Page 48 of Academy of the Wicked, Year Three (The Paranormal Elites of Wicked Academy #3)

The Ninth Life

~ZEKE~

T he barrier flickers again, thinning to translucence that makes the attacking books visible in horrifying detail.

They're not just books anymore—haven't been for what feels like hours but might be minutes in this temporally fractured space.

They've become something else, pages sharp as surgical instruments, covers that snap with predatory intent, spines that flex like living things hungry for the knowledge contained in flesh.

My arms ache from holding the defensive position, frost magic depleting faster than I can regenerate it. Each impact against the barrier sends shockwaves through my entire being—not just physical but existential, as if each strike tears away a piece of what makes me.

But I can't give up.

Not after seeing her.

The vision of Gwenievere—impossible though it was—burns in my memory like a promise. She saw me. Despite dimensional barriers, despite trial isolation, despite every rule that says observation without interaction shouldn't be possible, she saw me.

And she said she was coming.

You are mine as well.

The words replay in my mind, each repetition both strengthening and weakening my resolve. Strengthening because someone finally, finally claims me as theirs. Weakening because the irony is too perfect—finding someone who would fight for me just as I'm about to cease existing.

I've never had this before.

In all my lives—and I remember fragments of each, like dreams upon waking—no one has ever reversed the dynamic.

I've always been the loyal guide, the one who leads others through their trials, who ensures they survive their challenges.

The cat who walks alone but ensures others reach their destinations.

I've guided princes through labyrinths where one wrong turn meant death.

I've led scholars to knowledge that would have destroyed them if approached incorrectly.

I've been scout, guardian, protector, teacher—always the one enabling others' success.

But never the one being saved.

Never the one someone would risk a dimensional paradox to reach.

The barrier shrinks again, responding to my depleting reserves. What started as a sphere twenty feet in diameter is now barely six feet, just enough space for me to stand without touching the edges. Each compression feels like accepting smaller existence, lesser importance, reduced significance.

The books sense weakness—of course they do. Books contain knowledge, and knowledge has always been predatory toward those who can't properly wield it. They attack with renewed vigor, pages fluttering like wings of paper birds designed to flay rather than fly.

One gets through.

Just a single page, thin as breath, but it slices across my arm with surgical precision.

The cut is deeper than paper should achieve, and it burns with the particular agony of knowledge forced rather than earned.

I see flashes of what the page contained—formulas for unmaking, words in languages that predate sound, symbols that mean nothing and everything simultaneously.

My blood hits the floor of this non-space, and the drops don't behave like liquid should.

They hover, each one becoming a tiny mirror reflecting different versions of my death.

Drowning in ink. Crushed by accumulated knowledge.

Dissolved into component letters that spell nothing.

Paper cuts multiply until there's more space between flesh than flesh itself.

The barrier shrinks again. Four feet now.

I close my eyes, not in surrender but in acceptance.

The end is near.

I've known it since the trial began, really. This wasn't designed to be survived—it was designed to consume. To take the guide and transform them into the guided, to reverse every instinct I've developed across nine lives of leading others to safety.

Death doesn't frighten me.

I've died before—eight times, to be precise.

Each death is a transition rather than an ending, consciousness transferring to the next life with most memories intact.

It's the gift and curse of being feline, particularly one of my lineage.

We don't truly die until the ninth death, and even then, there are legends of cats who found ways to bargain for more.

But this death will be different.

The trial isn't just trying to kill me physically—it's trying to erase me conceptually. When I die here, in this space between spaces where time has no meaning and meaning has no time, I won't transfer cleanly to the next life.

I'll forget.

Not everything—the deep knowledge, the instincts, the accumulated wisdom of eight lives will remain. But the specifics? The faces, the names, the connections made in this particular incarnation?

Gone.

And what I fear most—more than pain, more than cessation, more than the nothing that might wait after the ninth death—is forgetting Gwenievere.

Forgetting her impossible eyes that shift through spectrums that shouldn't exist.

Forgetting the way she looked at me and saw person rather than tool.

Forgetting how she claimed me as hers despite barely knowing me.

Forgetting the first person in nine lives who made me want to be saved rather than just survive.

The barrier is barely two feet now, pressing against me from all sides.

I can feel my form wanting to shift—a desperate instinct to become smaller, to take up less space, to slip through gaps that don't exist. But shifting requires energy I don't have, and becoming a cat here would just mean dying as a cat rather than dying as a man.

The books gather for what's clearly a final assault. They spiral upward in a formation that would be beautiful if it weren't designed for destruction—a tornado of knowledge that will tear through my failing barrier like tissue paper.

I take what might be my last breath in this life, tasting the particular flavor of ending on my tongue.

Then everything explodes.

Not inward, toward me, but outward in every direction simultaneously.

Fire—dragon fire, hot enough to reduce paper to less than ash—erupts in coordinated streams that intercept the attacking books mid-flight. The flames don't just burn; they erase , removing the hostile texts from existence with prejudice that speaks of personal offense at their existence.

Strings of blood—impossibly thin but impossibly strong—weave through the chaos like a net cast by invisible fisherman. They wrap around books that try to escape the flames, binding them together before constricting with force that turns knowledge into confetti.

Shadows—not the passive darkness of absence but the active void of Duskwalker magic—spread across surfaces that shouldn't exist, swallowing entire shelves of hostile literature into depths from which nothing returns.

And through it all, moving with desperate purpose, is Gwenievere.

She came.

She actually came.

Not alone— I can see tiny figures on her shoulders, and is that Grim floating nearby —but she's here, in my trial space where she shouldn't be able to exist, fighting books that want to unmake us both.

"Zeke!" Her voice cuts through the chaos, and hearing my name in her voice makes something in my chest unlock that I didn't know was sealed. "Drop the barrier! We need to combine magic!"

The instruction goes against every instinct—the barrier is the only thing keeping me from being immediately shredded. But I trust her. Trust her more than I trust my nine lives of experience.

I let the barrier fall.

The books surge forward, victory finally in reach ? —

And meet a wall of combined power that makes my frost magic look like winter's first snowflake.

Gwenievere's hands glow with impossible combinations—dragon fire in one palm, Duskwalker void in the other, vampire vitae running through her veins and enhancing everything.

She doesn't just cast spells; she becomes magic, each gesture reshaping reality according to will that refuses to accept failure.

My frost responds to her fire not with opposition but with harmony. Where ice meets flame, instead of canceling out, they create something new—steam that freezes into crystals of pure magical force, each one a weapon that seeks hostile knowledge with unerring accuracy.

Dragon glyphs manifest in the air—Mortimer's contribution, though I can barely see his miniaturized form hovering above Gwenievere's head.

The symbols don't just float; they hunt , each one seeking specific books that contain knowledge too dangerous to exist. When glyph meets book, both cease—mutual annihilation that leaves reality cleaner for their absence.

Duskwalker void spreads like oil across water, but instead of remaining passive, it actively consumes. Every shadow cast by every book becomes a mouth that devours its creator. The darkness doesn't just absorb light—it absorbs the very concept of the books, unmaking them from reality's memory.

And threading through it all, Atticus's blood strings create structure from chaos.

They don't just bind—they organize , forcing the hostile knowledge into patterns that reveal their weakness.

Every book has an opposite, a contradiction, and the blood strings bring these oppositions together with devastating effect.

The synergy is perfect.

Not planned— we haven't had time to coordinate —but instinctive. Each power complements the others, covers weaknesses, amplifies strengths. It's like watching a symphony where every instrument knows exactly when to play despite never having rehearsed together.

The hostile books don't just lose—they cease.

One moment the space is full of attacking literature, death by a thousand paper cuts made manifest.

The next, there's nothing but sparkling dust raining down like snow made of dissolved possibility.

We did it.

We actually did it.