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⊹ Book 1 of the Aldergrove Duology ⊹
After being told he has only six months left to live, Clementine decides to track down his sister's murderers, leading him to Aldergrove A...
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The end of class didn't fill Clementine with the relief it usually would. Instead, dread weighed upon his chest. He made sure to leave the room in the midst of the crowd—he checked left, right, and left again. He made his way down the hall, making sure to glance at every rib in the wall to ensure Ian or his goons weren't hiding behind them. And when he reached the centre of the hall, he sat on a bench close to a group of girls bickering over a broken ivory comb.
Clementine waited, staring at the door to Elliot's class. He could see the students through the foggy windows returning instruments to their places. He tensed up a little when he saw one girl threatening a boy with a flute, but when he set his eyes on Elliot, he frowned strangely. His spotty-faced roommate was chatting with a petite, green-haired girl. He couldn't make out much of her face through the mouldy glass, but it looked as though Elliot had somehow made a new friend already. Why did making friends seem so easy for him? But then again, Clementine hadn't really tried to make friends, so he wasn't sure how tedious it was supposed to be. Either way, making friends in a place like this didn't seem like an easy task, and yet, Elliot was making it look simple.
As his class left the room, Clementine stood up. He watched as Elliot and the green-haired girl headed over to him. She was a little shorter than he was, her green hair fell to her waist, and lined across her forehead were five orange jewel-like scales. They shimmered in the light, and when Elliot pointed over to Clementine and muttered something to her, she smiled, revealing a jaw full of pearly-white, shark-like teeth.
"Clementine, this is Mavis. Mavis, this is Clementine," Elliot introduced as they stopped in front of him.
She held out her hand and smiled. "Nice to meet you."
He took her hand, shaking it. "You too," he mumbled. Then, he looked at Elliot with an expectant look on his face.
"Mavis is one of the people I was talking about," he said. "She's fae."
Mavis giggled and slipped her hands into her pockets. "The one and only here this year," she said proudly. "Elliot tells me you two were friends with the seelies that got sent back down the hill-y."
Clementine frowned. "Uh...yeah...."
She sighed sadly, shaking her head. "I was friends with Jack, but he sort of just...didn't come back."
"Jack?" Clementine asked.
"Some big beefy guy, apparently," Elliot mumbled.
"Jack was my bodyguard. He went to tell these awfully rude cold bloods to leave me alone, but he never came home," she said sadly.
Cold bloods? Could it have been this Jack he'd seen getting melted into the ground by those girls?
