Page 26 of Phoenix Academy: Madness

None of them shine as brightly as my mother's spirit standing a mere foot away.

She's always been strong and vivacious. Her energy and spiritual magic guided me through growing up on my own with the Heretic on my trail. Of course her spirit is just as strong in death as she was in life.

But she shouldn't be here.

"You should've moved on," I tell her, my voice choked with tears. "You're supposed to be at rest. With Lizzy."

"What do you see?" Mage Auerbach asks.

His voice overlaps with Mom saying, "Lizzy isn't here. I came back to watch over you. I felt it when you returned to life, and I knew that you needed me."

Tears roll down my cheeks. "She didn't move on? Or you're stuck between... I don't understand. I thought by now the spirits would have taken you both to the afterlife."

Mom opens her mouth to respond, but all that comes out is the sound of wind whistling through an empty cavern, like a cold endless scream.

Something inside the rune changes.

Normally I reach out towards the spirit realm and tap into its powers.

This time I feel the spirits reaching for me from the beyond and yank at my clothes and skin.

Their fingers are as cold as ice. Their nails scratch against my skin. Howls fill my ears, and darkness covers my eyes.

I stumble back, frightened and alone. My mother has disappeared in the cloud of dark spirits. Desperate, I try to reach outside the rune, to find the warmth and light that I know is somewhere past its borders, but I can't reach that far.

Every step I take draws me back to the middle.

The magic of the rune won't let me out.

Opening my mouth, I scream—but it can't be heard over the wailing of the spirits and the gnashing of their teeth.

Then. Warm hands on my waist. A grip pulling at my shoulders. Teeth clamping down on the hem of my skirt and jerking backwards.

I fall more than step out of the boundary of the rune. Reggie's arms wrap around my middle, and my back is up against his warm chest. The hands on my shoulders are Xavier's, and David, still in wolf form, has taken a chunk out of my red skirt. It flaps between his wolf fangs, and cold air grazes my upper leg.

"You okay?" Reggie's voice is so close that warm air brushes against my earlobe. "We smelled something off, and you were frozen in the middle of that damn triangle thing. That new teacher dude said that he was fixing it, but he was taking forever, so I figured I'd just yank you out."

"Thanks," I murmur, very aware of his breath, his warmth, the closeness of his spirit. "I think I've got it now."

I manage to get on my own two feet and break away from the twins' grips. Meanwhile, David-the-wolf spits out the piece of skirt fabric in his teeth.

"That shouldn't have been possible." Mage Auerbach's voice, full of shock, draws my gaze back to the rune circle, which looks normal and not haunted now. "No one can reach inside a protective rune and touch someone inside, much less pull them out. It shouldn't have happened."

Xavier says, "Weren't you working on unlocking it, though? I assume that's what happened."

"I wasn't done." He points to a symbol on the floor like we should all be able to tell what it means. "Somehow you three managed to reach into the spirit realm itself to pull her out. Fascinating. We should run some tests—"

I don't want to be an overeager mage's experiment, so I cut in. "What the hell happened in there? I was attacked by ghosts, basically. Was it some kind of trick or something?"

"No trick." He holds his hands up as if warding off my accusations. "I just wanted to see if your phoenix flames were affected at all by increasing your connection to the spirit realm. But those spirits... I've never seen anything like it."

"You could see it?" Reggie asks. "All I could do was smell it."

"Yeah, me too." David makes a noise, and Xavier adds, "David too. He's stuck in wolf form, by the way. That or he's being a stubborn asshole because he doesn't want to socialize with us."

Petra reminds me that she's here by saying, "I think your magic fucked the wolf up, Wolfe."

Reggie groans. "Dani is rubbing off on you, Pet."

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