“Initiate Amaranth, please just listen to me,” said Escher. “I’m… asking you this time, not threatening. Monster girls tend to be very sensitive emotionally, as I said before. They tend to be drawn to certain types of men, and from what I’ve heard about your encounter with the snow bunny, and more recently, the summoned lamias that Harper included in her report, you fit the archetype.”
Tess was still blocking Lee’s way, leaning left and right to keep her outstretched arms in his path. He could go through her if he wanted to, but it would feel unpleasant and probably land him on her bad side. He sighed and gestured for Escher to continue.
“It’s as I said. I’ll attract the monster girls here, and with your help keeping them occupied, I’ll collect rare alchemy ingredients from them. I can also keep a record of any clues we find that might point toward who has been creating them, if that is how the newer types have come about.”
Lee ran a hand across his chin. “This sounds a lot like what Head Wizard Odarin admitted that he’d been doing after I encountered the snow bunny.”
“He was my previous partner in this venture. He wasn’t as suited for the role as you are. It was more that the monster girls took pity on him, almost like they knew about his history as an Arcane Striker and his fall from grace.”
“Please, please, please say yes, Lee!” begged Tess. “This is the solution!”
“Where do the monster girls come from, and what happens to them once you’re done, er, researching them?” he asked.
“That’s none of your concern.” Escher pressed a finger on the bridge of her glasses. “What I can tell you is that they come here willingly. I don’t hurt them in any way, or hold them captive, or force them to do anything they don’t want to do. My research is more that of a curious conservationist. It’s narrow in focus, respectful, and of course, always consensual.”
“The snow bunny escaped. What about the risk this poses to Primhaven’s campus?”
“I still have Odarin’s direct permission, even if he’s no longer involved with the research. With your help, it would likely be much safer than what I could manage on my own. The choice is in your hands.”
“You’re awfully manipulative for an instructor,” said Lee.
Escher shrugged. “What’s your answer, Initiate Amaranth? Will you help me?”
“Say yes,” whispered Tess. “I know you don’t love this idea, but it’s sooooo perfect!”
Lee let out a long sigh. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
CHAPTER 16
Instructor Escher went on to explain, in rather technical terms, a few of the alchemy ingredients that she’d need his help in acquiring. Much of it was over Lee’s head, but hearing her espouse the scientific merits of monster-girl milk and nectar made him wonder at the wisdom of his decision.
He wandered aimlessly around the Seruna Center, followed by Tess. She’d gone quiet after pushing him to accept Escher’s offer, and Lee wondered if it was in part because of some of the same doubts that Lee was having.
Lee was planning on heading straight back to his dorm, and that route happened to take him by the infirmary. Toma was leaning against the hallway outside, plainly within view if Nurse Susie decided to open the door and look around. His entire focus was on the infirmary, and he looked tired, almost on the verge of collapse.
“How are you holding up?” asked Lee. “Don’t you think maybe it’s time to give this a rest?”
“What? No, of course not. I’m so close! She’s been in there with one of the third-year disciples for almost an hour now. I can’t hear anything, but maybe they’re just being quiet.”
“You think that’s your guy?”
“Girl, it’s a girl,” said Toma. “I must have been cracked for not considering the possibility earlier. I never heard the voice of whoever she was doing the deed with. It could have been a girl.”
“Okay, so…” Lee shrugged. “Why not take a break? Maybe consider your theory and look for signs elsewhere?”
“I should confront her, shouldn’t it?” asked Toma. “I’ll tell her I know her secret. See how she reacts.”
Lee winced. He wasn’t sure how Susie would fare under pressure. She’d made a life for herself at Primhaven, and now that she’d finally begun to give into her urges as a succubus through Lee, she might be susceptible to such accusations. Not only that, but even if she only admitted to having an affair with a student, there was a chance that she’d reveal his identity to Toma under pressure.
He didn’t like imagining how Toma would react to hearing the truth from someone else. He was a friend, Lee’s best friend, even. He deserved better than the lies that Lee had grown so comfortable weaving across every aspect of his life.
“I have to tell you something,” whispered Lee. “I should have probably come clean about this earlier. Toma… it was me.”
“What?”
“I was the one in the infirmary with Susie. The two of us had sex.”
“Fuck you,” said Toma. “That’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not. It’s the truth.”
“My balls it is. You’re cracked, Lee Amaranth.”
“Listen to me, Toma,” said Lee, grabbing his arm. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked Toma. “You think I dreamed it or something. That I’m chasing some kind of stupid delusion. Well I’m not! I’ll prove it to you, Lee.”
“You don’t have to prove it, I’m telling you, it was—”
“If you aren’t interested in helping, take off,” said Toma. “I mean it. Go away, Lee.”
“Well, that kind of backfired,” whispered Tess.
Lee sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Toma had his arms crossed and his face set into a stubborn expression.
“Fine,” said Lee. “If that’s the way you’re going to be about it.”
The stubbornness was mutual, in a way. It annoyed him that Toma wasn’t willing to believe him while simultaneously demanding the same belief about what he claimed to have overheard. They both had the truth on their side, but Lee had the complete version, and in trying to explain that to Toma, his friend reacted as though he’d been mocking him.
Lee headed to the dining hall and had dinner with Tess, both of them eating food off his singular tray. To anyone watching from afar, the sight of him at a table by himself must have seemed lonely. It would have been without her, now that Toma and Eliza were acting so different from the friends he’d grown to know.
He remembered Harper’s suggestion that he visit the prisoner, so once he’d finished his own food, he filled up another tray with desserts and headed out onto campus. The hatch down into the hidden jail behind the First Tower opened for him, the illusion fading as he approached even though he could innately see through it. He made his way down the stairs and into the dank basement underneath.
Gabby was awake. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in the back of her cell, still clad in the same black robe she’d been wearing when she’d first been captured. Lee noticed the small toilet on the left side of the cell that he’d missed seeing on the first visit, along with the shower drain and spigot opposite it. Both cemented the reality of the girl’s situation. She was a genuine prisoner, limited to a ten-by-ten square even when it came to using the bathroom and bathing.
“Hi,” said Lee. “Remember me? I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”
Gabby said nothing. She stared through him, rather than at him. Lee’s own eyes were drawn to her intricate, black neck tattoo. It looked almost like fingers, like a hand holding her head in place from below.
“I figured you’d probably eaten already…” Lee spied a discarded dinner tray that had been slid out of the cell through a small, horizontal opening along the floor. “I brought dessert. Apple pie with a brown-sugar oatmeal crust, garnished with a few dollops of vanilla ice cream.”
He saw Gabby’s eyes flick to the tray in his hand.
“One of the plates is for me,
” said Lee.
“I know you can’t acknowledge me openly,” whispered Tess, “but it still hurts when you talk as though I’m not here.”
Lee rolled his eyes at the melodrama in her voice. He set Gabby’s plate down in front of the opening on the floor and pulled a chair over from the end of the hallway. Sitting just outside her cell, Lee considered whether to say something else, start eating, or just wait.
He could sense the instant that the silence went on for a little too long and veered into awkward territory. He took a bite of his and Tess’s apple pie, trying and failing to come up with a way of drawing her into a conversation.
“Just be honest with her,” said Tess.
Lee had already drawn Tess into his mystic stream, and she was using a ghostly fork to take bites from the same piece of pie he was eating, though hers were ethereal in nature. He set his plate down on his leg and considered her advice.
“I was sent in here to be the good cop,” he admitted. “You know how that goes, right? If I had to guess, I’d say that Harper was already in here, either threatening or holding something over your head. Now I come in with pie and kindness, and the contrast between the two is supposed to loosen your lips.”
Gabby kept staring straight ahead, not looking at him, but also not looking away.
“It’s obvious enough that I don’t see the point in not telling you,” said Lee. “It doesn’t change anything. I’ve been imprisoned before, too. I know a bit about how much it sucks.”
Silence. He shrugged and kept talking.
“I was fifteen. I broke into an abandoned house late one night for, you know, the usual reasons.”
It had been to banish a particularly nefarious specter that had been poisoning food at a homeless shelter. Lee didn’t see the need to delve into that, however.
“I got arrested,” he continued. “The cop that caught me was just lucky. He’d been on patrol, and he saw me as I was leaving. He locked me in the back of his squad car and spent close to an hour yelling at me. I never gave him my name, or address, or any of the details, so he said he was just going to leave me in his car overnight and see if I was more willing to talk in the morning.
“My situation was pretty rough around that time. I lived on my own. My sister had just gone missing. I didn’t have anyone to call for help, any guardian to swoop in and save the day. I was pretty damn sure that they would send me to some juvenile delinquent facility, or foster care, or something.
“I just remember being so scared and powerless, feeling like I had this disaster looming over my head. I managed to get the car’s door open eventually, and I escaped, just like anyone would have.”
Gabby’s eyes finally focused on Lee, but instead of the openness he’d hoped for, they were cold and icy.
“That is nothing, I repeat, nothing… like what I’ve been through,” she said.
Her voice had a hint of an accent to it, perhaps Central or South American. Lee nodded and flashed a small smile.
“I know,” he said. “I really can’t imagine what you’re going through. All I can do is try to make it a little less sucky.”
He reached down to where he’d set her plate and pushed it a few inches forward, partially through the slot in the bottom of the cell.
“I’ll bring you more dessert tomorrow,” he said. “Let me know if there’s anything specific you want.”
Gabby continued to stare daggers at him, at least at first. Her eyes flicked toward the apple pie for a moment that tipped the balance in favor of her appetite instead of her willpower. She moved slowly, picking up the plate, pulling it through the slot, and then lifting it to eye level.
“It’s not poisoned,” said Lee. “Though I guess that’s probably what a poisoner would say.”
She didn’t seem to seriously consider the danger, taking a bite before Lee had finished talking. He felt like he’d taken a small step forward, even if it hadn’t led anywhere, so he turned to go, opting to give her space.
“What is it that you want to know?” asked Gabby.
Lee gave the question some thought. The answers that Harper had been seeking didn’t matter all that much to him. He didn’t care about Gabby’s real name, her previous employer, or the faction behind the prison escape.
Instead, Lee reached into his pocket. He pulled out the photo of Zoe that he always carried with him. It was worn and wrinkled, even though it was probably the hundredth he’d printed off from the original image file over the years.
“Do you know who this is?” asked Lee. “Have you seen her anywhere?”
Gabby stared at the photo. It was hard to tell whether her expression was one of genuine recognition, or if she was just thinking furiously about how to play the situation and respond to the randomness of the question.
“Who is she to you?” asked Gabby.
“My sister.”
Gabby came closer to the bars of the cell. She didn’t touch them. Lee wasn’t sure if they’d been hexed with enchantments to make contact unpleasant, or if it was just a deliberate choice on her part.
“Help me get out of here,” said Gabby.
“That’s not how this works,” said Lee. “I’m just asking if you—”
“I know who she is. I’ve seen her before. Help me get out of here, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
Lee could hear the desperation in her voice. It made a strange part of his heart ache to be on the receiving end of it, but he still shook his head, knowing that he couldn’t make that choice.
“I can’t,” he said. “Even if I wanted to, there’s no way we’d make it across campus and out the gate. I’ll do what I can to make sure you’re comfortable, but I’m not going to release you.”
He picked up the tray along with his half-eaten slice of apple pie and headed for the stairs.
“Zoe,” said Gabby.
Lee froze. “What… did you just say?”
“Her name is Zoe. Your sister.”
CHAPTER 17
Despite how much he wanted to, Lee didn’t take the bait. Hearing Zoe’s name out of Gabby’s mouth sent pulses of hope and relief echoing through every inch of his body. He ignored them as much as he could and didn’t say another word to her as he made his way back up onto campus.
She’d said Zoe’s name. However, Lee hadn’t been born yesterday. He and Harper had spoken about Zoe immediately after they’d first fought her on the mountaintop. She’d supposedly been under the effect of Harper’s sleep spell, but he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she’d caught a word or two before it had rendered her completely unconscious.
His hope was like a wild stallion broken free from the fences of the ranch. Lee’s responsibility was to reel it back in, suppress it, tame it. He couldn’t go charging into the woods, not when it meant leaning in to the brunt of Gabby’s surprisingly sophisticated attempt at manipulation.
It was a tactic he’d encountered before as a mystic amongst others who claimed to have the same power that he did. Charlatans claiming to be mystics or channelers often used small details, bits of information they could pick up off an internet search of someone’s full name, or even overheard details from hidden mics they installed in the waiting rooms of their offices, to do exactly to grieving people what Gabby was attempting to do to him.
Lee headed straight back to his dorm room, glad, for once, that Toma was still off chasing the evidence of his not-so-paranoid theory. He collapsed on his bed, and within a minute, Tess had glided through the wall and settled in to lie next to him. He pulled her into his mystic stream.
“I’m sorry, Lee,” she whispered.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I know how badly you want to find your sister.” Tess shifted so her hand was resting across her chest, hugging him from behind. “It’s so unfair for the first real clue you find yourself to be like this.”
“I don’t even think it’s a real clue,” said Lee. “I mean if it was… Damn, I don’t even know. I don’t want to think abo
ut it right now.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“You can’t just ignore what she said, though, can you?” asked Tess. “I’m not saying you should let her twist your arm, but… oh!”
Tess immediately shifted gears as Lee turned the screen of his phone on. She squeezed herself against him, moving so she could watch what he was doing over his shoulder.
“This can’t be new for you, can it?” he asked. “You must have seen other students using their phones before.”
“So they are phones, then,” whispered Tess. “A pocket-sized telephone. But it’s so different from what I remember.”
“You really don’t have experience with modern phones?”
“It’s not my fault! I haven’t left Primhaven since I, well, you know… Also, before I made the pact with you, I was only really ‘awake’ for a few weeks each year. I’ve seen people use these contraptions, but I’ve never really gotten a good, long look at them.”
“You never found one lying around and tried experimenting with it?” asked Lee.
“They won’t work for me.” Tess pressed her finger against the phone, demonstrating the lack of reaction.
“I guess touch screens aren’t optimized for ghosts,” said Lee. “Well, how about we watch some TV? You know what that is, right?”
“Oh, hush,” said Tess. “A television. There’s one in each of the dormitory common rooms.”
Lee brought up one of his streaming video apps and started scrolling through shows. Tess’s reactions spanned the gamut from oohs to ahs, with the occasional “wait, go back” thrown in for good measure. He settled on a comedy about a rural border patrol office and got comfortable, turning off the lights and slipping under the blankets.
They traded places, Tess lying in front of Lee while he spooned her from behind. He let her hold his phone, smiling at the delicate, careful way she positioned it. Her reactions to the show were full and innocent. She laughed even when she obviously didn’t get the joke, and her body tightened against his during the tenser moments.
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