Sixteen-year-old June Bae may very well be your typical high school student, but the Rose Cross Academy is not your typical high school. Instead of history assignments and English papers, June trudges through Alchemy mixes and Demonology homework.
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Chapter 10
This Little Piggy
By Rissa Renae
Plunging deeper into the murky woods, June heard the cry for help again. Words came with that cry but they were indecipherable. A protection Barrier loomed ominously bright, its pinnacle visible through sparse breaks in the forest canopy. June used it as his guiding landmark—he needed to get to the Crosses in that Barrier. As the cry for help meandered through the trees again, the red-pink glow suddenly snapped out of existence to plunge the forest into dark patches of lifeless grey.
Branches reached out with boney fingers to snag through June's hair and pull at his uniform as he ran. One snapped up to assault him, leaving a stinging welt across his cheek. Spindly trees proved a surprisingly difficult challenge. Trunks varying in size from the thickness of his wrist to the thickness of his thigh grew in scattered bunches. Sometimes they grew far enough apart for June to crash through unhindered. In other places, they grew so close together that the white-barked trunks melded into one another. Fallen branches and ragged underbrush tangled around his ankles and boots. More than once he tripped and tumbled to hands and knees, the litter of the forest floor scratching his palms and poking through his clothing. He felt a trickle of blood rolling down the side of his face from the welt he received earlier.
The cries and shouts grew louder and closer; he thought before two voices had been calling out for help. Now, it sounded as if just one voice was echoing unnaturally through the darkness. Frantic screaming followed by quick gunshots broke through the ink of the forest and echoed like a disembodied voice in the trees. Following the shouting, another Barrier snapped up to bathe the forest in an eerie reddish glow again.
Another tumble and June rolled head over heels through the underbrush. His head hit a tree trunk and stars filled the dim forest. Sound rang through his head like a badly tuned radio, squealing and whining, distorting into unintelligible sounds. He cursed and touched his head, checking to make sure he hadn't split his skull open. His hand, peachy in the glow of the Barrier no more than a few hundred metres off, highlighted another peachy patch in the forest.
A face lay among the underbrush, the dark shape about it resolving into a body. The face stared back at June, still and unmoving. Blood dripped from a large gash across the forehead that originated somewhere in his scalp and angled down to devoured an eye. The face sparked a glimpse of familiarity: Jeremiah Bartlett, one of Jackson Keaton's teammates. He was most decidedly no longer among the living.
June gave a shout and scooted back through the forest on his rear. His feet scrambled to get underneath him, kicking up large clods of dirt. Jeremiah's lifeless eye watched him. Shifting and pulsing light from the Barrier made shadows dance across his face as if he were still alive. One arm lay twisted into an unnatural position behind his back, bent so that his hand touched his head.
