Ethan’s face swung around, confusion marring his features.
“Jumping to my aid?” he said. “He wasn’t after me, he—” That shadow passed over his eyes again, something unsettled moving in their depths, before he turned away. “You shouldn’t try to pick fights with your betters, Wild. Now you know why.”
“Them’s fightin’ words,” Wally said in her deep Walter Cronkite voice.
I clenched my fist and leaned into him, so angry I could spit, no matter how disgusting it was. “You just corroborated my story in one sentence, then changed it to a bullcrap story in the next. Which is it?”
Ethan’s jaw clenched and he waved his hand, annoyed and frustrated. That made two of us.
“Just forget anything happened, Wild,” he said softly, for my ears alone. “Forget it, okay? This is bigger than us. Some people you just can’t mess with. I believe that. Just forget it, and we’ll get through the trials. That’s all we need to do right now. Everything else will work itself out.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” The bus shimmied to a start and the chatter around us raised in volume to compete with the motor. Our crew leaned in closer to hear Ethan and me arguing. “Those kids are still missing, and we were—are clearly on the right track. We can free them, I know it. Or at least find out who’s responsible for their disappearance.” Free them? Why had I said that? My head throbbed and I pinched the bridge of my nose, breathing through the pain.
Ethan’s face closed down again. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
I told him slowly, clutching at the foggy memories like a man with arthritis would a small gold coin. When I hit the part where Adam had told me to run, Wally sucked in a breath.
“That’s a threat, right?” she asked. “Is he behind all of this? We got nothing by following Jared, literally not a single clue. He just sat in the cafeteria reading a book.”
Ethan’s lips tightened and he minutely shook his head, looking away again. “Adam had Ethel’s memory ball. That’s it.”
More flutters of memory surfaced, about a conversation I’d had with Ethan. Something about an eyeball to open it… Next of kin…
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked him, the black hole in my memory scaring me a little, but more than the fear, it frustrated me to the point of tears. I had the key to unlock all of these mysteries, I could feel it, only it was lost in the swamp of blackness that was a time lapse.
…swamp of blackness crawling up his legs…
Ethan spoke over the flutter of memory, crushing it.
“I remember kicking your ass and stabbing you with Shade knives I could never have acquired on my own,” he murmured, so softly I wondered if I was half making up the words. The bus came to a stop and he shoved me out of the seat, something he could only do because I’d grabbed my head to stop the dull pounding. It didn’t work. “Let it go, Wild. Keep your eyes open and your ass down, or you’ll get everyone killed. That’s a warning from a friend.”
“Oh yeah, a friend?” I jabbed him in the ribs, following close behind him. “Since when are we friends?”
“Since never.” He hopped off the bus and walked toward the fifth and final gate. The House of Wonder. The magical house. Just like the House of Night, this gate clearly belonged to the House of Wonder. The metal was a brilliant silver accented with gold down long curving spindles that resembled a climbing rose that had been set in with cut red glass or rubies. I was suspecting those of his house wouldn’t allow mere glass to be used. But even the beauty and craftsmanship of the gate couldn’t detract from the situation at hand. Namely my memory loss.
“What’s going on with you two?” Orin said as he drifted to my side. “Things aren’t adding up. And Ethan is lying. I can smell it all over him.” Pete nodded and added a me too.
“I know. But I can’t…” I gritted my teeth. “There is a hole in my memory.”
“But he knows? Ethan knows you can’t remember?”
“Yeah. He knows, but he’s not talking.”
Orin stared at the ornate gate in front of us. He nodded silently as Pete dropped in on my other side, and Wally stepped up beside him. “We’ll just have to get the truth out of him.”
“Yes,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “We will.”
“But after the trial. We’ll need him for this trial,” Pete said. Orin and Wally bobbed their heads in agreement. They weren’t wrong.
I took a deep breath, calming the frustration and the anger and the fear of what had happened in that black space in my memory. “Right. After this trial.” I palmed my head as we caught up with Ethan. “We need to check with Colt, too. See if there was anything else missing from Ethel’s room.” I glanced around, looking for his crew.
The others exchanged pointed looks. It was Ethan who broke it to me.
“He’s gone. Missing. He never met us in our dorm, and he didn’t show up to his.” He didn’t look at me as he said it. “There’s nothing we can do about it. We need to get through this trial and get on with our lives.”
Chapter 12
I wondered if I’d have a stress fracture in my jaw from clenching my teeth so hard. Something was seriously wrong with Ethan. He seemed...defeated, somehow. Like the wind had been stolen from his sails. His pompous arrogance was gone, replaced with hollow indifference. Whatever had him spooked, he didn’t plan to fight back. And that dug into me almost more than the missing memories. It wasn’t like him.
“What happened?” I asked softly, needing more info so I could fight back for him. I wasn’t the type to say die, even when I was obviously being thrown into the deep end with weights around my ankles. “And why would Colt get taken while we ended up in the infirmary with knives sticking out of us? Shade knives, did you say?”
The beautiful woman strode along the top of the gates, just as she’d done with the first three trials. I wondered if her failure to appear the other day had anything to do with how badly our trip through the House of Night had gone. She waved a hand forward as she stood to the side of the gates. “Good luck to you all. Have fun.”
Fun.
We walked through the gates, Ethan leading the way, and a shiver cascaded over me as a magical wall slid behind us, closing us off from turning around and running for the exit. The timing was not surprising. A roar boomed through the air as soon as the wall descended, the sound vibrating through my body. I remembered it from that first day, when Wally had spouted off T-rex statistics, and everyone around us shifted and practically danced in fearful anticipation.
Thoughts of the day before fled. I was sure blood left my face in a rapid flood, if the numbing of my lips was any indication.
“Is there a reason the only magical worker among us waited to do this trial last?” My boot crunched against the brittle grass one moment and thudded against the rustic wooden floor of a saloon the next. Wooden walls had sprung up around us. An old-timey piano played in the corner, the keys pressing down and lifting again in a creepy mime without fingers to propel them. A long bar sat in front of us with a bartender behind it, one hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle of whiskey, and the other resting behind five shot glasses.
The man grinned from under his long gray mustache that curled up at the corners in twin perfect swoops. His leather vest hung flat on his stomach and his long, pointed wizard hat indicated he wasn’t great at putting together a costume.
“Welcome,” the man said, his voice gruff, like I’d expect, but with a lilting sort of accent that spoke of posh England, which I wouldn’t expect. “Pick your poison, my young friends.”
“Should be pick yer poison, if you’re going for the Old West vibe,” I glanced around at the establishment we’d found ourselves in. Card tables filled the space, each partially occupied. Men hunched over their cards with drinks by their elbows and ladies in fancy dresses and corsets by their sides. The dealers opposite them wore pointed wizard hats, like the bartender, and each had a little chest of gold by his stack of cards.
&n
bsp; We were the only crew present.
“This is the most important trial for him,” Orin said, at my elbow, looking around as I was doing. “He’ll need to impress daddy and all his peers to make it in his world. A failure here could mean his entire future comes crashing down. Society gives guys like him a lot of leeway, except when it comes to living up to expectations. I would go so far as to say that he will have the hardest trial of all of us. For us, there were no expectations, per se. For him…all of them.”
“Shut up,” Ethan said, the truth of what Orin was saying evident in the tightness of his voice.
“That’s good.” I blew out a breath, trying to ignore the throbbing of my head and the warning shivers coating my body. “I was worried it would be harder, somehow.”
“That, too,” Orin said.
A shadow zipped by in my peripheral vision and I swung my gaze that way. My vision dizzied for a moment before I saw a group of women in the corner, their breasts heaving out of the tops of their gowns to the point where I struggled to understand how their nipples stayed covered. Poofy skirts flared out from their corseted waists. They stared at me, one and all, some with knowing looks, others with expectant expressions. One laughed suggestively.
“What is the deal with this trial?” I asked as Ethan chose a table to his right and sat in the single empty chair. A distant roar permeated the walls and shook the bottles against the mirror behind the bar. That creature did not belong in the Old West. I knew that much.
“Pick a table, and best the dealer, who’ll use magic to try and confuse you,” Ethan said, determination in his voice. “They use mind tricks. Persuasion. It’s a test of your strength of mind. You need to be able to throw off the magic. Or you can choose the bar. See if you can do the same with the potion you ingest.”
Orin drifted to the bar. “It is rare the House of Wonder can concoct a poison that can befuddle a vampire. That ability is usually limited to the House of Shade, poisoners of the highest calibre.”
“It really doesn’t make sense that two houses would rely on the same craft when the House of Wonder thinks so little of Shades,” I said, wandering through the tables.
“Two sides of the same coin,” Orin said. “The same result, but different methods. Anyone from the House of Wonder would consider it an insult to create a potion without magic.”
“Snobs,” I said.
Something else was at work here. I could feel it. Something...not right. Much as I wanted to believe this trial wouldn’t be rigged after the last disaster, I didn’t trust it.
“It is the same craft, but with different intentions,” Orin said.
“One has no morals,” Ethan added, but without any heat, placing his elbows on the green velvet of the card table.
“So, then…” Wally pulled out an empty chair, but the players at the table weren’t looking at her. They were all looking at me.
My head pounded. My heart thudded. My sense of warning, slower to develop than usual, flared, so intense it nearly made me scream.
The man in the wizarding hat jumped up from behind the bar, wand out, and blasted me before I could dive to the side. The spell wrapped around my body, holding me in place as Pete shed his clothes and changed shape.
Orin turned from the bar with a sour face, an empty glass held between his fingers, his eyes on the bare bottom. “Shade,” he said in a strangled release. The glass fell from his suddenly lifeless fingers. He grabbed at his throat, eyes bulging, and took two staggering steps. “The Shade…infiltrated….”
“What’s he saying?” Wally yelled.
The Shade had infiltrated the House of Wonder. They were coming for me. Sideburns was finally making his move.
Almost as the thought formed, a man in black burst from behind the group of women in the corner. Limbs and skirts went flying.
Anxiety riding me like an unbroken horse, I forced myself to calm down and focus. The throb in my head drifted into the background. My intense desire to break free surged, firing hot through my blood.
The spell holding me cracked like an egg.
I snapped my eyes open and yanked out my knife. A split second later the man was on me, his own knife already slashing for my face.
I dodged to the side and slapped at his hand, using his momentum to knock him off balance. My blade parted black fabric. He turned and thrust, slower than I would expect, clearly not the best of his House. I knocked my forearm against his before ripping it down, following with my blade. It slashed against his wrist and over the top of his gloved hand. Red welled up in the cut and he jerked back.
People jumped up from chairs, wands or weapons raised. Wally grabbed the edge of the table and flung it, overturning everything. Money and cards rained down as she charged forward, a little alley cat of power. I could see the pink of her magic lighting her up. I wasn’t sure what good it would do against the living, but she was embracing it.
Honey badger Pete snarled and dove under the heavy green skirt of a woman with a hard expression and a poised throwing knife. Another dagger thudded to the ground from under her skirts, followed by a small hand-gun—her hidden weapons. She gasped and kicked out before staggering to the side in an effort to dislodge the honey badger latched onto her legs.
“We gotta get out of here,” I called as a glint of metal flew through the air, end over end. There was too much going on, too fast. I couldn’t keep up with it all.
A knife, the blade gleaming in the saloon light, sped toward my chest. I dropped and rolled before popping up again and grabbing a shocked trial worker who clearly hadn’t gotten the memo regarding the change in plans, and shoved him in front of me as a human shield.
“Ethan, shrug it off,” I yelled, seeing him frozen in his seat, his eyes dodging all around but his body still. “Don’t let the panic rule you. You rule you. Shrug it off. We need you!”
“Raaaaahhhhh,” I heard before a body went flying. Wally straightened, a strange glowing sheen around her, and I took a moment to marvel that a little chick like her had just thrown a grown man across the room. Something in me said that the spells they were trying to use on her were being deflected by her magic.
A spell tore at me from the bar. I swung my human shield around, and he raised his wand to deflect the assault.
“Good choice in shields,” I murmured, marching him forward.
Another spell hit his legs from the side. His legs stopped moving, frozen stiff. I continued pushing him forward anyway, his heels skidding along the wooden floor, hoping his brain and muscle memory would override the spell.
They didn’t.
Timber. Pete said.
“Crap.” I threw aside my now useless shield and reached Orin as Pete, growling and spitting, chased a wand waver out of the swinging saloon door.
Orin’s eyes stared up at the ceiling from his position flat on his back. Tex, the English Wizard with his stupid hat, smirked from behind the bar.
“Didn’t expect that, now did he?” Tex said, leaning against the counter.
“Wally, get my back,” I yelled as I reached over, grabbed Tex’s shirt, and yanked him toward me. His eyes widened then narrowed and his hands flew out to protect himself. I was one step ahead. I rested the blade of my knife against his throat and dug in, drawing blood.
Tex’s hands lifted into the air.
“Is he dead?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Is the vampire dead?”
“Not eternally, no. The vamps want him after all this is over. The necromancer too. The wizard and the weird raccoon thing got placements as well already. All this is for you. Don’t you feel special? Let them take you, and your friends go free.”
A beam of red blasted him in the face, ripping him from my hands and sending him flying. His back hit the shelves of bottles and his eyes rolled back in his head. He sank to the ground, bottles tumbling down after him, breaking against the ground or thunking on him.
Ethan stood behind me, his wand held in a steady hand and his eyes alight. “That was the stro
ngest persuasion spell I’ve ever pushed off,” he said, taking two quick steps to me, his expression triumphant. “I broke it, thanks to you.” He grabbed me around the middle and pulled me toward him, his soft lips a contrast to his hard body.
Electricity sizzled through me, but not from him—from the sense of victory. Two combatants sharing a win.
He broke away. “No way in hell are you going to turn yourself over in this trial,” he said. “We’ll beat this like we beat all the others. I have a reputation to uphold.” He winked. “So let’s go. Hurry.”
I liked this new Ethan better. The confidence was real. Whoever’d beaten him down had lost their hold on him. I grinned. “Let’s.”
He spun and cast a spell, slamming a woman dressed in black center mass and dropping her. Clearly, he had been thoroughly tutored on attack spells.
“Leave Orin,” Wally said, shoving a frozen woman out of the way and heading toward the door. “He’ll understand, and we can’t carry him.” Her voice dropped. “Always question your drink of choice when there is danger afoot.”
“That voice… It doesn’t get any less weird,” Ethan mumbled, running at my side.
We shoved out of the door, and Pete looked back at us as a woman took off running for a stand of horses. The scene melted into a dusky prairie, not unlike the savannah scene from the shifter trial, before changing yet again with a flicker, like a computer screen glitching. The Old West town flickered back to life.
“This trial is being tampered with,” Ethan said, slowing and looking at the sky. He brought out his cheat sheet, running his finger down the page.
“How was it?” Wally asked me quietly, standing very close. Her eyes roved my face as she waited for me to answer.
I palmed my head as the pounding returned, feeling a vague sort of danger but nothing imminent. Not yet. That last trial probably hadn’t gone the way they’d expected. We were a helluva lot stronger and quicker than most other trial goers. Working together made us shine.
“How was what?” I asked, smelling lilac on the air, a strange fragrance for the Old West town.
Shadowspell Academy: The Culling Trials: Books 1-3 Omnibus Page 40
