Good Witches Don't Steal (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 4)

by S. W. Clarke

  I came to the partly open door, caught a glimpse of Umbra’s back to me and the edge of a bed. Fae wings fluttered past the opening, and I backed up as I heard Nurse Neverwink say, “Valerian. It’s the only thing that’ll calm her.”

  So Milonakis was sick, but Umbra hadn’t brought her to the infirmary. She’d called Neverwink down here, to this place—whatever it was—where she had a bed and, I guessed, whatever it was she needed to treat this particular illness.

  On the bed, I spotted Milonakis’s boot, the toe of it up in the air. She moaned words I didn’t know, her voice thick and worried. She sounded like she was speaking to someone who wasn’t even here.

  A glass jar clinked, and through the doorway I could see Umbra rummaging through shelves lining the far wall, her fingers moving over jars. “Ah,” she said. “Here it is.” She turned with a jar in hand, uncorking it, disappearing from view.

  I ventured closer to get one good look at them all. And when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

  Milonakis grasped at Neverwink’s arms, her face partly in shadow, but I could make out that her mouth was open as wide as it would go, her eyes unseeing but also frantic. It was the kind of undignified sight I knew Milonakis would never want a student to witness.

  Hell, no one would want people seeing them like that.

  I was about to step away when Neverwink said, “You’re back, Nance. You’re at the academy.”

  Finally, Milonakis said something I understood. “Let me be! I’ll never be free of them. I can see them now if I shut my eyes.”

  Umbra took over Neverwink’s duties, handing her the jar of valerian and sitting by Milonakis, keeping her from sitting up. Meanwhile, Neverwink plucked the valerian root out, set it into a mortar and pestle on the nearby table, and began grinding.

  “Nance,” Umbra said. “Listen to me: they cannot leave the vaults of Edinburgh. They cannot follow you.”

  The vaults of Edinburgh. Aidan had mentioned those weeks back during one of our research sessions.

  Milonakis grabbed at Umbra’s arm, staring at her. “The children. The children are as stuck as the rest, for hundreds of years they’ve been stuck there.” And with a guttural grunt and wrench of the arm, she pushed Umbra aside, managed to climb out of the bed with force and speed I’d never expected from Professor Milonakis.

  And just like that, she was up and moving—and found herself staring face-to-face with me in the doorway.

  Umbra rose, Neverwink turned, and I was fully exposed.

  But so was Nance Milonakis.

  Her eyes had caught the light, and they gazed at me with a strange, milky whiteness. The pupils and the irises had lost most of their color, and I wasn’t sure how much she could even see.

  But she did see me.

  Her finger rose, and she pointed at me. “The children are trapped down there.”

  And then Umbra and Neverwink were on her, urging her back into the bed, and the moment they’d gotten her horizontal, Umbra stepped away, took two steps toward the door, glaring at me.

  “I’m sorry.” I nodded at Milonakis. “What’s wrong with—”

  “Go back the way you came,” Umbra ground out, hand on the door, “and if you do not, I will know. If you ever return to this place, I will expel you from the academy.”

  She shut the door, closing me from the room, sending up dust and dirt and leaving me in silence.

  I stood there for a second, eyes still on the door, Nance Milonakis’s face—her milky, half-unseeing eyes—floating in my vision.

  The children, she’d said. They’re trapped down there for hundreds of years.

  I had no idea what she meant.

  When I turned away, I found myself gazing down a hallway into blackness, where I was sure more of the academy’s secrets lay. The scent of cat pee was stronger that way.

  I started walking, turned back down the hallway I’d come by, and passed the closed doors which I felt half-certain I could have burned down in seconds.

  Not tonight, but someday. My gut held the certain knowledge I’d be back here, and I would find out why this place existed.

  For now, I needed to know what valerian was, and why Milonakis had gone crazy.

  “It’s an herb,” Eva said simply, healing tomes spread around her on the library table. “It’s used as a sedative.”

  I blinked down at the book in front of her, back up at her. “Neverwink said it was the only thing that would help Milonakis.”

  “Maybe it was. It’s quite potent.”

  A first-year library assistant passed along the floor below us, reshelving books. It was well into the next evening, and Milonakis hadn’t returned to her duties. In fact, I hadn’t seen her at all. Or Umbra. Maybe they were still in that underground room.

  The existence of which I had, of course, told Eva all about.

  Now she leaned past the books, speaking low and confidential. “What do you suppose that place is, anyway?”

  “Part of her office, I guess. An ancient part.” I shook my head, teeth on bottom lip. “How old did you say this academy is?”

  “Not clear. You know, the records don’t really go past the Battle of the Ages, when just about everything got destroyed, and the school’s been around at least that long.”

  Five hundred years. Those hallways felt five hundred years old.

  Footsteps sounded up the stairs, and Aidan said on approach, “All right. I canceled a date with Saoirse to be here, so make it good.”

  I turned in my seat. Since we were very nearly alone in the library, I said, “Last night Milonakis got snuck into Umbra’s underground lair, where she was raving about trapped children, and her pupils had turned white.”

  Aidan stopped short. “Is this like a Halloween thing?”

  I made a face. “I’m not screwing with you.”

  From behind me, Eva said, “Witches are supposed to be obsessed with Halloween. Black cats, brooms, peaked hats…”

  I glanced over at her. “Not helping my argument, Eva. And you’re right about the cat, but that’s still a lazy stereotype.” I set my arm over the back of the chair, facing Aidan again. “I saw Milonakis down there last night. She’s probably still there.”

  “No she’s not.” Aidan jerked a thumb toward the circulation room. “She’s here.”

  I straightened up. Glanced at the closed door as though I could spy her through it. “Now you’re playing.”

  He shrugged. “Check for yourself.”

  I did check. Eva and I both rose, she flying over the balcony and I taking the stairs two at a time, and we both arrived at the door to the circulation room at the same time, but I got my fingers on the handle first, yanking it open. Together, we pushed our way into the room and found a surprised Milonakis staring us down.

  And her pupils and irises were very much not white.

  “You,” she said to me, scanning me up and down behind her glasses, which she hadn’t had on last night.

  My eyebrows rose, fully clueless as to what she would say—or do—next.

  “You checked out The Witching World from the Room of the Ancients twenty-nine days ago.” She tapped a ledger. “And it’s still not returned.”

  Eva looked at me with surprise, as though the weirdest thing about this encounter was me taking a book out.

  “I… I have it back in my dorm.” I took a step closer to Milonakis, studying her. “Are you all right?”

  Her face hardened. “With you sequestering one of our most precious books away, which you know wasn’t supposed to have been taken out of that room in the first place? I’m very much not all right, Clementine Cole.”

  My head tilted as I stepped closer again. “How are the children?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Are they still trapped?” I pointed toward the ground. “You know, down there.”

  Milonakis’s gaze followed my finger, then rose back to my face. Then over to Eva. She looked cornered, and finally she sighed out, “The
re are no children. They’re not real. Not part of this world. What you heard last night, you shouldn’t have. Forget it.”

  “Oh, sure.” I waved a hand through the air. “Seems easy enough to forget I walked barefoot into a centuries-old underground section of the academy and saw you down there going on about the children with your white—”

  “Enough,” Milonakis cut in, her voice high and sharp. “For gods’ sake, enough of that.”

  Finally, Eva came forward. “You went beneath the city, didn’t you?” she whispered. I suspected she meant Edinburgh.

  Milonakis’s sharp eyes cut over to her. “And nearly lost my way. Tomorrow the headmistress and I will come to you lot with your mission, but I’ll say this to you now: Do not venture beneath the cobblestones. Not if you want to keep your heads. Not if you want to keep your lives. If I had the power to forbid you, I would.”

  “What’s down there?” I said.

  Milonakis’s lips parted, trembled in the vaguest way, and I sensed whatever Neverwink had done to help her last night hadn’t fully made its way through her brain and nervous system.

  She still bore a twinge of that mania.

  “Death,” Milonakis whispered. “So much death, years upon years of it.”

  “What do you mean—” I began, but Milonakis had fully snapped shut, closing herself off with a straightening of the spine and her fingers on her ledger.

  “Bring me that book,” she said, “or I’ll ban you from the library until you do, Clementine Cole.”

  That was all. She was done talking about anything but her obsession with books and control over this one place at the academy. She was still the same woman as she’d always been.

  I left with a promise to return her book to her, and when we returned to the table, we found Aidan poring over the books we’d left open on the table.

  He glanced up at us. “Why’s this one open to valerian?”

  “It’s what Neverwink gave Milonakis last night.” Eva flew back up, landing on the balcony and then dropping lightly to the second floor. I wasn’t jealous, not at all, as I trudged up the stairs. Eva tapped the book’s open page. “She was raving, and her eyes had apparently turned white. Neverwink used valerian with healing magic.”

  Aidan’s face paled, and he gazed down at the page with a graveness I didn’t even know he was capable of.

  “Hey,” I said. “What is it?”

  His eyes raised to me. “She went under Edinburgh’s streets, didn’t she?”

  I nodded.

  “My grandmother did that once, on one of her many research trips.” He paused. “She returned weeks later in the same way. The only cure was valerian.”

  “Cure for what?” Eva said.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed, eyes flicking between us. “Ghosts.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We thought my grandmother had just gone temporarily mad down there,” Aidan said as the three of us walked among the dark trees, following the path circling the central grounds. “My parents took her to all sorts of doctors, and finally we took her to a fae like Neverwink who knew what to do.”

  “I’m struggling here,” I said. “You’re saying valerian root cures…what? Ghosts?”

  “Ghost-madness,” Eva said without a pause, without any skepticism.

  “That fae doctor believed my grandmother been driven a little mad by her exposure to them under the city,” Aidan went on. “Of course, we thought she’d just gone a little mad from lack of light and too much isolation.”

  “Maybe she did,” I said.

  “I thought so for years.” Aidan dragged his fingers through his hair, fully agitated. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because my grandmother came back with white eyes,” he said, and that was when the three of us stopped walking.

  “This isn’t a Halloween thing, is it?” I said, half-wanting it to be.

  He shook his head.

  “When I met your grandmother,” I said slowly, “she wasn’t exactly…”

  “Sane?” Eva offered. Then, “Sorry, Aidan.”

  “No, you’re right.” He drew in air through his nose. “She’s nutty.”

  “And I assume,” I said, “we met her years after her trip to Edinburgh’s lovely underground crypts and vaults and streets.”

  “Ten years after,” he said. “She was never fully the same. Not from how I remember her as a child.”

  “And you chalked that up to senility?” I guessed.

  “Yeah.” Guilt laced that single word.

  “That explains a lot about how she acted when I met her,” I said, and with a big exhale, I didn’t know what to say next. So we all started walking again in a sort of aimless daze.

  Ghost-madness awaited me under Edinburgh. And there was no chance I wasn’t going into the under-city.

  The blade waited for me.

  Eva sensed the direction of my thoughts, because she grasped my arm. “I’ll go with you, when you venture under.”

  “No,” I said at once, and I knew as I said it I wouldn’t budge on this. “If anyone’s going white-eyed and a little insane, it’ll be me and me alone.”

  The next day, the guardians were called to our meeting room as Milonakis had told us we would be. She and the headmistress were already there when I arrived with Loki, and Milonakis remained conspicuously silent as we all sat down.

  She sat at the head of the table while Umbra stood, and it was the headmistress who began speaking to us. “After over a month, Nance Milonakis has returned from Edinburgh,” she said. “She braved much danger to walk amongst the formalists, whose ranks she left years ago in order to gather information for us.”

  I stared at Milonakis, who didn’t meet my eyes. Her fingers clasped and unclasped atop the table.

  Suddenly, much about her made sense. She had once lived in Edinburgh, had been a formalist herself. And maybe still was in some ways, rigid and shrewd as the woman could be.

  But she was on our side. That much I knew from the past three years.

  Umbra paused, eyes drifting over the group. “She managed to visit the mages’ prison underneath the council building, where she found over thirty mages held captive. These are lifelong inmates, never to be released. They are people who have defied the formalists, many of whom do not believe in their ways. They deserve to be free on principle, and some may very well aid us in our efforts against the Shade.”

  A prison. Where mages were kept. I stared at Umbra like I was a cat and she was an oversized fish; this was my godsdamn mission.

  He had to be in that prison.

  Umbra stepped to the board, where she’d written out a list of names. “These are all the names of potential sympathizers Nance was able to collect during her time there. Some of these people have been imprisoned upward of a decade.”

  In a glance, I counted them. Twelve names. None of which were the one I was looking for.

  “What about Callum Rathmore?” I said, surprising myself. But once the question was out, I pushed onward. “He’d be sympathetic.”

  “You mean the celebrity professor who mysteriously disappeared after one year here?” Keene said. “The guy who can’t seem to stay in one place for long enough to have a photo taken of him for Witches & Wizards?”

  I turned what I knew must be venomous eyes on Keene. On the table, Loki’s head turned toward him, too. Between the two pairs of green eyes staring him down, Keene’s hand ran over his sparsely-haired head in a subconscious attempt to comfort himself.

  “Yes,” I said. “And why do you think he’s been featured in magazines? Because he’s strong. Stronger than any of us.”

  “I saw just one floor of the prison,” Milonakis’s voice cut in, the first time she’d spoken since we’d all arrived. “The first floor is all fae. If Callum Rathmore is held there, he’d be on a different floor. Or perhaps they hid him somewhere.”

  “Nonetheless”—Umbra tapped the board—“Nance procured twelve names fo
r us. That’s twelve fae whose lives we can reclaim.”

  And just like that, Callum Rathmore’s name had dropped away. Umbra and Milonakis had moved on.

  Umbra asked Milonakis to show us a diagram of what she’d seen, and the professor stood, crossed to the whiteboard, and with a flame-lit fingertip, etched out the prison from memory. She even placed names inside various cells.

  By the time she was finished, she had created a replica of the first floor of the Edinburgh prison. It was all hard, black edges and perfect spacing and sizing, nothing out of place. Another clue as to why Umbra had chosen Milonakis: she could produce things like this from memory.

  But I did notice her fingers at her side held a tremor. She curled them, held them in a fist to keep the tremor away. Ghost madness, I thought.

  Umbra pointed to the board. “These are the exact locations of these inmates. Milonakis will render this diagram on parchment, and you will memorize this before you leave for Edinburgh in three days.”

  Three days. Three days.

  The itching intensified.

  “Nance,” Umbra said. “Tell them what they will face on entry.”

  Milonakis turned to us, hands folded before her. “The prison has no guards. At least, not of the sentient variety. Centuries ago, a master of enchantments cast a permanent animation on sixteen suits of armor. They patrol the prison night and day, without sleep or rest.”

  “Permanent?” Liara cut in. “That’s impossible. When the mage died, the enchantment should have died with him.”

  Milonakis glanced at Umbra.

  “Should have,” Umbra said, “but clearly did not, as Professor Milonakis can attest. It would take a year-long course on the intricacies of enchantment magic for us to understand why. Suffice it to say, they are wardens of the prison to this day.”

  Milonakis nodded, resumed. “Should they hear or see an intruder, they have been enchanted to cut them down by any means. No escort out, no questioning—simply death by broadsword.”

  Elijah clapped his hands. “Fantastic. Now I’ve got to know how you did it, Professor.”

  “Simple.” Milonakis’s hand dove into the folds of her robes, pulled out a card. “I presented this.”