The Chasm (H. Academy Series #4)

AMMA

Máncora, a coastal town in northern Peru, was wet, warm and stale tonight, the smell of salt and dry fish lingering in the air, sticking to my clothes. Everything was boiling—the ocean, the drinks left untouched for too long, and the wooden plateau underneath my feet, warm even through the soles of my sneakers. This was the second time tonight someone had played Macarena, and all the tourists, including Jade, still freaking loved it. I dabbed the puddle of ice that formed underneath my juice glass with a piece of cloth and focused on my laptop, trying to ignore the singing in the background.

This trip would be the end of me.

Following nothing but instinct and bad ideas, Jade and I boarded a plane to Lima, Peru almost a month ago. As soon as we landed, we summoned Jade’s grandmother. She was, for once, more useful than we imagined, and we ended up with a name and a place—Atoc Huamán, Piura region. The very next day, we were on another plane, headed to Piura. It was then when I finally realised what a stupid idea this was. We were in a huge region with nothing but a name. While my human brain immediately realised we had no legitimate reason to issue a judicial request and gain access to Registro Nacional de Identificación y Estado Civil’s records to potentially find anyone named Atoc Huamán, Jade’s thought process was much different. She found a coven. At first, we were careful while disclosing our secrets, but it became apparent after a few days that no one actually knew anything. The coven we’d first found sent us to a different coven and they sent us to another. The subtlety quickly disappeared, and the words ‘demon’s grimoire’ began to roll off our tongues with more ease. Some people flat out told us they didn’t know anything, some laughed in our faces, claiming we were hunting fairy tales, and others sent us on random wild goose chases. One of which led us to Sullana, another city nearby, where the same cycle repeated.

It became obvious that this was leading nowhere once we had gone through three covens in Sullana, but Jade wasn’t about to give up. After all, she had been having a blast in these cities. It was a level of determination I had never seen before; her energy had been seducing everyone from the Andes to the coast into giving her information. One singular thought guided her—the covens had either heard rumours or felt them on their own skin, the demons were coming, and stopping them was of the utmost importance. She even mastered the language, though most of her knowledge came from Enrique Iglesias’s songs, and though I repeatedly told her that Peruvian Spanish wasn’t quite the same, she didn’t mind. Others didn’t mind, either. People believed her, and that was the most hopeless part of the entire trip. They just didn’t know. No one had the information.

“Someone in Máncora might know something,” were the words that eventually sent us to the coastal town, more than ninety miles away, where we were right now.

We had been here for the past week, no luck in finding anyone or anything, stuck with a bunch of tourists spending their January somewhere warmer, and worrying the nights away. Well, Jade was drinking them away, but it boiled down to the same thing.

I was one failure away from telling her it was time to call it quits. We were wasting our precious time here, when we could be home, trying to find the Monk Tome, which was a failing task, as well. In the other hemisphere, with Professor Lange as the new Headmistress, the entire faculty was trying to locate the tome without success. Morta and Leon weren’t lucky, either. Whenever I mentioned that to Jade, she repeated that what we were doing was far more important, and that even if they found the tome, they’d still have to get here to translate it. She was definitely burying her head in the sand, and I was allowing it.

Maybe, despite the time crunch and the anxiety creeping toward me with each passing day, I, too, enjoyed the sandy beaches and the sunsets over the Pacific. The tourist and the surf season were in full bloom, and the town was vibrant and hectic and drunk. The rustic beachside restaurants, alive with music, were too charming to pass, and the fruity drinks too tasty not to order. Maybe, I, too, was running from something, quite possibly a demon still stuck in my bedroom.

I closed the laptop with a sigh, the social media search fruitless in the attempt to find Atoc Huamán, not that I thought he was the type to have an Instagram account. I crossed my legs on the bar stool, my knees beginning to hurt, and took a sip of the drink. Heat was lingering on my skin, and the calm dark ocean beyond the lights and the line of palm trees was suddenly appealing. I picked up the third burner phone of this trip and punched in Morta’s number.

She answered after the second ring. “Amma?”

“Buenas noches,” I murmured.

“I tried to call the number you gave me, but couldn’t reach you,” she said.

“Jade is making me switch burners every now and then,” I said. “Which is ironic considering half of Peru has her phone number at this point.”

“Where is she? Can I talk to her?”

I traced the line of half-naked bodies to the middle of the dancefloor. Wearing an off-the-shoulder white dress tied with a floral scarf around her waist, Jade twirled on the rustic wooden floor, her sandals hitting it in the rhythm, the short hem fanning out around her, revealing her tanned naked legs. Her hair was up in a messy ponytail, her cheeks flushed and sun-kissed, and her movements fluid and seamless, like she belonged to the sounds of the guitar. Two men were dancing around her, both handsome, both eager to get her attention. One of them was Mateo—a cheeky playboy with a wide grin and glowing eyes she’d attached herself to the moment we arrived to Máncora. The other was Aaron, an English tourist spending the gap year here before going to Cambridge, who she had met two days ago. She had slept with both.

“Honestly, she’s busy,” I said into the phone.

“Doing what?” Morta snapped, and I frowned at the sound of urgency in her voice; things at home weren’t great. “I hope she’s figuring out how to translate this damn tome, because we’re losing our minds over here.”

I pursed my lips and watched as Mateo spun her in a pirouette. She grabbed a shot from the table and spun right back into his arms, the white dress spiralling around her. She downed the shot, and Mateo used the opportunity to put his hands on her hips and come closer to her.

“She’s living la vida loca,” I mumbled.

“Please tell me she hasn’t gone to Peru only to shag half the country.”

“Only Mateo and Aaron and Cruz.”

I could imagine Morta burying her face in her hands as she groaned into the phone, “Is she even trying to translate the tome?”

“Yes, but we weren’t lucky,” I said, “we’re trying another place right now. Hopefully, we hear something.”

“Where are you?”

“You know I can’t tell you,” I said and looked at the dancefloor, but Jade wasn’t paying attention to me, her hands wrapped around Mateo’s neck, her hips swaying against his. “How are things back home?”

“Lange is losing her damn mind,” Morta spoke, “half of the classes are cancelled because teachers are trying to find the tome, the Veiled Hall issued a curfew and declared a state of emergency, we are tasked to maintain the shields around the school in shifts, since that’s the only viable defence strategy currently. Do you want me to continue?”

I sighed, “I know the situation’s not ideal-”

“Not ideal? We are fighting for our lives while you two are busy sun tanning!”

“That’s a bit dramatic,” I murmured and caught Jade’s glance. “Look, we wouldn’t be of much use at home anyway.”

“Maybe Jade could help us find her mother, who probably has the tome.”

“She’s told you all the places her mom might go to,” I countered. “Let us finish this. We’ll be back soon.”

It was difficult to imagine Hunt Academy in disarray while sipping juice in a beach bar surrounded by half-naked people. No wonder Jade didn’t give a fuck what was happening back home.

“No way, ‘soon’ is not a good enough answer,” Morta said, “I’m giving you a week. If you don’t figure it out until then, you better come home.”

Jade was now whispering something to Mateo in the corner, dragging her fingers up and down his toned arms, while he desperately tried to steal a kiss. I breathed in through my teeth.

“Fine, a week.”

“Thanks-”

“How’s Bal?” I asked before she hung up.

“Still locked in your room, looks worse now,” she murmured.

When I raised my gaze to the dancefloor, Jade was approaching, almost spilling the drink she was carrying.

“I have to go,” I said and added, “please, turn off Taylor Swift for him-”

“Is that Morta?” Jade interrupted me, took the phone from my hand and pressed it against her ear. “Hola, do not under any circumstance turn off Taylor Swift,” she said and hung up.

“Seriously? It’s been a month.”

“It’s my own form of torture,” she said and took a sip of her fruity cocktail, “though his was much more harrowing.”

“Morta wants us to come back in a week,” I said. “The Academy is in shambles, and they can’t find the tome. They need our help.”

She squinted, the music pulling her hips, and once again I thought she wasn’t fully present.

“I thought the merger of Lange and Darth had it under control,” she said, “maybe we should let them do it. After all, they want us to have fun and live our bestest lives.”

I sighed, “Is this about Thar telling you to stay out of it again? Is that why we’re here? Because if it is, I’ll be very disappointed.”

“No, chica, we are here because Mateo is about to introduce us to his grandmother,” she said and slurped the cocktail through the straw.

I raised my eyebrow. “Am I supposed to be thrilled that we’re meeting your one-week-stand’s extended family?”

“When you consider that Mateo hid the fact he was a mage for a whole week from me, maybe,” she said.

I frowned and looked around, but found only a confused Aaron looking like he didn’t know whether he should approach or not. One stern gaze from me, and his mind was made, his feet carrying him far away from our table.

“Explain,” I told her.

She leaned against the stool and kept her glass close to her chest. “Word has spread through northern Peru that someone is asking around about a demon’s grimoire. It reached Máncora and the Atoche family. All the members were asked to hide their identities,” she said, and when her eyes met mine, I saw conspiracies running wild inside. “So I overshared some more. Finally, Mateo cracked, and we’re gonna meet his grandmother, Josefina Atoche, maiden name—Huamán.”