Alec glanced at me before trying the door. Locked.
He wasn’t deterred, and dug into his pants’ pocket, withdrawing the tools he’d used to break into the school. Placing a small penlight between his teeth, he knelt down to start working on the lock. I took a stance beside him, and swept my eyes up and down the hallway.
It’s almost too easy.
Not that I wanted to get caught, but I’d come into this sort of expecting to. I’d figured this to be a suicide mission, and was surprised that it was going so smoothly. Even so, there was a gnawing in my stomach that grew more pronounced the longer I stood there.
Alec cursing under his breath drew my focus down to him as he dropped the penlight to the floor. It wasn’t because it slipped free; he’d tossed it out of frustration.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“Can’t get in,” he muttered as he stood.
“Now what?”
He looked down at me, his expression thoughtful as he contemplated our options. “We need a key.” With that statement, he grabbed me by the elbow and ushered me back the way we had come. Instead of turning down the hallway toward the dorms, we continued straight, farther down the administrative wing.
“Where do you plan on getting a key?” I whispered harshly.
“It’s probably best if you don’t know.”
Oh, shit, this can’t be good.
We continued silently and quickly until we reached the intersection to another wing. Surprisingly, we hadn’t seen any security guards along the way, and no one had seen us. But as we rounded the corner, something told me that was about to change.
On a large brass plate nailed to the wall of the hallway we’d just turned down were the words: Faculty Wing. No Students Permitted.
I pulled on Alec’s arm, forcing him to a skidding stop.
“Are you crazy?” I demanded as forcefully as I could in a whisper. “We’ll get caught for sure.”
“Where else do you expect to find a key to—” Before he’d finished the question, I saw the answer register in his eyes. They twinkled as he turned me around. “Come on.”
I happily obliged as we retreated back to the administrative wing. Whatever method of obtaining a key he had just thought of had to be better than breaking into a faculty member’s room.
Before we made the turn out of sight, the click of a door sounded behind us. I risked a quick peek over my shoulder as Alec picked up the pace.
Too late. An older Skotadi woman had spotted us.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Stop right there!”
Alec tugged on my arm, turning me forward, and forcing me into a run.
“Don’t let her see your face,” he muttered to me.
The second we rounded the corner, out of her sight, Alec let go of my hand and started checking doors. All locked.
I moved across the hall from him and checked two handles as we moved farther down the hallway. In the distance, the fast footsteps of the Skotadi were growing closer.
The third handle moved, and the door opened in front of me.
“Alec!” I called quietly. “Here!”
He darted across the hall toward me, pushed me inside ahead of him, and shut the door gently behind us. I heard him searching for, and eventually finding, the lock.
I couldn’t see six inches in front of me. Though I couldn’t see the room, it felt small, like the walls were close. The familiar scent of lemon and pine stung my nose, and I suspected we were in a janitorial closet.
Did all schools use the same floor cleaner?
I felt Alec brush by me, and heard shuffling nearby, almost as if he were searching for something in the dark. He wasn’t making a lot of noise, but as I heard the clicking of footsteps in the hallway, I put a hand on what I hoped was his shoulder to quiet him.
He paused as the footsteps approached, and continued without slowing.
Out of the darkness, two hands cupped my face, and then I felt lips pressed against mine. Just as quickly as they appeared, they were gone. As were the hands.
“You’re a genius, Kris,” Alec whispered.
I heard a soft click, before light shone from his penlight. It was only enough to illuminate what it was directed at, and would not be visible under the door, in the hallway. Even from what little I could see, I realized I had been right. We were in a janitorial closet.
Alec was rummaging through the uniforms hanging along the wall. I heard him muttering under his breath, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“Alec?” I whispered as I joined him. “What are you looking for?”
“The maintenance guys will have keys.”
Of course! Of all the rooms for me to find unlocked, it wound up being a useful one. I really was a genius.
I helped Alec search the pockets of the uniforms. When that search turned up empty, he spun around to shine the light around the room. Cleaning supplies and tools filled the cluttered space. Along the wall next to the door, was a peg board. With keys.
Alec snatched them. It was a big ring with dozens of keys in various shapes and sizes.
“I have no idea which one is for the office we need,” he muttered. “It’s going to take a while to try them all out.”
And if someone spotted us before we could get in…
We looked at each other, the weight of our dilemma setting in. But we had come this far. There was no going back now.
“Now what?” I asked.
Outside, in the hallway, we could hear voices approaching, and Alec flicked off the flashlight.
“Probably just a few kids…”
“...snuck back into their rooms…”
“Waste of time…”
I stepped closer to Alec, dropped my voice. “How long will they look for us?”
“Not long. She didn’t know who we were. They’ll figure we were just a couple of kids sneaking around. Used to happen all the time. We’ll just wait for them to give up the search.”
I wanted to ask what we’d do if they decided to look in here, but bit my tongue because I didn’t want to hear his answer. Of course, we would do what we needed to do. For survival.
I only hoped we could get out of there without testing the combat moves I’d loved to practice with Nathan. Real life wasn’t as fun.
CHAPTER 21
No one invaded our hideout. The voices in the hallway moved away. For good measure, we stayed in the closet for an additional twenty minutes before Alec cracked the door open. His head swung back and forth before he stepped out into the hallway, and he waved for me to follow.
There was a chance that the security guards were on some sort of high alert now, so we needed to be extra careful. And super quick.
Our dash to the administrative office took barely thirty seconds. Finding the right key took a lot longer.
As Alec tried one, after another, after another, I kept watch. Each time he had to switch keys, the knot in my stomach tightened.
It was taking too long. If the security guards made rounds, surely one of them would be coming by soon. One of them would catch us—
“Got it!” Alec swung the door open and pushed me inside ahead of him. He shut the door and locked it behind us.
The emergency lights in the hallway did little to illuminate the room. I stood just inside the entrance as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Alec brushed by me, having already spotted what he was looking for.
“Over here,” he said, opening the top drawer of a tall filing cabinet. There were two others next to the one he was going through, and I picked one. Opening the top drawer, I squinted at the files inside.
“Here.” Alec tossed me another small penlight.
“What if the file’s not under my name?” I asked. What if they knew me by another name? A name I didn’t know?
“It’s possible,” Alec murmured as he shuffled through files. “Look at the pictures. Everyone will have a picture.”
A solid ten minutes passed without either of us finding anything that
looked remotely like a file on me. Shutting the third drawer, I sighed heavily.
It was pointless. There was nothing here. We weren’t going to find out the truth about my background, about who I was. The truth wasn’t where we were looking.
Alec moved to a desk on the other side of the room, and began rummaging through the papers on top, and then the drawers. I moved on to the last, and probably worthless, drawer in my cabinet.
It didn’t open. I knelt down to get a closer look at it, and saw that it had a key hole on the front.
“Alec?” I called over my shoulder. “You find any keys that might fit a cabinet lock?”
I heard him rummage through a drawer. Finding what he was looking for, he came to my side and wordlessly dropped to one knee beside me. He had a small key in his hand, and slipped it into the lock. It clicked, and we slid the drawer open.
One manila envelope lay at the bottom of the drawer. I glanced at Alec before picking it up. My hands trembled as I lifted the flap and withdrew a thick stack of papers. There was no picture, and I avoided looking at the pages closer, suddenly afraid to know if it was my file.
I handed them to Alec, and walked away. With my back to him, I asked, “Is it me?”
My question was met with silence for what felt like an eternity before Alec’s guarded voice reached me. “It’s you.”
“Well?”
“You want to see?”
I kept my back turned, shook my head. “You do it.”
The only sounds I heard were from the shuffling of the pages as Alec flipped through them. After a few moments, I gained some courage and turned to watch him. He was standing, the papers strewn across the top of the cabinet, with the penlight in one hand, illuminating my history held in his other hand. His finger traced down as he read the lines, and came to a stop.
When his eyes lifted to mine, I gulped.
“You want to see this?” he asked.
“Just tell me what I need to know.”
Alec lifted the papers in his hand. “This chronicles your entire life, including all the information on the searches they conducted after Nathan took you.”
“Okay…”
“Apparently they put that Lillian chick in charge of finding you,” he added, then hesitated like he was unsure how much to tell me. “They converted her for that specific purpose.”
My heart sunk. I’d suspected it, and now I knew.
That meant they’ve been changing Kala to Skotadi for at least six years. How many others had been changed, like her?
Though alarming, that was the least of my worries now. There was something there Alec was afraid to tell me. Something that had caused those shadows in his eyes.
“You know you were created by the Skotadi,” he started as if easing me in to bad news. “Hade’s four demigods all contributed to your creation. A hybrid created with all four of their bloodlines was your father.”
So not five as Micah had suggested. And not Hecate’s bloodline. I supposed it should have made me feel better to know that I had no connection to Micah. But there was more. I could tell from Alec’s guarded posture, and that made me nervous. “What else?”
“They have listed who your birthmother was.”
My breath caught. Birthmother? I hadn’t even given the idea any thought. I had always assumed that she was one of the demigods, but if Alec had said that all four of Hade’s demigods had created my father, then who had my mother been? A poor, unsuspecting human?
Or one that they had forced into helping them?
Crossing to where Alec stood, I took the files from him, and read down the first paper. Apparently, my birthday wasn’t what I’d always celebrated. According to this, I had turned eighteen months ago. My birthplace was some place I couldn’t pronounce. Next to birthmother was the name…Hecate.
I lifted my eyes to Alec. “Hecate?”
He looked troubled, avoiding eye contact like he didn’t know how to respond.
“Hecate’s my birthmother? What…”
What does this mean? For a moment, I couldn’t process anything. Somewhere, churning in my head, were thoughts. Bad, bad thoughts.
No, this can’t be happening…
Alec’s eyes finally met mine. He gripped my shoulders like he knew I was struggling to put it all together. “Your mother was a goddess, Kris.”
It took several moments for his words to sink in, for me to register what they meant. If my mother was a goddess, then…
“Kris, you’re a demigod,” Alec said, piecing my scattered thoughts together for me.
I was a demigod. The demigod created by the goddess of magic. I was capable of manipulating magic—an Incantator. As a demigod, I was this world’s strongest Incantator.
My eyes snapped up to Alec’s, which were already on me, watching me carefully. “Am I the Incantator?”
He didn’t answer.
“Alec?” My voice rose in panic. “Does this mean I’m the Incantator?”
He didn’t get the chance to answer, if he were ever going to anyway. We both whipped our heads around to the sound of pounding on the door. The handle rattled as someone tried to turn it. A second later, a bright white light spilled through the window in the door and canvased the room.
“Come on,” Alec whispered as he grabbed my hand.
The light washed over us briefly before we moved beyond its reach. But we’d already been spotted. There was a shout from the other side of the door. “In here!”
With no time to look for another way out, Alec lifted the desk chair and hurled it into the wall of windows. At that moment, the sound of shattering glass was heaven to my ears.
“Go.” Alec guided me toward our escape route.
I looked out and recoiled. “Alec, it’s like a two story drop.”
The land below sloped down and away from the building, and though we were technically still on the ground floor, the ground on this side was a lot farther down.
Alec looked down and saw what I saw. “Shit.”
With a furtive glance over his shoulder toward the door, where we could now hear multiple voices, Alec swung his leg over the edge. He gripped a hold of the windowsill and lowered himself down before dropping the rest of the way to the ground. He landed easily enough and waved up to me, motioning for me to do the same.
“I’ve got you, Kris!”
As I lifted my shirt and tucked the file that held all the truths of my life into the waistband of my jeans, the door burst open behind me. A single Skotadi rushed into the room as I quickly swung a leg over the ledge. I didn’t have the time to get turned all the way around before he grabbed me. The second I lifted my face to his, I saw the recognition register in his eyes.
He knew exactly who I was.
He faltered briefly, enabling me to swing my other leg over the ledge. His hand still had a firm grip on my arm, and after his initial shock wore off, he started to pull me back up.
Below me, I heard Alec cursing and I imagined he was attempting nothing short of scaling the side of the building. He was too far below to be of any help to me.
It was all up to me.
I closed my eyes and thought of fire. Feeling the familiar tingling in my palm, I opened my eyes. The smile on my face alerted the Skotadi, a second before the baseball sized ball of fire exploded in his face.
He let go of me and staggered back, bumping into the desk. Behind him, two more Skotadi filed into the room. They looked from their companion to me, and charged. I had another ball of fire ready and rocketed into the center of the room, engulfing the desk and blocking them from coming any closer.
I swung around, grabbing the window sill, and lowered myself down as Alec had done.
“Come on. I got you,” I heard him say.
With one last look at the Skotadi scurrying around the room, attempting to extinguish the now fully engulfed fire, I let go. Alec’s arms encircled me, softening my awkward landing.
“Good?” he asked. When I nodded, he grabbed my hand and took o
ff at a run.
I glanced over my shoulder as we rounded the side of the building, saw the orange glow from the fire, and permitted myself a little smile.
I did that!
The fence seemed farther away than I remembered and, even though we were running full speed, I swore it took twice as long to cross the open yard. With every step we took, I expected a small army of Skotadi to intercept us, but as we got farther and farther from the building with no one stopping us, I realized we were going to make it.
As we climbed through the hole in the fence, crossing to the other side, the sirens started behind us. They were a distant wail by the time we reached the car. No one intercepted us there either, and Alec peeled out onto the empty road. Stealing glances out the rear window, I assured myself that no one was following us.
Only after several miles were placed between us and the orphanage did I finally start to calm down. Barely.
I lifted my hand, watched as it shook uncontrollably in front of me.
“Hey.” Alec grabbed my hand in his, gave it a gentle squeeze. “That was awesome back there.”
Afraid to speak just yet, I merely nodded.
We didn’t speak for thirty minutes, before I thought I finally could speak again.
“He saw me, Alec,” I said. “That Skotadi recognized me.”
Alec was silent for a long time. “We can’t stay here,” he finally said. “They’ll be looking for us.”
“Do they know where you live?”
“No.”
Another long silence passed before I asked, “Where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted solemnly.
I wanted to suggest returning to West Virginia, to Nathan and the others, but I didn’t think Alec would go for it. On the other hand, it might end up being our only option. Where we would go wasn’t as important now as just leaving. Our first priority was to get out of Aspen. Fast.
We dove into a discussion on our preparations to leave: what to pack, who would pack what so that we could do it quickly, what to tell Tenner. Fortunately, he was gone for the night, so we only needed to leave a note.
Sacrificed (The Ignited Series) Page 21
