(I should probably say now that this work is entirely un-betaed, so all mistakes are mine.)

Hope you all are doing okay and staying healthy out there!


Chapter 29: Testing the Waters

Burgess

There were ten minutes until first period started, and Jamie was frantically flipping through his world history notebook, reviewing everything he thought he might need to know for his upcoming Silk Routes Unit Test. He deeply regretted not studying enough earlier that week, but in his defense, he'd been freezing from the inside out.

He was only one of a handful of students in the classroom so far, including Pippa. Their teacher was busy writing instructions on the whiteboard at the front of the room.

"Jamie, maybe you should have asked to take this test another time? I mean, you've been 'sick', and…maybe now is not a good time—" Pippa whispered from her desk beside Jamie as more students took their seats around them.

Jamie halted his frantic page-turning for a moment to glare at her. "Does it matter when I take this stupid unit test? At this point, I want to get it over with, you know? Because I won't do well on it anyway!" He exclaimed, louder than he meant to.

Pippa stared back at him, stunned. "Jamie," she whispered, as the bell rang and their teacher call the students' attention to him, "I was just trying to offer some help. You're not the only one who will miss him. Me, Monty, Claude, Caleb, even Kay (Cupcake), we're still your friends, even if you haven't been around us much lately. "

Jamie looked down at his desk and didn't reply. Instead, he closed his textbook and cleared his desk, wearily accepting the unit test as it was passed to him. The class grew quiet, the silence filled only with the rustle of paper and scratching of pencils. It was only after Jamie sniffed a few times that Pippa glanced at him and realized that tears were falling down his face and onto his test. He hunched over his desk as he hastily wiped the tears away with his left hand, then he sniffed again.

Pippa watched him for a moment longer before returning to her test. She wanted to help Jamie somehow, but she wasn't sure if her help would be well-received. Besides, she had a test to finish, and the faster she finished it, the sooner she could focus on dealing with the mess the immortal world had managed to drop on their believers' shoulders.

"Does someone need a tissue?" Their teacher asked the class from the front of the room.

Jamie stiffened in his seat as silence reigned throughout the class room. Then he sniffed again, and the teacher's gaze pinpointed him as the source of the noise.

"Are you sure?" He asked.

With a huff of annoyance, Jamie marched to the front of the classroom and yanked a tissue from the box on the teacher's desk. He exited the room as fast as possible, simultaneously caring too much and not at all about what his classmates or teacher thought about his actions.

The 13-year-old walked with purpose to nowhere in particular, knowing that he had to finish his test but not wanting to face his classmates while he was crying all over again. Jamie came to a stop in the middle of the hallway, many classrooms away from his own. He wiped his eyes with the tissue again, and steeled himself with a deep breath in preparation to go back to his world history test.

On his way back to class, Jamie noticed that dark, heavy clouds had moved in over Burgess.

By the time the teen reluctantly entered his classroom and sat down again, snow had started falling.

Jamie's last thought before he turned his attention to the test in front of him was that the snowstorm looked nothing like the kinds of storms that Jack brought.

Jamie and Pippa didn't speak again until lunch, where they were joined at their usual table in the cafeteria by Monty and Caleb. (Claude and Kay had an earlier lunch period.)

"I'm sorry about earlier, in world history." Pippa started to quietly apologize to Jamie.

Beside her, Jamie pushed his zip-lock bag of veggie straws in her direction. A peace offering. "You didn't do anything. It's fine. I'm sorry for, um, all of that. It's just…I wish Jack was here." He said.

Pippa nodded. "I get it. And I meant it when I said we're all your friends. We'll figure this all out somehow." She replied. A sly grin appeared on her face then, and she promptly stole all of Jamie's veggies straws before he could react, dropping the ziplock bag into her backpack and zipping it shut.

"Hey! My veggie straws!" Jamie belatedly chased after the stolen food items, much to the amusement of his friends. He was stopped by Pippa, who told him he owed her for giving him all notes he missed in the classes they shared, and Monty chimed into to say that he knew Jamie actually didn't like veggie straws that much. (Jamie conceded that at least the first part was true.)

Five minutes before the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, Jamie remembered the all-important thing he meant to show his friends: Death's writing in his textbook. "Hey guys, I really need to show you something! Check this out." Jamie pulled his history textbook out of his backpack and put it in the center of the lunch table. He flipped through the pages until he came to the illustration of the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh and pointed to Death's handwriting, which glowed faintly no matter which way you looked at it.

"Where did that come from? What does it even say?" asked Caleb.

Jamie turned to Monty, hoping his friend might shed light on Caleb's second question. "It's in Latin. You look up Latin phrases for fun sometimes. Do you know what it says?"

To their surprise (or not) Monty nodded excitedly. "I do recognize it. I think it roughly translates to something like 'And light shines in the darkness.'" He said.

"Huh." Jamie looked down at the glowing script in the textbook margins again. "So 'et lux in tenebris lucet' means 'and light shines in the darkness.' Cool."

"But where did it come from?" Pippa prompted, running her hand over the glowing message. Some of the light seemed to cling to her fingers for a second after her hand passed over the words.

Jamie lowered his voice to nearly a whisper as he answered, "I can tell you guys more after school, but basically the spirit of Death implied that it was some kind of magic, I think, that can be used against the dark spirits that ki— took Jack."