear. “But you just had to go and make a fuss.”
His breath reeked of the same awful soul-stench that first alerted me to his true nature. My stomach twisted violently as he danced me around the ballroom to the tune of absolute silence. Beneath the chandelier, he slowed and bent me backward into a dip.
His mouth hovered above my own. “You’ll quite like studying at Hawtrey. And father’s estate will be the perfect place to raise a litter or two.” He lifted me out of the dip. “I know how much family means to you.”
“Remi!” a woman’s voice echoed through the ballroom, the reverberations rendering it strange and unfamiliar.
Helms’ leer twisted into a sneer, his eyes darting around the empty Great Hall. “Oh, not you.”
“Let go of my daughter,” the voice snarled.
“When I’m good and ready,” Helms snapped.
I drove my knee upward between his legs, but his grip didn’t loosen. He didn’t even flinch—unless you counted the furious narrowing of his suddenly blood red gaze. His fingers dug into my waist, other hand twisting my upheld wrist. The chandelier flickered and dimmed.
“Let her go,” a new voice ordered, this one small and trembling.
Helms vanished, and my feet dropped onto the floor with a loud click. Turning in a slow circle, I searched for my mysterious hero, but there was no one else in the Great Hall; no one sitting on the sofas around the walls, no one peeking over the balconies.
“Who’s there?” I called.
A boy materialized in front of the courtyard doors. He was short and stocky with a mop of curly hair falling into his big brown eyes. He came toward
“So,” he said, circling me with a curious expression I couldn’t quite read. “You’re my new sister, huh?”
“What are you talking about?” I tilted my head. “Who are you?”
“You really don’t recognize me? From the… you know?” He mimed sniffing and then widened his eyes like he was seeing something wild.
I gasped, one hand rising to cover my mouth. “Isaak?”
He beamed and thrust out a hand. “The one and only.”
Frozen, I stared at the pale fingers reaching toward me. When I’d used my gift on his grave, I’d seen flashes of his life through his own eyes, and he hadn’t spent a lot of time in front of mirrors. I knew everything about his hopes and dreams and fears and death, but I had never seen his face. Belhollow had been left without even a picture when the Gladwells hired Helms to twist everyone’s memories so that her son and my twin brother became a single person named Robert Borden.
Slowly, my gaze drifted back to his face, and now I saw what I should have recognized right away. The curly hair. The soft eyes. The warm smile. He was the spitting image of his mother, made masculine only by the sparse sideburns he was trying to grow and the slight squareness of his jaw.
But no… that wasn’t right at all. Isaak was adopted. Just like me.
“It’s fine,” he said, nodding at his hand. “I promise I don’t bite.”
Trembling, I reached out and curled my fingers around… nothing.
He frowned, eyes screwing up like he might cry. “Oops.”
“I… I’m sorry,” I stammered.
“Don’t be.” He shrugged and wiped the translucent hand on his translucent jeans. “Anyway, I just came to tell you something. If it’s true.”
“If what’s true?”
He smiled kindly. “If you’re my sister now.”
“Oh… well, I guess I hadn’t really thought of it like that.”
“Ouch.” He pushed his lips into a pout. “So that’s how it’s gonna be?”
I shook my head, confused. “No. I mean, what?”
He flexed his jaw from side to side, narrowing his gaze. “You’ll never be me.”
“Of course not,” I said, furrowing my brow. “I would never—”
He folded his arms. “She just feels sorry for you.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “Like I said, I would never try—”
“Good.” He smiled, and as his lips curved upward, they pushed his ears into furry round flaps on top of his head. “Then we have an understanding.”
“Wait, what?” I took a step forward, but the boy was shrinking, disappearing into the folds of his clothes. “Isaak? Where are you going?”
The pile of clothes on the floor jumped, and out poked the tiny, twitching nose of a bear cub. He wriggled out of his shirt, shook out his fluffy coat, and frolicked away. I gaped at the pile of clothes he’d left behind, and, finally, I screamed.
CHAPTER TWO
Light exploded into my eyes and I jerked upright, ears pulsating with a dull, churning roar. An arm slid around my shoulders, feverishly hot to my sweat-slicked skin. I shuddered and tried to pull away, but it held fast.
“Now, now,” Belhollow cooed. “You’re alright. Same dream, sugar?”
The real world came back into focus. I was on a veranda, bathed in the flickering golden glow of a lighted ceiling fan. The slats of a deck chair dug uncomfortably into my bare calves and thighs—I had only meant to relax for a second before taking one last late-night swim, but I must have dozed off.
The Atlantic Ocean rolled in slow and steady under the black velvet sky, splashing white froth over the silvery sand not even a hundred yards away from the Gladwells’ cottage. It had felt kind of wrong the first day or two, staying in a home that belonged to dead people, but Belhollow said it was the least their ghosts could do for us, all things considered.
Ghosts…
“Same dream,” I mumbled, hugging my goose-pimpled arms. “Sort of.”
Belhollow gave me a squeeze and chuckled. “Remi, for the millionth time, Laith has not become a monk.”
“I know. I guess.” I leaned into her side, my body rigid from holding back shivers. “But this one had other stuff, too.”
“Well, I’m happy to hear he’s not the only thing your subconscious frets over,” she teased, rubbing my arm. “Goodness, you’re like an iceberg. Here.” She pulled the fluffy white towel off the back of the chair and draped it across my back. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, tugging the towel around me like a cloak.
She pushed out of her crouched position with a creaky sigh. She was only forty-nine, I knew that now, which was a little younger than I would have previously guessed from the amount of gray mixed into her curls and the lines around her eyes. She blamed the up-and-down noises she made on a lifetime of shifting, said it was hell on the joints, and if I was smart, I’d start taking supplements when I turned thirty.
Thirty.
That’s how old Belhollow was when I was born.
That’s how old my birth mother was when she died six years later.
It was weird to think of her being only a few years older than me, already married and giving birth to twins, completely oblivious to the fact that one day we’d grow up to be a murderer who moves things with his mind and a girl who sees things with her nose.
Belhollow dragged another chair over, its legs grating loudly on the patio planks. She sat on it sideways, facing me with her elbows on her knees. Reaching across the space between us, she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“‘I don’t know’ usually means you probably do,” she said. “In my experience with dreams, anyway.”
I gnawed on my lower lip, staring out at the shimmering tide. “Professor Helms was there.”
“Hmm.” Belhollow frowned and nibbled on her own lip. “And now you’re afraid he’s back in your head.”
I shrugged. I knew it wasn’t true, that it had just been a dream—same as the part where Laith became a monk—but once another person has taken over your mind, it’s hard not to feel like they’re always with you. Like there’s a little piece of you they maybe didn’t give back.
“Well, he’s not.” She grasped my hand. “I’m pretty sure he’s not anywhere these days.”
That was the new theory: Daniel Helms died after the Halloween fight that cost Oberon Gladwell his eye. Originally, Belhollow believed the Gladwells had stashed the evil Manip away somewhere, along with my equally evil Kinetic brother, because they didn’t want to waste such valuable gifts. But after the Gladwells turned up murdered, and their final memory revealed the killer was Declan Helms, Chairman of the Tooth & Claw Society himself, Belhollow had changed her tune.
The Chairman had never personally set foot on the Gladwell campus. In fact, he rarely set foot anywhere outside of his many estates, so for him to show up in person and sic his personal hyena guards on the Gladwells… well, that was strange. Revenge seemed to be the only plausible explanation, as Daniel had been the Chairman’s adopted son.
“He was talking about how much I’d love it at Hawtrey,” I said. That was the name of the Shifter Academy in the U.K. where Helms had graduated. He had mentioned it that terrible night when everything happened, but I honestly hadn’t given it a lot of thought since then.
Belhollow made a face. “Well, I can assure you, you would not. It’s a military school. No science, no arts, no joy of any sort.”
“Sounds like Dean Embry’s kind of thing.”
She laughed. “I doubt it. The food is terrible—unless you like haggis and black pudding.”
“I do not.” I wrinkled my nose. “You’ve been there?”
“What? Me? Oh, no.” She gazed out at the ocean. “This is as far east as I’ll go. But the Gladwells went. After the Chairman took power, he was always pressuring them to see how education should really be done.”
“With even more murder, huh?”
“Pretty much,” Belhollow said, sadness suddenly welling over her features. “You know, the Gladwells had grand ideals once upon a time, Remi. Revolutionary, really. They were the first to build an Academy where shifters could learn how to be well-rounded humans, not just furry killing machines. I looked up to them. That’s why it was so shocking when…” She cleared her throat and waved a hand in front of her face. “Well, you know.”
