Second Breath Academy 2: How To Kill A Shadow (A Necromancer Academy)

by Leigh Kelsey

  “My brother did it, too,” Kati said, swallowing. “If it’s who I think it is … we need to know. We need to prepare, warn people.”

  Alexandra seemed to sink in on herself. “If it’s true, we’re all dead.”

  “Say it,” Kati breathed, her heart so loud she could hear it in her ears.

  “He said they wanted to summon a demon, but when they opened the doorway, something else forced its way through. A woman. He said it was—” Alexandra swallowed, clenching her hands into fists. “He said it was Lady LaVoire.”

  Kati sat back, nodding, sick to her stomach. There it was. The truth out in the open. Theo was an elitist, and if Lady LaVoire gathered power, he was a murderer. Because someone like that didn’t learn the error of her ways while locked away in the underworld for a decade. No, someone like that seethed and plotted and became consumed with revenge.

  Lady LaVoire had been a tyrant and a menace while she lived. She’d killed and enslaved so many people, had held the UK in a grip of terror. Kati was imagining all the stories, the footage, the news reports, and trying to picture how much worse it would be now that Lady LaVoire was wound up with vengeance.

  “You believe him,” Alexandra whispered. “Wilson, he was mad, he was raving—”

  “Last term,” Kati cut her off, “in the Stolen tower.” Alexandra went silent, watchful and wide-eyed. “The ghosts kept talking about a mistress, someone important to them, almost like their god. Those ghosts had been in that tower for hundreds of years, and Ingrid had been a poltergeist that whole time. So why now? What changed to make them possess Harley? They … they lured my brother up there last year, they spoke to him. That’s how this whole thing started, I think.”

  “Shit,” Alexandra breathed. “Bo mentioned ghosts, but I thought he meant it metaphorically.”

  Kati ignored her, trying to get the words out so she could make sense of all the noise in her head. “If they’ve been walled up in the tower for hundreds of years, why suddenly become more active last year? And how did they have the power to hurt Lavellian, to hurt me and my friends? I think…”

  “You think she amped them up,” Alexandra guessed, putting it into words for her, and Kati nodded emphatically. “It makes sense. She controlled the dead—it was one of her M.O.s, as well as turning people into possessed blood puppets.”

  Kati was going to be sick. She needed to speak to Iain, but that was the last thing she wanted. Tuesday, after her magic theory lesson, she’d tell him what she knew. She could be brave. This was more important than secrets and relationship statuses.

  “It all fits,” Kati said weakly. “But it means … it means he’s with her now. My brother’s with a mass murderer.”

  “You don’t know that.” Alexandra shrugged. “He could just be on the run on his own.”

  “Yeah,” Kati agreed doubtfully. He could be alone. And yet he’d managed to sneak home last September to leave her a cactus as a present. He was on the run, but he was close, she knew it. “Thanks,” she added, “for telling me.”

  “Is it what you wanted to hear?” Chen asked, her mouth twisted as Kati shoved out of the chair.

  “No,” Kati replied, looking at the other woman, pale and afraid and angry. “But it’s what I expected.”

  “What are you going to do?” Alexandra asked as Kati turned.

  Kati glanced over her shoulder. “I don’t know yet, but I need to tell Madam Hawkness. Tuesday—I’ll tell her Tuesday. Don’t tell anyone before then.”

  Because no matter how furious she was with Iain, she couldn’t bear him hearing about this from anyone but her.

  Feeling Horny

  Harley settled in easily, taking the room beside Rahmi’s with only a mild complaint that it didn’t have a window. Within half an hour, all four of them were amiably discussing their mutual disdain of the recently fired Mrs Hale. Kati didn’t tell them about who Theo had helped escape the underworld just yet—not until she’d told Iain—and the spectre of the truth hung over her like a shroud. But she managed to put it to the back of her mind for a few hours, gossiping and bickering good-naturedly with her friends over mugs of hot chocolate spiked with one of Rahmi’s potions.

  Kati had only just drifted off to the sound of rain battering the window behind her bed when knuckles rapped at her bedroom door.

  Expecting it to be Harley, freaked over her new surroundings or woken up after a nightmare, Kati awkwardly climbed over Dolly—who didn’t so much as snort awake—and padded to the door.

  “Um,” Kati said, blinking at the figure on the other side of the threshold. She rubbed her eyes but nope, it was still Madam Hawkness, intimidating headteacher, war hero, magical badass. Banging on Kati’s dorm room door in the middle of the day. “What are you doing in my dorm?”

  “I need you to come with me,” Hawkness replied, so seriously that the sleep clinging to Kati burned away instantly. “Quickly.”

  Madam Hawkness knew, didn’t she? That Lady LaVoire was back. She’d figured it out.

  Kati jammed her feet into slippers, grabbed a hoodie to throw over her navy blue pyjama pants and her thin vest, and on second thought, shook Dolly awake. Her familiar rose grumpily, but stopped muttering when Kati explained the situation.

  This is gonna be bad, Kit-Kat, Dolly whined.

  Kati was too worried to swear at her for using the dumb name.

  “Where are we going?” Kati asked her headteacher when they left the dorm and crossed the academy, heading to the back of the building in a route Kati knew well. It was the one she used to take to see Iain in the teacher’s tower.

  Instead of giving her a straight answer, Madam Hawkness—who Kati realised had her strawberry blonde hair in rollers and was wearing a teal velvet dressing gown—said, “The building woke me. There’s a secret bond between every headteacher and this academy; she informed me that something was very wrong.”

  “She?” Kati asked, momentarily distracted.

  Madam Hawkness nodded absently. “Yes, she.”

  They reached the door to the north tower and Kati’s stomach turned over, her breath coming faster. “When you say something’s wrong…”

  Madam Hawkness met Kati’s eyes as she pulled open the heavy door, and Kati knew. She figured out several things at once; Madam Hawkness knew about her and Iain’s relationship—which explained the conversation they’d had at her bedside—and Iain was in trouble. Big trouble.

  Kati took off running up the stairs, only pausing to bark a spell and fling his door open, panting for breath.

  She tore through the front room, Dolly and Madam Hawkness close behind her, and swore at the sight of Iain in his little bed—the bed where they’d cuddled so many times, the bed where they’d made love. He was thrashing in his sleep, veins standing out in his neck as if he was straining against his own skin, and sweat covered his whole body.

  “She told me I wouldn’t be able to reach him,” Madam Hawkness said as Kati dropped onto the bed, brushing hair out of Iain’s sweaty face and murmuring absent comfort in an attempt to wake him. “But you would.”

  Kati snapped her gaze to the headteacher. “The academy told you that,” she said flatly.

  “Yes.” Hawkness nodded, her gaze unwavering, challenging.

  Kati held her stare but she flinched when Iain’s back bowed, his limbs twisted in his sheets as he fought something in his dreams. “How long have you known?”

  “Since the beginning,” Madam Hawkness replied, crossing to the small window next to Iain’s bed.

  Hey, Prince Charming, Dolly said, reaching out to Iain as she jumped onto his bed. Curled up on a chair in the corner of the room, Blaze didn’t even lift his head to investigate the new scents in the room, utterly comatose. Wake up.

  He didn’t.

  “Iain,” Kati said gently, shaking his shoulders. “It’s alright, you’re alright.” She threw a panicked glance at Madam Hawkness. “What do I do? How do I wake him up? Has the academy told you that?”

  “He’s no
t just asleep,” Hawkness replied, her eyes narrowed in anger, though not, Kati sensed, at her. “And it’s not just a dream. He’s not alone in there.”

  Kati inhaled a sharp breath, fear gripping her throat. She shook Iain harder, bending over his body as if she could protect him from his internal battle from the outside. “When we walked past her statue weeks ago, he … he seemed affected. Like he could…”

  “Like he could feel her?” Madam Hawkness came closer, her eyes intent behind her horn-rimmed glasses.

  Kati nodded, staring helplessly as Iain thrashed. His hand lashed out close to Kati and she caught it, squeezing hard. “Is there a spell? Anything?”

  “It’s his mind; only his magic works there. Unless you’re willing to use black magic.”

  “If it saves him,” Kati began at a snarl. But she shook her head, dismissing the idea instantly. “I don’t think I can torture someone. Even to save Iain.”

  “You don’t have to.” Madam Hawkness waited until Kati looked at her, holding her gaze. “He can fight her, push her out himself. He’s strong enough. He’s stronger than me,” she added with a wry smile that faded quickly. “But he’s … he’s weak right now. I suspect that’s how she breached his dreams.”

  “He’s weak right now,” Kati repeated dully. “Why?” But she knew why, and sickness knotted her stomach, bile in her throat. “I was so angry at him. I still am. But I didn’t want this.”

  “It’s not your fault, Kati,” Madam Hawkness said gently. “You have every right to be angry at him. He shouldn’t have started a relationship with you when I tasked him with protecting you.”

  “Protecting me,” Kati asked, not daring to look at her as she asked, “or monitoring me?”

  “The latter, for a very short period. The former for much longer. His job was to make sure nothing happened to you.”

  “That’s why he was there when I got locked in the Venom Chamber,” Kati said bitterly. And why Dolly had seen him dismantling a trap four girls had set on her door even before that.

  “I’m asking you to postpone your anger,” Hawkness said, very suddenly serious. “Please, Katriona. He can fight her out of his dreams, but he needs something to fight for.”

  “I hate everything about this,” Kati sighed. “I hate you right now.”

  “As long as it saves him, hate me all you want.” There was genuine affection—and fear—in her voice. Iain mattered to Madam Hawkness. It helped Kati move past her bitterness and hurt.

  She swallowed hard, squeezing Iain’s hand, but her words were for the headteacher. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Talk to him. Just talk to him.”

  “Fine,” Kati said, her shoulders rounded. “Then get out.”

  She could tell Madam Hawkness didn’t want to leave, but she stepped away after a long moment. “I’m trusting you, Kati Wilson.”

  Kati ignored the threat, the responsibility. She waited for the door to shut, for the springs of Iain’s sofa to creak as Hawkness sank onto it in his front room, and sighed, facing Iain on the bed.

  “You’re a bastard, you know that?” she whispered, catching his other hand as it came close to knocking his wand off the bedside table in his thrashing. “I should be allowed to be angry at you in peace. But instead you had to get yourself in mortal danger—and according to the alarmingly sentient building around us, I’m the only one who can get you out of it. And better yet, the headteacher of the academy knows I had an illicit relationship with my teacher. Which is just perfect.”

  She let go of one of his hands to brush hair from his forehead, her touch lingering and an ache compacting tight and brutal in her chest. “You should have told me, Iain. When you told me your real surname, you should have told me you were a gentry then. We could have gotten together with no secrets between us.”

  His body wound tighter, veins pulsing in his throat and forehead. Kati squeezed his hand and stood, going into the little ensuite bathroom and running a flannel under the tap, pressing the cold cloth to Iain’s forehead for no other reason than she’d seen people do it in films and it seemed to work.

  “Hawkness is right,” she told him, sitting close to him and cupping his jaw. “You’re insanely good at spells, Iain. If you want her out of your head, you can do it. You’re strong. That’s why she’s trying to get to you, I bet. Because you’re a threat to her. Which means you can beat her.” Kati swallowed the lump in her throat, sweeping the cool cloth over his temples. “I don’t know what’s going on in your dream, but if you can hear me, you have to fight her, Iain. Unleash your magic, use your fists, shield—whatever it takes. Push her out. It’s not her dream, it’s yours.”

  She ran the cloth down his neck, praying he could hear her, her eyes stabbing with tears as he struggled, his back bowed and face taut with pain and effort.

  “If you fight her, I’ll consider hearing you out,” she said. “When I’ve calmed down a bit, obviously, and when it’s stopped hurting so much. But I’ll … I’ll listen to what you have to say. And there’d better be a soulsdamned lot of grovelling, Iain Worth.” She smiled weakly and bent over him, brushing a kiss to his damp forehead. She wished more than anything that she could lend him strength the way Dolly had to Kati during the wraith fight. She wished it with all her heart and soul.

  Heat flooded her, but it wasn’t magic or strength or anything she recognised. It felt like a sudden heatwave, but inside her. A pure red glow lit the curves and planes of Iain’s face, like light cast from the setting sun. But it was just past eleven, hazy golden sunlight outside. She could have written it off as something Lady LaVoire was doing to him, except that when Kati glanced away, the glow moved. It followed the path of her gaze from Iain’s face to his thrashing body to the covers that had fallen off him. As if … as if the crimson light came from her eyes.

  Scrambling away in panic, each breath coming shorter than the last, Kati ran to the mirror in the bathroom. A strangled sound escaped her when she glimpsed her reflection. Her eyes were red. Not bloodshot, not rimmed in redness. Glowing, demonic, bright red eyes.

  And at her hairline, where orange-red hair fell in front of her face, two tiny crimson horns poked through her freckled skin.

  What.

  The fuck?

  Kati’s breathing spiralled out of control and she backed away, her hands shaking. She hit something solid—not the door, but flesh and bone, and gasped.

  “What am I?” she whispered, breathing in jagged bursts. She turned slowly, dreading his reaction—and dove forward to catch Iain as he wavered, pale and sweaty and weak. “You were asleep a second ago.”

  “I was,” he agreed tightly, sinking against the edge of the bath but not letting go of Kati. Sweat clung to his pale face, everything about him tight and pained. “And then a dose of demon power and a few well placed words helped me get free.”

  “Demon power?” Kati breathed, shaking hard now. Tears built in her eyes. She daren’t look in the mirror again. What the fuck was happening? “Do I … do I have horns or did I hallucinate that?”

  Iain’s expression was carefully neutral as he reached up and brushed his thumb against her left horn, sending a shiver of sensation down her spine. Kati wrenched away, her eyes wide. Shit. Shit, that felt … orgasmic.

  “Okay, never do that again,” she said breathlessly.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, dropping his hand and gripping the edge of the bath right as his strength wavered again. “And yes, you have horns.”

  “I’m … what? A demon?”

  He shook his head, and Kati grabbed both his shoulders to steady him when he swayed. “I don’t think so. Maybe … maybe there’s a demon in your family line?”

  Kati laughed weakly. Maybe a touch hysterically, but who wouldn’t be a little manic to discover they had glowing red eyes and horns? Kati had horns. Fucking horns. “Oh, my mum’ll love that,” she breathed.

  Iain huffed a laugh.

  For a moment, Kati just watched him, her heart aching, her hands bracing hi
s shoulders so he didn’t fall face first onto the lino. “You’re alright, then?”

  Iain nodded, glancing away and seeming to remember that they’d broken up—mostly. Kati hadn’t actually said the words. But there was a very bold question mark next to their relationship status, and it made things … awkward. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t let your defences down like that again,” she warned him.

  “Trust me, I won’t. I learn from my mistakes.” He took a breath and without daring to look at her, he said, “Speaking of. You should know, I’m not really a teacher.”

  “No,” Kati fake-gasped. “Really?”

  Iain gave her a dry look.

  “I figured that out, thanks.” Kati said with a smirk. “So you’re really a gentry? A full-time one?”

  He nodded; Kati dug her fingers into his shoulders as he wobbled. “You can’t tell anyone this.”

  “Naturally,” she drawled.

  “I’m a team leader.”

  Kati swallowed. “Shit. Tell me it’s a lowly everyday team.”

  Iain winced.

  So … a major team. One like the team that had taken down the Black Brooms and Lady LaVoire. And Iain was team leader.

  “Well that’s not terrifying at all,” she breathed. “Was it … did you just come here to monitor me?”

  “No,” he replied, and he looked pale enough that Kati pulled him up off the bath and helped him back to his bed, ignoring the look he gave her that accused her of fussing. “Coming to SBA was never about you; it’s bigger than that.”

  “The kind of bigger that involves your aunt?” Kati guessed.

  “Her followers, actually,” he said, inhaling sharply at some pain as he settled against the pillows. He and Kati were still broken up—and would stay that way until Kati had made peace with his actions and he’d suitably grovelled—but she mentally booked the next day off school to stay here and look after him. “Madam Hawkness thought there might be a member of staff who was secretly a Black Broom.”