Ashley Jason

9. CHAPTER SIX

Over the next two weeks, life in Silvers, Texas was a little crazy.

On the bright side, the doctors at Silvers Hospital were able to repair Barrett’s wound. An interesting side effect of Barrett’s dragon powers was that he healed from injuries far more quickly than both supers and normals alike, meaning that by the end of the week, Barrett’s shoulder wound was already closed and healed and he was ready to go back to the Academy with me.

But that was probably the only bit of good news to happen during that time. The rest was … mixed, to put it lightly.

Mom and Dad came home next Monday. I imagine they would have come back much sooner if I had called them and told them about the attack, but I didn’t want to ruin Mom and Dad’s anniversary.

Not that I needed to worry about that, though. Because by the time my parents got home, they both were already aware of Parasite and Gentleman’s attack. They had apparently heard it from Triplet, the NHA, the INJ, the G-Men, and it even made Neo Ranks. I learned that last bit when Barrett and I got emails from a Neo Ranks reporter who wanted to interview us about the experience, though we declined the request because were too busy getting ready for school to spend time chatting with the media.

As well, I ended up having to speak with the Silvers City Police Department, the G-Men, the NHA, and the INJ myself. Fortunately, Shade herself did not interview me. Instead, another agent, named Fingerprints, showed up to interview me. Fingerprints was apparently the G-Men’s top spy and could learn a person’s memories just by shaking hands with them. That was why the ‘interview’ was approximately three and a half minutes long, give or take a couple of seconds.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know how helpful any of the information I shared with them was. Without knowing where Parasite and Gentleman had teleported to, I could only tell the authorities that Gentleman was wounded, which meant that travel would probably be difficult for those two. Knowing their tendency to evade law enforcement, though, I suspected that Parasite and Gentleman wouldn’t be too slowed down by Gentleman’s injuries.

Jake came back home around the same time Mom and Dad did. He was even more furious about this attack than they were, doing a complete run around the entire city to find Parasite and Gentleman himself. He failed to find anything, though, so he came home and spent a lot of time angry about the fact that Gentleman had nearly killed me. I recalled that Jake was still pretty angry at Gentleman for betraying us in our first year, which was probably why he was so upset.

The NHA assigned more agents around my parents’ house, just in case Parasite and Gentleman tried to attack it. That seemed unlikely, given how Parasite’s real target was me, but they decided to be safe rather than sorry, and so assigned about half a dozen NHA agents to protect our house from further attacks from Parasite. I suppose it wasn’t entirely paranoid, though, when you considered that Parasite had tried to steal my dad’s powers once.

Cora, as you can imagine, was also upset. She actually learned about the attack from her mother, who worked as a nurse at the Silvers Hospital. In fact, Cora’s mom was actually one of the nurses assigned to Barrett, which was nice because it meant someone I knew was looking after him.

Despite that, Cora was both angry and afraid when she called me. She called me later that very night, in fact, after her mom got home from work and told her what happened. I assured Cora that I was still alive and okay, which Cora was happy to hear about, but she was still quite pissed. I could tell that a lot of her worry was for her mom, though, because she worked at the hospital and there was some fear that Parasite or Gentleman might attack the hospital while Barrett was there.

Granted, that fear turned out to be baseless, but it took me a while to reassure Cora that the hospital was safe and that neither Parasite nor Gentleman was likely to try to attack it anytime soon. That helped calm Cora down a great deal, but I could tell she was not going to be entirely worry-free until Parasite and Gentleman were both in jail.

That, sadly, was likely not going to happen for a while. Parasite and Gentleman had once again pulled off their disappearing act, which amazed me because they no longer had Dragon King’s backing to explain how they did that. Either they found a new patron—unlikely, given their reputation—or they really were good at hiding from the law.

Either way, I did ask my parents about Triplet’s birthday photo. And their answer disturbed me: Neither of them remembered inviting Parasite to my birthday party. Dad even insisted that he didn’t remember Parasite there, even after Triplet texted him the birthday party photo so he could see it himself.

Exactly what this meant for the Parasite case, I had no idea. Triplet did not call me at all during the next two weeks, so I had no idea how the case was coming along. Dad told me that Triplet’s only response to Dad saying he didn’t remember inviting Parasite to my birthday party was a simple “Interesting,” which was very unhelpful, as you might imagine.

I still didn’t understand it myself. How did Parasite and I know each other even before we met in my first year? Why did Parasite never mention that he had seen me at my sixth birthday party? Parasite and I were far from friends, but given Parasite’s utter obsession with me, I figured he would be more than happy to bring that up. Did we interact with each other so little back then that Parasite simply forgot about me?

Regardless of the answer, I really couldn’t wait to go back to school. While Parasite had attacked the Academy once already, Night Soldier had already sent out a message to the students telling us that the Academy was safer than ever now. On the bright side, if Parasite did attack me at the Academy, then at least he would leave my family alone. I was really worried about my parents and especially little Ronny, who I could easily see Parasite attacking if he couldn’t get to me.

Yes indeed, I couldn’t wait to get back to the Academy. I would get to see Courtney and Sofia again, resume my in-person weekly meetings with Professor Hernandez, and hopefully get closer than ever to finding a cure for my condition.

Unfortunately, I was about to learn the hard way that life at the Academy was not exactly going to be sunshine and roses.

Indeed, as I was about to learn, life at the Academy was, in some ways, going to be even harder than my third year at the Institute.

And it started on the first day of school when Jake and I arrived in front of the Academy Auditorium to start orientation for our fourth year …