Silverwood Academy

Chapter 1

The cursor on the laptop continued to blink at her expectantly, even though Rachael Barnes couldn’t think of a single word to type. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath, realizing the pen she’d been chewing on was also useless at this point. Scrappy, her calico, American shorthair, rubbed up against her leg, but Rachael didn’t pull her eyes away from the damn blinking beacon. “In a minute, kitty.” She had to write three hundred more words in the next couple of hours to meet her deadline, and if she didn’t, there were going to be a lot of angry WebReader fans across the world. This was no time to screw around.

“What happens next?” she asked, tossing the pen into the air as if it might clatter off of the table and give her some sort of indication of what her main characters should do now. Of course, that was also no help, so Rachael dropped her head onto the desk, evading the keyboard, and letting out a sigh. Not for the first time in the last week, she was regretting killing off her heroine.

Sure, she’d been able to stretch out the grieving amongst the rest of the cast enough to fill her quota for a few days before she’d had to figure out a new plot line. At the time, as Chell Knight lay dying in her fiance’s arms, it had all seemed so clear. It was time for Chell to go, for the other characters in the Silverwood Academy series to take flight. After all, Chell was taking up so much screen time, and as much as Rachael loved her, she’d become a crutch to Rachael’s writing. She needed to find a way to make her story interesting without Chell.

More importantly, it had been huge for ratings. Over a million people had read Episode 574 within hours of its posting. Even on her best days before that, Rachael had been pulling in shy of 700,000. Since then, her views had continued to grow so that Silverwood Academy was by far the most popular series on WebReader, which was the most popular novel series site in the world. Killing off Chell would be worth it if she could sustain those kinds of numbers. A few more months with that sort of following, and her next commission check would be enough to put a downpayment on a house--a house! She could finally move out of this shitty apartment and prove to her mother that quitting her accounting job to concentrate on her writing full-time really had been the best decision.

It was obvious now that she hadn’t been prepared, though, and the readers were starting to let her hear about it. One thing was certain, the patrons of WebReader were a vocal bunch, and while she’d been getting mostly positive comments for the last two years since she started writing the saga, now, more and more of the feedback was angsty. “Why’d you kill off Chell if nothing cool is going to happen?” Or, “Is everyone going to stop crying one of these days? What happens next?” her readers wanted to know.

Shaking her head, Rachael said aloud, “Good question, XiYon54. Don’t we all want to know?

Eventually, she’d planned on working the plot out so that Chell’s fiance, the dark and brooding Graham Halloway, would find a new love interest in a new character, a new student at Silverwood Academy. But she realized too late that it would take far too long to introduce a new woman into Graham’s life--and that would also shift the emphasis on the story to him. Sure, she could highlight Chell’s older sister, Sammi, but she’d already made her a bit of a dark horse, and the last thing she needed was for people to end up hating her main character.

“Surely, I can come up with three hundred more filler words and worry about this tomorrow…..” Rachael read back over what she’d just written. Professor Jared McCall, one of Chell’s good friends and another of Rachael’s secondary characters that fans seemed to really like, was lecturing his class. He was telling them how important it was to be completely prepared when entering a fray with a bloodsucker when a student asked a question that brought back a memory of Chell, and the professor had fled the room in tears. Rachael was considering having him run into someone in the hallway, maybe this new student, but it just didn’t seem to be working. Who was this girl? Where was she from? Why was she starting class in the middle of the semester? “And what the hell is her name?

“Meow,” Scrappy called again, clawing at Rachael’s leg, gently, but annoying just the same.

Shaking the cat off, she said, “Quit. You’ve got food and water. Give me ten minutes…. Twenty minutes.” It wasn’t like her kitty to be so agitated. Scrappy scratched a little harder this time, and Rachael wished she’d been wearing pants because it kind of hurt. She glanced down at the ratty gym shorts she’d thrown on that morning and pondered going to change into leggings or jeans. But she was going to take a shower and get cleaned up to have lunch with a friend as soon as she was done with this episode and submitted it to her editor, Lark. So focus was key. She could do this--power through. Write a few more sentences, and get the hell out of there. Then, she could shower, change, and go meet Ebony for lunch.

With an air of decisiveness she didn’t feel in her heart, she declared, “Fine. Jared will meet this chick in the hall. She can just be generic for now. We don’t even need a last name at a first meeting. No explanation necessary. The good prof is upset; he’s taking a minute to collect himself. New girl wanders by--lost. He points her in the right direction, and runs back inside to apologize to the class and say they can go a few minutes early. Easy enough.” Satisfied that she could stretch that into three hundred words, Rachael poised her fingers over the keys.

The words started flowing again, enough of them anyway. She got there--three hundred and five words. Good enough for her quota. Good enough to send in to her editor who would read through it quickly enough, make any corrections to typos, and then stick this sucker up for her adoring fans. She hadn’t even needed to send Jared back into his classroom to get her words in and craft a satisfying conclusion to the episode. All was well with the world.

And then that damn Professor McCall had to go and ask a stupid ass question. “I don’t think I caught your name, miss. What is it?

“Why’d you say that?” Rachael cursed her own character for speaking out of turn, something they did often enough, even though it was technically her fingers flying over the keys.

She had no idea what the answer to the question might be. But thinking about the fact that she wrote under a pen name and needed a name quickly, she chose her own name, her real name, for now, and typed it in.

“Oh, uh, I’m Rachael,” the girl said. “It’s nice to meet you.

“You, too,” Professor McCall said with a smile. “It’s very nice to meet you, too, Rachael.

With a deep breath, Rachael ended the episode, closing the document with a satisfied smile. “All I have left to do is send this to Lark and….

Rachael stopped mid-sentence as the floor beneath her feet began to vibrate. Dishes in the cabinets rattled, knicknacks shifted slightly on their shelves, even the books seemed to be dancing.

“Merreow!” Scrappy screeched, her tail up and all of the hair standing on end across her back.

Bracing her palms against the table, Rachael tried to imagine what could possibly be making her second-story apartment shake. “We don’t have earthquakes in Baltimore, do we?” she asked, her eyes wide with alarm.

As quickly as it had started, the rumbling ended, and everything went still. Scrappy seemed to relax slightly, but Rachael didn’t move, not yet.

Once she was sure the ground beneath her feet was solid, she stood and crossed over to the window. A look outside told her nothing. Cars continued to pass on the highway, I-95, a half mile from Shady Side Apartments. The trees and green spaces all looked normal. She didn’t hear any sirens or people screaming. “Huh….

Rachael crossed to the front door and opened it slightly, sticking her head out into the open space near the stairs that led to the ground. There were four apartments here, two across from hers and one beside. She could hear a TV laugh track coming from one and music from another. The other was silent, but in the parking lot at the foot of the stairs, she heard some people talking, and by the tone of their conversation and soft chuckling, she thought they seemed unbothered. The concrete didn’t appear to be cracked. She didn’t smell gas or see anything at all unusual.

“Weird.” She pulled her head back in and closed the door before Scrappy had a chance to dart out, not something she usually did, but under the circumstances, Rachael wasn’t taking any chances. Weird cat. Weird shaking. Just plain weird.

Shaking her head, she crossed the room. “Maybe I imagined it.” She knew that wasn’t the case. There were a few glass collectibles on her shelf that had moved out of their positions, and a vase on her writing table that held silk flowers from her coworkers on her last day at Merek and Merek that had moved as well.

“Whatever.” She shook her head again, deciding it must not be anything to worry about. Maybe an airliner took off at the airport a few miles away, though that had never shook the apartment before. Or maybe a big truck had gotten off the highway at the closest exit and that had rattled the building. She didn’t have time to think about it at the moment. If she was going to make her lunch with Ebony, she’d have to hurry.

Rachael flipped open her laptop and quickly sent the email to her editor before heading off to take a shower hoping whatever that rattle had been it hadn’t broken any pipes or affected the hot water heater. Nobody liked a cold shower.

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