Academy of Shifters: Hell Week, page 1
Hell Week
By Marisa Claire
Academy of Shifters Copyright © 2019 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: Hell Week
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 NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
CHAPTER ONE
“You’re the Chancellor?!”
The words exploded from my mouth and ricocheted off the walls of the shifter catacomb. Immediately—and irrationally—I cringed. As if any of the cavern’s hundreds upon hundreds of decomposing occupants could be disturbed by my exuberant echo.
“Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?” Belhollow’s eyes glimmered with excitement and pride—and leftover tears. We were still standing on her son, Isaak’s, grave, after all.
Her son, who my own twin brother had murdered.
Her son, who my own brave boyfriend had tried and failed to save.
Her son, who my own worst nightmare Manipulated her—and everyone else—into forgetting.
Belhollow tightened her grip on my wrists, squinting at my face. “Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me, honey?”
Her words were playful, clearly designed to pull me out of the dark spiral my thoughts were dragging me down into, but all I could manage was a slow nod. There wasn’t a drop of moisture left in my mouth. In fact, I had the distinct impression of having licked dirt.
Oh, wait.
I swiped a quick hand across my lips. It came away covered in grime. Stomach lurching, I yanked the collar of my robe over my face so I could spit without it splattering on poor Isaak’s grave. But no matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t escape the horror of what I’d done.
So I turned and faced it.
There was the low, flat stone, and there was the hole my paws had dug at its base, the hole I’d plunged my muzzle into so I could better smell the memories drifting off the body underneath. It wasn’t deep, but it was ugly.
I had defaced a child’s grave.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered, dropping to my knees. “I thought… my brother… I’ll fix it. I can fix it.”
Frantically, I began scooping loose dirt back into the hole. How could I have gotten so carried away in my quest? And how much farther would I have gone to get to the truth? The Scent Sight was considered one of the four major gifts, but I was ready to speak to the returns department. It was one thing to be able to sniff out a living person’s true intentions, like I had done with that monster Daniel Helms, but to steal memories from the dead?
Never again. I will never, ever do that again. Not once as long as I live.
Belhollow knelt beside me, stilling my hands with her own. “Honey, no—”
“Yes!” I rasped out, struggling against her grip. “I can fix it. I promise. I’ll put it back just like it was.”
“It’s fine.” She squeezed my hands. “It’s okay, Remi. It’s good enough.”
Staring at the small, uneven mound of dirt I’d made, I shook my head and tried again to wrench my hands free. It wasn’t anywhere close to okay.
It looks like some kind of scavenger got in here and tried to—
I shuddered, unable to finish that thought. “Please… I can fix it.”
“Alright, sweetie, alright. Let’s do it together.”
“No! You shouldn’t have to!” My hands broke loose and returned to the dirt, packing it desperately into place. “I can do it. Just let me. I’m so sorry.”
With a heavy sigh, Belhollow gave up and allowed me to continue smoothing out my work alone. It needed to look like no one had ever been here. Like her sweet boy had never been disturbed. His memories played over and over in my mind. His adoration for his adopted mother, his longing to grow up to be a bear just like her, his naive trust in my awful brother… What happened next could have been written off as a tragic accident—if my brother hadn’t laughed.
“You know,” Belhollow said softly, “this is the first time I’ve been able to visit him. I didn’t even know what I’d lost, and then when I did, I couldn’t risk the time it would take to spend down here searching for him. Not that I ever really believed he’d be here anyway, being a non-shifter…” Her voice choked off, but she quickly cleared her throat and continued, “Your brother may have taken my son, but twice now, you’ve given him back. And for that—”
“No.” I shook my head, unwilling to take any credit, even if seeing Isaak’s resting place did give her some peace. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t find him. Rahm brought me here. He… he wanted me to see what he’d done. Like he was—” My mouth snapped shut before I said something that might make her pain worse.
“Like he was proud?” Belhollow’s fingers curled around my shoulder, tugging me out of my hunched position. The hole was filled in and smoothed over, but it still stood out like a scar in the earth.
I hung my head, pulling my filthy hands into my lap to rub my bare knees, which were sore and pockmarked from kneeling on the hard, pebbled ground. My heart felt pretty much the same way, but there was no massaging the pain out of that.
Belhollow tipped my chin up, forcing me to look her in the eyes. “Your brother is unwell, Remi. In ways none of us here were equipped to handle. Now that I’m in charge, you can be sure we’ll be adding a mental health professional to the staff. But when your brother arrived...” She lowered her gaze. “I don’t know if you want to hear all this right now.”
“Please.” I clutched her arm. “I need to know the truth.”
Belhollow turned her face toward Isaak’s stone. Her eyes squeezed shut, and finally she said, “I’m not sure how much of that I can give you, but I’ll tell you what I know. The trouble is, your brother was something of an unreliable narrator from the start. He shifted a year early. Highly unusual, but not unheard of. Especially for someone who had been dabbling in… a variety of substances.”
I sucked in a breath. Would I ever learn anything about my brother that wasn’t depressing or devilish?
“Your brother ran away from his last foster home. It was unclear if he was lured away by a bad crowd, or if he joined up with them later. In any case, one thing led to another until your brother wound up alone in the company of an unsavory character. Whether the threat to his life was genuine or part of the paranoia we later realized he suffered from, Rahm’s distress and his chemically lowered inhibitions conspired to call out his wolf.”
It was my turn to squeeze my eyes shut. I could hear Rahm’s voice echoing through Isaak’s memories, claiming that if the young boy wanted to be a shifter, too, then he just needed to put himself in danger and give his animal a chance to save him. But he had conveniently left out the role that ‘chemically lowered inhibitions’ might have played in his own premature transformation.
“He killed that other young man, Remi. Ripped out his throat and ran away. By the time Miss Shirley caught wind of him, he’d been running for ten days and crossed two state lines. Our trackers located him, but he refused to come willingly, so, given the circumstances, he was subdued and brought in.”
My mouth hung open. “He killed someone, so you brought him to college?!”
Belhollow frowned. “I obviously have deep regrets. But, at the time, we all felt sorry for him. Wanted to rehabilitate him. And, terrible as it is, accidents can and do happen during initial shifts. We’re not in the business of holding that against new students. In this case, we were just relieved that the authorities determined the other young man had been killed by a drug dealer’s attack dog without any tampering from us, if you know what I mean.”
She tapped her forehead to indicate every shifter’s ability to subtly manipulate non-shifters, and I shuddered just thinking about it. I understood that our secrets had to be kept, but at the same time… We had no right to violate less powerful people that way.
“During his first semester,” Belhollow continued, “he proved to be extremely bright and an extraordinarily quick learner—which is why, I’m afraid, he was given so many chances to rectify his anti-social behavior. But as time wore on, it seemed as though every shift left him a little less human inside. Eventually, we all agreed that he would have to be expelled, which in his case meant…”
I gulped. “Culling.”
Belhollow studied my face. Shadows danced across her own, cast by the torches flickering along the cavern walls. I realized she might not have known that I was aware of the Academy’s practice of turning difficult or under-performing students over to the mysterious Tooth & Claw Society. Ever since Dean Mardone revealed that she was sending Victoria on a special mission to find out what really happened to the culls, I had assumed Belhollow was in on the plan. But all Mardone had ever said when I asked was that Belhollow was not with the Gladwells.
Nerves knotted my stomach, hoping I hadn’t jumped to the wrong conclusion.
“Yes.” Belhollow grimaced. “A brutal practice. One I will obviously be fighting to discontinue. But in Rahm’s case, the decision was unanimous. He was a danger to himself and others. We agreed to let him stay until graduation, and then to send him quietly away with… the others. His classmates would be told he transferred to another Academy.”
She reached out and traced the letters carved into her son’s headstone: Isaak Robert Borden.
“We were unaware of Rahm’s Kinetic gift until the day…” She took a deep, shaky breath. “After that, the plan changed. The Gladwells weren’t going to let anything as insignificant as a non-shifter death get between them and a Kinetic. So, here we are.”
Watching the older woman’s hand caressing the name on the rough slab, I gently asked, “How old was he? I… I couldn’t really tell from…” My voice trailed off. I had no idea what to call the scenes I’d witnessed after smelling his grave.
“He was fourteen.” Belhollow smiled. “But still sweet. Not like some teenage boys. Not yet anyway.” She looked down. “Now I’d give anything to know him during his surly phase.”
I placed my hand over hers. “If it helps, I could feel how much he loved you.”
She gripped my fingers. After that, we sat in silence for what felt like quite a while, each of us alone with our own grief and trauma.
“His name wasn’t Borden,” she said suddenly and fiercely. “Not anymore. Those people… they didn’t know how to love him. They don’t deserve to have their name on his grave.” She laughed through a sneer. “But what’s one more insult to injury?”
It made sense that the Gladwells had Helms use the boy’s original last name for the contrived version of events the filthy Manip had twisted into everyone’s memories. “Belhollow” was not exactly a name you ran across every day. Questions would have been impossible to dismiss. But making sense didn’t make it right.
“We’ll get him a new one,” I said. “With the right name on it. And maybe something nice, not so plain. Something like ‘Beloved Son.’”
“That’s a lovely idea, sweetheart.” She gave me a blurry smile. “Now, how about you help this old woman off the ground before my knees lock up for good?”
My own legs weren’t wild about the idea of unfolding and holding me up again, but I managed to stand and help Belhollow up, too. As she dusted off her clothes, I registered for the first time that she was still wearing her infirmary scrubs.
And they are splattered with blood.
It was my nose that offered up that unsettling piece of information. My eyes had completely overlooked the splotches lurking between the innocent cartoon characters printed on the light blue fabric. I had never understood that practice—was seeing my doctor dress in children’s television characters supposed to make me feel more at ease? Just one more brand of goofiness I’d always been immune to.
Belhollow noticed my goggle-eyed stare and brushed at the spots as though they weren’t stains. “Sorry about all this, honey. Never had time to change. I went straight from the infirmary to the Board Room and then to my office after everyone left. I was finally coming down the stairs to go home when I felt the vibration of the lift. The closet door was locked, but—” she patted her chest pocket and it jangled, “—I have the Chancellor’s keys now.”
My mind wound back to the moment back in the tunnel when the lift began moving upward again. I’d been so close to avoiding all of this. But Rahm had used his kinetic power to whisk me off the platform at the last second. He was determined that I would experience Isaak’s last terrifying memory—so determined that it was foolish for me to think he wouldn’t have kept trying, night after night after night. Maybe it was better to have gotten it over with. At least now I had some answers.
And a whole new slew of questions.
Belhollow slid her arm around my shoulders and guided me away from Isaak’s grave. “Come on, let’s get you back to the land of the living. You’re too young to be hanging out down here with this crew.” She waved her other hand at the walls and their creepy shelves full of shrouded bodies.
As we walked through the rows of low, flat, identical headstones, I pulled my robe tighter around my chest. There was a chill in the air that my wolf fur had obscured when I first entered this monstrous catacomb. The only other underground cavern I’d been in was the Shiftnasium arena, where the temperature was always just about perfect. Was this one climate-controlled to preserve the remains, or did it have something to do with the memories drifting off the old bones like ghosts?
Ghosts that only I can see…
“Dean Belhollow—I mean… Chancellor?” I waited, and she gave me an encouraging smile. “How did you know what was happening? When you found me? How did you know what I’d seen?”
Belhollow squeezed my shoulders. “I’ve known you were a Scent Seer since last Halloween, honey. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. Not like I’ve never seen Miss Shirley get the truth from—”
“Miss Shirley!” I threw my arm out in front of Belhollow, frozen to the spot. “When I smelled Miss Shirley—”
Belhollow’s head snapped toward me, eyes wide with alarm. “You did what?”
My neck shrank into my shoulders, and heat crawled up my face. “Well, I didn’t want to.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did Rahm make you?”
I shook my head. “No. It was more like… she did.”
Now her eyebrows really shot up. “She… Miss Shirley? Made you… smell her?”
My face flamed so hot I must have looked like one of the torches on the wall. “I know it sounds nuts, but you know I hate sounding nuts more than anything in the world, so you have to believe me… it was like she was calling to me…”
Belhollow let out a nervous laugh, probably thinking I was turning out like my psycho brother after all. “Baby girl, I don’t mean to be crass here, but don’t you think that was probably just because she’s, you know…? How do I say this… um, relatively fresh?”
“No!” I huffed, but then immediately reconsidered. I did like that explanation better than the nonsense coming from my own mouth. “Well, maybe. But the point is when I smelled her... I saw her whole life flash before my eyes. And it explained a lot of things. Like, I know the Board is just a branch of the Tooth & Claw Society now, and they fund the Academy in exchange for the culled students, though I didn’t see what they do with them, so I’m no help there, but—”
Belhollow tightened her grip around my shoulders, pushing me back into motion. “I am obviously aware of all this, Remi, and I will tell you the same thing Dean Mardone told you and Laith earlier this semester—let us grown-ups handle it.”
Bristling, I snapped, “I am a grown-up now. Is this a college, or a kindergarten? I can help.” I drew myself up to my full height and said, as imperiously as I could muster under the circumstances, “I am the Scent Seer after all.”
She chuckled. “Yes, you are, so you can help by doing what Scent Seers do best—finding new students. If your services are needed elsewhere, I’ll be the first to let you know. Until then, it would be best if you forget everything you learned from Miss Shirley.”
“Why?” I demanded.
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Because I said so, Remi.”
“That’s not an answer,” I whined.
But Belhollow said no more, and my frustration grew with every step. It didn’t help matters that the spaces between my toes were filling up with tiny pieces of cave grit. Or that a confusing jumble of images from other people’s lives flickered across my mind every time I took a breath. Now that my focus wasn’t lasered in on Isaak, it seemed everyone in the crypt had something they wanted to show me.
