The Puppet Master: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 4

by Savage, Vivienne

  Then she truly began to fight, turning wild and frenzied, a terrified beast with fire magic, blending acid into the rain that stung my skin. I used glamour to neutralize it, changing the composition of the misty condensation in the air to bicarbonate.

  The moment she singed Victor, I told the skies what I wanted and called down the storm. The heavens split open with a deluge of rain so intense her magic instantaneously snuffed out.

  One by one, bolts of lightning streaked from the sky. The first two missed, and a third came close to it, but somehow, I was the storm and the storm was me. Instead of electricity dispersing and traveling through the others, I drew every bit of it back to me. I felt it throbbing in the skies and trembling with rage and fury.

  With each arc of electricity, I was closer to my target until finally one landed dead center of her skull. I grasped one of the next bolts before it struck the ground, and with agility I hadn’t known I possessed, I turned like an Olympic athlete hurling a javelin and flung it directly at Tricia.

  That time, I did not miss.

  It hit her center of the chest and her body went rigid, eyes wide. I’d paralyzed her with a hit to the heart.

  “Now!” Anton shouted.

  The moment I dispersed the electricity, Victor slammed the stake into Tricia’s chest with all of his strength. I dashed over and kicked it with all of mine, driving it in inches deeper. Her howling scream could have split the night sky. She convulsed and shook on the spot before she fell backwards, writhing and covered in blisters but unable to fight. Defenseless. Then Anton delivered the final blow, slicing her head cleanly from her body.

  I watched her head roll across the road, strangely empty of pity or even anger. It was over, at least for now. One more enemy gone.

  And yet we were no closer to finding Annalise.

  15

  I Knew It!

  Gabriel had never hugged me the way he hugged me when the EMS healer released me from her care. My nose hurt, and my eyes would be purple by sunrise, but she’d assured me I didn’t have another concussion.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  He didn’t speak. Just held me. Just squeezed me so tight it felt too intimate for onlookers.

  Finally, he leaned back and looked at my face. “Are you really?”

  “I am. I’m…” Relieved Anton had dealt the killing blow. Thankful I didn’t have to look into those empty, dead eyes any longer. Glad that once they’d emptied her pockets of all evidence, someone had incinerated her remains until nothing was left.

  Grateful there was one less person able to hurt my friends because of a vendetta against me.

  “Maybe it’s time for us to go—”

  “Hey, you two. You want to get in on this?” Sebastian called, interrupting whatever Gabriel planned to say.

  “Yeah!” Dragging my mate by the hand, I followed our mentor down the narrow lane. Evidence markers had been set up, along with a chalk outline of where Tricia’s body and decapitated head had been prior to incineration.

  We came to a unit crowded by sentinels. The door had been raised, and an agent took photographs, the bright flash casting white light onto the walk path every few seconds.

  “Looks like she was headed to this unit,” Sebastian said, gesturing us through after the photographer emerged. There were a dozen empty coffins there, two burnt husks on the floor and the fresh odor of incinerated nosferatu. The battlemage standing nearby wore a cocky smirk on his face.

  Daylight spells were a bitch for nossies.

  “A vampire safe house. Clever. We never thought to check public storage for nests,” Gabriel muttered.

  “Did she have more keys on her?” I asked in follow-up.

  “She did. We’re preparing the incantations for a Steps Retraced spell now. Thankfully, when you cast that lightning bolt at her, it knocked the fucking shoes off her,” Sebastian said, grinning. “So even without having her physical body, the mages have an easy way of finding everywhere she’s traveled in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “I should get you home,” Gabriel cut in, looking antsy. “You’ve had a—”

  “Certainly,” Simon interjected, overruling Gabriel and earning more of my love than ever.

  “Of course, we’ll also be tracing where all these keys go by mundane means,” Sebastian added. “I recognize a few of these tabs, so that’s a start.”

  Simon chuckled at his partner and beckoned me over. We joined a small group of sentinels standing away from the storage locker.

  “Sky, you’ve already met Matt.” Simon indicated a large, burly man with shoulder-length blond hair. It took me a moment, but then I matched up where I had seen him before—the hospital last year when a crazy mage had unleashed a plague of zombies upon the city in his attempt to become a powerful lich. Matt’s entire squad had been killed. He had been the sole survivor.

  “Hey,” I said, feeling stupid for saying so little.

  “And this is Kendra Winters.” Simon introduced a young woman who couldn’t have been much older than me. Of course, it was often hard to tell with mages. “Kendra, this is Skylar and her partner Gabriel. She’d like to watch how we track in instances such as this.”

  “Of course. Come on over here, Skylar. I was just about to begin.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mages’ spells were different than those cast by the fae. I didn’t require components or arcane words and rituals to work magic. Kendra took Tricia’s shoes and drew a chalk circle around them, adding in a few sigils I recognized as cardinal directions and representations of the element air. Matt brought over a map, which he spread out on the ground beside his partner. Kendra connected the two items with another line and muttered an incantation under her breath.

  A part of me expected the shoes to sparkle and start moving around, leading us onward to wherever our quarry had gone, but that was a rather ridiculous notion and likely would take us a full day to follow. Not exactly the quick help we needed. So while I was a little glum at the lack of overt magical display, I still leaned forward with interest, waiting to see what would happen.

  The shoes pulsed with a ruddy, ember light, the slow rhythm reminding me of a heartbeat. Then the same glow appeared on the map, little specks of color blooming at our current location. As I watched, the specks began to move, leaving a glowing trail that went along the tracks for a while.

  “That’s where they jumped on the train,” I offered once I had my bearings.

  “Well, let’s see where she was before that,” Kendra said.

  Anytime the glow stopped and lingered on a position, Matt jotted down the cross streets while Sebastian rattled off what was in the area after doing a Google search on his phone. From the looks of things, Tricia had been a busy bee, stopping over at three other storage facilities and random points throughout the greater Chicago area.

  When the spell petered out, Kendra and Matt split the addresses between various teams.

  “You guys sticking around to help with this?” Sebastian asked. “It’ll be some sweet hours for you.”

  Holden loped up to us in his bear form and transformed, sweat glistening on his brow despite the cold weather around us. “Hell yeah, we are!”

  A second later, Stark landed beside him and took human shape. “Sorry we’re late. It was a clusterfuck down there at the attack site.”

  “Huh?” No one had told me anything in detail aside from assuring me that Pilar was safe and the humans were being evacuated. “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon, Sky, you know how it goes whenever King Oberon shows up. He’s never alone,” Stark said.

  “You should have seen it. A dozen fae showed up to help get everyone off the train. They had dryads healing people and a leprechaun comforting the kids. I’ve never seen so much faerie dust thrown around!” Holden exclaimed.

  “What?” I turned my gaze up to Sebastian and Simon. “You didn’t mention fae came.”

  “Liadan contacted Oberon,”
Sebastian admitted. “He and his retainers arrived not long after Anton led you here. While he took Pilar home, Stark and Holden stayed to assist with documenting the damage and filing the report with the city.”

  “Yeah,” Holden said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Paperwork is a bitch.”

  “All part of the job, man. And we’ll all have plenty of it to finish when this is over.”

  Ugh. Paperwork. Even magical folk like us couldn’t escape every mundane task. Each report had to be thorough.

  “All right, kids, if you’re going to tag along, we need to get going,” Matt called.

  Victor bowed out, but the rest of us piled into two separate vehicles. I hadn’t seen so many SBA cars since the incident with the Plague Doctor last year when we had to canvass three different hospitals. Even with our lights flashing, it still took nearly an hour to reach the farthest point Tricia had visited, another storage facility out near O’Hare Airport. Kendra cast a spell over the key and the pillar of pulsing light illuminated the night sky, leading us to the correct building and unit.

  “Not exactly subtle, but effective,” Holden remarked.

  “Oh, but it is,” Kendra replied in a quiet voice. “Only we can see the marker. Sort of like a quest giver in an MMORPG. You see the icon when you activate the quest, but no one else does unless they’re in your party.”

  “You just became about ten times cooler.”

  Kendra grinned at Holden then swept her gaze across the storage lot. Much like the last place, it looked like a bunch of outside and indoor units.

  “What are you thinking, Matt?”

  Matt sniffed the air and studied the marked unit. It was larger than the last one, about the size of a double-car garage, with two heavy padlocks on the roll-up door and a second normal door. “Sunrise isn’t too far off. Best to wait another three hours and then go in. They’ll have nowhere to flee, and right now, they can’t leave without us seeing.”

  “They could be destroying evidence.”

  “They have no way of knowing we’re lurking out here,” the older sentinel assured me. “Besides, if we go in now, then we potentially miss out on any nossies who would otherwise retreat here for the day.”

  “It’s a sound plan,” Gabriel agreed.

  The next couple of hours hidden beneath an invisibility spell flew by faster than I expected. Exactly as Matt predicted, three nosferatu arrived at the shelter just before dawn, completely oblivious to our presence. Kendra had hella control over her spellwork.

  One by one, they turned to mist and streamed beneath the door.

  “Sun’s coming up. Time to do this.”

  Kendra dropped the spell and gestured for Matt to take the lead. With eyes gleaming and a feral grin on his face, he turned to Sebastian. Without a word, both sentinels jogged ahead to the unit while Kendra and Simon prepared their magic and I… Well, I didn’t have much to do except ready my stake and my faerie fire. Sebastian used the key to unlock the door and then Matt kicked it open, badass style.

  No magical traps sprung. No frenzied vampires leapt out at us.

  After a nod from Matt, Holden broke the locks on the roll-up door then he and Stark lifted it, allowing the first rays of yellow sunlight to fill the room. This storage unit was arranged like the other, a row of six coffins on each side, propped up on boxes. Dread filled the air with a palpable tension, and chills tickled my spine. Inside those twelve boxes, there could be twelve nosferatu. We had no way of knowing how many had gathered here for shelter, but what we did know was that nests as large as this were uncommon.

  One by one, the sentinels popped open the lids.

  I remembered how it had been last year when I needed to rouse Holly in the middle of the afternoon, hours ahead of her usual bedtime. She’d been incoherent and bewildered, barely able to stumble out of her bed. Rising from it to help us had consumed every ounce of her willpower.

  These nosferatu weren’t so fortunate to have the same purity of blood Holly had taken in from Carmilla. They lay there like dolls, staring up at us. Frozen. Helpless. Their eyes narrowed in hate and despair and so much more emotion than I’d known eyes could convey from still bodies.

  One by one, we hammered in stakes then filled their mouths with holy wafers and garlic before decapitating them. They went up in flames.

  We visited two more safe houses, finding most coffins empty afterward.

  “Most likely, those nosferatu were destroyed,” Sebastian said. “It’s going to be a lot of this from this point forward.” Then he glanced at his watch. “About time for you to call it a day, I think.”

  “But I want to be involved.”

  Sebastian took me by the shoulders. “Sky, you’ve been involved. You did wonderful tonight. Shit, I couldn’t be prouder of you. This night began with you going on an outing with friends and ended with you helping clear one of the largest nests we’ve seen in years. Not to mention bringing Tricia to her end.”

  I swallowed, my throat dry and tight. He was right, obviously, but I still felt like I could be doing more. Gabriel touched my elbow and gave a gentle squeeze. That small bit of comfort made me want to curl up against him and not move, reminding me just how tired I actually was.

  “Okay, but you’ll let us know what’s happening?” I finally capitulated.

  “When we discover more, we’ll give you a call,” Sebastian promised.

  * * *

  Simon portalled us back to campus, which was better than a two-hour drive through Chicago rush hour. Gabriel, Holden, Stark, and I stepped from the dirty storage lot into the courtyard near the residential section of campus. That was a hint if I’d ever seen one.

  “Gonna go shower and crash. See you guys later.” Stark waved and turned, heading off to the staff buildings.

  “Yeah, what he said,” Holden agreed. “You two take it easy. I’ll check on Tinsel when I wake up, if you don’t beat me to it.”

  The reminder was enough to knock my exhaustion to the wayside. As Holden jogged off, I turned toward the path that would lead to the townhomes rather than our shared apartment. “Oh my God, I should go see if she’s okay.”

  “You need to rest first,” Gabe argued.

  “I won’t be able to sleep easy unless I see her with my own eyes. Just for a minute.”

  “All right. But slow down before you fall on your face and I have to carry you there.” He took my hand in his and gave a slight tug, his smile teasing but his eyes worried.

  Upon reaching the townhouse, we were greeted by Oberon. He opened the door before my knuckles touched the wood and the sweet, savory siren song of maple bacon wafted out to me from the kitchen.

  “Ah, Skylar and Gabriel, do come in. I’m told congratulations are in order. Well done.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “Please, allow me.” He touched his fingers to my forehead and the dull ache that had plagued me vanished, along with the uncomfortable swelling. I touched my nose, feeling the smooth skin beneath my fingertips.

  “Thank you,” I said again, this time with more enthusiasm. I never wanted to take advantage, but having the faerie king as a friend was great.

  Oberon stepped aside and swept out an arm in the grandiose, welcoming gesture I’d expect from him were he inviting us into Avalon Palace. He must have stayed overnight. Lia was in high spirits, her scarlet and golden hair twisted into a clumsy bun against the nape of her neck. She wore a sapphire-blue silk robe that trailed behind her in a ripple of glossy fabric over the kitchen floor.

  “Good morning, Skylar! Would you like your eggs scrambled, fried, or poached?”

  “Morning, Lia. Scrambled.”

  “And you, Gabriel?”

  “Poached. Thanks, Lia.”

  Oberon’s lips twitched ever so slightly. I imagined fae royalty didn’t often serve others, but he was going to have to accept the fact that Lia loved cooking for people. By the looks of things, she’d been busy already. Waffles waited in a tall stack on a serving dish next to the biggest pile of bac
on I’d seen. My stomach rumbled in anticipation.

  But first things first, I twisted around to look for Pilar.

  “She’s asleep,” Lia said. Gabe shot me a look that clearly said that’s where I should be too, but he also didn’t appear upset by the mountain of food Lia was arranging on his plate.

  “Oh. Well, that’s good at least. Did you, uh, have any idea what she’d become when she Ascended?”

  “It is never a certainty,” Oberon replied. “Sometimes there are hints, signs of what is to come for our children, but until they reach that moment nothing is set in stone. Pilar demonstrated great strength of character. It has been a long time since a pleiades has graced our court. They tend to keep to themselves, preferring to remain in the mountains.”

  A pleiades. At least now I had a name for what my friend had become. Somehow, it was fitting that Pilar had Ascended to become a star nymph. She would have made an amazing faerie godmother, but I’d always felt she was meant for more. Pleiades were the godmothers of every worthy mortal to ever wish upon a star.

  “So, she’s really okay?”

  Lia set a plate piled with fluffy scrambled eggs before me and smiled. “She’ll be fine. Some rest and—” She paused and canted her head, her gaze going distant. Lightning flashed outside, somewhere near the campus gates, then again a second later, seemingly right atop us. Gabriel flinched as thunder shook the townhouse.

  “The hell is that? There wasn’t a storm in the forecast,” he began, only for understanding to dawn on his face the very moment I heard the frenzied, furious crescendo of a desperate heart song. Dain’s anger billowed from the porch like the heat waves from a furnace, tinged with fear and genuine terror. Pain.

  Oberon gazed at the door in silence and…shame?