AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then, as quickly as it had come upon me, it was over. I felt my body go limp in my seat and I slumped forward over my desk. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know that every face in class was turned curiously in my direction. Despite the shock of what had just happened, I felt the burn of embarrassment sting my cheeks.
“Madly, what is it?”
Jersey’s concerned voice was near my right ear, concern I knew would be mirrored in her sea foam eyes.
“Hey, James, quit trying to scare us,” Aidan whispered into the other ear. Though his comment was meant to sound casual, I could hear the genuine fear in his voice.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes to Aidan’s. I knew by the frown that appeared on his smooth brow that he knew something was seriously wrong.
“Mr. Laraby, Madly’s not feeling well, can we take her down the hall to the bathroom?”
“She doesn’t look very good, does she?” Mr. Laraby asked, eyeing me suspiciously. “No, why don’t you take her to the nurse’s office?”
“Yes, sir,” Aidan replied, coming around to throw my arm around his shoulder and slip his hand around my waist. With virtually no effort, he hauled me to my feet.
“Jersey, grab her bag.”
I heard the rustling of Jersey jumping to obey Aidan and then the patter of her feet as she followed behind us.
As soon as we were clear of Mr. Laraby’s room, Aidan steered me to the long line of army green lockers on one side of the hall and propped me up against the cool metal.
“What was that all about? What is it?”
At first when he asked, I wasn’t sure how to answer, wasn’t really sure what had happened. But then, as the fog cleared from my mind, an image was left in its wake. It was the mental picture of someone I recognized.
“It’s Lady Sheelah.”
As my vision came back into ultra-clear focus, I saw Aidan’s pupils dilate and, for the first time since I’d known him, the jokester disappeared into the royalty that he was born to be.
“Then we need to get to her.”
With that, he took my hand, pulled me away from the lockers and practically dragged me down the hall. I’d forgotten all about Jersey until I heard her speak up from somewhere behind us.
“Um, hello? Is somebody gonna tell me what the devil is going on?”
“Come on, Jersey,” Aidan called over his shoulder. “Keep up.”
“I’m trying, but not all of us are giants,” she snipped.
When I turned to look back at her, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her short legs flying in her efforts to reach us.
“Just like not all of us are shrimps,” I teased.
“A shellfish joke? Seriously? Are you actually gonna go there?”
Jersey’s expression said she was skeptical. I smiled again.
It helped to have her around to lighten the mood. It gave me a reason not to focus on the sinking feeling that was pulling at my heart, a feeling that assured me that what had happened in Mr. Laraby’s classroom did not bode well.
The three of us made our way quickly from Building C to the dorms that crouched in a tight circle in the center of campus. Veritas Academy was a private school, so our handler, Lady Sheelah, stayed in our dorm acting as our Resident Advisor, a very human-looking position.
As we arrived at her room, Aidan took the lead and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so he knocked a second time. When still there was no sign of Lady Sheelah, he reached for the knob. It was unlocked, turning easily.
Pushing the door open a bit, Aidan poked his head into the room and said, “Hello? Sheelah?”
When there was no response, my breath began to come faster. Something was desperately wrong; I could feel it.
“Stay here,” Aidan ordered as he swung the door wide and stepped inside.
He disappeared into the dark interior of the small room and Jersey and I looked at each other. Then, as she so often did, Jersey said exactly what I was thinking.
“As if!”
I took the first step into Lady Sheelah’s room. Jersey was right behind me. I felt her fingers fist in the tails of my shirt, tails I’d purposely left hanging out over my cheesy blue plaid skirt.
Leaving my shirt untucked was my tribute to individuality among all the other uniform-clad students. “They” frowned upon it, but Jersey and I had decided two months ago that they could make us wear a uniform at Veritas Academy, but they could never make us all look the same. For Jersey, that meant wearing lots of costume jewelry and fingernail polish in every color of the rainbow.
In the quiet of the room, I heard nothing but the smack of Jersey’s lips as she chomped on her gum.
“Jersey, shh,” I whispered over my shoulder.
“I can’t help it. I’m ‘nervous chewing’,” she explained in a hushed voice.
I don’t know how it was possible that I hadn’t yet become accustomed to her loud gum-chewing. She’d done it almost all our lives, ever since she’d bought a pack of Hubba Bubba on our first trip to dry land.
Doing my best to tune it out, I called softly to Aidan.
“Over here,” came his response.
The normal tones with which he spoke eased my fretting mind. In fact, I was just about to relax when I rounded the corner and saw him standing over Lady Sheelah.
From behind Aidan’s shoulder, I could only see her head. Her dark brown hair was spread out around her, fanned out almost purposefully. Her face was turned to one side, her expression blank, her jaw slack. When I saw the splatters of silver on her pale cheek, I gasped. There was only one thing I knew of that looked like that. It would’ve been red inside her body, but outside it…
Numbly, I edged my way around Aidan. My stomach rebelled at the sight that lay before my eyes.
At the foot of her twin bed, Lady Sheelah lay prone on the floor, surrounded by a pool of liquid silver. It was mercury, the blood of the mermaid.
Connect with M. Leighton at
mleightonbooks.blogspot
Other Books by M. Leighton
Blood Like Poison Series
Fragile
Madly Series
Nine Lives Series
The Eclipse Series
The Fahllen Series
Wiccan Series
Please enjoy this excerpt from my Young Adult Contemporary Novel
GOING UNDER
1 Mad Skills
Jessie
It was two weeks until I officially began classes at East Franklin High as the new guy, but today I was getting a preview of my new teammates and competition on the football field. From what I had heard and read about Coach Osborne, he was serious about this team, and giving anything less than my best wouldn’t earn a much needed position on first string. The spot was necessary if I planned to get a football scholarship and get the hell out of the place I currently hung my hat.
I drove to the football field. The parking lot next to the field house didn’t look like it was filled with vehicles belonging to high school kids – it looked more like valet parking at The Peabody. My old jalopy definitely didn’t fit in, so I took this as the first clue that I wouldn’t either.
I joined the crowd of guys sitting on the bleachers and the man standing before us announced, “I’m Coach Osborne and this is my assistant, Coach Sheffield. Before I can put you on the field, I need a copy of your physical.”
We didn’t have to get physicals at Collinsville, so what was up with that? A physical meant seeing a doctor, which required money I didn’t have. I thought of the injury to my shoulder, wondering what I would do if I couldn’t find a doc to release me to play because of the extensive trauma. Physical therapy had helped, but it wasn’t a hundred percent and I still had a lot of pain, which I'd chosen to deal with, rather than control with narcotics.
I watched the other players as they lined up to turn in their physicals and thought about how some things never changed for me. I had spent my entire life raising my hand to tell someone I didn’t have the things I need
ed and here I stood, 18 years old, still doing the same thing.
