by Sarina Dorie
It must have been good enough for Vega. She swirled sparkling magic around us with her wand and released my other hand.
She rubbed her hands together. “We need to prepare for this. When are we going to go?”
“As soon as possible. Tonight. I guess we should wait until everyone goes to bed.”
“Good. You go run and get supplies: candles, a cape in case it’s cold down in the crypt, maybe a blanket, and the items you need for your spell.” She strode to her wardrobe and opened the cupboard. “I have to decide what to wear for this occasion.”
I left to collect supplies. I pillaged a threadbare blanket from a closet outside the girls’ dormitory and some nubs of candles from Ludomil Sokoloff’s custodial closet. I didn’t own a cape. I would wear my wool coat since that was the warmest item of clothing I owned.
Vega expected me to use a spell to perform necromancy. She didn’t know about my affinity. I needed to keep it that way, which is why I tried to find items for a pretend spell. I picked a used tea bag out of the garbage outside the staff room and scooped the herbal contents out and wrapped it up in a piece of discarded paper. Probably I needed something more than that to look authentic, so I grabbed a piece of chalk from my classroom. My errands took me an hour.
I made it back to our room before curfew to find Vega in a beautiful beaded gown. It was longer than most of her flapper dresses, but it still felt authentically vintage. She had touched up her makeup and applied red lipstick and nail polish. She wore a beaded headband. While I had been busy scavenging, Vega had been beautifying herself. Why didn’t that surprise me?
She retrieved a fringed shawl from where she had draped it over a chair and wrapped it over her shoulders. “There you are. I was wondering what was taking you so long.”
“Why are you dressed up? Aren’t we going to the crypt?”
“Of course we are, you fucktard. This is how I always dress when I visit the dead. They’re all dressed in their finest clothes; I don’t want to be the most underdressed person in the room.” She looked me up and down. “Not that I have to worry if I’m in your presence.”
As smart as Vega was, I had no idea how she could also be so ridiculous. I grabbed my coat, scarf, gloves, and hat.
“Ugh! I can’t be seen with someone dressed like that,” Vega said.
“The point is to not be seen by anyone.”
Vega’s brows drew together in concern. “Sebastian Reade is going to see us, isn’t he?”
“I think he’ll understand if I dress practically rather than in my party clothes.”
“How would you know? It’s not like you ever talked to him.”
Vega threw open my wardrobe. She selected a lacy scarf with fringe and placed it over my coat, as if it could disguise what I wore. We waited half an hour after curfew before setting out.
“Do you know how to get to the crypt?” I whispered.
“Of course I do. I go there all the time.”
Surprise, surprise.
Vega lit our way with her wand. I followed Vega to her classroom. She headed straight for the closet. It was like mine, with a flight of stairs that led to a storage area. There were fewer cobwebs in her stairwell. We descended the stairs, passed two more storage closets and made it to the lowest level.
She placed a finger to her lips, as if I needed reminding to be quiet. “This is the dungeon,” she said.
We tiptoed down a hallway that led to Thatch’s room. A woman giggled somewhere nearby. Miss Periwinkle? I prayed we weren’t going to get caught. Vega must have had the same thought because she doused her light. She grabbed my arm, her nails digging into my wrist as she pulled me along. The passage was dark, and I bumped into her several times.
A moment later her wand glowed with light and not a moment too soon. We stood at the top of a stairwell. If nothing else, Vega came in handy for not allowing me to plummet to my death.
She counted under her breath as we walked. She halted at thirteen.
“Watch that step. It’s booby-trapped,” she said. She easily skipped the step as she glided down the stairs. I leaned against the wall as I eased my shorter legs past the thirteenth step.
“Why is it booby-trapped?” I asked.
“To keep students from desecrating the graves of honorable teachers of the school’s past. The first booby trap was Thatch’s quarters, of course. Don’t worry, there are only two more traps left.”
The stairway descended for what felt like three floors. At the bottom, Vega showed me another place to avoid. “Step on that stone and you’ll land yourself right in Khaba’s office, tied to a chair until he finds you in the morning. After I realized that was where it led, I removed all my clothes and stepped on the stone on purpose to see what his reaction would be.”
“What was his reaction?”
“Nothing. That’s how I found out he was gay. That was ten years ago, of course. I know better now.”
I was surprised the hot-pink pants hadn’t given it away, but maybe Khaba had dressed more conservatively ten years ago.
Vega sauntered over to a heavy wooden door with Celtic knotwork covering the frame. I found it curious the decorations were made of what looked like iron. Fae and many Witchkin were allergic to cold iron. Maybe the door needed to be made from a Fae-resistant material in case we were overcome by a zombie apocalypse and that was all that would protect us from the dead.
Vega jabbed her wand into the keyhole, and it clicked inside. She peeked inside. “It’s clear.”
“That lock was iron, but you still got magic to work on it.” Derrick couldn’t even pick up a cell phone with his bare hands.
Vega sighed dramatically. “Does Merlin-class Celestor mean nothing to you? Never mind. It’s better you don’t answer that and prove how stupid you are.”
Vega was always boasting about how strong and superior she was. Apparently she wasn’t all talk.
We marched across a stone ledge at the edge of a pit. The scuff or our feet on the stone floor echoed in the vaulted room. An undulating mass writhed below. I wouldn’t have known they were disembodied hands if I hadn’t previously fallen in. The hands didn’t greet me today. Maybe they knew I was on a mission.
Or maybe Vega scared them.
On the other side of the chamber, we descended another flight of stairs.
“Is that considered a booby trap?” I asked. “It seems kind of dangerous compared to the one that lands a delinquent student in Khaba’s office.” Especially since the hands supposedly fed on fears. Any emotion a student projected was multiplied threefold.
It was fortunate I had been able to think sexy thoughts and tame the supposed demons with my feminine wiles. Or my affinity. It was hard to say which.
“That wasn’t a booby trap. The hands are the reason the booby traps exist. Jeb doesn’t want students falling in and getting hurt.” She harrumphed. “My first year teaching at Lady of the Lake, we kept finding decapitated skulls that students snuck out of the crypt and left in the hallway. If we’d had something like this at my previous school, this would have put a stop to those students being disrespectful to the dead.”
Vega jabbed her wand into another keyhole. The door creaked open. A cold breath of air washed over me, sending shivers up and down my spine even though I was completely clothed. I hugged the blanket and bag of supplies to my chest. The light of her wand suddenly felt too dim for where we were going.
“Honeys, I’m home.” Vega laughed and strode forward confidently.
Already, I was creeped out by my choice of witness. I remembered what had happened the last time we were here. She’d tried to nail me into a coffin.
She closed the door behind us.
“Is that necessary?” I asked. “What if we can’t get out?”
“Of course it’s necessary. I don’t want any moisture or rats getting down here and deteriorating the bodies. It’s already risky enough with all the bacteria you’re bringing in.”
/> The air smelled of decaying leaves and the cloying fragrance of blood. The crypt didn’t smell like apples and vanilla like the room with the dead body below the library. But it wasn’t moldy either. The air was dry and cold.
I followed Vega along the perimeter of the room. She waved her wand over the shelves in the stone walls. Each was open with bones or bodies in various states of decomposition. Some even housed two. Many of the bodies were dried, the skin over the faces taut and shiny. The quality of the air must have mummified them.
Vega pulled on my scarf, nearly strangling me. “Check out this one. He’s one of my favorites. Sleeping Beauty.”
Obviously, Vega had been here often. All those times she wasn’t in her classroom or our dorm room that I had suspected she was off campus, I now wondered if she had been here.
Vega held her wand close to the face of a corpse in one of the higher shelves. The man was beautiful, just as she’d said. His dark bronze skin was smooth and unblemished, the proportions perfectly placed and symmetrical. It was an honest face. He was cute in that boy-next-door way.
His dark skin tone contrasted sharply with his blond hair, just long enough to curl in a rakish sort of way. I could tell he was mixed race, but I didn’t know what he was, nor could I guess his affinity or Fae heritage. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty when he’d died. He was so well preserved he looked as though he could simply be asleep. The old-fashioned suit reminded me of something Thatch would wear. There was something familiar about him.
“Who was he?” I asked. “When did he die?”
Vega waved her wand over the inscription on the plate in the wall, though it was too dark to see it. “Dox Woodruff. He was a teacher here. He died in 1932.”
Now I knew where I’d seen him. He’d been the hot teacher Vega had drooled over in the old yearbooks from the twenties. He’d been a teacher at the school when Thatch had gone there.
“They did an excellent job of preserving him. I would do him if he still worked here.” She placed a hand on his arm. He held a book to his chest. “I read about his life in his diary. He fell in love with one of his students, Millie. She was in love with him, but he was too gentlemanly to compromise her virtue, so he told her he would wait until she graduated before he married her.”
She smiled, tears filling her eyes. “Millie’s parents objected, saying she was too young and asked her to wait. Dox patiently waited, courting her and exchanging no more than a chaste kiss with her. Millie went to college to become a teacher and when her parents discovered she landed a job here—so she could be with him—they were enraged. The lovebirds decided to elope without her parents’ blessing, but on the day of their planned wedding, they intervened.”
“What was their objection?” I asked. “Was it racial?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Millie’s parents objected to his Fae lineage.” She lowered her voice as if one of the cadavers might overhear. “He was a Fae prince! Can you believe it? His mother was human, so technically he was Witchkin, but his father was a prince of the Silver Court, and Dox lived amongst the Fae his entire life before coming here. He kept his lineage secret—but Millie’s parents found out, and they demanded that no one in league with the Fae be permitted to teach impressionable young minds!”
If that was the attitude, I could see why people had objected to Khaba—and why the principal hadn’t been particularly forthcoming with the news about Julian Thistledown’s lineage. Though I didn’t like the way Jeb had gone about it, trying to erase the mistake of not spotting a Fae predator from everyone’s minds rather than admitting the oversight. Jeb was a jerk for trying to make Darla and other girls feel like nothing had happened.
Vega caressed the corpse’s arm lovingly. “Dox was fired from his position as the magical defense teacher. It was a scandal, but ultimately Womby’s decided to rehire him because his father donated money to the school. Of course, that was all going on while he was courting Millie, waiting for her to graduate from college. By the time she took the job here and the parents got wind of their plans, they hired a freelance fairy godmother to intervene on their behalf.
“The thing about that ‘fairy godmother,’ she wasn’t Witchkin like they’d thought. She was a real fairy—my guess is someone affiliated with the Raven Court. She knew her way through a magical contract like nobody’s business. The parents had said to stop their daughter. They hadn’t specified how. It wasn’t just one Fae that attacked Millie while she was in Lachlan Falls with a group of students, but several Fae. Millie didn’t stand a chance.”
This was the juiciest gossip I had ever heard about the school. And it was coming from my wicked roommate? I couldn’t believe Vega even deigned to tell me this story.
Vega placed a hand over her heart, leaning closer to Dox’s face. “Thatch told me that your mother told him Dox tried to revive Millie with a kiss. He pushed all his magic into her, trying to resurrect her from the dead. He didn’t care if he died so long as she lived. But it didn’t work. He was completely drained, and his heart stopped.” She sighed longingly.
“Did my mother know them?”
“Probably. She worked with him.” She shrugged. “You want to meet Millie, the young woman Dox died for?”
Millie wore a beautiful white gown with a high collar and a long train that draped down from her shelf and obscured part of the corpse below her. It was difficult to tell from the way her bridal headband and veil draped over her if her dark hair was cut in a short bob or curled and tucked up. She reminded me of Snow White with her cherry-red lips and pale complexion. I hoped there weren’t any vampires in the crypt.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. She looked a lot like Vega, though her face was rounder, whereas Vega was slender.
Vega waved her wand over the inscription on the plate in the wall. “Millicent Pettigrove. 1932. I hope I’m as well preserved as she is when they give me a tomb here. She died saving the lives of her students and colleagues from Fae. They got her, but they didn’t get her students.” She turned to me, her eyes wide with awe. “Do you believe in past lives?”
Was she asking if I thought she might have been one of them? I didn’t believe in past lives, but I didn’t want to tell Vega that.
“I don’t know. Anything is possible.” Except that Vega could possibly have been reincarnated from a woman who cared about her students. More likely she just wanted Dox to be her past-life boyfriend. I couldn’t blame her either. He was the hottest cadaver I’d ever seen.
Vega showed me the corpses of the teachers who had died in recent years. Lisa Singer, one of my predecessor art teachers lay on a low shelf close to the floor. Pieces of Jorge Smith were housed in a small cubby of his own. He was the one who had supposedly been attacked by students the year before I’d been hired. At least, that was what Thatch had told me to scare me. I now knew Julian Thistledown had killed him because Jorge Smith had put together the clues that Julian had killed Lisa Singer and Agnes Padilla.
Vega nodded to Lisa Singer who was almost as intact as Millicent Pettigrove. “Sometimes I come down here and listen to the silence. I talk to Lisa and tell her about my bad days and wonder if she can hear me.”
“I didn’t know you were friends with any of the previous art teachers,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t when they were alive, but they aren’t as annoying now that they don’t complain about their stupid curriculum or lack of art supplies.”
That sounded more like the Vega I knew.
I was surprised Lisa Singer was down here. People had said she’d mysteriously disappeared. Then again, Jeb might have been trying to cover up her death, not wanting the school to have more bad publicity.
“This is John Bingham. He tripped down a flight of stairs and broke his neck the year I was hired on. Probably pushed by the students.” She introduced me to more corpses.
The way she talked about the dead, indignant on their behalf at the threadbare state of the clothes t
hey were entombed in, or the manners in which they’d died, was touching. She spoke about them as though they were her friends. I’d never thought about how probable it was Vega might not have living friends. She was rude, snobby, and arrogant. In the past few months when I’d seen her speak with other teachers, she tolerated their presence, but she didn’t talk to people as though she liked them. Even Thatch, Miss Periwinkle, and the other Celestors who were equal to her skill level weren’t her friends. She didn’t act as though she enjoyed hanging out with them.
And no one seemed particularly fond of Vega either. She sat on a high horse where there was only room for one queen bitch. It had to be lonely.
I never thought I would feel sorry for Vega, but I did.
When we came to Sebastian Reade, Vega leaned closer, peering inside the alcove. His complexion was waxy and pale. Black veins covered his face and hands. It was creepy. He wore the same brown suit and bow tie he always wore.
She tsked. “Those mother fuckers didn’t even give him his own tomb.” She shoved her wand into the shelf past him, showing me the bones of his roommate.
“Are all the teachers buried here?” I asked.
“No, some are buried in the graveyard in the woods, but they’re the ones who die of natural causes. Sometimes families request cremation or want the bodies entombed elsewhere, so we don’t have all the teachers’ corpses. Plus, they only keep the corpses who die of mysterious circumstances here, probably so it’s easier to exhume the body to examine later. Mr. Reade didn’t have a family, though.” She smoothed the older man’s bangs to the side of his forehead, tenderly, as though she cared about him. “Did I tell you he was my foreign language teacher?”
“No,” I said, wondering where this was going.
“I went to Lady of the Lake School for Girls. He had to put up with me for two foreign languages during the same day. It isn’t like Womby’s over there. Students have to take a minimum of eight classes, but they can take more if they want early-bird or independent studies. If you want to get ahead, that’s the way to go. And Mr. Reade was there every step of the way.” She smiled wistfully.
