Evading The Dark

Chapter 5

The short walk to my door was a quiet one. My thoughts were plagued with worry and confusion over what I'd just heard. The other academies were missing students. Students,as in more than one. This whole situation was weird and it wasn't sitting well with me. One school missing a student was bad enough, but more than one? A few? That should not have been possible. And all the students disappeared without a trace? Nate was a lot more forthcoming when Cedric wasn't around, he said not a single scrap of evidence had been found; no words left with close friends and no forgotten emails.

Not. A. Single. Lead.

Something wasn't right. Missing students and strange sightings in the woods; it shouldn't have been possible for all of this to happen.

"Hey, are you gonna open the door or just keep looking at it? My burger is screaming for me to eat it."

"Oh right," I said, snapping out of it. "Sorry."

After letting Cedric in, I closed the door behind us and set all of my school stuff by the bed. Now that we were in a closed room, the smell of the food was even stronger. My stomach growled with impatience and filling it with delicious, non-healthy food suddenly took precedence. I opened the little window that led to the hidden platform on the roof and climbed out, Cedric following close behind with the bag of food. Once we got up there we went straight to our "table."

It was really no more than a few storage crates that we lifted from the kitchen when no one was looking, but it was ours. I grabbed my burger and took a second to bask in the delicious smell. Five thousand calories about to head straight to my heart and have a little clogged artery fiesta, yum.

"Mmm, Luthos, I'm a genius. Tell me I'm not a genius." Cedric spoke around a mouth full of burger ... charming.

"You're a genius," I answered, dryly.

"Aw, come on. You can say it with more enthusiasm than that. Try this." He cleared his throat and continued in his imitation of a girl voice; or was it supposed to be my voice? "Oh, Cedric, you are so clever! You come up with the most amazing ideas; really, a pure genius. See? More like that."

I rolled my eyes so hard I could literally see my own brain cells die from having to watch his act.

"That better not have been your interpretation of me," I said, leveling a hard stare his way.

"Oh, but it was. I think I was spot on, no?" He was full on smirking by now.

My only reply was to beam a fry straight at his face, but he ended up catching it in his mouth, which was a complete waste of ammo in my opinion. However, I couldn't be outdone. I started launching more fries hoping one would hit my target.

"Quit eating my missiles!"

"I can't help it. These missiles are so good, totally worth Nate almost getting in trouble for it."

And just like that, the mention of his brother brought back that nagging feeling that had been held at bay by our food fight. I dropped the fry I was holding and sighed. "Look, don't joke about that okay? It's not funny. He seemed pretty spooked about this whole situation. And it wouldn't have been worth it at all if he had been caught," I said, hunching over a bit on my crate, my appetite quickly fading.

"Whoa, I was only kidding, you know that. What's wrong?"

I looked at him; all joking had left his face to be replaced by a very serious expression. Perhaps my statement sounded a bit harsher than I intended. But I couldn't help it, he was just sitting there happy and carefree. Like we didn't just hear the biggest thing to have happened at the academies in the past decade. It irritated me.