Hades Academy: Fourth Semester Read online

  “The men in this class will have their work cut out for them,” Lamoureux began her latest lecture. “Despite what human culture will have you think, men become scared much faster. When a female demon takes a man home and transmorphs, voilà, he is suddenly in fear for his life. On the contrary, human women are much, much braver. It takes a great deal to frighten them. They are strong, these human women.”

  If I were in a better mood, I would’ve yelled out an excited “woot!” for women being strong, but the thought wasn’t actually all that inspiring given my own family history.

  Damn, I’m a sourpuss lately. So bummed about my mom that I can’t even get pumped for some good ol’ fashion female empowerment.

  Next to me, Aleks was still taking notes dutifully. I wondered whether or not he actually got any, well, enjoyment out of this class, or if his interest was purely academic.

  God, I was sounding like Morgan. Determined that everyone needed to pair up. Maybe this was part of my stupid seduction demon instincts.

  No.

  “Can I help you?” Aleks’s ice-blue eyes were on me. I shook my head.

  “No thanks. I’m taking notes up here.” I tapped my forehead. Then I frowned. “You look awfully chipper.”

  “What is...chipper?” Aleks said.

  “I just mean to say that you’re not, you know, exhausted from the party? Hungover?”

  “That does not happen to me,” Aleks said simply. “But if you need help, a raw egg is recommended. Followed by a shot of horseradish vodka.”

  That didn’t seem like the ideal cure. Frankly, I’d rather stay hungover.

  I tried to tune back into the lecture to distract myself from the thought of wolfing down more alcohol and turning my stomach again.

  “A danger for seduction demons,” said the professor, “is that we find too much pleasure in the pleasurable parts of our work. That we simply forget that creating terror is the true nature of what we do. We should not”—she slid a look at Gerard—”how do you say?

  “Catch feelings,” growled Gerard. He was clearly classic alpha material. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought he was some kind of werewolf shifter.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “The feelings, they should not be caught. Your humans, your victims, are just that. Their value is in the fear that you may engender in them. To make them rely on you and then transmute that into pure terror. Our own emotions can complicate things. But the best seduction demons are the ones who keep their, how do I say?” She tapped the corner her of her eye. “Les yeux sur le prix.”

  “Eyes on the prize,” Gerard supplied helpfully.

  I couldn’t help but think about what professor Rouse had said during our fancy high-level demon class. If my mom had been at Hades, she’s been in this class, although probably not with the same professor since Lamoureux looked a lot younger than Rouse. And she’d heard some version of this instruction. Taken it to heart. Burned through countless human men including my father. And when she, as Gerard would say, caught feelings...it ended up turning her into the worst version of herself. Killing him. Almost killing me, her daughter.

  If we talked about anything else in class that day, I didn’t remember it.

  Except that later that night, in the common room, I realized I had no way to do the homework. And it occurred to me that if today was the day we were learning to avoid catching feelings, then that was probably something I should really take to heart. I asked Teddy if he had notes from class.

  “I...” His face went red. “I was passing notes with Zelda,” he admitted. “So I don’t exactly have...I mean, they’re notes, but they’re not notes that...”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, I definitely don’t want to read them.”

  On the armchair to my right, Morgan scowled. “You guys got to have all the fun in seduction class.” She gestured at her textbook. “I’m just learning all the things that it’s possible for humans to be jealous of. And you know what it is, mainly? Money and hotness. All you humans”—she gestured at me, which I didn’t really mind—”are insecure. And poor. Or you think you’re poor.”

  “I mean...I slept under a bridge for weeks at a time,” I commented mildly. “I think I genuinely am poor. Or was, at least.”

  Morgan waved her hand. “Yes, but I will never be trying to induce jealousy in you, Nova. Anyway, point is, I’m jealous.”

  “Well that’s kind of ironic,” I quipped. Morgan was buried back in her textbook and didn’t notice. Karolina, meanwhile, was filling out something that looked like a demon crossword but had something to do with sigils or runes or something...I had no idea if it was homework or something she did for fun. Probably didn’t matter either way.

  “I’m going to get some notes,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  No one noticed me slipping into the guys’ dorm, since at this point it was kind of a regular occurrence, and the only person who cared enough to call me out was Camilla anyway. My Doc Martens echoed through the halls as I made my way to the Infernal Three’s room and rapped my knuckles on the door.

  It opened, and it was Raines.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice more than a little brusque. “Can I help you?” He gave a wry smile. “Oh wait, you don’t like that. I forgot.”

  I folded my arms. “Actually, I was wondering if Aleks was around. I need some notes for...for class.”

  Raines looked behind him. “Nope. He might be in the library, I’m not sure.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  Did I? The thing was, even after all my angst about taking Raines down with me, even after all I thought about in seduction class and demon etiquette class, I still wanted to...well, grab Raines by the collar and kiss him until I couldn’t breathe. But more than that, I had something to prove. Something that, conveniently, I could really only prove by kissing him until I couldn’t breathe.

  As an answer to his question, I launched myself forward and locked my mouth to his. The same familiar taste and feel of him washed over me, like a drug, like some kind of magic potion that not even the highest level demon could produce. If he felt anything like this, I guess I could see why he’d come after me. It was addicting. Because I was here even though I knew I was playing with fire. Here to prove that I wasn’t like my mom.

  Raines didn’t hesitate. He grabbed me by my waist and pulled me in, hard, and soon we were kissing furiously, shedding my Hades Academy blazer and his tie and my blouse and his shirt until his hands were skimming all over my back and we were horizontal on his bed, my skirt low over my hips, his breathing hard in my ear.

  The urge to go further, further than we’ve ever gone, was insatiable. More instinct than desire. My stomach was lava hot, my fingertips electric with every inch of his skin that I traced down, and when he pressed his mouth into my neck, I groaned. He stayed there a moment, holding me to him.

  “Nova,” he whispered. “I need you.”

  The words shot through me like cold hard steel. Panic flooded my chest before I could even understand the feeling, the instantaneous reaction of the stab of a blade or the desperate need for air underwater. My body was screaming to me: get out. Get away. You’ve gone too far. Everything about seduction class came back to me: this was dangerous. For any seduction demon, and for me especially.

  For me to do to Raines.

  I jerked back up, pulling myself away, wrapping my arms around my askew bra and my goosebump skin. Raines beneath me was frowning, propped to his elbows, the corded muscles of his arms growing tight.

  “Nova? Did I say something?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, Raines, I thought I was...”

  I thought I was keeping us safe. Keeping him safe. I thought that I could do this without making it worse, without making him a victim. Without using him and making him need me.

  Nova. I need you.

  If things were different, it would’ve been the sexiest thing I’d ever heard.

  But now, for me, fo
r me with Raines, it was Armageddon.

  Thirty seconds later, I flew back down the hall, brushing angry tears from my face.

  I wouldn’t let Raines be my victim.

  Chapter Nine

  When I arrived at Lamoureux’s class the next day, she was nowhere to be found. Her boy-toy Gerard stood at attention by the window in complete silence, but there was no sign of our actual professor.

  As the minutes began to pass, we all started to get a little worried. Something just didn’t feel right.

  “Gods, I hope she’s okay,” Teddy moaned. “It isn’t like her to just disappear on us like this.”

  “Oh, Ted, you’re so sensitive,” Zelda replied, wrapping her arms around him. “I’m sure she’s just running a little late.”

  “Maybe we ask him,” Aleks suggested, gesturing toward Gerard, who continued to stand in silence even while we all talked amongst ourselves. “He talks much more than the last guy.”

  If he noticed that Aleks was talking about him, he sure as hell didn’t show it. In fact, there was something off about Gerard, too. Not just his stoicism—that was at least somewhat typical. But the look on his face was unspeakably sad, like some kind of depressed mime in an old black-and-white movie. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable.

  “I say we just wait!” I insisted with more than a bit of frustration. The situation was stressing me out way more than it should’ve been.

  Just like the last time my mother was watching me. Shit.

  But my intuition was telling me something. She was close. Really close. And that’s when she walked through the door—still the spitting image of me, just older and clearly weathered by the years. My body immediately entered into a state of panic. I was frozen.

  “Good morning class,” my mother snarled at the front of the room. “I’m afraid Professor Lamoureux is feeling a bit under the weather. I’ll be taking her place today.”

  “Oh wow, a substitute!” Teddy cheered. I forgot that he hadn’t the faintest idea what my mom actually looked like. Couldn’t he see the family resemblance, though?

  “I have but one lesson to teach,” she continued in the most sinister voice she could muster, like some kind of witch in a Disney cartoon. “And it’s that Nova can’t escape from who she really is. She’s exactly like me in every way. The sooner she understand that the better.”

  Aleks, Teddy, and Zelda all turned and stared at me.

  “She is right,” Aleks noted. “You are the same.”

  “I’ll say!” Teddy cheered in an overly perky tone that gave me the creeps.

  “I’m not!” I screamed in return. “I’m not her!”

  They continued staring at me with their mouths agape, only now in complete silence. What the actual fuck?

  “Just take a look at yourself,” my mom said, picking a small mirror off the desk. She slowly walked over to me, before dramatically raising the mirror to my face.

  And it was her staring back at me. I was my mother—she was right. And all I could think to do was scream my fucking lungs out.

  “Wake up!” Karolina yelled louder than I’d ever heard her. She was shaking me awake and the image of myself as my mother quickly began to fade away. I was safe and sound in the comfort of my own bed, with just a bit of moonlight shining through the window of my otherwise totally dark bedroom.

  A “holy shit” was all I could manage to say in reply.

  “It was just a nightmare,” Karolina said, her voice back to its usual near-whisper. “Everything’s okay, Nova.” She gave me a gentle little pat on the head.

  “Thank you,” I told her, still pretty damn frazzled. “I dreamt that...well, I don’t even know how to explain it.”

  She climbed up onto the bed and sat beside me. “I have nightmares sometimes, too. I’ll dream that I’m up on stage with my zanziphone in front of a huge audience, but when I start to play, I suddenly don’t remember how. Then everybody laughs at me and I run away in tears.”

  Okay, so maybe that wasn’t quite as traumatizing as dreaming about your evil mom who almost kidnapped you a few weeks before, but it was really sweet of Karolina to share something so personal.

  “And other times,” she continued, “I’m up on stage with my zanziphone, but then realize I’m completely naked.”

  Well, maybe I didn’t need to hear something that personal.

  “Nightmares are the worst,” I said.

  “You just have to keep reminding yourself that they’re not real. That’s what I do.”

  My worry—which I didn’t really want to share at the moment—was that the message of my nightmare was all too real. Maybe I was destined to turn out just like my mom.

  “Do you need me to lie in your bed until you fall asleep?” Karolina asked.

  “That would actually be really nice,” I found myself saying. Usually I was the type to want all that space to myself, but knowing somebody was right there sounded like exactly what I needed if I wanted to ever get back to sleep.

  When I woke up a few hours later the beams of moonlight through the window were replaced with rays of sunlight. Karolina had already left for her early morning orchestra practice. Most importantly of all, I was feeling a little better. Karolina had her quirks, but at times like these she felt like nothing less than the kindest demon in the world.

  I HAD TO GIVE PROFESSOR Mantel credit: if anybody else were teaching necromancy, I wouldn’t be able to take my mind off how the Children of Abaddon were trying to use it to communicate with and, ultimately, resurrect the devil. But she was so hip and had a way of making her lectures so interesting that it was easy to get my mind off the terrible stuff. Today she was discussing some real-life historical examples of necromancy.

  “There’s, of course, Rasputin, or as some people called him, the Mad Monk,” Mantel told us.

  I already knew that Rasputin was one of the most famous demons of all time thanks to Lattimore’s first-year Human History class. As an advisor to the tsars of Russia, he’d done plenty of meddling in the human world—perhaps too much meddling.

  “The tsar and tsarina employed Rasputin believing that he had a miraculous power to heal their sick young son Alexei. Which he technically was doing...by resurrecting poor little Alexei every time he passed into the world of the dead. Nobody knows exactly what methods of necromancy Rasputin was using, but needless to say, he was a master at his craft. The energy he expended to perform the resurrections arguably led to the Chaos that descended upon Russia, ultimately resulting in the death of the tsar’s entire family as well as Rasputin himself. Morbid, I know, but still one of the most fascinating examples of necromancy in our history.”

  Always guaranteed to get weird insights about the world here at Hades Academy.

  Her lecture, as always, was fascinating, and I was more than happy to leave the class with nary a thought of some stupid devil-worshipping cult when Mantel abruptly asked me to stay after class. And, honestly, I should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy to spend a whole day avoiding thinking about my mother. My bad.

  “Don’t worry, this isn’t urgent news or anything,” Mantel told me after the room cleared out. “Well, not exactly. But Lattimore and I have been working hard digging up some more information about the Children of Abaddon, and I wanted to fill you in.”

  “But why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “Ugh,” Mantel groaned. “Nova, you have got to stop devaluing yourself. We’re looking into it because we care about you. I mean, I also find this whole cult thing fascinating, and I’m eager to learn more, I’ll be honest. But Lattimore and I have been talking to every contact we’ve got because the safety of one student here equals the safety of all the students here.”

  A fascination with cults? It struck me just then that Mantel reminded me a lot of Raines’s ex-girlfriend Tavi, who was similarly obsessed with morbid stuff. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing—for a girl who used to be in love with my current hookup, I found Tavi to be totally cool. For
an angel, anyway.

  “Anyway,” Mantel said, “Dean Lattimore and I have turned up a little bit of new information about the Children of Abaddon. I wanted to share it with you right away. Lattimore wanted to tell you himself, but you know, dean duties called.”

  “Always with the dean duties,” I joked. Earlier this semester he seemed to think he’d be way less busy, but every time I’d seen him around he still looked like he was in a hurry. Honestly, I was surprised he hadn’t keeled over from a heart attack by now...if demons could have heart attacks. Which made me even more appreciative that he was spending any time at all looking into this stuff on my behalf. “What’d you two figure out?”

  “So, this isn’t something you should be alarmed about. Maybe on the contrary, actually! But according to a high-ranking source in the Regents government, the Children of Abaddon have been stepping up their recruiting efforts lately. Like, by a lot.”

  “Sorry to be blunt, but how can that possibly be something not to be worried about? As far as I’m concerned, that just means more cult members to come kidnap me while I stroll a few feet out of these front gates.”

  “It probably means they’re getting desperate,” she explained. “Apparently the Regents were pretty damn spooked that cult members were able to get so close to Hades Academy, and now they’re quietly redoubling their efforts to eradicate any and all cult activity. The Children of Abaddon are expecting a fight, and for that, they’re going to need to increase their numbers.”

  I wondered if this was true or if Mantel was just trying to spin it in a more positive light.

  “So for years they kidnap people to ritually sacrifice, but in the end the thing that makes the government want to take action is that they got within a few miles of their school? Like, really?”

  Mantel broke into laughter. “That’s the government for you. But at least they’re finally doing something. This whole situation could really be coming to a head, Nova. It might mean violence between the Children and the government, but it also means that you might not have to worry about your mom for much longer.”