Sorcha's Secret World, Part one.

Chapter 5, Beaumont.

Kingsmouth Academy was a square red brick building, surrounded by a brick wall. There was an annexe for the dorm rooms and a gym. The grounds were large, with open areas for the students to walk and sit, a football ground and a tennis court. It seemed like a pleasant place to study and live if it wasn't for the screaming monstrosities that ran aimlessly around the campus. They weren't zombies, even I could tell that much.

They were pink, lumpy and vaguely humanoid. Suddenly I knew what they reminded me of; the playdough figures my daughter used to make. With blobby arms and legs and a blobby head. I know that is a terrible description, but it's the best I can do. And like most of the things on the island, they were trying to kill me.

Up to this point, I hadn't really used frost spells very much, but now they came in useful. A flurry of icy cold air and ice shards spread from my fingers, freezing the fleshy things in their tracks, a thin layer of ice creeping over them. A second spray of ice shards shattered the frozen bodies into lots of little pieces. Gross.

I carefully stepped over the remains and made my way into the building.

I could hear voices coming from the reception office, it seemed people were still alive here! Arcane wards glowed on the walls of the reception area, presumably to keep the fleshy things out.

Was this... was this a magic school? I tried not to geek out too much and promised myself I wouldn't make any references to a certain book series about a certain young wizard who goes to a certain magic school in England.

"Don't worry, you're not interrupting a parent-teacher meeting or nowt," a red-haired woman in a red blazer turned around and greeted me. "I'm the witch doctor in residence. My name is Annabel Usher. So, this really pissed the curriculum up the wall" she said. Her accent was Scottish.

"It was a great setback for us all." a man in a grey suit agreed and introduced himself as the headmaster, Hayden Montag. The only other person in the room was a teenage girl with short tousled hair dressed in an oversized hoodie. Her name was Carter, she was Danny's friend. There had been no other students in residence at the time the fog rolled in, but the faculty members had all still been there. The people in the room were the only ones left alive, and they were having problems of their own.

The fleshy things out there were the students' familiars and were now running wild.

"They look a fright, but well, think back about your first shop class projects and see how they turned out." Annabel Usher explained.

That was all very interesting of course, and under different circumstances, I would have loved to have learned everything about an actual 'Academy for the Magic Arts'. But I was chasing after a crazy cult leader with a magic sword that wanted to destroy the world or something like that, so regretfully I didn't have the time.

"Ah, so you are trailing after our mythical weapon of mass destruction then?" Miss Usher asked.

"She's not too late, right?" Carter asked. She looked worried, poor kid.

"I pure hope not, I have a reputation to uphold as the only thing that is Scottish and dangerous on the Island," Usher replied.

Wait, what now? What was Scottish? But I didn't get a word in edgewise.

"I should have called in the calvary as soon as I knew it was on the island. But honestly? It caught me with my metaphorical knickers down. I had no idea what it was."

It was not your fault Miss Usher," Cater reassured her. "No one has ever removed anything from the academy before and gotten through the wards. Not in one piece, anyway."

"That open day could have gone better," Miss Usher admitted.

"What happened during the open day?"I asked horrified, but Annabel Usher kept talking.