“That is not normal for our world, even if it is what we strive for.” She let out a sigh and spread out the papers on her desk. “I will not spill your secret, Ms. Johnson. Though I will tell you this, there will be no hiding behind a hat and a boy’s name by the end of the Culling Trials. And the other directors will not be as lenient should you give them a reason to cast you out. Such as fighting in the halls. Or being out past curfew.”
I stared down at my boots, a ridiculous urge to cry sweeping over me. A question burned its way to the tip of my tongue. “Why would they get rid of me when you can see I have value to this place?” I had to find a way to stay. For my family. And maybe a little bit for me too.
“Your family is well known, Ms. Johnson, and not, shall we say, well loved. Your father is a null. Your mother dropped out of the academy right before her fourth and last year. The time and expense put into her training was never recouped. So, any excuse to evict you early in the game…well, they will take it.” She sighed again. “But…I will do what I can to protect you.”
My head snapped up. “Why?”
Her smile was soft, genuine, and it soothed away some of my fears. “Because I have been on that side of the desk. In my day, women were not trained alongside the men, and we were seen as lesser because we had breasts instead of balls. You are strong, stronger than many of the men here, and that will make you a target and a threat.”
Her words echoed the Sandman’s, and a trickle of a warning slid down my spine.
She reached out and touched the black box on her desk that had drawn my attention on my first visit to her office. “Strength can be broken, Ms. Johnson. Even those who believe they are untouchable can be cast out.” Her fingers flipped open the box, and I craned my neck to see inside it.
“Wands?” A stack of them lay in the box, at least a half dozen.
“Most of the students who have been kicked out of the academy under my watch were affiliated with the House of Wonder. Not the House of Shade as you might think. Arrogance was their downfall. Which is why I believe you will be safe. You’re confident, yes, but arrogant you are not.” She snapped the box shut and smiled at me again.
She scribbled something on a piece of paper then pushed it aside next to another stack. My eyes tracked it, latching onto the words even upside down on the further stack of papers.
Heath Percival.
Gregory Goblin.
Lisa Danvers.
Mason Whitehall.
Another kid had gone missing? I couldn’t stop myself from saying something. She would know if there were any updates, and there had to be a reason she was working on sensitive information in front of me.
“Is there any word on Gregory? On any of the missing kids?”
Her eyes closed, and she leaned back in her chair, rubbed at her gray temples with her fingertips. “You need to go now, Ms. Johnson. That bastard Jared will escort you back to your room.”
The door opened, and the handsome vampire held it wide for me, having obviously listened in to our whole conversation. He glared at the director but spoke to me. “Let’s go, Johnson.”
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be escorted by a vampire who could hold me up by one hand, but seeing as I didn’t have a choice in the matter, I went along with him.
We had almost reached my dorm room before he spoke. “That was incredibly foolish what you did there with the girls. They could have killed you and been within their rights.”
I looked him right in the eye. “And if I’d killed them?”
His lips twitched. “Should you have managed, yes, you would have been within your rights as well. They attacked your friend. You protected her.”
“Then you can remind them of that fact,”—I put my hand on the doorknob—“because if it happens again, I’ll bring a wooden stake with me.”
He should have been pissed off at me for threatening his future students. But he smiled and laughed. “I’ll do that. You are stronger than you look. That is excellent.”
I opened the door and shut it behind me, leaning against it. I only had a second to take a deep breath before a blur of arms went around me. “They didn’t kick you out?” Wally asked.
I pushed her off, gently. “Not today. But the director knows about me.” I made eye contact with each of them in turn. “She let me stay because you all stood up for me. Because we’re working together as a team.”
Ethan grunted. “You mean because I stood up for you.”
“That too.” I nodded. “But I learned something while I was in there. I think another kid has gone missing.”
There was a collective intake of air. “Who?” Pete asked.
“Someone named Mason Whitehall? Does that name ring a bell?” I asked. Wally answered slowly.
“He’s a necromancer. Like me.” Fear tracked across her features. I couldn’t blame her. What if she’d been caught out on her own when she’d been on her way to our room? Would she have been taken instead?
I forced myself to look at Ethan. “Thanks. For what you said in there.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t lying. My dad would be pissed if we lost you now. He’s not stupid, and neither am I.”
“Well, isn’t that just a bucket full of love,” Pete said.
I grabbed my clean sweats and made my way to the bathroom for a second shower to wash off the vampire blood.
The room was quiet as I tiptoed back to my bed only to find Wally in it. “I’m scared,” she said.
God, I could already see how this was going. With a grimace, I climbed into the bed on the other side and turned my back to her. “Go to sleep.”
She rolled over and threw an arm around me, spooning me. “Fifty percent of people who die in the night die in their sleep.”
“Crap, not this all night,” Ethan grumbled.
I patted Wally’s hand. Just like Sam and her nightmares. How many times had she crawled into my bed in the middle of the night? Too many to count. I sighed. “Go to sleep, Wally.”
I fell into a doze, but it was light. My eyes popped open at the soft thud of a mattress hitting the floor, followed by the shush of it being pushed across the floor. Pete positioned it next to my bed and flopped onto it. He held a hand up, and I took it without thought.
“They could take any one of us,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
I squeezed his hand. “No more losses from our group. Tomorrow, we find Gregory.” I yawned and settled deeper into the mattress, my back warm from Wally and my hand tight in Pete’s.
Home. I was home.
The next morning, I woke with an elbow in my neck and a heavy weight on my legs. I tried to sit up.
“What the hell?” I managed to prop myself up on my elbows enough to see the honey badger splayed across my legs on his back, pinning me and the sheets down. Orin lay on the mattress that Pete had pushed over, his head at my feet. Upside-down, Orin was not the way to wake up. His eyes locked on mine. “You did not wake up when something came by our door. It scared Pete.”
The honey badger rolled over, still asleep, let out a fart that I swear lifted a green cloud around his butt, and kicked at the sheets with one foot.
“Jesus, Pete! That’s awful!” I couldn’t help the gag as I fell out of bed and onto the mattress beside us, scrambling over Orin to get away from the stench.
I crawled across the floor and finally stood ten feet away where the air wasn’t so heavy.
Orin was already out of bed, as if he’d never been there. “How are we going to find Gregory?”
“Breakfast and healers first,” I said, feeling the previous day’s aches and pains come roaring back. I was not going to turn down the healers today. I’d aim to find Mara seeing as she likely already knew I was a girl and hadn’t said anything. The last thing I needed was more people knowing my secret.
Ethan rolled onto his side. “And what if we find him and he’s dead and they think we did it because we’re standing over the body?”
I arched an eyeb
row at him. “That’s where you come in.”
He arched an eyebrow right back at me. “You want me to use my pull if we get caught?”
“Bingo.”
I was dressed in no time flat, my mind already working toward the goal of finding Gregory, where to start, who to talk to. Because even though Rory and Sideburns were on the case, I could no more leave this problem to someone else than I could leave Wally to have her ass kicked by a bunch of mean girls. Even if those mean girls were vampires.
The five of us ate breakfast by ourselves, and I was not the only one to notice. No one interacted with us, but to be fair, none of the other trial goers interacted with anyone outside their team, so it wasn’t just us. Not even smoking hot Colt came over to chat with Ethan, though he did look my way more than once. I kept my head down and pretended not to notice him.
“The lines have been drawn,” Orin said.
“Good.” I swiped a hand across my mouth. “I’m going back to the room. Wally, come with me.” Rory’s warning pinged inside my head. “From here on out, we go out in groups of two. Even you, Ethan.” I pointed at him as he opened his mouth, no doubt to protest. “No one gets left behind.”
Pete grumbled something about being stuck with the dick of the group. Ethan shot him a look, and I snapped my fingers at both of them.
“We need to find out if anyone knows about this latest missing kid,” I said. “Ask around, see if you can find any details. They may not have announced it yet, but someone has to know something.”
I hurried away from the mess room, Wally at my side. The weight of many pairs of eyes was no small thing, but I did my best to ignore it.
“What are we going back to the room for?” Wally asked as we headed up the flight of stairs that led to the second-floor dorms.
“Gregory knew something was up. Whether it was because of the cheat sheets or something else, he knew.”
She lowered her voice. “And you think he left a clue behind?”
“Maybe. It’s worth checking out.” The others had told me it was impossible to find what a goblin had hidden, but something had occurred to me between that bus ride yesterday and being called to task in the director’s office. I had felt those gems in the House of Unmentionables challenge. Maybe I could use that same ability, whatever it was, to find a clue about Gregory’s disappearance.
I reached the room first, and as soon as I lowered my hand to the handle, the slightest warning tingle cut across my palm. I put a finger to my lips and motioned for Wally to stay outside.
Someone was in our room.
There was no noise, but I felt it in my gut, alongside the warning that I was about to surprise someone who didn’t want to be surprised.
I twisted the doorknob as slowly as I could, then slid through the narrowest opening I could manage.
A figure had his back to me, hunched at the window as he slipped out. I recognized that hair.
I slammed the door behind me, startling Rory.
He spun around, throwing stars in hand, and threw one on reflex. I ducked to the side and the star embedded in the door with a thud.
I glared at him and he glared back. What the hell? I mouthed the words.
“Everything okay?” Wally asked from outside.
“Fine, just bumped into the…door. Give me five minutes,” I said.
“And they say I’m weird,” she said.
Rory stalked across the room, silent even in his anger. He moved to grab my arm, but I was done being dragged around. I batted his hand away and pointed to the bathroom. Not the most glamorous place to chat, but it would work and give us a semblance of privacy.
I shut the door behind us and he rounded on me, not wasting a second. “What the hell indeed, Wild? Rumors are flying that you’re a girl! And someone said you took on a trio of vamps last night and broke curfew? How in the hell is that flying under the radar?”
His words were like a bucket of ice, and I hated that part of me agreed with him. He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t right either. “They attacked Wally.”
“Not your problem,” he growled. “None of them are your problem. You look out for you, that’s it in this world.”
I lifted my chin. “No, not anymore. Director Frost knows. You’re right about that. And she’s backing me. So, no, I’m going to follow my gut.”
He got right in my face, looming over me. “And what about Billy? What happens to him and Sam if you get booted out or killed? You think they won’t come here the same way you did, looking for answers?” His words shot an arrow into my heart. He knew me enough to know how to hurt me. But that went both ways.
I curled my lip. “I see you have the same intimidation tactics your father taught you.”
Rory grunted as if I’d booted him in the gut. Low blow, but I was done playing fair. No one else was, so why should I?
“I asked you to trust me.” He stepped back, jaw muscles ticking.
“I do.” I looked him straight in the eye. “Trust isn’t the issue, Rory. You can’t be here every second. Which means you have to trust me too. I’m doing what I need to do to survive. And my crew is part of that. They’ve helped me get this far.”
He blew out a breath and closed his eyes, then shook his head and went for the bathroom door. “Stay clear of the vamps. They’re in on this, on the missing kids. I don’t know how yet, but…”
I grabbed his arm, stopping him. I knew already that someone from the House of Wonder was in on the kidnapping—I’d seen the wand myself in one of the kidnapper’s hands. “What do you know?”
“Scent dogs were brought in. Cadaver dogs. They picked up on a vampire who shouldn’t have been snooping around the mansion. It’s all they’ve got so far, and I shouldn’t have even told you that much.” He put his hand over mine and leaned in closer, this time with none of the aggression. “Please be careful. I know you, Wild. A day off is the worst thing you could have right now.”
“Why?”
“Because when you aren’t kept busy, trouble finds you like a lemming finds a cliff.” He grinned and then was gone, out of the bathroom and out of the window before I could ask him anything else.
“Okay, Wally, come on in,” I said.
She opened the door, eyebrows lifted. “Did I hear you talking?”
“Um. Yeah. To myself.”
“Oh, I do that all the time.” She smiled and then did a slow circle. “So, you think Gregory hid something?”
I nodded. “Just a gut feeling.” I thought about Gregory’s connection to treasure, to gold and gems. A tiny pulse started in the tips of the fingers of my left hand. Quick experimentation indicated that the tingle dulled when I clenched them and deepened when I spread them wide. I followed the pull of that pulse to Gregory’s bed.
“It seems too obvious,” Wally said. “Statistics clearly show that goblins excel at hiding things. To put it near his sleeping area would be ridiculous.”
I ran my fingers over the mattress, the sheets and the pillow, the pulse deepening as I got closer to the foot of the bed. “But he had nowhere else to hide anything. And if he left the room on his own, he might have thought he’d be coming back.”
There was nothing in the sheets, but that pulse was still there. I pulled the mattress up—nothing. As I pulled my hand out from under it, my fingers slid against something like a flap. No, a slit had been cut into the underside of the mattress, almost imperceptible. “Bingo.”
I reached in, felt paper, and pulled out a small bundle of pages, fanning them over the bed. “These are Ethan’s cheat sheets!”
“We could use them,” she whispered, as though someone might be listening in. Which I supposed was a distinct possibility.
I frowned. “But if Gregory wasn’t taking these to sell them or turn Ethan in, what was he doing out the night he went missing?”
A booming announcement cut through the air, sudden enough that we both jumped.
“Mason Whitehall, report to Director Frost immediately.”
I grabbed Wally’s arm. “That’s the missing kid. How can he be called to her office if he’s missing?”
She frowned. “Could you have made a mistake?”
I’d been so sure his name was on the list of missing kids, but it struck me that there was a simple way of checking. We could watch her office, see if he showed up.
I tucked the cheat sheets back to where they’d been and let the mattress fall into place.
“Come on, we can see her doors from a spot down the hall.”
I bolted from the room, Wally rushing to try and keep up with me, but I didn’t slow, not for a second.
We covered the short distance in under a minute, skidding to a stop at the top of the stairs. The double door was shut and the director’s thug, Adam, stood outside it, hidden in the shadows.
“Hey, did Mason show up?” I asked before I thought better of it.
Adam lifted his head, eyes narrowing as he looked our way. “No.”
I nodded and slid down to sit at the top of the stairs, feet on the first step, watching the door.
“Wild?” Wally crouched down beside me.
“Why would they call him to the office if he’s on the list of missing kids?” I asked again. Then a new possibility struck me. “Or are they worried about him being taken?”
My blood ran cold. The kidnappings seemed to take place after the trials. What if the director knew who was at risk?
We needed to see that paper with the list of kids on it. There could be more names added.
Which meant we were going to break into the director’s office.
Chapter 19
We waited for over an hour, sitting at the top of the stairs watching the director’s door for the boy to make an appearance. Mason was called twice more over the PA system, but he never showed. My skin prickled each time he was called. Every part of me knew he wasn’t going to show, but I still waited. Just in case I was wrong. Finally, I turned away from the doors, Adam gave us a pointed glare from his spot in front of the director’s door, and we headed back to our room.
Only Pete and Orin were there.
Shadowspell Academy: The Culling Trials: Books 1-3 Omnibus Page 30
