My Sister's a Guardian (RotG Fanfiction)

Chapter 13: The Teacher's Mistake

(Content/trigger warnings for this chapter: anxiety)

**Isabelle**

Fizzing sounded behind me, and I jumped as everyone else in the room gasped. I spun in my chair to see a pink disc spinning between my row and the next. Oh no...

It spun larger and faster and blurred to haze. Lotus appeared, their eyes shining and their cinnamon eyebrows drawn together.

Questions burst around the room, directed at me and Lotus at once.

"Who is that?" asked one girl, pulling on her fraying red braids.

"Another curse of Windshallow?" said a boy, jerking his triangular head off his desk.

"Why are they crying? What's going on?" shouted another girl, the loudest of all.

Lotus looked at me. "You need to leave your school. Fear Angels are coming. Isabelle—"

The disc fizzled into a ball and vanished.

I jumped out of my desk as the questioning voices of my classmates grew to a roar.

"Where are Fear Angels?"

"Who was that?"

"Curse? That's a curse, right?"

"We have to leave!" I cried as I bounded for the door.

But my teacher Mr. Woods strode through it then, swishing his water bottle full of purple Windshallow water. His blue eyes were wide as usual, like he had drunk four cups of coffee, and his blond hair stuck up as if with static.

"Isabelle?" he glanced at me before shutting the door lightly behind him. "Are you all right?"

"We need to leave! Evil beings are coming!" I should have tried harder to make Jack stay! I sought to push past Mr. Woods to reach the door, but he stepped in front of me and would not move.

"Isabelle, you need to calm down."

A thrum of wingbeats came into earshot.

"We're all going to get paralyzed! I'm going to die! Please let me through!" I spun to face my classmates. Perhaps they could help me convince him. "You know Jack? He's the one who first told me about Fear Angels!"

"Who's that?" Mr. Woods said, but many of my classmates' eyes widened.

The wingbeats grew louder. My ears rang. "We have to go!" I tried to grab the door handle, but Mr. Woods gripped my shoulder and held me back. "You don't understand!" I cried. "I'm their target because of my powers!"

"Isabelle, let's—"

An enormous skeleton with great black wings landed in a crouch outside the window. Its stare was hollow and hungry, its feathers stiff and sharp. A Fear Angel. It was more of an instinct than a guess. Half the class jumped to their feet, and a few screamed, but clearly not everyone could see the skeletal being. There was no convincing myself that the danger wasn't real, however. And I had a vague swirling sense that I had seen Fear Angels before, which only amplified the terror violently shaking my body. I tried desperately to pry Mr. Woods' fingers off my shoulder and break for it.

Some of my classmates joined me, trying to push him away from the door. But we could hardly get him to move.

"Isabelle, use your powers against that thing!" the loud-voiced girl shouted.

The Fear Angel passed through the window, and the rest of the class sprinted to the door. Mr. Woods' eyes widened, and he yanked it open just as the skeletal being crossed the room. It reached for me. I leaped, trembling, to the side; its elegant boney fingers brushed my teacher instead. His muscles went slack, and his body dropped onto the crowd before him, just missing me. My chest squeezed for him and whom he'd fallen on, but terror locked my muscles and forced me out the door. Guilt tugged at my chest.

In other classrooms, people began to scream.

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