“Are you sure? I mean...can magic be hidden?” I already knew the answer though.
“No. Magic can’t be hidden, even with a blocking spell since the spell itself is magic. The dark, murderous kind of magic leaves a sticky residue on objects and in the air itself around where a murder happened for months.” The man frowned. “There was nothing like that here.”
The same as when Leo had died. There’d been no magic around him either.
So, that was it, then. I could go. The Ministry was already shrugging into their cloaks, packing it in here so they could move on to the next case. I stood and got out of there quickly in case they changed their minds.
A rubber knife...
I turned into the hallway and nearly barreled into Ramsey who was leaning against the wall by the door, arms crossed.
"You..." I swallowed, not sure what else to say.
His mouth twitched as he shrugged, understanding sparking across his thunderstorm eyes.
It was him. He’d turned the dagger to rubber, but when? After the headmistress and the Diabolicals had come and found me with a knife at Ramsey’s throat, everything had happened so fast. But if he’d done it then, why had I been in a dungeon for three long months? Had it really taken that long to declare Vickie’s death an accident? Of course there were storms that slowed things down and other cases the Ministry was involved in, but...still.
I supposed I should’ve felt angry for being robbed of that time, but I only felt numb.
Headmistress Millington, who stood in the middle of the hallway, regarded the both of us and then flicked her attention into the room. "No more questions?"
The mustached man appeared at the door with a stack of parchments under his arm and shook his head. "I'm sorry about your streak of bad luck at the school, Headmistress, but we're done here. We'll be in touch if there’s news about Professor Wadluck."
I sucked in a breath. The Psycho-Physical Education professor was still missing?
The headmistress nodded sharply, the tension in her shoulders easing some as she turned to us. "Don't think I'll let you off the hook so easily. I don't know what kind of disagreement you two had, if that was even what you were doing when I walked in." Her cheeks flamed.
Mine did too. Ramsey, on the other hand, just grinned. Sonofabitch.
"You gave me a scare when I heard the alarm in your room, Ramsey, and then seeing Dawn with the knife, whether it was rubber or not, on top of Professor Wadluck missing, Vickie’s death, trying to keep this school going, and everything else that's been going on..." Her voice warbled at the end, and she looked away, smoothing a strand of brown hair back into the pile on her head.
A pang of guilt struck my heart.
"I'm sorry, Headmistress," Ramsey and I said at the same time.
"You should be,” she snapped. “Until the last snow of the season, the both of you will shovel the main walkway to the school gate. Every day after classes and before dinner. No excuses. No magic to do it for you. I want you both shoveling."
I nodded, willing to accept whatever punishment she dished out since I deserved so much more.
She shooed us away. "Please. Go to dinner."
Ramsey and I turned to head back down the hallway, but I outpaced him almost at a run, needing to get away from him as quickly as possible. I had too many thoughts to wade through, each one more confusing than the last.
A rubber knife... If he hadn't changed it, I likely wouldn't be racing back to my dorm. He'd done that...even though I'd tried to kill him.
I could feel his stare probing my back, wondering about me, but now I didn't really know what to do with myself around him so I was wondering about me too. I couldn't just switch off the rage and hate I felt for him, even if he didn't kill my brother. Did he? The truth was in my pocket, but right now, more than anything, I wanted to find Seph.
Not in the deserted entryway. Not in the nearly empty Gathering Room. I raced upstairs to our room and burst through the door. Empty. Not even Nebbles the Undertaker cat to hiss and spit at me.
Voices drifted across the hall, and I quickly crossed toward them.
"Hey, have you seen—" I started.
The girl from two doors down took one look at me, dove into her room, and slammed the door in my face.
Well. Still guilty in the eyes of the school, then. Lovely.
"Dawn," a sultry, honeyed voice said.
I flicked my gaze down the hall.
There stood Morrissey outside her room, red ribbons decorated with teeth woven through her long black hair that fell to the middle of her black cloak. The same girl who'd never said a single word to me before now, but had been a good friend nevertheless.
She stared at me with her beetle-black eyes and smiled. "If you got any spare teeth you don't need, I'll read your fortune. It won't hurt."
No. No, I didn't have any spare teeth. But since I was feeling so lost and confused, I said, "Yes. Yes, I do."
Chapter Two
"Can we expect Echo and her fists anytime soon?"
Morrissey closed the door of her and Echo's room. "No."
I'd never actually been in their room, and it was a lot tidier than mine and Seph's, and it had a lot more teeth. I could instantly tell which side of the room belonged to Morrissey. A lifelike drawing on her desk caught my eye, framed not with teeth but silver looped into hearts. It showed Morrissey, and a smaller, lookalike version of her missing several teeth, both of them smiling from ear to ear.
"My sister," she said, coming up behind me.
I nodded as a pang speared my chest. The proud note in her voice reminded me of how Leo used to talk about me, and me about him.
"Have a seat, and I'll get us ready."
I did as she said while she retrieved a rolled black cloth from the trunk by her bed. "Why are you talking to me now and not before?"
"Because I didn't have anything to say before." She took the cloth to her desk, laid it down carefully, and began to unroll it. "Until your teeth began whispering to me."
Oh. Of course. "And I'm guessing teeth whisper to you often?"
"Only when their owner needs help."
"But you did help me. You helped me in gym class and with the séance."
"Because you asked me, and I could tell that you needed help, but now, your teeth are asking."
I sighed, loud and long, not following. I’d always thought my teeth were just teeth, but what did I know?
She leaned down in front of me and caught my gaze with her midnight eyes. "It's a custom where I’m from not to speak until spoken to by one's teeth. Then and only then. It wasn't personal that I didn't talk to you before, but when your teeth aren’t talking, I don’t talk either. I listen."
"All right." I shrugged. "I'm not mad or anything, but why now, I wonder?"
"You don't think you need help now?"
Ah, good point. Before, I’d had tunnel vision on Ramsey and hadn’t thought I'd needed guidance. Now, doubts tumbled through my head, along with the impossibilities that had come to light about Leo's murder, harder and harder until they'd crushed me to my lowest point. And Morrissey was offering me her hand to help me up—a hand that was currently holding a giant metal torture tool.
"Uh, thought you said this wouldn't hurt?"
She winced. "I meant the fortune part. Not the tooth-pulling part."
My jaw dropped. "You tricked me."
"Sorry? You can heal yourself right after I pull the tooth, right?"
"How about before you pull my tooth. Like preliminary healing?"
Frowning, she shook her head. "That makes the tooth too numb to speak clearly. But the pain will only last about two seconds, and then you can heal it right after."
I started to loosen a breath, about to give in, when my next thought froze my lungs together. "Wait. Which tooth are you taking? Not one of my front ones, right?"
"Of course not," she said with a sultry laugh. Her voice wasn’t what I expected her to sound like. I guess I thought she’d sound th
e same way she looked—small and unassuming—though I knew she was anything but. "Front teeth only whisper about superficial things anyway. The ones that whisper the loudest are the ones near the back. They're the ones that know exactly what you should do next because the nerves run deeper."
I nodded. "Makes sense."
"Does it?"
"Not one bit,” I admitted. “So which tooth are you taking?"
"The one that whispers the loudest, and I’ll insert a fake tooth when I’m finished.” She brought the torture tool closer. “Ready?"
I nodded, gripping the bottom of the wooden chair so tightly that my fingers cramped, and opened my mouth wide.
Morrissey's pale face brightened at all the pearly white possibilities in front of her, then slid the long tool inside. Her dark eyes sparkled as they locked onto one, and pressure tightened around it. "On the count of three... One."
She yanked. I sucked in a breath as pain filled my mouth. My eyes watered. Salty blood trickled across my tongue.
“Bind thee in health, Protect mind and soul too, Boost vigor and happiness, Make it all renew,” I murmured, and instantly, a pleasant numbness filled the spot where my tooth had been.
Morrissey held the tooth up in front of her, clasped tightly in her tool's tongs, her mouth opened in awe while she stared at it. "Two. Three."
I flopped back in the chair. "That's not how ‘on three’ works."
She shot me an apologetic smile and then returned her stare to my tooth. "This one is telling me all sorts of things.” She leaned in as if to listen. “You need to find a familiars' cemetery after the dark hour as soon as you can."
A familiars’ cemetery, which would basically be a pet cemetery. "Not for Nebbles, I hope. Does it say why?"
"No. It says that you..." She tilted her head, her brows merging into a line of confusion. "That you were at White Magic Academy recently?"
I sat up straighter, a rush of nerves knotting around my spine.
"With a tooth that looked exactly like this one and that you were...searching for something." She looked at me, her eyes wide. "A tooth that looked like this one... I don't know what that means."
I swallowed hard. I knew what it meant. It had been a skin-walker, one who didn't need magic to transform into someone else. I was at White Magic Academy while I was here...because Morrissey said I was looking for something there. What was it? The only reason I knew all this was my parents went to White Magic Academy and sent me a letter saying how great it was to see me. Then Ramsey had said it wasn’t him who’d killed Leo, but a skin-walker. That was the only explanation I had of me being in two places at once.
I reached into my pocket and grazed my fingers over the crystal ball, not ready to look at it, not ready to admit what might be on it could be true. That Ramsey didn't kill my brother, and that the skin-walker did.
Don’t trust anyone, he’d said in the dungeon.
I cleared my throat, my voice still sounding rough after so much disuse. "So I need to find a familiars' cemetery after the dark hour and figure out what a tooth that looks like that one was searching for at White Magic Academy. Got it. Anything else?"
"That's it, but it's more information than what's usually packed inside a tooth. And it was more like a shout than a whisper.” She dragged her excited gaze away from my tooth to look at me. “These things are urgent."
"Yes. Agreed." Because despite what the Ministry thought, Vickie's death was no accident. I knew that truth in my bones, just as I knew that Seph's sleepwalking was linked to Leo's, and that this was all linked to the onyx stone and Ryze. Leo had even told me to guard the stone during the séance. Others could die if I didn't figure all of this out, and soon.
“It’s interesting,” Morrissey said, “because your tooth isn’t the first who has whispered about an exact replica while its owner was somewhere else.”
Which meant the skin-walker had been busy...
A knock sounded at the door, and Morrissey rose to answer it. A familiar face appeared on the other side tattooed with red and white swirl designs all over her bald, ebony head, a face that nearly caved my chest in with relief. When she saw me, a wide smile spread across her mouth, and tears immediately sprang to her big dark eyes.
“Hey there, stranger,” she said.
I flew at her, a sob in my throat and a heavy weight suddenly freed from my shoulders. We clung to each other and sniffled and laughed and cried, and it struck me how easily I'd made a friend even while fueled by rage and the need for revenge that had filled me so completely that I didn't feel like I fit inside my own skin anymore.
She started to pull away, but I couldn't let her.
"No,” I choked out. “I'm not done."
"Dawn.” She gasped while patting my back. “I can't breathe."
"Oh. Sorry." Finally, I let her go. "I was so worried."
"I was so worried," Seph said at the exact same time, and we both laughed. "Are you... Did he..."
I knew the questions she was trying to ask, but I didn’t know the answers. "I'll explain. Well, I'll try anyway."
“Good.” Seph looked to Morrissey, who appeared transfixed as she laid my tooth on her desk. “Have you put her fake tooth in yet?”
Morrissey shook her head.
I sat in the chair again, and she replaced the torture device with another from her black cloth, this one with a brand new shiny tooth clamped in it.
“You won’t even be able to tell,” Seph said.
Morrissey wedged it into place where it clicked and fit perfectly.
“Thank you, Morrissey.”
Her midnight eyes flicked toward my tooth on her desk, and she smiled wide.
“Bye, Morrissey.” Seph took my hand and led the way to our room.
Something tugged at my memory for an instant as we walked out into the hallway, too fuzzy to take shape, but seeming important somehow.
The charms on Seph’s bracelets and earrings tinkled a happy little song and brought me back to where I most wanted to be—with Seph.
"I can’t believe they locked you away for almost three months when you didn’t do anything,” she said. “But you were finally cleared? You’re staying here?"
I nodded. "More importantly, are you?"
She shut our door behind us, her black cloak swirling around her ankles. Her bald head glinted in the torchlight when she turned. "I haven't sleepwalked once, even when you were gone. I always woke up in my bed where I belonged, with Nebbles lying on my face. Isn’t that great?"
I heaved out a breath that unraveled some of the knot in my stomach. "Absolutely."
And while I was relieved, I wasn't so naive to think everything was normal. Far from it.
Seph plopped down on her bed, taking me with her by my hand, and despite my doubts and worries, it did feel good to be back here with her. To have someone I could talk to freely.
“So Ramsey...is innocent?” she asked, squeezing my hand. “Catch me up with that.”
Just then, our door creaked open, and a furry gray body slithered through. At the sight of Nebbles the Undertaker, Seph’s familiar, my heart squished into goo, just like it did every time I saw her.
“Hi, Nebbles,” I squeaked. “Long time, no see. Did you miss me?”
She pierced me with her one orange, glaring eye and went straight to Seph’s boot where she deposited whatever was caught in her mouth. A dead mouse, I realized, picked clean.
“Oh good,” Seph said, grimacing. “Thanks, Nebbles. You really shouldn’t have.”
Careful not to jostle it off, Seph crossed to her desk, dropped a couple of pieces of parchment to the floor, and gently toed the remains onto it. With her mouth twisted in disgust, she picked up the parchment and the remains and put it on her desk. Nebbles sat proudly with her chest puffed out and one fang peeking out of her mouth.
“Good job, Nebbles.” I gave her a thumbs-up, which she ignored, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
Cats. I just wanted to kiss and smush all the furry little
murder balls, no matter how dark and dire everything else was.
“If there are no more interruptions.” Seph gave Nebbles a stern look and then returned to her bed. “What about Ramsey?”
“He’s...” I couldn’t answer if he was innocent or not, not without looking at the crystal ball, which I still wasn’t ready to do just yet. “He said something to me when I confronted him. Something that didn’t make sense but did at the same time.”
She patted my knee. “You’ve lost me completely, but go on.”
“Right before I went to his room, I received a letter from my parents saying how great it was to see me at White Magic Academy.”
“Right before?” Confusion formed deep ridges across Seph’s brow. “What? You were here, with me.”
“It didn’t make any sense to me either until Ramsey mentioned a skin-walker.”
Her mouth popped open. “Then he’s lying. You said—”
“I know. There were no traces of magic anywhere near Leo when he died. But the Ministry told me there was no magic on the doll that looked like Vickie, either, or her body.”
Seph rose from the bed and rubbed at her head while she paced the room. “A skin-walker who doesn’t use magic... How can that be? It requires a twin’s eye and then a spell to walk through skin. There’s no way you can do that kind of dark magic without magic.”
I nodded, forming my next question carefully so it didn’t sound like an accusation. “Does what you do with dolls require magic?”
“Oh yes. It’s the only magic I’m actually good at.” She stopped and stared at me, her eyes wide. “You said the doll didn’t have traces of magic on it, so was it this skin-walker, who doesn’t even need magic, who killed Vickie?”
“Possibly.”
“And your brother?”
I touched the crystal ball again in my pocket. “Maybe.”
“The skin-walker could literally be anyone, and no one would know.” She drummed her fingers on her lips and started pacing again. “But why though? Why kill your brother and Vickie? Why pretend to be you at White Magic—?” She stopped again. “Oh. It’s kind of genius, really. Be you, a student who enrolled but never showed up so you won’t be recognized while you...do what?”
Necromancer Unleashed: Book 2 Page 2
