The Academy

  The Ghost Bird Series

  Meeting Sang: Sean

  ♥

  Book One – Alternate Opening

  The Boys’ Version

  ♥

  Written by C. L. Stone

  Published by

  Arcato Publishing

  Published by Arcato Publishing

  Copyright © 2023 C. L. Stone

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Sean | 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Also By C. L. Stone

  Sean

  1

  Inside the Academy hospital in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, the building breathed with healing, and busyness, and death and on rare occasion, with tiny, brand-new life.

  It just so happened that now on Sean’s shift, one such little life was sleeping quietly in the ward. The tiny bundle, wrapped in a yellow checkered blanket, with cheeks and face and hands still pink, slept as soundly as could be, despite bright hospital lights shining all around.

  Sean admired the baby ward immensely. Quiet. Serene. Full of promise and cute babies to ogle all day.

  And perhaps in the back of his mind, a tingling. He had been found as a baby, in a hospital, though not in a ward like this. A lost baby. He might have not even been in such a ward at all, not like the baby he watched now.

  He wasn’t sure why he thought of it at times like this. Not all babies were born in hospitals, sure. Would anything have changed in his life if he had been?

  Would he want it to change?

  Unfortunately, Sean didn’t actually work this ward. He wasn’t even supposed to be on this floor. But he needed a break from his rounds and no one came to look for him here.

  Sometimes one needed moments of peace, to remember that life wasn’t always chaos.

  ♥♥♥

  Sean struggled with the last hour of work at the hospital. Returning to the correct floor had brought patient after patient needing his attention.

  One more. One more hour and he’d finally be free.

  Well, free-er. It was relative.

  He hadn’t been able to get away from the hospital all day long. He had been on call for emergencies during the night after only taking a few hours off to sleep, and it was taking a toll. He was exhausted. And hungry. The hospital cafeteria had closed for the night and it wouldn’t be open for another couple hours yet.

  He looked forward to grabbing some dinner and then heading home. The condo that he had just recently purchased, which was closer to the hospital for him. He hadn’t even had a chance to settle in and unpack.

  One more hour.

  He knocked quietly on the door of the last patient he needed to see for the night.

  A nurse answered the door. She was a petite woman with blonde hair cut short over her ears. Her eyes were blue. She was mature, with a ring on her finger. She smiled at him. “Hey, Dr. Green.”

  Sean had stumbled across her before but hadn’t yet spoken with her directly. He was pretty sure she didn’t normally work this floor, but nurses got moved about quite frequently to fill in gaps.

  “Hi,” Sean said. “I was just about to announce myself and enter the room. How’s our...” Sean leaned back to read the name on the paperwork outside the room that he’d temporarily forgot. “How is Mr. Marshall?” This was a new one on his roster, just brought in from another hospital as overflow.

  The nurse hesitated, looking down at the paperwork before meeting his gaze again.

  “Not well, I’m afraid,” the nurse said. “We’ve given him pain medication. He’s a grump and threatening to leave, but his family wants us to keep him here under our care and hopefully talk him into the surgery he needs.”

  “Oh,” Sean said. One of those. He took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I can handle this.” He aimed to walk around the nurse to enter.

  “Wait,” the nurse hissed at him. “What are you going to do?”

  “My best, as always,” Sean said and shared a quick wink with her before he turned and looked in on Mr. Marshall.

  Mr. Marshall was a tough man in his fifties with broad shoulders and thick arms. His brown hair was peppered with white and hung over his eyebrows. He wore sweatpants under his hospital gown, and his expression was serious. The strong expression on his face told Sean he’d be trouble.

  Sean stepped inside the room and shut the door behind himself. He scrunched his face into something as serious as he could and when he spoke, he more grumbled than anything.

  “Hello, sir,” he said as he went to the bed and looked over the medical chart. “How are we feeling at the moment?”

  “Like shit,” Mr. Marshall growled and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I know how you feel,” Sean said.

  “You don’t,” Mr. Marshall said with a snort. “I mean, really. You’re not even a real doctor. You’re too young. What are you doing here?”

  Sean bit back a smile. “I am a doctor,” he said. “This is my last year of residency before I strike out on my own.”

  “Yeah?” Mr. Marshall asked. “What would you know? You’re just a kid.”

  “I have more experience than you realize,” Sean said. He read over the chart and checked on a few of the notes left by his doctor suggesting a heart surgery. The prognosis was not good without it. “So, you’ve got life insurance?”

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “Your funeral planned?” Sean said casually, tossing the chart casually onto a nearby chair. “I mean, if you don’t want the surgery...”

  Mr. Marshall laughed a little. “I’m not dying. I just want to get rid of this pain. It’s killing me.”

  “Then why won’t you do the surgery?” Sean asked.

  “Because it’ll kill me,” Mr. Marshall said and closed his eyes.

  “So the pain kills you, you die. The surgery will kill you, you die,” Sean said, and raised a thoughtful brow. “Are you sure about that? Because it seems to me if the surgery will help you not hurt, and is more likely to not kill you... you either want the surgery or like the pain enough to die with it. Is that your option?”

  “Who says that to anyone? They allow you to tell that to patients?”

  “If you had any interest in living, you’d do what I suggested,” Sean said. “But if you don’t, then it doesn’t matter.”

  “How dare you,” Mr. Marshall said and then mumbled the rest of his thoughts.

  “Maybe the others will bother, but I’m not going to waste my time with a dead man.” Sean shrugged and headed toward the door. “I just thought you were the type to appreciate some actual frank advice. Get the surgery or die within a few weeks. And if you plan to die, get out the life insurance policies and make sure the kids know what you want for your funeral.”

  “Why should I listen to some kid who isn’t even a real doctor?” Mr. Marshall demanded. Curses flung out of his mouth, getting louder.

  Sean left, closing the door behind him to give Mr. Marshall a chance to think. He had a feeling Mr. Marshall just needed someone else to be the bad guy to tell him honestly, brutally honestly, what his options were. Lashing out... that was fine. Sean was willing to be that bad guy. He’d check in next time he was here and try again, but he wanted Mr. Marshall to have time to think about it.

  Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, but his regular doctor could be the good guy.

  He was about to head downstairs to his office for wrapping up notes and other things when he spotted Luke Taylor in the hallway. He was leaning against the wall, his arms folded, looking like he was going to fall asleep where he stood. His long blond hair hung in front of his face.

  Sean approached him, an eyebrow raised. “What are you doing here?”

  Luke breathed in sharply through his nose and straightened up, stretching his lanky arms over his head. He wore all black, which was unusual for him. “Need a partner.”

  Sean groaned internally. He wasn’t exactly in best form to be crawling around rooftops. However, he knew that if Luke was here, it was because Sean was likely his last option.

  Interesting.

  “You’ll have to fill me in on the way,” Sean said, resigning to his fate.

  2

  Sean joined Luke in the elevator and they made their way down to Sean’s office. Luke told him all about how North and he had traversed a mall, allowed North to get pickpocketed, and how there was a suspicion that there were actually two people they’d been assigned to watch.

  “Good to know,” Sean said as the doors to the elevator opened. “Now just one minor question.”

  “Sure,” Luke said, following him out onto the office floor.

  “Why exactly are we following these two?”

  Luke made the most exasperating noise Sean had ever heard him make. “Very good question. That’s what we’re trying to find out now.”

  Sean’s office door was wide open. Inside, an irritated North, with arms crossed and wearing a tired scowl, stood opposite Owen. Owen held a couple of sheets of paper with some envelopes in hand. Owen was studying the papers closely.

  “This script does appear to be familiar to me,” Owen said. “Though I can’t place it. We may n
eed to contact Dr. Roberts.”

  “Good luck,” Sean said. “We’re on opposite shifts as of now. But he should be here in the morning. Unless it’s an emergency, I wouldn’t wake him.”

  “Then we’ll just have to wait,” Owen said. He adjusted the black-framed glasses on his face as he looked up from his studying to North. “We also have registration tomorrow. Everything might need shifting around.”

  “It’s not great timing,” North said. “The school. The diner...”

  Owen tilted his head a little. “Not too much for you, surely?”

  North hesitated.

  That was unlike him.

  “Two might be a little much,” North said. “Maybe. Everything is so early in the projects that it’s hard to tell.”

  Owen seemed to accept this answer and nodded sagely. “The expectation of a diner is why I assume you weren’t given a letter yourself. So why are you here tonight working on it?”

  North shrugged. “Fell into my hands.”

  “You’re going to have to learn to trust the others to take care of things for the next few weeks.”

  “We’ll get better organized.”

  Sean coughed in an annoying way to alert the others he wanted to say something. “Why am I here? Exactly? After all, my shift is over and as you all said, we do have registration tomorrow.”

  North lifted a hand and started counting off with his fingers. “We need cameras better angled at the motel. We need someone to tell us if we should be pursuing both, but that takes finding the source of the letter. We need to gather video footage from that mall, and the reports of any wallets stolen...”

  “Not to mention someone needs to go back down to that computer in the motel and see what’s being run there,” Luke said. “Victor’s left a key... thingy there. The longer it’s there, the more likely the kid doing stuff might notice. So we need to hopefully retrieve it after one or two sessions.”

  Sean was listening, but he was so tired he also wasn’t processing any of the information they were rattling off to him. “Back up a second,” he said. “What exactly do we need to do within the next hour?”

  He could feel his mind getting a little dark, a little dizzy. He’d chug a bit of coffee if he needed to, but he was fading fast. If they didn’t get moving, he wouldn’t be of any help.

  And it sounded like they needed all the help they could get.

  ♥♥♥

  From the hospital, everything happened in a blur. Sean couldn’t put his brain onto the task of answering anyone’s questions for now. That side of him had shut down.

  Instead, all that was left was strict obedience. Go with Luke. Do what he said. Just a couple more hours.

  It was so early in the morning, and the sun wouldn’t rise for another three hours perhaps. Sean struggled to hold on to Luke’s ankles as Luke dangled precariously over the edge of a motel roof.

  Changing out a camera that had gotten knocked down. Or stolen... Because they never found where the lost one went.

  So Luke thought it’d be better to reinstall in a slightly different spot. Though now it was pretty clear why there weren’t security cameras throughout the property. There was likely illegal activity going on and no one wanted witnesses, which meant they needed to be more clever about their cameras and hiding the fact that they were cameras.

  It was very difficult not to want to tickle Luke’s feet. And he might have tried, except they were on the second-story roof and the ground was all cars and concrete.

  Instead, Sean waited as patiently as possible, using physics to balance Luke and hang on to him without straining too many muscles.

  When Luke finally wiggled his toes, Sean took that as the signal and helped to hoist Luke up.

  Sitting beside Sean on the roof, dressed all in black, including a black ski mask, Luke lifted the mask off and breathed in fresh air deeply. “I hate these things.” A bead of sweat collected at his brow.

  Sean agreed. He wore all black as well now, and despite it being a cool night, it was still August. “What now?”

  “One more camera. I want one at those stairs. If they steal this one again, I want to get the stairwell and see if that one gets left alone.”

  Sean groaned. “Always one more...”

  “I know,” Luke said. He clapped a hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “If they’d leave the cameras alone, we wouldn’t have to be up here.”

  “Are we even at the right building? There’s three.” At least he thought. Maybe just two, but one seemed a lot longer than the other. There was a pool, still empty and covered despite it being summer.

  “Ye-up,” Luke said. “At least for the thief. Even if a girl team takes over watching her, at least they’ll be set up to do so.”

  “Good luck getting a girl team,” Sean said. “From what I’ve heard, most everyone is pretty busy.”

  Luke nodded, though the edge of his mouth curled up slightly.

  Just slightly.

  He was pleased with this notion.

  Sean thought it was curious, but he couldn’t pinpoint why Luke would think it was good that everyone was so busy. He also couldn’t build up a question to ask about it. Maybe it didn’t matter. Sean stood carefully and motioned with a hand. “Let’s do it before I lose my ability to help anymore.”

  Despite the both of them being in a hurry, getting a camera set up on a stairwell was both very risky and very, very tricky to do. Without ladders, it meant dangling Luke even further, and Luke contorting himself, sticking to the walls, and hoping neither of them forgot a safety measure.

  And if someone came out now, and happened to look up, there wasn’t much excuse for Luke being where he was. He couldn’t climb back too quickly. It’d be far more trouble.

  Sean stilled his mind at first, holding the rope he needed to keep secure and as steady as possible. However, counting as he usually did at times like this left him nearly dozing off where he was.

  Maybe Owen should have come instead. However, he was at the mall with North securing footage and likely going over it for at least a few hours. That kind of thing would have put Sean to sleep for sure. At least after this, he could go to bed.

  Instead of counting, Sean tried to think of the scariest things on the planet. Spiders. The dark depths of the ocean floor. Dolls. Cave-ins. Being buried alive in poop.

  That last one made him chuckle to himself.

  It was right after his chuckling that he heard it: a car pulling into the lot.

  Sean wondered if Luke would try to come back, but instead, he remained where he was. Likely moving and coming back would get him caught faster.

  The car pulled up to the second building. Just their luck.

  Doors opened. There was talking. Footsteps.

  Still, Luke remained.

  There was nothing alarming about the noise. Mostly grumbles. It sounded like one was feminine. Someone, or two people, climbed the stairs. By the time they got to the second level of the motel, Sean was actually able to hear the conversation.

  “No, you’d never make it up here by yourself,” the feminine voice said.

  “I always make it back!” came the muttering of a masculine voice.

  They bickered, though lightheartedly. Down the outdoor corridor. Eventually there was the sound of a door opening, and then shutting.

  At first silence, Sean breathed a sigh. Luke hadn’t been caught.

  Though within moments, it sounded like a fight was happening.

  Suddenly, Sean’s load lightened tremendously.

  Sean pulled, frantic to figure out what happened, only to discover the frayed end of the paracord.

  Luke had cut the line?

  There had been no sound, no indication that Luke had fallen at all.

  The fighting noise, thuds and shouting, continued. Had Luke somehow dropped onto someone and gotten into a fight?

  There was no way to tell from here, and no point in staying on the roof. Sean did his best to find his way back in the dark to the footholds of the exterior corner that they had used to climb up. He shimmied his way down to the second floor and scurried as fast as he could to the other end.

  Luke was crouched down below the window of 221B. His head was tilted, listening.

  The fighting noises seemed to have settled down a little, but there was still talking inside.

  Sean mouthed at Luke, wanting to hiss at him for being so close. Surely one of them would be out here at any moment.