The Angel of Elydria (The Dawn Mirror Chronicles Book 1) (2 page)

Paulina shrugged. “Never too late to start, I guess―anyway, you’d better get outside. Madeline will be here any second and you don’t want to keep her waiting.”

“Well, don’t work too hard. See you later.” Penny waved to her mother, swept up her book bag that lay by the door, and slipped outside.

Penny grimaced upward as she took a bite out of her muffin. Gloomy blankets of deep gray clouds covered the Oregon sky and the humidity was palpable in the autumn air. She hummed as she took a seat on the curb in front of her house and stared at the whispering woods growing alongside the houses on Hillshire Lane. Her mind flashed to the image of a twitching mess of legs being extricated from her body cavity and a sick feeling washed over her.

As she sat waiting, Penny thought she sensed a peculiar heaviness pressing down from somewhere high in the sky, as if a huge balloon, filling with air, was threatening to pop. The wind whistled by and brought a flurry of burnt orange leaves with it. The nippy breeze succeeded in undoing any progress that Penny had made in arranging her hair.

Something feels really off today. Maybe all that prophetic dream junk she always talks about might actually mean something for once,
Penny mused
.

Heavy moisture clung to her cheek. The clouds were swollen with rainwater, and the only sound was the rattling of dead leaves blowing across the gravel. Penny shook her head again and smirked at herself.

Yeah, right. If anyone hangs around Mom enough they’ll start looking for cosmic messages in alphabet soup. It was just a stupid dream; I shouldn’t let it get to me. I’ve got to cheer up―it’s Friday, after all.

It was those insignificant moments she spent, sitting alone on the curb, which Penny would always think back on after the end of her life on Earth; the simple act of staring into the pines with her peace yet unbroken, while the wind raced onward to wherever it was destined to die.

THE QUIET OF morning was disturbed as a car glided around the corner and the chorus of an 80’s rock song rang out through the neighborhood. Penny stood and waved to the driver as the car rolled up alongside her and stopped. She yanked open the door and jumped into the passenger seat, then lowered the volume with a brisk turn of the knob before looking over at Maddie.

“Glad to see you’re cheerful as usual,” Maddie said with equal parts mirth and annoyance, her pink star-shaped earrings swinging as she drove off. Maddie’s wispy blonde hair hung around her shoulders and her blue eyes scanned the road, buried under vibrant pink eye shadow. She was a striking beauty and this often proved to be a source of insecurity for Penny.

“So, I think I’ll be getting a solid ‘B’ for today’s essay. How’d yours turn out?” Penny asked, though she had an idea what the answer might be.

Maddie gave a derisive laugh and turned the music back up. “I didn’t even do it—practice ran late. Besides, Arlington is crazy if he thinks any normal person can handle this workload. Why do teachers always seem to think that we only have
one
class to keep up with?” she scoffed.

“He
is
kind of ridiculous, I’ll admit, but all the same…you probably shouldn’t just blow it off,” Penny replied, her words transforming into a massive yawn.

Maddie shot her a look. “Let me guess. You stayed up all night again, didn’t you? Please,
please
tell me you’re not reading that girl-power detective series for the fourth time,” she moaned.

“Fifth,” Penny mumbled under her breath.

“Wow. You
still
haven’t changed since the sixth grade,” she teased. Penny ignored her comment and let her friend ramble on about how well she had done in dance practice for the rest of the drive.

For the rest of the drive, she listened and nodded as Maddie told her about all the praise her dance instructor had given her last night.

Twin Rivers Community College was a small, out-of-the-way school hidden among the overgrowth of trees that crowded the Oregon town. The buildings were dilapidated, weatherworn, and charmless.

Maddie parked and they made their way toward the campus, the biting chill on the wind carrying invisible droplets of rainwater. Halfway across the parking lot, Penny noticed Maddie stumbling and raised her eyebrows. Her friend’s face had taken on a peaky color and her usual spunky nature seemed strained.

“You okay?” Penny asked.

“Yeah…I just started feeling a little messed up―bad headache. It’s this drab weather,” she said in a shaky voice and smiled, trying to recapture her usual level of energy.

Penny’s brow furrowed and she drew away from Maddie. “My mom had a headache, too. I’ll bet something’s going around. Don’t come near me, I can’t get sick this close to midterms.”

“I just hope I can make it through Arlington’s class without falling asleep. As if it wasn’t miserable enough already,” Maddie sighed. They wove through the thin crowd of students shuffling their way to class just as drops of cold rain began to splash down.

“Argh! Let’s hurry!” Penny exclaimed, using her book bag as an umbrella. They sped over the misty grounds until they reached the overhang outside their classroom and scurried indoors, dripping all the way to their seats.

It was a cramped, square classroom with twenty or so desks crammed into it. A young man in the front row stared in a stupor at the words their professor scribbled onto the blackboard with chalk. A group of girls in the seats behind Penny shrieked with laughter at something on the screen of a cell phone they were passing around. Professor Arlington set the chalk down with a curt click and swiveled around to face the class. He was a willowy young man with soft, mousy brown hair that hung in an elegant curtain to his chin. A pair of round glasses were always sliding down his nose; Maddie sometimes kept a tally when she was extra bored. Since he was skinny and rather tall, he had something of a stretched look about him. He clapped his hands together and peered around at the class with a half-smile.

“All right, everybody. I trust you’ve all been working long and hard on your papers, yes? Did anyone have a particularly exciting thesis they’d like to share?” he asked in his usual brisk tone, his hopeful smile fading when nobody so much as blinked an eye in response. Penny could almost feel Maddie’s annoyance radiating off her.

Penny felt a little sorry for their professor―she had taken a liking to him and his optimistic efforts to teach literature to a group of people that had little to no interest in the subject. While Maddie classified him as intolerable, Penny harbored a quiet admiration for his enthusiasm. Yet with the unrelenting workload he assigned, she could understand why he was scorned by the majority of the students.

Professor Arlington sighed before moving to collect the papers from the six or seven people who’d bothered to complete the assignment. Penny held her paper up as he walked by and Professor Arlington added it to the stack and then halted, swiveling his head back to look at her. Penny felt a bit peeved at his apparent surprise; she was one of the few students who could be relied upon to complete every assignment. His pace slowed significantly, and Penny worried she’d fall asleep before he made it back to his desk.

At the front of the classroom, Professor Arlington turned and looked around the room. Penny watched him in a sleepy daze. Maddie’s head was down on her desk and the rest of the class had already assumed their usual coma-like positions in anticipation of his lecture. The professor’s eyes skimmed across Penny and he rubbed his forehead, his expression strained.

“Class…is dismissed,” he said in a quiet voice.

Startled, Penny sat up and blinked in astonishment. He had never dismissed, let alone cancelled, a class before. Half of the class straightened up but stayed silent, now rapt with attention. Professor Arlington appeared even more uncomfortable when no one stirred.

“Did I misspeak? Class is dismissed!” he repeated with sharper enunciation, his face growing chalky.

“But―sir,” a girl from the back spoke up. “We just got here―”

“I am quite aware of that, Miss Winslow. Please, all of you, leave.”

In a state of befuddlement, the students started packing up. Penny rose from her seat, took her book in hand and strode from the classroom with Maddie close beside.

“What was that all about?” Penny asked, still surprised. “Do you think he’s mad no one did the essay?”

“Maybe he got sick, I don’t know,” Maddie said with disinterest.

“He didn’t look sick, he looked upset,” Penny insisted, reaching for her bag to prepare for another sprint through the drizzle. She stopped short. “Oh no—I left my bag!”

“Then go get it,” Maddie said, exasperated. “I’m cold and my head hurts. Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

Uneasy about intruding on her professor after he’d ordered them to leave, Penny plucked up her courage, doubled back, and cracked open the door. She peeked inside and her heart all but stopped beating.

Through the crack in the door, Penny could see Professor Arlington standing at the back of the room, surrounded by thousands of tiny points of white-gold light that looked like bubbles floating in a glass of champagne. In shock she watched him move his hand along the empty space in front of him, drawing strange, silvery writing. The letters hung in midair, bleeding like ink from a fountain pen. They hovered for a moment, then pulsed with a bright flare and faded.

He waved his hand again and produced more silvery writing from thin air. The lettering looked to Penny like arcane runes, shimmering as bright as tinsel. Professor Arlington wore a tormented expression, as if enduring an inordinate amount of pain. The lights in the room flickered from a surge of energy that seemed to radiate from the center of the room. Trembling, Penny backed away and let the door slam, trying to remember how to breathe.

That―that wasn’t real, I’m hallucinating, it’s not possible…
Penny’s mind raced even faster than her heartbeat, and she felt an alarming rush of lightheadedness. She swiveled around and charged away from the classroom at full speed to where Maddie stood waiting. Penny splashed through the mud to her, adrenaline pumping through her veins.

“M-Maddie!” Penny choked out, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears. Maddie looked over, her expression telling Penny that she was in a sour mood. “I―I―”

“What happened?” Maddie asked, looking impatient.

“In there―he was―it was―I can’t even explain,” Penny said in a fluster, cursing herself for being unable to articulate what she had seen.

Maddie let out a long sigh. “Honestly, Penelope,” she hissed as she trudged past.

Realizing Maddie was heading to the classroom, Penny shrieked, unable to stop herself. “Maddie, no! Don’t go in there, please!” she shouted and chased after her, her voice sounding high and unnatural. She ignored the sidelong glances she was getting from bystanders. “It’s dangerous―please!” Her anxiety doubled.

Maddie flashed Penny an irate glare and marched into the classroom. Penny froze and felt the blood drain from her face as the door shut behind Maddie. Just as she forced her legs to unstick themselves and move forward to rescue her friend, Maddie exited the classroom.

With a nonchalant stride that Penny hadn’t expected, Maddie joined her, Penny’s bag in hand. Dumbfounded, Penny’s lips parted in disbelief as Maddie shoved Penny’s bag at her and kept walking. With a little groan, she jolted after Maddie.

“Did―did you see it?” Penny asked in an unsure tone. “Did you see the…?” she trailed off, unable to find a word for what she had witnessed.

Maddie’s brows arched in irritation, “Listen Penny, you don’t have to pretend any more. I should’ve just gone with you. I know how anxious you can get…with your fainting spells and all.”

Penny’s frustration overwhelmed her. “I’m not making anything up! I saw something―something impossible in there! You’ve got to believe me, Maddie,” she sputtered, her nerves jangling.

“What? What was so mind-blowing, hmm?” Maddie inquired, no longer concealing the annoyance in her voice.

Penny’s expression darkened; if she tried to explain herself, she would sound insane. “It was―I don’t know―why are you so mad all of a sudden?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“I have a pounding headache, I’m soaked through, we drove out here for no reason because apparently Arlington is blossoming into a drama-queen, and you’re trying to play some weird game that I’m really not in the mood for,” Maddie shot back.