by Cecily White
“Amelie,” she said, obviously using some mind-reading mojo, “whatever problems exist between you two are as much your responsibility as his. If you insist on making him hold your end of the burden, it will only lead to suffering for you both.”
“But ma’am, I just want to talk to him.”
“And tell him what?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it. What did I want to tell him? That I had feelings for him? That he made me jittery and happy all at once and, by the way, I believed we were meant to be together forever?
I scanned myself in quiet appraisal. My uniform was ruined, torn and stained with smears of Jack’s blood. My feet were covered in demon splooge, a chunk of mottled black skin caught in the laces of one shoe. I shuddered to think what might’ve been nesting in my hair. Even if I could convince him to talk to me, I doubted my appearance would move him toward anything beyond a barf bag.
“I’ll think of something,” I mumbled, self-conscious.
Smalley’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry, Amelie. I know this isn’t easy. Please remember, everything we do at St. Michael’s is with your best interests in mind. Which is why it pains me to give you this.”
It took me a moment to focus on the familiar yellow slip she held, though heavens knew I’d seen my share of them.
Student Incident Report:
Name– Amelie Lane Bennett
Violation– Unauthorized channeling within school grounds; assault of a faculty member; non-consensual healing.
Disciplinary Action– Official warning; restricted contact with aforementioned faculty. If behavior re-occurs, student will be suspended indefinitely.
– J. Smith-Hailey
I took it from her with a robotic motion. “But…I was protecting him. He knows that.”
“Amelie,” Smalley sighed. “There is no limit to what a man can know and disregard in the service of his ego. He’ll see you tomorrow morning for your field test, then I’m afraid the rest is up to fate.”
I listened as if her words made sense, but they didn’t. I had tried to help. I was the only one who tried to help. Everyone else had just sat back, content to watch Jack get shredded. How was that fair?
“This sucks,” I said.
“Indeed. Just remember, dear, life is suffering.” She patted my shoulder. “Love, even more so.”
And that was how she left me—with guts in my hair, goo on my shoes, and that infernal yellow note in my hand. Jack’s cramped lines swam together like worms in a rain puddle as I reread them, again and again. Love, huh? This wasn’t love. It was betrayal, pure and simple. Why would he do this to me? We were on the same side…weren’t we?
Lisa’s voice startled me when it sounded a few feet away. “There you are! Everything okay?”
I quickly refolded the yellow slip and stuffed it into my shirt pocket. “Yeah, everything’s fine,” I said. But it wasn’t fine. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be fine for a while.
Chapter Six:
Good Intentions
We made it to Demonology class in plenty of time. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t concentrate on a single word Gunderman uttered. Anatomical vulnerabilities of demons, the boiling point of fiend’s blood, a hundred and one ways to shield your Watcher against demonic energies… It went in one ear and out the other.
All I could think about was Jack. The silk of his hair, the lingering scent of him, like soft rain and warm sugar. About midway through class, I looked down to discover that the margins of my notebook were littered with vines and flower doodles.
So, so lame.
I closed the notebook and shoved it away. A thousand questions still pressed their way into my brain, the same questions that had been lurking since Lisa first mentioned the Graymason. Who could orchestrate something like this? Who would want to? Did it have something to do with the war? If so, why kill instructors? They were nobodies—a few class lecturers and a glorified hall monitor. Lutz was the only one with any real influence, and that was tenuous at best. If someone truly meant to disable the Academy, the ideal person to kill would be Headmistress Smalley. It’s not like she was a hard target—a middle-aged Channeler who lived alone with a bunch of cats and a semi-retired half-bondmate next door. No, it had to be something else.
The demon attack must have been orchestrated by someone inside St. Michael’s walls. Someone with power. Someone nearby when the rift opened. I’d watched enough C.S.I. with Katie to know that every serial killer chooses his victims according to a pattern. The Graymason had to have a pattern, too, and I was willing to bet today’s attack was part of it. So if I wanted to figure out who was doing this, I needed to access the victim files. That meant breaking into…
“The Archives,” I muttered under my breath, pen tapping against my lip.
“Excuse me?” Lisa paused her obsessive note-taking. “Did you say something?”
“Hard drives,” I said, louder this time. “Dad needs a new hard drive. For his laptop.”
“Okay, whatever.” She gave me a funny look then returned to her notes.
Gunderman had lapsed into some tangent about the Crossworld aristocracy and how if made-vamps didn’t watch their step they’d end up serving tea and bloody crumpets to the new Immortal Sovereign for the next six billion years. Personally, I thought the Borgias were more interesting.
I returned to my plotting.
The wards on the Archive room would be comparatively light. Henry stayed in there most of the time, which could make things complicated, but even he had to take lunch, right?
I glanced at my watch. 11:05.
If Henry kept to the patterns we’d noted on last year’s stakeout, he would go to lunch early with Smalley. Which meant I had about thirty minutes to get to the Archives, find what I needed, and get out without being seen.
My hand shot into the air. “Dr. Gunderman?”
“Yes, Miss Bennett? Would you care to enlighten the class on the proper technique of cutting through a Nero demon’s hind plate?”
“Uh, no, sir.” I let a slight waver enter my voice. “I-I think I need to see the guidance counselor. I feel a little blue from the training exercise this morning and I can’t concentrate. Would you mind terribly if I left class?”
Gunderman set down his scalpel to give me a long, hard look. I could hardly blame him, after our discussion only a few hours ago. He was probably remembering the last time I’d left class, when all the campus livestock went missing. Not my fault, by the way. How was I supposed to know Virox demons aren’t vegetarian?
“To the guidance office and back,” he warned. “That’s it.”
I thanked him and took the hall pass.
The sun had inched higher, so I tried to keep to the shadows as I crossed the front lawn to the main building. I gave up halfway. Everyone who mattered was still in class anyway.
When I entered the hall to the faculty offices, beads of sweat immediately chilled into goosebumps along my spine. The windows at both ends of the hallway were open and swaths of gauzy curtains rippled in the breeze like restless spirits. Most of the office doors were shut, locked up tight while professors held class. I could feel their wards pulsing under the hardwood thresholds. Far down the hall, one door remained ajar, light stretching across the floorboards in a long, yellow beam.
The Archives.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have gone back the way I came. I could already see shadows moving inside the room, and quickly recognized the hushed echo of Smalley’s voice.
“Henry, have faith. It’s pointless to get upset over something so beyond your control—”
“I’m not talking about faith, Judy. I’m talking about you. The more you involve yourself in this, the more likely you are to get killed.”
“She’s not a killer, Henry.”
“That doesn’t matter. Whether it’s her or someone else, I don’t like you putting yourself in danger. The boy is here now. Let him handle it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It is that easy!” Henry insisted as a deafening crack of ceramic against drywall rang out across the hall. “This is not your responsibility.”
“Henry…” Smalley sighed in her world-weary, here-we-go-again voice.
“Have you ever stopped to consider what will happen if you’re wrong? If the Elders are mistaken? If the killing doesn’t end with the prophecy?” he ranted. “Are you willing to die for something so uncertain?”
A tense silence fell across the room like a muted blanket of snow. Henry was usually so calm that it weirded me out a little to hear him yell like that. Smalley must have been surprised, too, because the silence lasted forever.
Finally, Henry let out a deep breath. “I’m telling you, Judy, there’s more to this than the Elders know.”
I barely had time to flatten myself against a doorway before Henry emerged, hair wild and eyes dark. The tips of his knuckles were raw and bloodied, like maybe he’d spent the morning slamming them against a brick wall. He barreled toward the main foyer with methodical steps, thankfully at the opposite end of the corridor.
“Henry, wait.” Within seconds, the clomp of Smalley’s high heels followed, and a heavy door slammed behind her.
Once they were gone, I peeked out.
The Archives were still open.
My dad has this theory that you can tell everything about someone by how they keep their office space. Vacation photos, bonsai trees, ceramic knicknacks. If Bud’s theory was correct, then Smalley’s beloved Archivist was in serious need of a spa day.
Sheaths of paper lay scattered across the long rectangular room, and most of Henry’s Precious Moments figurine collection lay in decapitated disarray. The walls were marred with spits of white dust where ceramic angels had exploded on impact, and the framed prints of soothing beachscapes had either tipped chaotically or fallen to the floor. Even Henry’s frog-shaped doorstop looked like it’d attempted suicide once or twice.
I didn’t wait to find out if they were coming back. I had files to pilfer, and the gods of opportunity did not knock twice.
Whenever a faculty member retired or left the school system for any reason, his or her records went into a special locked cabinet known as “the dead file.” I’d only accessed the dead file twice before—freshman year, when Katie needed the old choirmaster’s address so we could summon a small demon to his house, and again sophomore year, so we could send a note of apology to his new house after the old one was demolished by the larger-than-anticipated demon.
It took a few seconds to find the right cabinet, then another minute to unmake the wards on the locks. When I finally got the right drawer opened, I was already dizzy from the Crossworld energy draw.
If you had a boyfriend to drain it on, this wouldn’t be an issue, an irritatingly familiar voice whispered from the back of my brain.
Inner voices are rarely helpful.
My fingers tripped over the manila folders—dog-eared personnel files, archaic disciplinary reports. Finally, near the back, I hit paydirt. Templeman, D’Arcy, and Lutz. All in a row.
I tugged the files out and set them on Henry’s desk. It helped that I knew what I was looking for; I didn’t have to waste time riffling through unnecessary documents. Their lives weren’t important, only their deaths.
I tried to keep things in order as I pulled out the stack of crime scene photos, starting with Templeman’s.
At first glance, it looked more like a tea party than a massacre. He sat alone at a table in the courtyard of his French Quarter house, bushes and ferns lush behind him. White linen napkins lay neatly folded beside a tray of half-eaten cookies, with two bone china teacups perched at opposite ends of the wrought iron bistro table. Even the centerpiece bloomed with fresh white flowers.
I scanned the photos quickly, muscling through the gag reflex when I got to the close-ups. His throat was slit from ear to ear in a single stroke. Fountains of wet, painful red doused the pristine white of his shirt, all the way to where it tucked into his trousers. His hands were carefully folded in his lap, head bent forward. For a moment, I wondered if he’d been praying…then I noticed something even stranger.
Apart from the mortal wound to his neck, there were no injuries, no defensive scuffs of any kind. Even his hands looked freshly washed. With the Quarter as busy as it was on Saturday afternoon, I found it hard to believe no one would have heard him if he’d screamed.
D’Arcy’s crime scene, by contrast, looked like a Bruce Lee fight scene gone wrong. Every part of him was raw and bloodied, sword slashes and defensive marks all along the outside of his forearms. His clothes had been torn, buttons ripped off his shirt. One sleeve of his jacket dangled by a thread, and his cheek had begun to swell purple from the broken capillaries of impact. It didn’t surprise me that D’Arcy had fought. He’d never taken crap from anyone in life, so why would his death be any different?
My fingers trailed over the final, blurry photo of Lutz.
It confused me. His jaw was slack, the corners of his mouth turned up in the slightest smile, as if he’d fallen asleep on a sunny beach instead of in the clutches of a madman. He sat in his rocking chair, hair slicked over his head in the usual careful combover, a framed photo of his dead wife clutched tightly to his chest. Nothing broken, nothing out of place. I might have believed he’d died in his sleep, except for the eyes. The blue of his irises had faded to a muted gray that covered his pupils, like a demon’s, only burned from ice instead of fire.
“Why didn’t you fight?” I asked the photo. “Why did you give up?”
“Let me know if he answers you,” a voice interrupted from the hallway. “I have a few ideas, myself.”
My head snapped up to see Jack leaning against the doorframe. He hadn’t cleaned up from earlier, his hair still matted with dried blood and sweat, black streaks of demon goo staining his shirt. I wondered how long he’d been watching me.
“At the risk of sounding redundant,” he said, “you don’t belong here.”
“So I’ve heard. But first things first.” I forged ahead, ignoring the zip of power between us. “Why did Templeman fix tea for the guy who murdered him? And why does D’Arcy look like he body-surfed a cheese grater, while Lutz went down without so much as a broken fingernail?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know. None of this makes sense,” I continued. “I’ve seen what demons can do. These weren’t demon deaths. You know that, right?”
“I know you need to leave. Now.”
Okay, it wasn’t like I expected him to stand there and let me poke around in the school’s secret files. But did he have to be so harsh about it? I tried not to flinch as he walked around the desk and began gathering the photos back into their file folders. Every brush of his arm littered my skin with golden sparks.
“That’s so cool,” I murmured, unconsciously reaching for the flutters of light. They melted on my fingers like snowflakes on water. “Is that why you hate me? Because I healed you?”
“I don’t—” He pulled away with a brittle exhale. “Miss Bennett, I gave you an order. Several orders. You ignored them. If this is the extent of your regard for authority, then I question whether you’re cut out for Guardian duty at all. Maybe you’d be better off serving in the human sector like your parents.”
A ripple of annoyance ran through me at the mention of my parents. That was a low blow. “I’m not like my parents,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t be realistic,” he argued. “There are plenty of things a girl like you could do. You could try a cooking class, or get a desk job, or something.”
“A desk job?”
“It happens. People do leave the Guardians. You know that better than anyone.”
Jack spoke calmly, but I couldn’t ignore the flood of fury in my throat. He had to know how idiotic he was being. If Henry was telling the truth, then the female Guardian population had already been decimated by demon attacks. So here I was, a Channeler, desperate to train and willing to f
ight. Why would Jack encourage me to quit? It was insane, especially when he knew what kind of power we could generate together.
“You’re not being fair,” I said.
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Yeah, and no man is an island. Any other clichés you’d like to share?”
He held my gaze for a split second before glancing away.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t understand what’s going on here. But nothing I did this morning gives you the right to treat me like a criminal.”
“I’m not—”
“You are,” I insisted. “You talk to me like I’m six years old and give me orders that make no sense. You’re not even old enough to order a beer, so get over it.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need to be protected. I’m a grown woman who can do whatever—”
Before I could finish, he swiped at my wrist and spun me toward the exit. “You’re not a woman. You’re a child—”
“I’m a Channeler!”
“A child who should be with your father in the human sector. Where you can live. Where you can be happy, with no demon battles or rules about where you can go and who you can be with—”
“I won’t be happy—”
“You will, just not here.” Heat crept up my wrist where he held it, an electric hum vibrating into my bones. “Our world is full of death. You don’t belong here—”
“I do.”
“No! You belong somewhere safe. You belong—”
“I belong with you!”
Every inch of him froze and, for a second, he stared at me, his face pale with shock.
I don’t think either of us expected me to say it. But once I had, there seemed no place big enough to shove it back in. The words still echoed between us when he started toward the door again, pulling me along by the hand.
“Don’t say that. Not ever,” Jack muttered. “It’s dangerous. You’re dangerous. Not to mention impulsive, immature, and too selfish to understand that people get hurt when you’re around.”
