Chapter 100: Too Late

Astrid

I kept walking with Ivy’s messages still open on my phone, glancing at them every few steps like they might rearrange themselves into something less alarming. East wing. Please hurry. My unease grew with every step I took away from the main buildings, and I almost turned back twice, my thumb hovering over Reed’s contact both times. But then I thought of Ivy, my roommate, my friend, the one person at this academy who’d never once made me feel like an outsider, and I couldn’t just ignore her if she genuinely needed me.

I’ll just check, I told myself again. This time the thought didn’t comfort me at all.

The farther I walked from the main academy, the quieter everything became. No students. No voices. Just my own footsteps echoing off stone I didn’t recognize. I pulled out my phone and called Ivy again, and got nothing, the line ringing out into silence before I ended the call myself. I stopped walking.

"Ivy?" I called out.

No answer. My phone buzzed in my hand, and I jumped hard enough to nearly drop it. A new message from Ivy. I’m here.

I looked up at the old east wing rising ahead of me, and something about it made my skin crawl. I typed back where, and got nothing in response. I called again. Nothing. My fear was real now, no longer something I could talk myself out of, and I reached for Reed’s contact with my thumb actually hovering over it this time.

Then I heard it. Someone crying, faint, coming from somewhere inside the building. I froze.

"Ivy?"

The crying stopped instantly. My heart pounded against my ribs. I knew I should leave, every instinct in my body was screaming at me to leave, but then the voice came again, and it sounded exactly like her.

"Astrid?"

I moved before I could stop myself.

The door closed behind me with a soft, final sound the moment I stepped inside, and I spun around fast, but there was nothing there. Just an empty hallway, dusty and quiet, old classrooms lining both sides like they’d been abandoned decades ago. I walked deeper in.

"Ivy?"

Nothing. Then, "Astrid, help me," drifted from somewhere ahead, and I turned sharply toward a classroom door standing slightly open. I walked toward it even as every instinct told me not to. Ivy could be hurt. I pushed the door open and stopped dead.

The classroom was empty.

My stomach dropped. "Ivy?" I said again, and got only silence in return. I backed out into the hallway and pulled out my phone. No signal. I stared at the screen, my mouth forming a useless what before I even looked up.

The hallway looked different. Longer. I knew this hallway, I had just walked through it a minute ago, but now it seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me, one classroom bleeding into another, then another, more doors than the building should have had. My heartbeat slammed against my chest. An illusion. My mind went immediately to Estelle.

"Estelle?" I called, my voice echoing strangely down the corridor. No answer came back.

Then I saw her. Ivy, standing at the far end of the hallway, her head bowed low.

"Ivy?" I took a step toward her. She didn’t move. "Ivy, are you okay?"

She raised her head slowly, and I froze. Something was wrong with her face, not injured, just wrong, like my eyes couldn’t quite hold onto the shape of it no matter how hard I tried. I stepped back instinctively. Ivy smiled at me.

Then she disappeared.

I turned and ran for the exit, but the hallway had changed again, the door I’d come through simply gone. I stopped, my breathing turning ragged and uneven.

"This isn’t funny!" I shouted into the empty space.

No one answered. Then I heard a different voice, one that stopped my entire body cold.

"Astrid."

My mother’s voice. Exactly as I remembered it, warm and familiar in a way that made my chest ache before I even turned around. She was standing at the end of the hallway, alive, smiling at me the way she used to smile when she counted coins on her bed.

"Mom?" The word came out broken.

I took one step toward her before I stopped myself. She was dead. I knew that. I had watched her die through a crack in the wall.

"You’re not real," I said, my voice shaking.

Her expression shifted, and for one fractured second I thought I saw something else underneath the illusion, someone else entirely, before the hallway lurched and changed around me again. I stumbled backward, turned, and ran.

My phone slipped from my hand as I ran and I caught it against my chest, fumbling to call Reed. The call wouldn’t connect. I tried Xander next. Nothing. My panic climbed higher with every failed attempt, until I reached for them a different way, through the bond, through whatever thread connected the three of us now.

I could feel them. Faintly. Somewhere out there. My chest loosened for one desperate second of hope. Reed, I reached, pushing everything I had into it. Xander.

For one second, something answered.

Then pain exploded through my skull and I screamed, my body slamming against the wall as my legs gave out beneath me. Something had blocked it, not just distance, something deliberate. Magic. Someone had known about the bond. Someone had prepared for exactly this.

I forced myself upright, my back against cold stone. "Who are you?" I called out.

A voice answered from somewhere I couldn’t see, calm and almost amused. "Someone who’s been waiting."

I spun around. Nothing. I backed away, my hands shaking. "What do you want?"

A soft laugh drifted through the empty hallway.

"You."

My blood turned to ice.

I ran again, but I didn’t get far before a hand closed around my arm and yanked me backward. I screamed, fighting, kicking, twisting against a grip that didn’t budge no matter how hard I pulled. A hand clamped over my mouth and I bit down as hard as I could, hard enough to taste blood that wasn’t mine, and the person holding me cursed and loosened just enough for me to wrench free.

"Reed!" I screamed into the empty corridor. "Xander!"

I reached for the bond again, desperate, throwing everything I had left into it, and for a moment I thought I felt them, closer now, or maybe I was only imagining it because I needed to so badly. Then something cold pressed against my skin, and my strength drained out of me all at once. My knees buckled beneath me.

I tried to stay awake. I tried to twist my head enough to see who was holding me, but the hallway had already started to blur, the walls dissolving into darkness that swallowed everything whole. Footsteps surrounded me, more than one person, their voices too distant to make out clearly.

Then a voice whispered close against my ear, low and satisfied.

"Finally."

My eyes widened. I didn’t recognize it. My fingers went slack and my phone slipped free, hitting the floor with a crack that split the screen down the middle. I watched it through vision that wouldn’t focus anymore, watched the screen light up one last time with a single message.

Too late.

I tried to reach for it. My fingers barely twitched.

Then the darkness closed over everything, and I was gone.