Darkside Sun by Jocelyn Adams Page B

dignity, or come unconscious. The choice is yours.”
    I opened my mouth to scream my frustration at him, but a puff of frost escaped instead. “Oh, God. It’s happening. It’s never happened outside before.” A quick scan of the blue sky turned up nothing out of the ordinary.
    “Yes.” He nodded. “But not here. The bigger question is how can you feel it from a distance already?” He glanced at me as if I’d turned into a hissing cobra and he wasn’t sure if I’d bite him or not.
    I ignored the last thing he said and concentrated on the first. “Yeah, not here. If I just go away, it’ll stop. Or is the wraith coming for you?” When I still couldn’t see any darkness above me, I asked, “Where is it? And why is today the first time I’ve ever seen a wraith?”
    He composed himself, all shreds of unease evaporating to leave him calm as a sleeping babe. “I let in the one in the AL to see what you’d do, but this one is here all on its own. If you’d stuck around long enough, you’d have seen one before now. As for where it is, we might as well start your training early. You tell me.”
    “How the hell should I know?” Even as I spoke, something in my body seemed to be reaching out of me of its own accord, some sense I hadn’t been aware existed in me. Unable to pull it back, I floated, detached from my body, my senses riding the air, using it to feel like a million fingers touching everything and everyone. A scream slammed me back into my body with Asher standing nose-to-nose with me.
    Ava’s scream.
    I puffed snow onto his face, and he wiped it off. “My room,” I said. “I totally forgot the walls were starting to come apart when I left. Why did I just leave Ava there like that? But nothing has ever happened before, though, after I left.”
    “Did anyone see you with the bible? Speak!”
    I backed up, but he followed. “Tell me!” he barked.
    “I didn’t mean for them to see it, but they surprised me.”
    “Dammit.” He threw my bag into the backseat of my car, pressed the key fob around my neck to lock the door, and then sprinted toward V2.
    I’d put them in danger. Or the useless book did, but it had been in my hands. He’d warned me. Why hadn’t I been more careful? Could the wraiths sense his bible? Were they looking for it, and that was why Asher didn’t want me showing it to anyone?
    I didn’t much like Ava, but I didn’t want her dead, either. What could I do? Would I be able to stop him? I had to try, and maybe I could learn how to send back a wraith and seal up the rift by watching him. That didn’t make me a sentinel, though.
    I ran after him. Sucking wind, I sped across the grass, down the cement pathway that led to the door. No way he’d gotten inside already, but I couldn’t see him. Did all profs have keys to the dorms? Somehow I didn’t think so, so where did he go?
    With my shaking hands, it took three tries to bring the key from my lanyard to the lock, and two more to actually get it to turn. Once inside, I raced up the stairs two at a time. I was nearly hyperventilating by the time I made it to the third floor.
    Huffing, I hot-footed it toward my room. Two girls huddled together in the hallway, giggling, with towels wrapped around their hair. They stank of fruity soap. How had they not heard Ava’s scream? Then again, it had sounded like maybe it came from inside my head, which was equally odd.
    My door remained shut. Low voices filtered out from beneath, and I recognized Asher’s as one of them. So he was a freakin’ Houdini as well as a hot professor and a wraith hunter. I put my key in the lock, breathing snow against the door. It swung open with a push of my hand.
    I froze at the sight of Ava and her guy glowering at Asher, who did an impression of a menacing statue just beyond the threshold. When the giggling behind me grew in volume, I swallowed my fear like a black pill, stepped in, and shut the freak party in together. No need to wig out my