Cloaked masses drift through a forlorn park. Their tentacles seek the flesh of a helpless seven-year-old girl. She hides and runs, but fear nourishes the starving monsters. They peek into her soul and speak truths she knows.

"Not even your parents love you. Every time you do something, you embarrass yourself."

"Carter!"

My body jerked as I woke up to Mrs. Crenshaw's screeching voice. Cheek on my desk, I bolted upright into a sitting posture and looked my science teacher into her opaque glasses. She had a hunched, scrawny stature and a long, bird-like nose below her grey, nest-like hair.

Thought Professor Manaba was bad? Meet Mrs. Crenshaw. She was a playground bully who had grown up into a teacher. Her hobbies were asking questions students couldn't answer, giving grades based on preference, and handing out detentions for stupid reasons. And she didn't even teach us anything cool. Just see for yourself.

"Carter!" she said and stabbed a pencil as sharp as a claw at me. "Please, explain to us how owls see at night."

No joke, I learned more about nocturnal animal vision when googling stuff for my night vision potion than in her course.

"Em, they see well?" I guessed.

Mrs. Crenshaw grumbled. "Excellent. Your previous teachers did not waste their time on you. 'Owls see well at night', who would have guessed?"

That remark earned her chuckles from the rest of the class. Did they find it funny or were they afraid they'd be targeted next if they didn't laugh?

"For your information, owls have eyes that are rich in rods and poor in cones," Mrs. Crenshaw explained. "That means they are good at detecting light, but their color vision is more limited. And now, hand in your essays, everyone!"

Just as I opened my bag, Siris formed as an intangible, translucent aether cloud I saw in my soul. He struggled to sit still, his vibrant energy contrasting with my sleepiness.

"Let me eat your essay!" he said. "Then, you can claim that your invisible magic ghost cat ate your homework. You wouldn't even be lying."

Siris dissipated as Mr. Crenshaw plucked the essay from my desk. What a nightmare to be awake. People stared at me like I was a tourist attraction. I woke up too late to style my brown hair into anything other than a messy bun like in some clichéd Wattpad story. And while the dress I bought from Darcy's money still looked pretty, it started wrinkling and didn't make me look better.

At least science class ended and my favorite subject started: World Issues!

Our teacher, Professor Felix Weber, hailed from Whateley University not far from our high school and you knew he was a professor just by his looks: Graying maroon hair, monocle, a nice tweed jacket over his beer belly, and even the matching German accent. And he was one of the few people who got the funding to research Paranormal Psychotic Encounters.

Even though his course wasn't an AP course, he treated it like one. He sometimes let us walk over to the Whateley University campus nearby to show computer programs that determined if footage of the paranormal was authentic or not. Today, he was content with just presenting us papers on why reports of PPEs increased since the eighties.

I sat next to Simon. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt with a cartoon figure on it and baseball shorts, enjoying summer while it lasted. A mist of glamour appeared around us - did he borrow Darcy's pixie? – as he dropped his phone before my misty eyes.

"What's it like to attend two high schools?" Simon asked.

"Tiring."

"C'mon, you get to be a mage? What's a little fatigue if you learn how to sling fireballs?"

I yawned.

"I sure know what I'd do with magic," Simon explained. "Pretty sure it's the jocks who are the losers and the nerds who are the bosses in the wizarding world."

"Simon," I said, "can we please focus?"

"I've always wondered if wizarding schools also teach history and algebra. Considering that yours employs a dual-high school model, I guess-"

"SIMON, FOCUS!"

He shut his mouth and gave me about ten seconds to read the picture on his phone. I only read the word "mortasheen" before my eyelids dropped and tried to lure me into dreamland.

"It's a page from an uncle's old book," Simon explained. "When Dad treated Mrs. Turner, he said her lungs had nodular lesions, her respiratory tracts had an ulcer, and so on. I looked at what this might mean and found the mortasheen. It's a horse plague created by Nuckelavees."

"Nuckelavees?"

"Don't tell me you never watched season four of RWBY?"

I did. And I combed our Academy's wiki. The original Nuckelavee was a centaur-like, B-ranked Unseelie demon trapped in Loch Ness by the Mither of the Sea. Shapeshifting kelpies created local doppelgängers which were weaker than the original, but dangerous enough to poison horses with their mortasheen.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," I said, "but Mrs. Turner wasn't a horse."

"She wasn't," he said and switched to another page, "but there's also the hestermoan! It's similar to the mortasheen, but less like a virus and more like a curse. You put a demon into someone's body and it constantly gives your target new diseases while blocking healing attempts. One cure is transfer based on kinship. If you give that demon to a relative, the person originally meant to die survives."

"Great," I said. "Any more ethical options to stop it?"

"Well, the Erlking might have a poppet in his Domain which you could find and destroy."

"And how do we get there?"

"You tell me! I'm just the helpful sidekick who draws the bad guys to himself while you charge a magic missile."

As he pulled his phone back, I noticed Simon gained a bit of muscle definition under his short-sleeved T-shirt – even though he claimed not to be the buffest guy.

"You know, I've started doing pushups since getting into monster hunting," he asked as he noticed I was looking at his arm. "It's not much, but I think I'm improving."

"Simon. I really appreciate this," I said. "But I am not allowed to go into monster-infested areas without Darcy's okay. She wouldn't want you to endanger yourself."

"Right. Darcy knows everything better, doesn't she?"

I felt bad about this. Should I let him on monster hunts? On the one hand, he's just a normal human. He can't make good wards and mind magic means the end for him.

On the hand, he was physically stronger than Darcy or I (training aside - he's half-a-head taller) and could carry Molotov cocktails or iron crowbars while we warded him. I can't do everything alone. He helped me last time and he was ready to do it again and again. He was serious about this.

Weber arrived and took Simon's phone away before I could speak. "Apologies, but this is verboten here," he said.

Now, I was in trouble. The glamour made others interpret what we were talking about as something else, but it didn't distract from the fact that we were, ultimately, not participating in coursework.

"I hope your conversations are related to the papers," Weber continued, "because I don't see much ink on your papers. And one last bit of personal advice, Ms. Carter, please try to go to bed earlier next time. My granduncle Lukas always used to say that sometimes, it is better to do things tomorrow if the day doesn't have enough hours."

True, true. Simon read the paper Weber gave us although he looked like he'd rather crumble it in his fist and toss it in the bin.

I yawned. When Weber was gone, I texted Isa and told her to meet her in the library at lunch. I had questions about Klaus Kringle. Of course, I first had to survive this course which wasn't easy. You can't believe what tricks my tired mind played on me. I saw all kinds of weird things.

I even saw a goblin staring at me through the window!