Elija's POV
We walked down the hallway like two soldiers marching straight into a nightmare – from one fucked-up dream into another. My boots echoed against the linoleum floors, each step sounding like a warning bell in my skull.
Lorena walked beside me, chewing gum like she was ready to punch a demon in the face. Honestly, she probably was.
"If this school gets any more haunted vibes, I swear I'm bringing a priest. Or weed. Maybe both," she muttered, side-eyeing the flickering ceiling lights.
I managed a nervous laugh, but it died halfway in my throat as we reached the classroom door. My hand was shaking when I pushed it open.
Inside, the room was already half full. The same buzz, the same flickering lights, the same faces. But something felt... off. There was a tension in the air, like the walls themselves were holding their breath.
And then I saw him.
Edward. Standing by the whiteboard, an old, yellowed newspaper in one hand like some relic he was about to summon a ghost with. He was wearing a navy blazer that looked like it had been tailored in 1943. His eyes scanned the room like a hawk stalking its prey. Then they landed on me.
I froze. My breath hitched. My spine locked up like someone had yanked it into place with chains.
Next to me, Lorena bumped me gently with her elbow.
"Jesus fucking Christ, he's looking at you like you're the last fucking poem in his war journal," she whispered. "God, I wish someone looked at me like that. Preferably not someone who's legally allowed to drink before I was born."
I wanted to disappear into the floor.
Everyone settled. Edward carefully laid the newspaper down like it was the last surviving copy of humanity's regrets.
"Today," he began, voice low, thick with drama, "we will not speak of dates. Or battles. We will speak of shadows. Of memory. Of the heavy, echoing ghosts that live in the corners of history."
I swear, the temperature dropped five degrees.
Lorena snorted, then stage-whispered, "Is this a history class or a fucking séance?"
Edward's eyes shot at her.
"Perhaps both."
Someone in the back giggled nervously. Lorena raised her eyebrows like, 'Ok, spooky grandpa, I'm watching you.'
But Edward wasn't done being creepy.
He turned, slowly, dramatically, and looked dead at me.
"Some memories," he said, "are not inherited. They are... carried. From lives we don't recall. From dreams that aren't dreams. From gazes that feel like they've already met you."
Fuck. My throat closed. My fingers clenched around the desk. His words were like needles in my skin.
He was talking to me. I knew it. Everyone knew it. Hell, the walls probably knew it.
Lorena leaned in, whispering so close to my ear I could feel her breath.
"I'm just saying," she hissed, "if he starts talking in Latin, I'm out. Gone. Smoke bomb. I'm not dying in a gothic fanfic."
Edward turned again, this time to address the whole class.
"Today's assignment," he said, with that slow, haunted smile, "is to write something... different. A letter, perhaps. A poem. A prayer. But not from you. From your soul. From a part of you that remembers things you don't."
He paused, then pointed at me.
"Elija, you may write in verse. Your words... they already know the shape of memory."
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't even nod. My heart was doing parkour in my ribs.
Lorena whispered, "Okay, nope. This is some reincarnation type shit. You were a witch in your past life, confirmed. Probably burned at the stake. No wonder you hate fire drills."
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Lorena's POV
Okay, let me fucking explain something right now.
This is not normal. None of this is normal. The lights? Flickering. Edward? Acting like he just came out of a Victorian haunted romance novel. Elija? Looking like she's about to astral project from emotional whiplash.
Me? I am the only emotionally stable bitch in this classroom, and that's saying something because I once cried over a chicken nugget.
Edward kept talking. Something about "echoes in the blood" and "ancestral grief." And Elija's eyes were WIDE. Like, full-on anime panic mode.
So naturally, I did what any best friend would do.
I fake-coughed: "BULLSHIT."
A few kids laughed. Edward did not.
He turned to me slowly like he was about to banish me to the spirit realm.
"Lorena, if you'd like to express disbelief, perhaps do it on paper," he said, with the calmness of someone who's definitely cursed at least three people in Latin.
"Oh I will," I said sweetly. "I have a whole fanfic about you already."
The class collectively lost their minds.
Meanwhile, Elija looked like she was about to pass out. I grabbed her hand under the desk. Her fingers were ice.
"Hey," I whispered. "Grounding time. Breathe in. Breathe out. We're not letting some Dracula-ass man make you spiral. You are here. I am here. We're fine."
She nodded. Barely.
Edward started writing words on the board: "The soul remembers what the mind forgets."
Fucking dramatic.
I leaned toward Elija.
"You know what? If this turns into some weird past-life shit, I swear, you're the tragic ghost bride and he's the cursed poet-priest or something. And I'm the comic relief that dies second."
She finally smiled. A tiny one. But it was there.
And I swore to every sarcastic deity in the sky – I was gonna get her through this shit, even if I had to exorcise a ghost using a Hamilton soundtrack and a Monster energy drink.
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Elija Cullen's POV
There was something off about the classroom air today.
It wasn't just Edward and his cryptic sermon about "memories that don't belong to us." It wasn't even Lorena's increasingly unhinged commentary whispered next to me like a devil on my shoulder who drank four Red Bulls and ate a tarot deck for breakfast.
It was... the silence.
Something heavy.
Like the room knew something we didn't.
Like the walls had been waiting to eavesdrop on this moment since before we were born.
I was halfway through writing about what my soul might say to this fucked up era ("Please log off." was the opening line) when Edward cleared his throat in that way that made your spine try to escape your body.
He stood at the front of the class, one hand resting gently on that old newspaper again like it was a relic. His eyes flicked over each of us, pausing on me for just a second too long. Of course.
"Before we continued," he said smoothly, "I need to ask... has anyone seen The Book?"
You know the moment in horror movies when everyone looks around but no one breathes?
That.
Even Lorena froze.
Because we all knew what he meant.
The Book™.
The weird one. Bound in cracked black leather that looked suspiciously like it could whisper to you in the middle of the night. The one he'd brought in yesterday for "literature dissection" — and then promptly kept locked inside a glass case like it might try to eat someone.
Now it was gone.
And the room fucking knew it.
Edward gave us all that headmaster stare. The "I will wait here all day until one of you breaks under the weight of your guilt and anxiety" stares.
"Anyone?" he asked again, voice deceptively calm.
Lorena, of course, coughed loudly and muttered, "Maybe it ran away. I would too."
I elbowed her.
But it was too late.
Edward's eyes locked on her. And I swear to whatever goth god controls lightning and eyeliner, the room temperature dropped a degree.
He took a step forward.
"Lorena, was that a suggestion or a confession?"
"Oh," she said with the fakest smile I've ever seen. "Sir, I don't even have the emotional stability to commit petty theft. I can barely steal someone's boyfriend, let alone cursed literature."
The class chuckled nervously.
Edward didn't.
He leaned slightly on the edge of his desk and said, "The book was last seen yesterday. And now it's gone. The type of book that isn't just misplaced. The type of book that finds its way to people who... call it."
Call it?
What the actual cryptic-wizard-shit was that supposed to mean?
I felt my stomach twist.
Because the moment he said that... I felt something. Like the echo of my dreams scratching behind my ribs. That voice again, like ink and fire.
Lorena whispered, "Oh my god. Elija. Your face just went full 'I see dead people.' Don't you dare have a psychic meltdown in front of Edward. He looks like he collects student tears in a thermos."
I whispered back: "I didn't take it."
"I didn't say you did," she replied. "But if the book took you, I'm coming to the underworld with a baseball bat and holy water in a Starbucks cup."
I actually snorted. Loudly.
Edward raised an eyebrow at me.
"Elija," he said, too casually. "Do you remember seeing the book last?"
I froze.
Fuck.
I did.
Not here.
Not in class.
In my dreams.
Burning pages.
Symbols I couldn't read, but somehow understood.
And someone holding it.
But I couldn't say that. I couldn't tell a man who talks like he keeps a cult in his basement that I've been having literary hallucinations involving our maybe-immortal, terrifyingly-hot English teacher.
So I said the only thing my brain could come up with:
"Sorry, I don't make eye contact with haunted objects."
Silence.
Lorena choked on her own laughter so hard I had to slap her back.
Edward smiled. Barely.
"Very well," he said smoothly. "Let's return to our souls and their screaming."
He walked back to the board like nothing had happened.
But something had.
I could feel it.
The air was wrong.
And when I glanced at the front desk — the space where the book had once been — I could swear, just for a second, I saw ash on the glass.
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Lorena's POV
Okay, let's get this straight.
If one more creepy adult looked at my best friend like she was a missing chapter in their haunted diary, I was gonna throw hands.
Or chalk.
Or a chair.
Also: Edward was definitely hiding something. No one gets that dramatic over a missing textbook unless it has a demon contract in the appendix.
And Elija?
Poor babe looked like she was about to astral-project out of her skin.
I kept sneaking glances at her while pretending to doodle skulls in the margins of my paper. But the truth? I was watching. Always. Because I knew this wasn't normal.
Like — the dreams, the weird magnetic death-stares, the book, the way Aurora kept lingering by the window like she was waiting for a prophecy to kick in?
Yeah. This was not just school anymore.
This was a plot.
And I swore to every sarcastic deity in the sky — I was gonna get her through this shit, even if I had to exorcise a ghost using a Hamilton soundtrack and a Monster energy drink.
Hell, I already had both.
Edward kept talking about souls and timelines and "past life echoes" and honestly? I tuned him out after the phrase "soul contracts." Too close to MLM cult vocabulary.
Instead, I wrote this in my notebook:
> To Whom It May Concern:
If this school becomes an actual hellmouth, I am suing.
P.S. If I die, please delete my internet history and give my Switch to Elija.
I passed it to her.
She looked at it, deadpan, then scribbled back:
> If I die first, you are not allowed to perform a séance.
You'll probably summon Steve Buscemi instead of me.
God, I loved her.
I glanced at Edward again.
He was back to pacing.
And I swear... I saw something shimmer in his reflection.
For a second — just one fucking blink — his shadow wasn't shaped like a person.
It had wings.
Nah.
NOPE.
Not today, Satan.
Not today.
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Elija's POV
Class finally ended, and I swear I've never left a room faster without actually running.
Lorena was behind me, already googling "how to break generational curses using caffeine and crystals."
I felt like I was coming undone.
Like my skin didn't fit. Like the walls were whispering behind my back. Like Edward knew something. And Aurora?
Where the hell was she?
Which, if you ask me, was even worse than her showing up and throwing me into an existential spiral.
Why did I feel like something was about to change?
Why did it feel like I'd already lived this?
Like I'd burned before?
And why... did I want it to happen again?