Page 8 of The Goddess is Awakened
Simple kindness was rare. Especially when you were me. The witch and the Hellhound probably thought it was nothing to thank me for bringing their luggage and introducing themselves to me, but it was pretty significant because it never happened. Most people either made shitty comments or wanted to be as far away from me as possible.
I didn’t know why I was this way. I didn’t even knowwhatI was. I knew if I fucked off to some remote corner with the internet, I might be able to figure that out. For some reason, I kept being repeatedly drawn to the Academy of the Profane, where I had to do manual labor, and the students were sometimes worse than the adults.
The Library of the Profane should have been a better option. It was full of obscure and sometimes dangerous magical texts. The Library would pretty much forcibly remove you from the premises, and the grounds would become permanently invisible to you if the library thought you intended to use the contents for ill will.
I didn’t know what the library’s magical system would make of me. I had no magic. It felt like I wassupposedto. I had no intention of using it for anything but finding out what I was. I would have tried, but I kept feeling in my gut it wouldn’t help me.
For some reason, it was the Academy of the Profane I kept coming back to. And I did it a lot under different names, several decades apart when no one would remember me. It would get more complicated in the future if the same thing that always happened occurred again. Employee records were now digital, and many had photos now.
There wassomethingat the Academy of the Profane that would answer everything. There were massive gaps in my memories. It was like someone wiped them before a certain point in my life. Or maybe I was just defective in more ways than the one everyone noticed because there were a lot of chunks after that missing, too.
I didn’t always end up here. Most of the time, I preferred living in cities populated with mostly humans to cities like Profane that were full of supernaturals. Humans called Profane Salem, but I’d been around the supernaturals enough to know that they called it Profane because of the massacre. Humans asked fewer questions and treated me slightly better, and nothing bad ever happened.
I’d get these pulls to Profane, and it was always the Academy. I never knew what I was looking for, but the same thingalwayshappened. I wasn’t violent, even with how supernaturals always treated me. I couldn’t afford to be. I might not have magic, but I was always the biggest person I knew.
Every timeI ended up at the Academy of the Profane, I’d start having blackouts. I had all this missing time I couldn’t account for where I had no idea what I’d done. A sympathetic witch who was willing to overlook how uncomfortable I made them could have helped, but I couldn’t ask anyone for help.
You see, every time my blackouts started, students were being brutally murdered on campus. The Academy was covering it up, and the only reason I was even in the know was because I was always in maintenance and got stuck cleaning up the blood after the bodies were taken away.
It was a lot of blood. They knew I wouldn’t talk, so they told me someone was removing students' hearts with almost surgical precision. I didn’t know any of the students. I hadn’t had any negative interactions with any of them.
I didn’t even have any medical training that I could remember. I would have made a mess if it were me. I still couldn’t say itwasn’tme. Between the blackouts and parts of my life I didn’t remember at all, I could very well be capable of that shit.
My mission always shifted to finding answers about me and finding out who was murdering students. It always ended because the Academy and the Paranormal Investigation Bureau always came to the same conclusion. It must be the strange man in maintenance who made the entire campus uncomfortable.
I hadn’t found any proof it was me, and neither had they. They were looking for it, though. I disappeared before they could. I’d been drawn to this place twice, and the exact same thing happened. So, I ignored it when I was drawn here a third time.
I’d been working construction in a primarily human town. I had a nice apartment and a few friends. I’d been ignoring the pull to Profane for a really long fucking time. It got insanely stronger nineteen years ago, and I finally gave in two years ago. I got a job in maintenance at the Academy again.
The students and faculty were the same. They were just as awful to me, with the exception of the two tonight. No one had been murdered yet, but I felt like now, more than ever, that I wassupposedto be here. I might get answers this time.
And maybe I would get them before anyone died. I really hoped it wasn’t me killing them.
church
They really should have asked my grandfather’s input on the new headmaster. He ran this academy for ages and was one of the best. I ran away from my father in Ireland to live with him when I was sixteen. It was all very carefully planned, and my grandfather could have sided with my father and sent me right back. He hadn’t spent that much time around me. Before I was born, my father moved to Ireland, and we rarely visited.
My grandfather took one look at me on his doorstep at sixteen, a fully-formed vampire with their magic, and demanded to know how that happened. It wasn’t an accident like anyone else with magic my age. My dad tried to drown me in the bathtub when I was seven so I could be a vampire faster.
And then I ended up being a very rare energy vampire. Nosferatu created us alongside the bloodsucking kind. There used to be a lot more of us. The supernatural community turned on us and tried to wipe us out like the humans did to them. We were excellent at reading and manipulating emotions.
Mostof the time that just involved helping with negative emotions, but if you were my father, it meant using a kid to sniff out disloyal people in his business and manipulate people he was trying to close business deals with. That wasn’t me. I hated every minute of it.
The rest of my family was like that, too. My grandfather moved us to Profane when he turned eighteen to get away from them and started a family. My dad moved us back to all the toxicness, and I ran back to the one person I knew was sane and might let me stay.
My grandfather had been a fantastic headmaster here. He was retired and on the board now. He thought Gabriel Morningstar should get the job. Lindsay Krauss had been a student here when he was running things, and Gabriel taught dark arts under him. His input should have been given the most weight instead of some snooty-ass board member.
I was willing to give her a chance. She had a fantastic opportunity that my grandfather didn’t. A primordial god contacted the board about teaching history. My grandfather had always talked to me like I was on the same level as he was and never lied to me. He wasn’t upset Headmaster Krauss would have a god teaching under her when he didn’t. He was happy for her.
I was pretty sure I knew about it before everyone else. For some reason, the other faculty seemed surprised Azren was up there. That was when I figured out exactly what kind of headmaster she would be. She disrespected a fucking god’s pronouns and, for some reason, decided to meddle in dorm assignments.
My grandfather didn’t tell me we’d all be belching like savages, but he did warn me that my roommate assignment might end up total hell at first but would make sense by the time I graduated. No headmaster in the history of this university had ever tried to fuck with it because the ghosts always knew what they were doing. I also noticed one girl, who I later learned was her daughter, didn’t touch her pastry.
My roommate situation was okay. I was hoping for a double and only having to deal with one, but I ended up with a quad. I had a kitsune, a brujo who had lost their hearing during a dodgeball match when a witch played dirty and exploded an earth ball, which wasn’t supposed to do that, right by his head, and a lion shifter who wasn’t a student, but his interpreter.
They were all cool as shit, and we vibed well. I didn’t pick up any nasty emotions that would have made rooming with them utterly miserable. Oscar and Ren grew up next door to each other and were dating. It was sheer luck they both got in and ended up roommates.
Ren’s little sister was deaf, so Oscar already knew sign language when his hearing was damaged. They told him there was a slight chance it might return, but it hadn’t. West was here to help Oscar in class. They were all teaching me sign language because Oscar was still trying to learn to read lips.
