"Wait," he shouted across the room.
Definitely not.
Wrenching myself away from him, I took off between the curtains into a vacant room that reminded me of the headmistress's office. Lavish framed photos hung on the black stone walls with men and women glaring out. They blurred past me as I sprinted by, my heart crashing.
Behind me, the crowd began to hush.
The man in the straw hat yelled, "Wilva! There’s a skin-walker here who looks like you!"
He’d known. He'd known something was off about me. The headmistress would likely know it was me, and soon, I bet she'd come looking. They would probably all come looking.
Pivoting left toward a narrow, dark doorway, I knocked into a small podium between paintings in my hurry. A carved marble likeness of Ryze wobbled on top, and its crash to the ground filled me with dark glee.
Let them come search for me. It might draw them away from the staff, but if they did come searching, I'd have to skin-walk into someone else in case they spotted me.
"Ambulabunt mecum in cute, Ne quis in Morrissey geminae," I muttered.
As soon as I rushed inside the dark room ahead, my body immediately began to shift. I shrank, my hair grew to my waist, and something adorned the top of my head that hadn't been there before. A crown of teeth, or what she'd been wearing the last time I saw her.
Behind me, shouts sounded over the adrenaline humming through my blood. They were coming. They likely knew their way around this castle. I didn't. That could pose a problem if I let it. I wouldn’t let it.
Ahead, a torch-lit hallway led off of this room. I just needed somewhere I could hide to do some osteomancy. I started down the hall, which appeared empty—until two figures appeared at the very end. Both had bright blue hair poking from within the deep hoods of their black cloaks, and I couldn't see who they were. But they could see me. I could feel the power of their gazes from within their hoods scraping through the layers of skin to the real me. I stopped breathing as we approached each other but willed myself not to break stride.
The voices behind me grew louder. As soon as the two figures passed me, they'd soon learn from the others the skin-walker had gone this way and then point out exactly where I'd gone.
We passed each other, and I denied them anything more than a bored glance. As soon as they were out of my line of sight, I took in my options. A door opened to the left, and past it, the hallway branched left and right.
I swept down the left hallway, and then after making sure the coast was clear, I stopped and pressed my back to the wall, listening and gathering all my courage. But not for long. A door at the end of the hallway opened, and before I saw who it was, I retraced my steps to the first hallway. The two black-cloaked figures headed toward the shouting voices and pounding feet, and they blocked me from sight as I shot through the door. Jackpot. A spice closet, similar to the one Ramsey and I had once holed up in when we’d been sneaking around Necromancer Academy. My throat pulled at the memory, but I couldn’t lose it now.
Quickly, I scrawled a symbol on the wood that would lock the closet door from the outside, and then dropped to my knees to read the bones I scattered in front of me. A tricky chore since I had no light, literally and figuratively.
Footsteps pounded past and then turned left. They'd figure out I hadn't gone that way soon enough.
"Where is the Staff of Sullivan?" I whispered into the dark. I chose a bone and then scooped the rest into my pocket. With my next breath suspended in my lungs, I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. I didn’t trust it, but I opened the door anyway, just enough to read my bones from the light of the hallway torches.
Straight, the bone read.
Pocketing the bone, I slipped out, sidestepped to the left slightly, and headed straight down the hallway I hadn't yet taken.
Why hadn’t they discovered me yet? They'd had plenty of time to do a locator spell by now, unless they wanted to play a game of cat and mouse before they tried to capture me.
The short hall led to stairs that disappeared into darkness below. I took a burning green skull from the wall and held it in front of me as I descended, my hand shaking. Down here where I couldn't see, didn't know where I was, I could easily be backed into a corner. But I refused to give up.
The dark swallowed me up whole, so thick and suffocating that the skull light was nearly useless.
"Dawn," a snake-like voice whispered from right behind me.
I whirled, my pulse striking too loudly to hear much else. I didn’t see anything. After a moment, I turned around again and kept going, my eyes straining to take in anything beyond the meager light from the skull. Let them think I was a mouse. I'd still get the staff while they played their little games.
"If you join Ryze, you can have anything you want," the voice whispered again, and it echoed over and over on anything.
"Bullshit," I hissed. "Joining Ryze won't bring me revenge."
"Are you sure you need it?" The whisper brushed against the back of my head and feathered Morrissey's black hair into my face.
Ahead, another green-lit skull snapped into existence and shined its eerie glow on a face that took my breath away, that stuttered my steps and splintered my resolve. Leo.
His blue eyes that were so much like mine took me in and then swept around us. "Biscuit, what are you doing here?"
I swallowed hard. This wasn't real. Someone was messing with my head and my emotions, but it wasn't working. I wouldn’t let it.
"Nice try." I pulled up my spine and strode forward, straight to my so-called brother.
He reached out and took my arm, his warm touch and his lavender smell a shock to my soul. "Hey..." He blinked hard at the face that didn't belong to me, his mouth pulling into a frown. "Why are we here? And why do you look like that?"
"You're dead, Leo." I sounded so hollow when I said it, so matter-of-fact, but the truth still stung bitterly all the same.
"I was, yes. I remember talking to you through the spirit door, but..." He rubbed his chest, gazing at me imploringly. "Biscuit, my heart's beating."
Shaking my head, I sidestepped him and kept going. "It won't work," I shouted into the dark. "You can give me all sorts of promises, but you can't give me what I want. I'm not like you. Just because my magic is dark doesn't mean I'm easily corrupted by it. Unlike you, my magic doesn’t make my choices for me."
“Biscuit, wait!”
He sounded so real, triggering all sorts of doubts to crash through my head. What if I was wrong? What if somehow, some way, that was him? But no, even Ryze couldn’t fuse Leo’s soul back into his body since his soul had already passed through the spirit door. Unless his soul had been split, and it hadn’t. Headmistress Millington had had no reason to do that after she’d murdered him.
Still, the sliver of hope in my heart caused me to turn around.
Instead of the imploring look on his face, he gazed at me with his chin tucked to his chest and a strange tick pulling at his mouth. Shadows darkened his face, not from the green glow of the skull he held, but from his skin pulling too tight against his bones. He looked skeletal, just like the skull.
His lips peeled back with a low growl. He lunged, the movement filled with lethal intent.
“Leo!”
He didn’t stop. He reminded me of the murderous relivers wandering in the catacombs. Not my brother at all. He’d kill me if I didn’t stop him.
“Revertere ad mortem,” I shouted.
The spell blasted toward him and exploded on impact, sliding flesh and bones across the floor. Not my brother’s flesh and bones. That wasn’t him. It wasn’t, whether that had been his soulless reliver or just an illusion, but I sobbed and nearly went to my knees anyway. Barely, I resisted having a breakdown. I had to get out of here.
When I turned to do just that, a dark, oily presence crowded my back. It spiked the hair along my arms and carved out my confidence with a dull blade. Whatever that was, it most definitely wasn’t Leo.
I sped my step
s, shooting glances over my shoulders.
"Maybe magic doesn’t make your choices for you," a voice said. Not a whisper this time. Familiar and almost motherly.
Headmistress Millington.
“But I can make your choice for you,” she said.
“Occid—”
Before I could finish the killing spell, she grabbed me from behind with unnatural strength that bound my arms. A jagged tip of a knife bit into my throat and then split through skin from ear to ear.
And all I could think as warmth gushed down my neck was if the headmistress had used the same blade to kill me as she'd used on my brother.
Chapter Three
I slumped to the ground. A bloody gurgle bubbled up from my throat as I tried to form words. A healing spell. A shout at Headmistress Millington. My eyes strained to see her in the darkness which grew more absolute by the second.
I was dying, and she’d killed me.
Over the sound of my dying heartbeat, footsteps thudded nearby. Not inside this room with me, but outside. Was the headmistress running away again? No, I couldn’t let her. Even death wouldn’t stop me.
With the last of my strength, I hauled myself to all fours. The sound of my blood plinking to the floor in steady drops tossed my stomach sideways.
“She’s in the Room of Nightmares!” someone shouted behind me.
The Room of Nightmares... Did that mean everything that had happened in this room only been a nightmare and not real? No. I could never be that lucky. But at the same time, I hadn’t picked up her scent.
Gripping my bloody neck which felt all too real, I forced myself to my feet. The glowing green skull lit the frame of a door in front of me, and I clawed at the knob to get myself out of here. The door popped open, and as soon as I cleared the threshold, the bleeding, the pain, the nightmare ended. I blinked down at myself and found no traces of blood.
As I sucked in a relieved breath, a ray of light slanted in from an opening door across the Room of Nightmares. Quickly, I shut the door I clung to and drew the locking symbol across the wood. Then I dumped the bones from my pocket to the floor with trembling hands.
“Where is the Staff of Sullivan?” I whispered.
Straight, read the one I chose.
But...there was nothing there. No hallways, except the one I was in, or doors to step through. Just a tin pail of dirty water on the floor and a couple of mops leaning against the wall. Red tapestries hung from the ceiling in rolls and billowed like clouds in a storm. Something dripped from inside of them continuously. No Staff of Sullivan in sight.
"Sonofabitch." Hissing through my teeth, I set the bone down, closed my eyes, rearranged them, then chose another.
Straight.
I squeezed my hands into fists and sprang toward the wall. Surely there was a hidden latch or a trapdoor or something I was missing. I threw the mops out of my way, not caring how much noise I was making, and flattened my palms against the surface, feeling and groping. Nothing. Nothing but wall. Had the bones stopped working?
Heaving a frustrated breath, I started to turn back to them when I spotted something shiny and new lying on the floor. A white broom handle, the wood polished to a high shine. Pretty damn fancy for a broom handle. I swept my gaze down it, and my mind flashed back to that night Ryze had stolen it. His hand had covered the rounded end, but the rest of it had looked like any other staff. A staff someone had taken great care to hide by attaching a mop to and then hid in plain sight.
I snatched it from the floor, and as soon as I did, a surge of magical energy buzzed my fingertips. Pure, good, white magic that didn't belong at all in Ryze's castle. This was it. I'd done it. I gripped it tighter, hardly able to believe it. What if this was some kind of trick, like I tried to walk out of here with it and triggered a trap? That was probably the case, but I'd accomplished steps two out of three, and hey, I wasn't dead yet.
After I collected my bones again, I peered through a crack in the door. The hall appeared empty. For now.
I slithered out, the staff under my palm growing slick with sweat. At the end of the hall, lightning flickered outside a window and highlighted a dark figure standing there. Watching. Waiting. I stopped and froze, my gaze sliding down the silhouette's arm to what they carried—a torture tool. One I'd seen before that had extracted a tooth.
"I'll save you the trouble, Morrissey," I ground out. "My teeth are all whispering the exact same thing. Care to guess what that might be?"
Silence, as constant as her stillness.
"Go to seven hell— Ahhh." I slapped my hand over my mouth as something metal scraped hard along my teeth, running a terrible shudder through every single bone. She hadn't moved an inch, though, still only a silhouette.
I wanted to send her to the seven hells myself, but I wanted out of here with the staff even more so I turned and ran. One step away from her brought on another hard scrape, not in my mouth but behind my eye sockets. I cried out and stumbled, the resulting brain shiver quaking my brain so hard it knocked into my skull.
“Occidere!” The killing spell came out as a pained shriek. A black ball formed in my palm and hurled toward Morrissey, but I missed, too agonized to aim.
Pain scraped down the inside of my skull and seemed to echo in every single one of my teeth.
My spell blasted into the red tapestries and ripped a hole through them right over Morrissey’s head. A flood of dead bodies poured down right on top of her. Dozens and dozens, all bleeding and maimed, just like the ones I’d seen in the street only less stinky. Magic, surely.
Time to go. I gripped the staff tightly and hurried as fast as I could in the opposite direction.
“Bind thee in health,” I hissed, but the steady scrape grinding up my bones turned my voice into dust.
Behind me, more and more bodies thudded loudly to the ground from the tapestries above like they were made from mountains. It was like I’d triggered a chain reaction. Or sprang a trap. Everywhere I turned, they followed at my heels, spraying blood up and down my back. I sprinted faster. Every bone in my body rang, and I bit down hard on my back teeth.
The hallway turned again, and a hole opened up in the ceiling straight ahead. Not from the red tapestries but in the air itself. A head poked through, and I came face-to-face with one of the figures with blue hair.
“Occid—”
“Wait!” One of them flashed out an arm.
The other appeared in the hole, too, and pushed back their hood. It was Jon.
His eyes widened as the tapestries ripped open behind me. “Now, Echo!”
Two arms reached through and swept me up into the hole.
When I righted myself, I realized I now stood in a part of the castle I hadn’t yet discovered—a small bedroom that might’ve belonged to a servant. Except for the three of us, we were alone.
“Seven hells, Dawn, the weight of those bodies could’ve crushed you,” Jon said. “They’re spelled to each weigh a ton.”
So had they crushed Morrissey? Gods, I hoped so.
Echo dropped her hood and grinned. “I knew that instant murder hole spell would come in handy. Miss us?”
Relief sprang tears to my eyes. “What are you—” My knees buckled, but Jon rushed forward to catch me. So did Echo. They both had blue hair. I’d never been so glad to see them in my life.
“No more magic for you,” Jon whispered.
I started to argue that it wasn’t mage’s oblivion nearly sweeping out my feet from underneath me, but my teeth rattled against each other with painful scrapes.
“Is that it?” Echo asked, pointing to the staff clutched tightly in my hand.
I nodded.
“Then let’s get it out.”
They led me down the hallway and had to support me more and more as I steadily drooped. We neared the large entry through the room where I’d knocked Ryze’s statue down, and the silence beyond pressed into my skin. Where was everyone? Were they all looking for me?
I gasped at the sight in front of me
as soon as we cleared the red curtains. Everyone who had been sitting at the long tables now sat slumped face first into their plates. Some of them rested their heads onto their neighbor's shoulder, but all of them had their eyes closed, completely still and silent.
Echo adjusted my arm around her shoulder and glanced down at me with a grin. “It's a real shame not everyone knows the poison detection spell you taught me. Don't worry. They're asleep." She winked, her grin widening. "I think."
Chapter Four
Seph, still floating above her bed, had shifted the slightest bit.
As soon as the three of us made it back to Necromancer Academy, with the staff, and we’d stopped in Mayvel to visit some other healers so they could heal me, my parents ambushed us in the entryway to tell us the news. We immediately went to Seph’s room.
"What does this mean?" I whispered to my mom, my gaze riveted to Seph. She'd turned sideways a little toward the stone as if the weight of it were dragging her arm toward the ground.
"I wish I knew," Mom said. "She only just did this."
And we'd only just arrived. Coincidence? Or wishful thinking? Likely the latter, but just in case, I conspicuously pointed the staff at the stone in her hand since I wasn’t sure what it could do. Nothing happened.
"We'll continue to keep an eye on her," Dad said with a solemn nod.
Jon loosened a wistful sigh. "Please let us know if anything else changes."
"Of course." Mom flicked her gaze to me and zeroed in on my face, specifically my chin. "Is that blood, Dawn?"
Damn my face for revealing everything.
I swiped my hand over it. "Probably just sauce. You know how I am with food.”
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look like you’ve been to all seven hells and back.”
Necromancer Uprising: Book 4 Page 3
