A girl even sprinted past Piper, carrying a sword almost the length of her leg. Its rusted tip showed antiquity, and its dented golden hilt had seen many battles.
A creaky door opened down the corridor ahead.
The hallway was sterile, wide and long, and the walls were bare. The door that opened revealed a group of teenagers, wearing ordinary clothes, and chewing on strange sticks of meat.
Piper crinkled her nose and watched them approach. The smell of rich lamb and boiled potatoes wafted over to her, but it vanished before the group reached the landing and went down the stairs.
Piper took the corridor to the left—the one that most of the occupants went down. It wasn’t narrow, like most of the others, and was lined with doors.
She stopped at an interesting set of doors. The wood was rotten and greying with age, and looked like the entranceway to an old castle dungeon. Piper cracked open one door and peered inside.
Her hand released the door and it swung open all the way. Her eyes shone with awe and she staggered inside. Air seemed to disperse from the room, and her lungs constricted with starvation. The room was by far the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Wooden spiral staircases led to mahogany balconies above, reaching up six levels. Each floor was riddled with a never-ending maze of bookshelves, except the ground floor where she stood. Perfect rows that led all the way to the back of the room, where paned windows loomed from the floor to the high ceiling.
It was a grand library, one like nothing Piper had ever seen before. Students flooded the room, gathered around tables, pored over old dusty tomes, and—
A deep voice brushed against the shell of her ear. “An easy place to get lost.”
Piper looked over her shoulder. As her gaze rested on him, the muscles in her shoulders and jaw relaxed.
Ash leaned against the open door, his ankles crossed, and his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. His chest pressed against the thin fabric of his singlet that was dotted with sweat marks, and his damp hair hung over his forehead, curled at the edges.
Piper fought her eyes from dropping to his chest. “Did you see that?” she asked, and pointed at the balcony. “What are they doing?”
A group of students—all in plain black trousers, crisp white shirts, and loose ties—threw their hands upwards, and puffs of grey smoke wafted from their palms.
“Practising,” said Ash. His tone matched his bored expression. He wasn’t as impressed as Piper was.
One of the students, a girl with snowy hair and a face full of freckles, pressed her wrists together and spread her fingers. Her hands rotated just as Piper stifled a gasp.
A silent eruption of sparkling dust gusted from her palms. The smoke twisted, pulling in on itself, before it settled on the form of a chicken with human legs that hopped on one bare foot.
“They’re conjurers,” said Ash. “Some of us major in it. Though, it’s not exactly useful if you ask me, or anyone else in the Academy.”
The chicken-human dissolved into nothing. The girl cursed, loud enough for Piper to hear the vulgar word from the doorway, and kicked the vanished apparition.
“Oi!” hollered a blue-haired boy from the tables. “Trying to study here!”
The conjurer made a rude gesture from the balcony.
“Come on,” said Ash, wrapping his fingers around Piper’s wrist. “This is no place for a chat. Distract the wrong sort of student in here, you’ll find yourself trapped beneath the city for days.” Ash guided her out the library and back down the corridor. “It happened once,” he added.
“What, you were trapped under the city?”
“Not me,” he said, flashing a crooked grin at her. “Most don’t mess with the enforcers. But transporters—that’s what the guy with the blue hair is—they know they can take on just about anyone in the Academy. Conjurers are an easy target. All they can do is summon apparitions, tricks of the light and sight, nothing real.”
The silver fox, darting through bushes and down passageways, came to mind.
“The fox,” said Piper. “Was that an apparition?”
Ash paused at the second landing and shot her a curious glance. Then, the creases in his forehead smoothed out and he nodded. “He took the form of a fox with you? Most days he enjoys being a bird. I guess he’s mistrustful of new blood.”
Piper blinked like a startled owl. “That—That wasn’t a fox?”
“Nope.” Ash tilted his head, his hand still wrapped around her wrist. He tugged her down another hallway. “He’s a lare. A sort of spectre that can take whatever form it wants. They’re meant to ward off dullborns from our sanctuaries.”
“These lares,” she said. “They just let anyone in? For all it knew, I was a … dullborn?”
“If you were a full-bloodied human, you wouldn’t have been let through. The archway appears to those with traces of daywalker in them, or with ties to our world. It’s a gateway.”
“If the arch only lets those through who are like your people—”
Ash’s brow arched. “My people?”
Piper flushed the shade of her name. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that—”
“Connections,” he said, “don’t mean that we let anyone through. The archway does, but the lare acts as a diluter. Just by you being here means that any human you have a bond with can stumble through the gateway.”
“Any?”
“Your friends and family.” Ash turned a corner, and she skidded beside him. “Even humans with a smidgen of daywalker in their bloodline, dating back thousands of years, can enter. That’s where the lare comes in.” He dipped down a spiral staircase, and it clanged as she wobbled behind it. “The lare weeds out the ones we don’t want.” They stepped off the staircase. “Besides,” he said, “I told him I was expecting you. Though I expected him to bring you to me. Never did take orders well, that lare.”
Ash pulled Piper through a door down the depths of a narrow corridor. There was an unlit fireplace that stretched up the wall into a marble mantelpiece, and two armchairs facing it.
A panelled window had dirtied over with grime and was bordered by dusty old curtains. But sunrays still struck the murky glass and flooded inside in sharp wedges.
In the corner, by a modest bookshelf, was a study desk. Guns and greasy cloths covered the desk, and tubes of a white shimmery substance.
A stunning girl—with electric white hair and silver eyes as piercing as Ash’s—sat at the table.
She didn’t look up from what she was doing—carving golden symbols into the gun handles—and continued to engrave with the gentle caress of a lover.
Ash steered Piper over to an armchair, and she plopped down with a thud. She hadn’t realised just how tired her legs were or how dizzy her brain had become, until the armchair cuddled her in a warm embrace.
“Elsa,” said Ash. His voice had sharpened. The girl at the desk looked up, a blank sheen to her fierce eyes. “Mind getting lost?”
Elsa flipped up her middle finger. But she stood from the chair, gathered her guns, and left without a backwards glance.
CHAPTER 13
“Do you speak to everybody that way?” asked Piper.
Ash dropped into the armchair opposite her. “Only the special ones.”
Piper heaved a breathy sigh and tucked her sandaled feet under her bottom. The plush cushions of the chair moulded around her body.
“When I spoke to you last night, I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Ash yawned and ran his fingers through his uncombed tresses. The pinewood-locks dropped back over his forehead and scraped above his eyebrows. “What changed your mind?”
Piper’s lashes fluttered as she looked down at her hands. Her fingers had tangled together in her lap, and her olive skin gleamed with a light sheen of sweat.
“I had to know why this is happening,” she said, and glanced at the paintings on the wall. They were all of some white-flowered gardens, and a couple with forests in the backgrounds. “This is a school?
”
“Sort of.” Ash lounged in the chair. “It’s the Academy.”
“Of what?” she asked.
“Of London, I guess. The Academy that we have in London.” A lopsided grin graced his face at her bemused expression. Planting his forearms on his thighs, he hunched over. “The provost wants to meet with you,” he said. “When there’s time, that is.”
“I have time.”
Ash rubbed his jaw. “You’ll be summoned. The provost decides when to meet.”
“So that’s why I’m here? To see the provost?”
“And here I thought the honour of your presence went to me,” he said, arrogance slicking his tone.
“I came for answers,” she said. “I don’t care who the messenger is.”
“Ask away.”
“Colt,” she said, the name stinging her tongue. Her finger hooked around a strap on her sandal. “You said he’s my father.”
Ash nodded.
“What does he want with me? Why did he reach out to me after sixteen years of not being in my life? Then, you guys show up and—”
Ash interrupted: “We’ve been hunting Colt Stirling for a long while. Him, and a few others. There is a group of them, a cult. They’ve been on the run since before I could talk and throw tantrums.”
Piper arched her brows and scanned his face. There weren’t any wrinkles that she could see, no signs of aging. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen next month,” he said. At her confused frown, he held up his hands. “I know, I know, I don’t look a day over sixteen. It’s the soft skin. Moisturising really is important to everyone’s beauty regime.”
Piper shook her head and snubbed his comment. “So this cult—your people have been hunting them for seventeen years?”
“Thereabouts,” he said. “They’ve broken our laws, and they need to be brought to justice. Problem is, they disappear for years at a time.”
“What laws have they broken?”
“Daywalkers aren’t allowed to lay with dullborns, for starters. And to reproduce with them?” He shook his head, his eyes creased with disgust. “That’s a big no-no. Producing halfbreeds with humans will secure a daywalker a life sentence in the ground.” Ash added, “Don’t worry. halfbreeds are welcomed into our world. After all, the law recognises that they’re an innocent result of another’s offence. We’re not an archaic organisation, but we have our laws and we live by them.”
Piper snorted. “Someone should tell your friend that.”
Ash looked baffled, blinking at her in a stupid manner. “Desmond?”
“The way he drooled over April last night.” Piper shrugged. “It looks like he didn’t get the memo on the ban of human-daywalker hook-ups.”
Ash set his jaw, and dimples dipped in his cheeks. “Anyway,” he said. “It’s been challenging to hunt law-breakers when they disappear for sixteen years straight. Not a trace of them. There are signs, you know, when a halfbreed is conceived. Shooting stars, dramatic shifts in energy…even natural disasters when on a large scale.”
He looked at the fireplace. It crackled and popped as embers burned beneath the logs.
“The date of your birth was at the time of the Autumn Western Europe floods,” he said. “It was because so many of your kind were birthed that the disaster happened.” Ash looked at her. The glow of the embers danced in his shadowed eyes. “Now,” he said, “after all this time, the cult has resurfaced and they’re tracking down their offspring. We suspect that they’re recruiting them for something, something big that they’ve had in motion for almost two decades.”
“What makes you think that?”
“An daywalker cult doesn’t run around the human world to make an estimated eighty halfbreeds without a reason. Whatever they’re doing, they’ve been planning it for a long time, and now they’re close to achieving it.”
“I don’t plan on being a part of it,” she decided aloud.
“You are welcome to stay here with us at the Academy,” he said. “If you don’t want Colt to find you, here would be your best bet. Or, you can return home if you wish. It’s entirely your decision.”
Her narrowed eyes swept over his calm face. “That sounds too easy.”
“Everything is at a price.” He smiled. It was a careful smile, one laced with secrets. “If you choose to return home, you can’t come back here. If you stay here, you are here forever.”
“Not much of a choice.” Her tone was as crisp as dried out leaves.
“Every halfbreed we find will be given the same ultimatum,” he said. “It has been that way since the first halfbreed, thousands of years ago.”
“You want me to leave my life behind to join some school I know nothing about?” The incredulity tightened her words. “My mother, my friends, my world, are just to be tossed away so I can band up with strangers?”
“Our provost understands the emotional strain that you are facing,” he said, his voice slicked in professionalism. Piper recognised that she was now speaking to a representative of the school, not the Ash she’d met. “You have one day and one night to make your final decision.” He checked the clock on the mantelpiece, then slapped his hands on his knees and stood. “The day has already begun. Same time tomorrow?”
Piper fumbled out of the chair, her hair frizzing in the heat of the room. “That’s it?” she barked. “You promise me answers, drag me to this school, and slap me with an impossible ultimatum?”
“I delivered on my promise,” he said. His eyelids drooped as he stared down at her, a frostiness glazing his silver eyes. “I told you what you were up against, what your father is involved in. He is a part of a cult, along with what we estimate to be eight others. As we speak, the other halfbreeds are being tracked down by our enforcers. We hope to save those who escaped without touching the banyon.”
“An enforcer,” she said. “That’s what you are?”
“Yeah.” A proud gleam coated the grey hues of his eyes. They shone like polished silverware, she thought. “Desmond, too,” he said. “We work under Athena—you’ll meet her later—and take whatever case she gives to us. Though, a few units are on this case.”
The door swung open and cut Ash off. The striking blonde from earlier stood in the doorway. She didn’t have her guns or liquid gold with her.
Ash groaned. “What is it, Elsa?”
“Not to intrude on your moment by the fireplace, but there was a burst of energy five minutes ago.” Her gaze, for the first time, darted to Piper before swerving back to Ash. “An aswang got through the barrier.”
“There are other enforcers in this school,” he said. “Ones who aren’t already occupied.”
The beauty turned menacing on Elsa’s face as she curled her upper lip. “Oh, I’m sure the provost will love to learn that you’re dismissing your duties on the case you’ve been assigned to.”
Ash threw back his head and inhaled through his flaring nostrils. Piper saw the lines of worry and dark circles of no sleep that smothered his eyes.
“My case is the halfbreeds,” he said. “Not aswang breaches.”
“Your case is the cult,” she said. “And this summoning happens to have taken place in the exact location of the halfbreed you interviewed last night. Kieran what’s-his-name.”
“Kieran,” said Piper. “I met a Kieran at the restaurant. Could it be the same one?”
Ash dropped his head back down and looked at Piper. “Fancy meeting your brother?” He paused, a look of contemplation masking his eyes. “Again,” he added.
Piper lifted her stare to the ceiling and wrung her hands together. Elsa’s impatient gaze scalded the side of her face, but she tried her best to ignore the dislike radiating from the gun-maker.
“Ok,” she said with a firm nod. “If I’m supposed to be a part of this world, I should see how you operate, right? Before I make any decisions, of course.”
Ash grinned, a cheeky smile, and winked. “Right.”
Piper wondered if he smiled at all the halfb
reeds like that.
CHAPTER 14
If Piper had known that the energy burst was in Sutton, she wouldn’t have agreed to go.
Sutton was an outer borough of London, and farther out than Piper liked to travel. The journey wouldn’t have been so bad if the daywalker had some sort of magical transport. As it turned out, they didn’t—they had black vans with tinted windows and fake license plates.
‘The Fae used to help us out with transport,’ Ash had said when she’d asked. ‘Then, there was a sort of squabble among a few species, and they took the sides of our opposition. Since then, we travel whichever way we can.’
As Piper sat in the back of the van, the windows sleek with dark paint, and Ash lounging beside her, she realised that ‘whichever way’ was by slow cars in clogged traffic.
With a dirtied cloth, Ash wiped his gun in methodical circles. Though it was already shiny, and didn’t need a clean. On the other side of Ash napped Desmond. The speed of the van and the potholes on the highway road didn’t make for good sleeping conditions, but Desmond managed to nap without stirring.
Piper rested her head against the window, hoping for a little rest herself, but the window rattled and gave her a dull headache. Maybe the headache was brought on by other things, she mused. It was only the morning before that she’d been shopping with Nigel in Soho, enjoying a blissful state of ignorance, unaware of what her life would churn into in a matter of hours. She wouldn’t have guessed in her weirdest daydreams that she’d be in a van with four strangers, all of whom had knives and guns—lots of guns; pistols and shotguns, rifles and revolvers—strapped to their bodies, headed for the dreadful suburbs.
Bile crept up her throat and burned. Piper swallowed and rubbed her churning stomach. Nerves ate her up from the inside, but she was sure that hunger had something to do with it, too. The last meal she’d eaten had been one chicken taco for lunch the day before.
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