To Sir, with Love: An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Blurb

  Title Page

  Floor Plan

  What's Happened So Far

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE The Past-Due Blood Debt

  CHAPTER TWO Monday, Bloody Monday

  CHAPTER THREE Building the Perfect Mouse Trap

  CHAPTER FOUR Broken Mirrors Reflect Truth

  CHAPTER FIVE Absolute Certainty of Rectitude

  Epilogue

  LotSW, Mailing List, and More

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  A Preview of London Underground

  TO SIR, WITH LOVE

  When the world ends, the fog rolls into Solomon Island and the dead start to rise. Innsmouth Academy senior Blodwedd Mallory fights to save her school from the destruction. But can she uncover the secrets of the Academy’s dark history before Mal'un the Accursed destroys the Academy’s headmaster and prevents her graduation and initiation as a Templar?

  TRIGGER WARNING

  **Note that this novel contains graphic horror and scenes of violence in a prep school setting that might be triggering for some readers.**

  To Sir, with Love

  An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World

  Blodwedd Mallory

  What’s Happened So Far…

  The last of the track team died on Thursday before noon. Lisa Reistad, the Amazonian-sized Innsmouth Track & Field team captain, was pinned on the northwest corner of the Academy yard wall by a giant, pincer-wielding svell berserker. It gutted the three-time all-star champion, strewing her intestines for yards before she had a chance to put her orange and white size 10 sneakers back on the leaf-strewn, late-autumn lawn to stage a getaway.

  Who knew the draugr could move so far from the sea? Not Lisa, that’s for sure.

  The rest of us? We’ve been doing what we can to survive. It’s the end of the world, and we know it. What to do about it is anyone’s best guess. Those students who weren’t fortunate enough to have swallowed one of Gaia’s bees…well, they’re now roaming around the yard. More or less. Some are loping. Some are…well, I don’t even know what to call it.

  You see, pretty much everyone is dead. A few weeks ago, a strange mist came in from the sea around Solomon Island. That’s where Innsmouth Academy is located. With that mist came a herd of dead things. From the waters, this gross throwback from Norse mythology found its way ashore—the sea draugr: The ashen men and women. Their bodies are blue-gray, bloated and distorted by the sea. Some of them look like they’ve been dead years…maybe even centuries.

  On the bright side, there are a few of us left here. The headmaster, H.J. Montag. Ms. Usher. She’s the Witch Doctor on the faculty. There are a few students who didn’t die in the first swell of zombies and who were smart enough to hide themselves behind the wards in the administration office during the worst of it. Those of us who are older with a little more power behind our spells, we had a fighting chance at least. The bottom line is that the students who aren’t dead and running around the fields as zombies were either well enough connected in the occult world that their parents got them to safe rooms or they’re here, in the front office, behind the wards.

  Yep. There are exactly five of us left, counting the headmaster and Ms. Usher. There has been word from the Sheriff’s Office that the Council of Venice is planning to move in some troops to assist later this week, but for now, we’re eating canned meat and fish pies and drinking powdered orange mix, reinforcing the wards, and trying to figure out what to do next.

  This sucks. I’m a senior at Innsmouth Academy and have an invitation from the Templars to initiate in London in the spring but to do that I have to graduate.

  It’s not looking good.

  I believe one should fight for what one believes. Provided one is absolutely sure one is absolutely right.

  Mark Thackeray, To Sir, with Love (1967)

  A cold November wind blew off the Atlantic Ocean up the small beach on Solomon’s End, fluttering the gold and red leaves that had fallen from the trees that lined the shriveled lawn outside the campus walls to the east, and creating white caps in the usually placid waters to the west where the river flowed down to join the larger body of water. To the north, a boathouse was visible on the riverbank, small boats docked within, bobbing in the wake.

  With a hot blast of sulfurous fumes, a dark skeletal presence materialized next to a large outcropping of rock that lined the shore. It raised its shrouded face and scented the air. It could smell the ocean salt and impending storm, as well as the faint burnt-anima scent of the protective wards that enclosed the campus. The time was nearly here.

  The wraith made its way up the small sandy beach, its black robes undulating, as the icy waves lapped against the shoreline, and the algae-green of the sea water mixed with the crimson red of blood covering the shoreline in pools, staining the sand in spurts of arterial spray. There had been a significant disturbance to the order here.

  Some other god’s vengeance had arrived before it on the island, the wraith mused with satisfaction. It passed a group of ravenous, blood-covered zombies—unrecognizable from their former lives as Academy staff members—as they gnawed on the corpse of one of their colleagues laying on the weathered wooden pier. Beside the pier, a capsized dinghy, overturned in the water with a plume of black smoke coming from its engine, was proof of their unsuccessful escape attempt.

  With a sigh it turned to the campus to the east and proceeded up the rocky rise to the leaf-covered lawn, peppered with well-maintained ash, beech, and chestnut trees. The wraith hated the heavy wet feeling of manifestation in this reality. Each movement cost an aeon’s worth of energy from the aether of the Hell Dimensions, and it would need every drop to secure its task.

  Humanoid figures scuttled around the yard aimlessly in front of it, their wrinkled shiny skin setting them apart from the animated corpses on the pier. The sight of them made it glad. These would become its helpers, cut loose from their former masters. Their damaged brains could be easily fixated on its tasks. They would bring it secrets and be its eyes and ears so it would not be forced to stay on this wretched plane of existence for long.

  The wraith approached a V-shaped break in the tall brick wall surrounding the campus, the protective ward destroyed with the fall of the bricks. Here was its long-sought entrance. The path was clear. This was where its quarry had been hiding for a score of years, but not for much longer.

  The wraith floated through the break into the campus yard. The humanoid creatures gathered around it, following it like worshipers, as they muttered and mumbled, sang and gamboled in glee. It reached out a long thin arm and stroked the lop-sided head of one of the creatures. It looked up at the wraith and smiled with a mouthful of jagged teeth. Through its eyes, the wraith saw itself mirrored and exulted.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Past-Due Blood Debt

  “Oh my Gods!” Zandria McCullough said, wiping a nasty combination of dust and blood down the leg of her jeans. “I’d give a ransom right now for some industrial strength acid and a pair of steel tongs.”

  The jeans were definitely ruined, but it hardly mattered, of course. Zandria, better known as Gypcie, had been wearing them for a least a week now, and neither of us had showered for two. She had dust all over her face and something that looked suspiciously viscous on the side of her nose. Gypcie’s shoul
der-length light brown hair that generally billowed around her face could now indeed be called a shag, although it was looking more wall-to-wall than Vidal Sassoon.

  I nodded in agreement with the sentiment. Working our way through each room was dirty, awful work. My black leggings and high-top sneakers were splattered in blood and dirt as well. My long auburn hair was mostly out of my face thanks to some good old-fashioned grime and the cinnamon bun-sized…well, bun, on the back of my head. Think Princess Leia, but only one. It kept me looking relatively neat, although one irritating chunk in front refused to stay back. First world problems. Survival first, then a week-long spa treatment.

  Despite the terrible events on Solomon Island, Gypcie and I had stayed on at Innsmouth Academy because we were old enough and powerful enough, being two of Gaia’s chosen, to assist with the containment efforts here. My mother had been mobilized by the Templars to deal with the effects of the situation back in London, so I had nowhere better to be than here at the moment. After confirming that her grandmother had gotten to safety, Gypcie had decided she would stay on to help as well.

  We’d been searching all the classrooms—at least the empty ones—for supplies. So far we’d found a pair of rusty scissors, a half-dozen paper clips, several promising looking tomes in Latin, and some ridiculously shoddy janitorial work. Oh and blood. We found lots of blood. On the floors. On the walls. I tried not to think too hard about whose it was.

  The Defensive Magic classroom, which we were currently searching, was thankfully free of its newly ambulatory former students. With a sigh, I straightened a student desk that had toppled on its side during the initial onslaught. We were all in class that day, listening to lectures, doodling in our notes and daydreaming about the future, when the first of the zombie hoards from Kingsmouth breached the front wards and knocked the massive iron gates off their hinges.

  Susan Smith’s eyes went wide as we heard the tromping of running feet up the stairs to the second floor and the screams in the hall. Professor Renteaub, who had lectured us on preparation the whole semester, turned from where he was writing the assignment on the chalkboard in time to see the mangled townie rush through the door. The townie tackled him and proceeded to chew off his face before he could raise a shield in defense.

  The zombies caught us all by surprise. Within 30 minutes most of the students and 14 of the faculty were dead and half eaten. Within 30 hours, most of them were back, and hungry themselves.

  I shook my head to bring myself back to the present moment and took a deep breath to push down the sorrow and shock that had welled up. I couldn’t afford to dwell on the memories right now.

  Turning my attention back to the room, I caught a glimpse of a familiar term paper laying scattered across the floor and slumped in defeat. I had spent the last three months researching “Urban Combat: Arcane Technologies and Their Application in Combination with KPIs for Team Honing and Easy Maintenance (A.T.T.A.C.K.T.H.E.M.).”

  Hell, I’d spent a week on the title alone.

  All that work I’d spent to graduate this spring so I could initiate with the Templars...scattered and covered in gore. It was looking like I was never going to graduate on time.

  Disappointment took my breath away. This probably meant I was never going to meet Richard Sonnac, the brightest and best of the new Templars. Sonnac was to-die-for handsome and in all honesty, more than a little of my fascination with the invitation to initiate after graduation revolved around my hopes that I’d meet him. I even had a photo of him framed on my dorm room desk.

  With a heavy sigh, I bent down to pick up the bloodied pages and to find the clip that once held them together. Maybe if I brought the paper back to Ms. Usher, she’d help me get credit for it. The annoying chunk of hair flopped into my face as I bent over and I pushed it back with an impatient swat. I was going to need to throw myself a serious pity party when this was all over.

  While I collected the pages, I saw a bright flicker out of the corner of my eye. Gypcie was back at the bookshelves on the south wall, diligently reading each dusty title to see if it was worth hauling back to the main office. Fear flooded my body. What was happening?

  “Don’t move,” I hissed at her under my breath, tucking what I had collected of the paper under my arm. She froze but swept her eyes around the room to find the cause of my alarm.

  A streamer of neon yellow energy rolled silently up through the worn wooden floor in the center of the room, bringing with it the distinct smell of sulfur. The brilliant light heaved and twirled. For a moment everything around it shimmered and disappeared as a gaunt figure, shrouded in a black and red robe, parted the golden cloud and manifested in the center of the room.

  “Seriously?!?” I cried aloud in anxiety before I could help myself. What now?

  The figure had a vaguely human shape, although it was far too thin to be much other than bones beneath the robe. Its antebrachial appendages—OK, forearms already, but I got an A on that Occult Anatomy quiz!—were covered in long black leather gloves, pulsing with red swirls, and its head was shrouded by some kind of red webbing, a long proboscis extending down the middle of its body from under the shroud. Out of its shoulders and back, long black metal poles erupted, covered in lengths of taut chains, which appeared to be connected somewhere on the back of its body.

  Oh yeah, and it had a bloody metal scythe at least as long as it was tall, with a curved blade covered in gore, half again as long.

  As the last bits of reality coalesced, the figure adjusted its bodyweight to lean toward us, raising the head of the scythe above its shoulder.

  I am not one bit ashamed to say that Gypcie and I turned for the door and ran like the devil was on our heels.

  The administration office of Innsmouth Academy is in the central building, stashed to the left side of the main entrance, with a waist-high service counter presumably designed for the students’ convenience to interact with Academy staff.

  That former convenience was no longer a blessing. We’d covered the counter with all manner of debris—old metal lockers, framed pictures, and sandbags—and reinforced it with wards to keep out the groups of marauding zombies, dead faculty, and a disturbing number of flying insects drawn by the smell. Not surprising of course, given the state of dead and decaying things outside. When the founders built the school back in 1798, I’m sure they didn’t expect hordes of undead to be clamoring at the gates.

  Or maybe they did. The occult prep school, located on Solomon Island off the coast of Maine, has a dark history and has been “accidentally” destroyed and rebuilt several times. But in 1967 the Illuminati regents cleaned up the last mess, modernized the “gifted student experience,” white-washed the walls (and the student records) and hung out a placard that proclaimed “OPEN!” Metaphorically speaking, of course, on the last bit.

  Standing in the office, I could hear the anxious squeaks and squawks of the herds of reanimated familiars roaming the halls. They were the remnants of assignments’ past—weirdly animated bags of pale flesh, covered in wrinkles and ectoplasmic goop. The Innsmouth Academy faculty had a long reputation for assigning the academy’s undergrads the task of building a familiar of their own. With all the missing students, this unfortunately left us with quite a lot of them to contend with at the moment. Talk about homework getting out of hand.

  Every few minutes, a handful of the familiars ran up to try to get past the wards on the office doorway. Predictably, they incinerated on contact, but not before they screamed bloody murder. After the first 50 or so of them suicided, I stopped jumping at the noise.

  Headmaster Montag, Ms. Usher, and Carter were in the back corner of the offices where they had been coordinating containment and relief efforts for the past few weeks. They had been in touch with the local Sheriff’s Office in Kingsmouth proper and word was that Council of Venice peacekeepers would be arriving on the island to render assistance soon.

  After running back from the Defensive Magic classroom, Gypcie and I also were tucked safely be
hind the wards in the office, since we had renewed them all this morning. This had the benefit of keeping both the former students and the familiars out. We were discussing the possibility that something even more dire was roaming the halls with the Headmaster and Ms. Usher. Carter was Googling like crazy, trying to find data to correlate to what we reported.

  “It was a wraith,” I exclaimed, wringing my hands. “We were packing up books from the Magical Defense classroom, and it manifested right next to us!”

  “A wraith? That's...improbable,” said Headmaster Montag, shaking his head. “They cannot manifest far from their wretched corpse. Only the Yazidi knew how to… Ohhh...the Yazidi.”

  Carter looked sidelong at Gypcie and me. Ms. Usher facepalmed. Whatever it was, we knew it wasn’t going to be good.

  With a faint stench of dirty wool and formaldehyde—he had been wearing the same plaid suit and blue surgical gloves for the past two weeks at least—Headmaster Montag pursed his lips and wandered to the large-paned window behind us. He stared out into the yard for a moment before continuing.

  “As a bookish child, I accidentally intoned a Yazidi death-curse that claimed my mother, our neighbors, and a passing couple in the street, though it spared their small russet dog,” he said as if the last part somehow made up for the first. This kind of thing coming out of the Headmaster’s mouth wasn’t even a shock anymore. After four years of listening to the man relate the most horrible details with cold objectivity, I was somewhat prepared to be grossed out or horrified every time he spoke.

  “I was young, and needed the knowledge,” he said, matter-of-factly. Yup, there it was, right on schedule.

  He turned to Carter, who had swiveled toward him in her desk chair, adding, “This is why I saw something of myself in you. A great and terrible power, to be shaped with the care I never had.”