The War of Elevens| Book 1 of the Space Thief Chronicles

Chapter 8| Slaying Giant Wasps With the Math Teacher

Mr. Ecscent unlocked the huge double oak doors to Eldnac with a key he had for teacher-uses. He looked at Melissa while he did this, as if to say, How would you have gotten in without me?

"I gave Lilly a tomahawk for a reason," Melissa snapped. 

Lilly was taken aback by her constant poison towards him. Generally, outbursts like this never raged from her cousin. She was excellent at holding her tongue and even better at fostering her agitation in private. It was interesting to see her trying and failing to keep her aggression towards Mr. Ecscent at bay. What had happened between the two of them?

"Smashing things is not subtle," said Nathan with an exasperated shake of his head.

In the entryway, Melissa had Lilly do a few practice swings with the tomahawk. She nearly chopped Mr. Ecscent's toes off the first three times she swung it and nearly beheaded herself the next three times. Tomahawks, Melissa said, were generally used for throwing, so she showed Lilly the proper way to throw it. Blood leaked from Lilly's bandaged hand by the time she'd finished practicing. 

"Don't throw or swing it until I say so," Melissa said. She kept saying that, over and over again...as if Lilly was eager to use it, and Lilly was anything but eager. She was terrified of using this thing! What if she pulled her arm back to throw it and ended up whacking herself in the face instead?

The school was eerie-quiet, and as the sun climbed skyward, gold bars of light spread through the beige entrance hall. It was strange to be here when no one else was...it was almost as if they had stepped into an apocalyptic version of Eldnac.

Everything looked okay. There was no sign of the strange color-changing mist or monsters down this hall...but there was a small something that bit into Lilly's spirit. If she had not been thinking about magic, or if she had not been acutely aware of how tense her hands were around the tomahawk's handle, then she might have missed it. This something felt like a butterfly was trapped in the veins of her wrists, wings flapping wildly at irregular intervals. It was something completely different from her normal pulse—she could certainly feel that thrumming through her—this feeling was like a current, a second pulse.

As they started down a locker-lined hall towards the gymnasium, Mr. Ecscent said into the silence, "Every staff member takes the day after exams off. They go out and celebrate...it's sort of a beginning-of-summer ritual for the faculty, so that's one thing we don't have to worry about."

"What about the janitors?" Lilly asked. There were six main janitors at Eldnac, two of which worked full-time. The other four were specialized cleaners who came on different days of the week. Lilly loved each of them. They were her friends just as much as Maya was. Sometimes, she'd eat lunch with the most paranoid janitor, Mr. Larykins, in his favorite closet that smelled suspiciously like bananas. He was an elderly bald man who was convinced the school had a vampire infestation. When Lilly had detention (which was at least once every week) and she had to stay after school and help Mr. Larykins clean the boys' locker room, they jammed out to screamo music together.

"Gotta love magical janitors," Mr. Ecscent replied with a shrug.

"You mean they know about the Shifter World?"

"All six of them. They help regulate the—"

Mr. Ecscent stopped walking so abruptly, Lilly nearly crashed into him. They were at the end of the hall. Here, the corridor split into two separate directions. Directly in front of them was the grand stairwell that led up to the school's second level.

For the first time, he and Melissa looked at each other with some amount of agreement in their eyes.

Then the school filled with noise.