The Puppet Master: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 4 Read online

  We took two cars. I loaded into Holden’s van with Pilar, Gabe, and Teresa, while Lia rode with Holly, Anji, and Ben in Victor’s borrowed car. Victor remained at home, foiled by the fading hours of afternoon sun.

  “Thanks again for letting me come,” Teresa said. She glowed with happiness, a wide grin on her face that hadn’t diminished since we picked her up.

  “Gotta keep you under my eye to guarantee you have more imagination than Sexy Cupcake or whatever it is the kids are dressing as for Halloween this year,” Gabriel quipped.

  “Sexy Cupcake?” Teresa rolled her eyes. “I have way more imagination than that. Besides, Sky is helping me with my costume.”

  My mate beamed. “Sky’s helping you? Great.”

  “Oh yeah,” I assured him. “Have a great one in place. We’re going as Sexy Pikachu and Sexy Eevee.”

  “Burn!” Holden said, drawing out the word. He and Pilar high-fived.

  They were such an unlikely pairing, but I loved their friendship. If it weren’t for my suspicions about who Pilar was really dating, I’d suspect them of hooking up.

  Maybe they were. Maybe she’d intentionally made it appear that she was sneaking off to hang out with Dain and—

  No. That was ridiculous.

  Gabriel grimaced at us. “Ha. Ha.”

  My poor mate. I leaned over and gave him a kiss. “We were thinking of going for some sort of theme. Maybe pirates.”

  “Pirates, really?” Gabriel took Halloween seriously and tended to pick gory costumes and maniac killers.

  “What’s wrong with pirates?” Holden asked. “Bruh, she has a little eyepatch for you and some clip-on feather extensions.”

  We picked on Gabriel the entire way to Holiday City, one of my favorite, least-visited stores because once I stopped inside, money spilled out of my purse like a fountain. There wasn’t a larger Christmas store in the state, and the inclusion of other holiday departments after its expansion two years ago had made the place a sprawling, vast wonderland of holiday goodies. Due to the high concentration of fae in Chicago, they’d added a section celebrating Mabon, Samhain, and other holidays for us. It always sold out.

  Of course, the lot was packed, so we had to park a block away.

  Not that anyone minded, except maybe Holly. She carried an open parasol to shade her from the bright sunshine, her expression dour as she inspected her complexion in a compact mirror and muttered about how she missed tanning. Even so, Lia linked her arm through Holly’s and beamed up at her. No one could resist Lia. No one.

  “You’re beautiful just the way you are, Holly.”

  “Says the only other person among us who can’t tan,” Holly retorted.

  By the time we reached the store, Holly had a small smile on her face. Me, she ignored entirely. Baby steps.

  “Ohmigosh, look at these, Sky!” Teresa called. She waved me over to a section devoted to all things pirate.

  “I am not going to sit on your shoulder saying ‘polly wants a cracker’ the whole night,” Gabe said. “That’s boring.”

  “Not if you’re an undead shoulder piece,” I said sweetly. “We’re going to be zombie pirates.”

  “That’s a little insensitive, don’t you think?” interjected Holly. “Thousands of people died to zombies and you’re making a joke of it less than a year later.”

  Ouch. The joking grins faded from Teresa and Gabriel’s faces.

  “Jesus, Holly,” Ben muttered before he wandered into the next shopping aisle with his basket.

  “Don’t ‘Jesus’ me when I’m not the one planning to make a mockery of a thousand people for a Halloween contest.”

  “Yo, girl, we get it,” Holden said, his voice measured and still friendly despite the bass of authority that spilled into his tone. “Sky made a mistake, but you don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

  Holly’s mouth opened again. Then, appearing to think better of her response, she muttered a quiet, “Sorry,” then moved to the end of the aisle.

  So much for our cursed crew, a la Pirates of the Caribbean. Teresa’s face fell—crumpled, really. She’d been excited about the idea, and so had I.

  “Guess I’ll go look for sexy cupcakes,” Teresa said.

  “I’ll go talk to her,” Gabe said.

  “And I’ll go see what crawled up Holly’s ass.”

  Lia took my hand and shook her head. “Not now. She did apologize.”

  “Barely.”

  “It’s a start.”

  I sighed. Lia really was a better person than me. “Fine. What are you going to be? There’s a cool witch’s costume over there on some sort of animatronic display. I saw it moving a minute ago.”

  “Where?” Lia asked. Her scarlet brows slid close together.

  When I turned to point out the costume near the front of the store, a stretch of empty space yawned between the two cashiers. I frowned and scanned the area for the display. Had I imagined it? “I could have sworn…”

  “You know what would be wonderful?” Lia started.

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s go as each other.”

  “Huh?”

  “You dress up as me and I’ll be you.”

  “You want to be a sylph?”

  “I want to be a kick-ass sentinel,” she clarified. “And a brunette.”

  “That’s…not a bad idea.”

  “You’ll be Queen Titania. I’ll put you in one of my dresses.”

  “And I can give you some of my gear!” The idea grew in my mind as I imagined pulling the rest of our friends in on the plan to scramble our identities. As long as we traveled together as a group for context, we had a winning plan. “I love it.”

  “Love what?” Ben asked when he returned.

  “We’re going to go as each other. Teresa can be Pilar.”

  “I actually like that idea,” Pilar muttered. “Simple, but brilliant.”

  “If only Dain were coming,” Gabriel said slyly, “Then I could be him.”

  “Maybe I’ll invite him,” I added.

  “Ben can be Holden. They’re both sandy blonds. No dye required.”

  Holden gave us a look. “I’m brown.” He had the entire Jason Momoa look going for him, his wavy hair streaked golden at the tips.

  “So am I,” I pointed out. “We’ll ignore skin color and only dye hair as needed. Glamours can handle eye color. It’ll be fun!”

  Anji blew out an exasperated breath and put her hands on her hips. “Does this mean we drove out all this way for nothing?”

  “Not at all.” I shot a glance to Holly, who had rejoined us but remained sullen and quiet. “We can still help Holly get things for the senior class haunted house. What do you need us to grab?”

  With an unspoken apology in her eyes, Holly turned to me. Lia was right. Some battles weren’t worth fighting right away. “We need phony cauldrons and fake blood. Lots of fake blood for this year’s haunted house. The price of alchemical supplies went up by double so we’re not brewing our own fog this year either. We need a machine. It’s literally cheaper to buy it than to make it for once.”

  “All right. Gabe, you go find a few gallons of fake blood and I’ll get fog machine juice.”

  “I’ll help Holly pick out a decent machine,” Ben offered.

  Once Holly rattled off the remaining other small odds and ends that were necessary for building her portion of the haunted house, our group split off to divide and conquer the Halloween supplies. Gabriel and Teresa went off one way, chatting amicably with Pilar about the potential identity swaps, while Holden lurked behind Lia and me.

  “Hey, is this the witch costume you saw earlier?” Lia asked, touching the spider-embroidered sleeve of a witch’s corseted dress.

  “Oh yeah, it is. An employee must have moved it.”

  “It’s pretty, and…” She took a look at the tag and swallowed. Despite becoming a queen, Lia still thought like a girl who grew up in a household unable to afford dollar-menu sandwiches. Living frugally was branded into he
r after a childhood of poverty. “Expensive. Good thing we don’t need it now, yes?”

  Leaning over netted me a glimpse of the outrageous price tag. Almost two hundred bucks.

  “Geez, what’s this thing made of? Silk or—ack!” A spider scuttled from the web pattern onto Lia’s hand. She laughed at my reaction and raised her hand. Or tried to. A string of webs lashed her from wrist to elbow.

  “Haha. Funny, Gabriel!” I called into the next aisle where I’d seen my mate just moments ago.

  “Funny, what?” he asked from the direction of the store checkout.

  He hadn’t noticed anything. Meanwhile, the webs still flew, flung with the force of a rocket. Lia cried out and tried to brush the spider from her, but several more spilled from under the witch’s dress.

  “Who’s doing this?!” I called, only for a cloud of bats to descend from the high ceiling. The lights flickered and blinked out, some of them exploding in showers of glass.

  A man across the store screamed, and more yells followed right after. But the scarier sound came from behind me, a hair-raising giggle that was straight out of a horror movie with clowns terrorizing children. Then a hand grabbed me, jaunty bells jangling, and a jester doll tackled me to the floor.

  “Sky!”

  Somehow a stupid plastic and polyester toy was holding me down with the strength of a shifter. Suddenly, Gabe was there, yanking it off me and helping me to my feet.

  The whole store had become a weird, chaotic battleground.

  The kind of weird, chaotic battle ground I’d seen once before.

  “Gabriel, she’s here!”

  “I know,” he said grimly, removing the non-lethal baton I’d seen him carry during my freshman year. “These aren’t monsters. They’re our friends.”

  For some reason, Gabriel and I could see each other clearly, as could Liadan, who suddenly shone with the force of a torch, flames dancing over her skin and racing over her clothing without burning a stitch. I stared in awe at her and noticed almost everywhere the light touched, the illusions went semi-transparent.

  But not all of them were. Someone was pouring some heavy magical juju into the store, bringing props and costumes to life.

  “Fire!” someone cried. “There’s a fire!”

  Alarms rang and those shoppers who hadn’t already run for the doors stampeded that way now, seeming to carry my friends along with them. I spotted Ben’s worried face in the crowd, and watched Holden beating off a grim reaper near the checkout counter.

  “Lia, c’mon.”

  She took my outstretched hand and we made our way to the exit.

  We encountered more people along the way to the exit. The stampede of panicking mortals made for a difficult, terrifying egress. I resisted phasing through them all, too desperate to find the faces of our friends amidst the crowd.

  “Tammy!” a woman screamed. “Tammy! Where’s my daughter! Has anyone seen a little girl? Please, someone!”

  And I knew I couldn’t leave if someone’s child was lost. Gabriel’s gaze met mine.

  “I’ll go back—”

  “I’ll do it,” I insisted. “Get Lia to safety.”

  “I’m not going either. The child is more important. It’ll take more eyes than yours to find her,” Lia said, the voice of reason in a store gone mad from illusions.

  Then a feeling akin to ice cubes racing down my spine chilled my body from head to toe, preceding the most bloodcurdling noise I’d ever heard. From above us, a creature as large as Holden descended from the ceiling, its wings spread as its glossy bone beak headed straight for Gabriel’s chest.

  “Gabe!”

  Lia threw out a hand and a shield flared between Gabriel and the valravn, saving his life. Rather than being impaled, the force of the collision threw him backward through a display shelf. I called out for him, my worry stronger than my fear. I should have been terrified, because I recognized the valravn we faced. The same one from New Orleans.

  Then it turned away from Gabriel and set its sights on Lia.

  “Over my dead body,” I muttered as I put myself between our enemy and my friend.

  Malice burned in the darkling’s eyes. It charged forward and struck the Prismatic Barrier I threw up, but the force made tiny fractures through the barrier. It’d never survive another stab, which meant defense wasn’t an option.

  Fine then. Offense it was.

  “They’re not all illusions!” Ben shouted. From behind me I felt a surge of power and heard the tinkling of shattering glass, the disruption of a spell shield somewhere within the building.

  Holly’s voice echoed through the store, an incantation sending up a flare of fire and magic that rose toward the warehouse’s high rafters, followed by the roar of a creature that could only be a grendel.

  Lightning charged around my hands and sizzled through the air between myself and Annalise. She flung out both wings and ate the magical assault, as if I’d thrown confetti at her instead of a debilitating attack.

  Everything I had, I poured into this assault, all of my energy and my concentration on a prolonged electrical storm. My wings flared out, dim and gray and colorless. Annalise only cackled.

  “You gave your greatest gift. What are you now without light, but a doused lantern unable to take a spark? Useless,” she hissed. “Purposeless.”

  The sparks around my fingertips sputtered, dying light no threat to her. The knobby shoulder of one of her wings hit me, knocking me to the side, a one-two punch successfully landed when the second struck me in the head. My world spun around upside down and I stumbled from one side to the other.

  We couldn’t fight her, but we could flee to a place where she could not go.

  “Get Gabriel out of here!” I shouted to Lia. “Go into the Twilight!”

  Lia was already at my mate’s side, grabbing him by the wrist. She started to phase through the Twilight with him, but when I tried to join her, pain spiked through my skull and I emerged in a location the exact opposite of where I wanted to land—my progress mirrored.

  Then Annalise phased with us into the mystical realm.

  A darkling shifter able to touch Twilight.

  “Lia, run!” I screamed.

  Her only chance now was to cross over fully to Tir na Nog, even if it meant leaving the rest of us here to die. That was my duty as a sentinel, and as a friend. We couldn’t do it, but as the queen of the realm, Lia had that power.

  “Ah, ah, ah, little queen.”

  Thorny vines erupted from the ground in Lia’s path, effectively cutting off her escape. It shouldn’t have been possible—none of this should have been possible—but somehow Annalise had powers here. Lia darted to the side, but more vines blocked her way, herding her toward Annalise.

  Ignoring the pain in my head, I rushed the darkling and threw myself into her side, using the winds to propel me. She batted me aside with a wing.

  A sharp bone spur protruding from the wing ripped through my shoulder. My blood spilled over the floor before the tiles rushed up to catch me.

  “Sky!” Fire flared around Liadan again and circled around her as a majestic, white-hot inferno. Each time she burned the thorns, more replaced them.

  And each wave of fire was dimmer than the last. A year ago when Lia saved us from the zombie horde, she’d blown through a tremendous amount of power.

  Annalise stepped toward her without fear.

  “Perhaps it is better to have your heart now than it would have been before. You did me a favor, little queen.”

  My head hurt so badly I wanted to puke. I rolled onto my knees and pushed up on my forearms. The world was fading, threatening to pitch me into unconsciousness.

  In a blur of black and blue, Holly broke through the Twilight and threw herself between Annalise and Liadan, answering my prayers. At that same time, a growl shook the entire plane with the tremendous force of a category seven earthquake. Annalise staggered back from it at the same time that a white dire wolf lunged from the darkness of the Twilight rea
lm, its blue eyes gleaming bright.

  The beast struck Annalise with the power of a freight train, then the two rolled across the floor. She screamed and flared her wings, fighting him beak against teeth, wings against claws.

  Using what little strength I had left, I dragged myself over to Gabriel and raised a Prismatic Barrier over us. Ben blipped into position beside us with more accuracy than I’d ever seen from him, his defensive spell already activated. Later, I’d marvel over how quickly he’d grown. Now, we didn’t have a second to spare. Shōki pulsed with silver light, more intense than I’d ever seen it, when Holly edged Lia around the battle and joined us, joining her mage shield with ours.

  “You’re bleeding,” Lia said.

  “Help Gabe,” I panted. I’d never seen the sword react to him falling unconscious before, and that petrified me.

  “I’ve got shield duty!” Ben exclaimed to Holly and Lia. “You two help Gabe.”

  The battle continued and for the first time ever, I had hope that Annalise might finally be taken down. Eldan—it had to be Eldan—matched her in size, and his ferocity was terrifying to watch. He tore a chunk from her wings, broken feathers scattered on the spectral breeze.

  Then the giant hound yelped and blood blossomed against his white coat.

  Eldan shook off the slash and leapt at Annalise, snarling and snapping his strong jaws at her beak.

  A barrier formed between Eldan and Annalise, black and glistening in the same hues as my oil slick hair, a direct contrast to the usual opalescence of a Prismatic Barrier, and dark as the darkling’s soul.

  At this, Eldan recoiled and stared. His blue eyes went wide. Renewed fury took over after that. He lunged again and clawed his way through it, only for the same thorny vines to erupt through the ground. Several feet of concrete foundation ripped as if they were tissue paper.

  I stretched out alongside Gabriel and struggled to maintain a barrier to protect us from the collateral damage of the fight. War horns blew as the two juggernauts tumbled across the floor, and then more fae from Tir Na Nog appeared from various corners of the realm. They dispersed to take on whatever other threats there may have been, but none stood between Eldan and his quarry until the moment Annalise spread her wings and shot away.