Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,40
If she turned tail and ran now, what was going to happen to Alex? Sure, he was a dumbass. But it was also partly her fault for being best friends with a dumbass.
A warm glow filled the hallway, followed by a soft, squeaking noise. Tala found herself looking down at the firebird, who stared back up at her and waggled its tail. She breathed easier.
“Great. What are you up to now? Did you find Alex?”
The firebird grinned through its beak and hopped away, skidding to a stop at the end of the corridor and ambling into the boys’ locker room. It poked its head out a few seconds later and chirped at her, impatient.
A loud shuffling sound echoed down the hallway. The firebird ducked back into the room, and Tala spun around, heart pounding.
“Langdon!” she gasped, relieved at the sight of the round-faced boy moving toward her. Langdon Schillings was captain of the school’s chess club, the type who always had a good word to say about everyone. On his heels was Vivi Summers, the editor-in-chief for the Elsmore Gazette.
The smile on her face froze when both drew nearer. The duo moved at a peculiar lurching gait, dragging their legs like they had difficulty controlling them. Their skin was oddly blue-tinted, and the color of their eyes were a strange white, leached of all hues to the point that their irises were nearly transparent.
The Langdon she remembered had green eyes, and behind her rimmed glasses, Vivi’s had been brown.
More students appeared: Kenneth Somerset, her lab partner for one semester; Rhett McGowan, a boy she was in history with; Sophie Alcantara, the student council secretary, and many more. Eerily silent, they moved toward her with the same blank, colorless eyes.
“Guys?” Tala backed away. “Guys?”
There was only silence, and the sounds of dragging feet, as if their own body weight was a sudden and unaccustomed hindrance.
Tala wheeled around and ran, nearly stumbling when another half-dozen students poured in from the other end of the hall, blocking the exit.
“Alex!” she yelled, panicked, but there was no reply.
“Spellbreaker.” The whisper rose from Vivi’s lips, the sibilant hiss a stark opposite to the girl’s normally timid tones.
“Spellbreaker.” The murmur spread, a strange fervent hunger glittering in the otherwise expressionless faces. “Spellbreaker.”
Tala barreled into the boys’ locker room, slamming the door closed behind her.
The firebird nudged at her feet, crinkled its beak up at her, and flew off toward the row of lockers. “Thanks a lot,” Tala snapped after it. “You should be protecting me too, you jerk!”
From behind the lockers came a noise that sounded suspiciously like a raspberry.
Tala dragged a long bench across the doorway to block the entrance, then piled on a few more chairs for good measure.
There was a quiet breeze coming from somewhere, and she shivered. She didn’t remember the locker rooms being this cold.
The wind came again, stronger this time, and Tala felt her teeth chatter. She looked at her hands and saw, to her surprise, small puffs of air leaving her mouth as she exhaled.
“Hello?” The embarrassingly quavering echo of her voice bounced off the walls, so she doubled down and roared the next words out. “If this is some prank, then I swear by every Kardashian you know that I am going to…”
She stopped. There was movement at the other end of a row of lockers, an odd, scraping noise. Cautious, she crept toward the sound.
The air grew colder.
Tala was a practical girl. She got down on her hands and knees, pressing the side of her face against the floor, so she could peer through the gaps between the lockers and floor.
What she saw were a pair of feet, standing roughly three or so rows from where she knelt. The skin was an unhealthy blue. There was a quick, cracking sound every time it jerked forward, one foot twitching over the other in a parody of movement, and small particles were forming on the ground it had trodden on, leaving behind a path of glassy ice.
Tala’s heart felt as if it were threatening to punch its way out of her chest. Her rational mind argued against the existence of ghosts and the undead, but was promptly overridden by the part of her that stopped screaming inside her head long enough to remind her not only was there currently a firebird loose in the area, but she was also probably definitely being hunted down by a malicious Snow Queen, and therefore natural laws need not apply.