A Study In Shifters

by Majanka Verstraete

Suddenly, the walls of the library seemed to close in on me, suffocating me. Everything seemed to be suffocating me as all the feelings I’d once had, the good and the bad, rushed over me like a tsunami.

  “I have to go,” I told Wyatt as I pushed the cipher and book into his hands. “Sorry. Will you put those back? I…” Without finishing my sentence, I started running toward the exit. “Bye.”

  “Marisol, wait! At least let me…”

  Wyatt’s words died out as I disappeared behind the library doors and rushed through the hallway. As I took the steps to the second floor two at a time, my heart raced at the speed of a freight train.

  It was Mannix.

  My jaguar howled and paced around, panicking, a mirror image of myself as my own pulse quickened, too. No, it couldn’t be, but…

  It had to be. He’d called me by name. He was playing the puzzles he always challenged me with. He knew no one but me could’ve deciphered that code.

  What was he doing here? How did he know I was here?

  And more importantly… Was he involved in the murders somehow? Or did he know more about them?

  Because he’d given me a clue that only vaguely rang a bell. Calliophis Bivirgata. The Latin name of an animal. If I had it correct, the genus Calliophis was some species of snake, but I had to check to make sure.

  Snakes. Snake venom. It could match the theory I had, but…how did he know? Was he following me?

  Now, my jaguar ran around in circles, in full-on panic, jumping against the door and walls, doing everything she could to tear down the cage I had locked her up in.

  I needed to calm down. If my jaguar was panicking, that meant I was panicking, too, and if I didn’t calm down and my jaguar escaped, then someone could get hurt. If I let my emotions get the better of me…

  I reached the top of the stairs, my heart still pounding in my chest, ready to jump out of my body at any second.

  I had to calm down. If I walked into our dorm room this flustered, Indra would know something was up. She would start asking questions, and the last thing I wanted right now was for her to find out Mannix had contacted me and had left cryptic clues about the case.

  Before he’d messed up my case six months ago, before he’d murdered an innocent person, no one had known about Mannix. I thought he was a field agent like me, but he’d infiltrated the Conclave under false pretenses. He stole all the information the Conclave possessed on supernatural beings, he tried to summon a demon, and he made me and the Conclave look like complete and utter fools.

  Now, he was on the Conclave’s most wanted list, dead or alive. If Indra found out he was here… However bad things were already, they would get a dozen times worse.

  Deep breaths, Marisol. Deep breaths.

  The hallways around me seemed so solemn in the nightly darkness. The staircase was deserted, and long shadows stretched from the windows.

  My jaguar growled, still on edge, and lifted up its back, resembling a cat stretching itself.

  I imagined Elise Felton, long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, sneaking down the grand staircase, tiptoeing on each step until she reached the foyer downstairs. How she pushed the door open and went outside.

  Was the door open, though? It had been this morning when I went to see Keira Sampson, but maybe a prefect or cleaning lady or teacher had opened it up early in the morning and locked it at night.

  I should go down and check if it was closed, but I didn’t want to risk running into Wyatt again and having to explain myself or incurring the wrath of another prefect or teacher on duty.

  Besides, I’d learned enough for today. With Mannix’s cryptic message, I had enough on my mind to call it a day.

  With a sigh, I moved into the dorm hallway and dragged myself to the door of the room I shared with Indra. I contemplated whether I should knock or not, eventually decided I shouldn’t, and went inside. Indra was sitting on her bed cross-legged, reading a book. She looked up at me, her expression bordering on furious, eyes wide, lips thin.

  “Where have you been?”

  “In the library, reading, like I said I was.”

  “It’s past eleven. The library closes at ten. Don’t lie to me.”

  “You sound like my mother.” I slumped down on my bed and took a deep breath. “Wyatt came to lock up and we talked. I tried to steer the topic back to Elise, but I didn’t learn anything new. Just that he saw her in the library when he locked up. They left together, he locked the library, and that’s the last he saw of her.” I felt a little guilty for lying to Indra, but telling her the truth would make things a lot more complicated than I could handle right now.

  “We knew that already. Well, maybe not in detail, but it’s nothing new.” Indra wiped a hand across her brow. “This case is annoying the hell out of me. I feel like whenever we learn something new, we find another ten things we have yet to uncover. Like for any secret we discover, ten more show up.”

  “Well, I had an idea just now. We still don’t know if Elise Felton died sometime during the night or closer to the time when Keira Sampson found her. If she died during the night, she would’ve had to sneak out. But if she sneaked out, did that mean the front door was open then, or did someone deliberately let her out?”

  “It was open this morning when you went on your little solo adventure,” Indra said. She pushed herself on her arms to the edge of her bed and dangled her legs over the edge. “I don’t think they would leave it open all night, though.”

  “I think someone comes to lock it at a specific time and then unlocks it the next morning.” Thinking about the logistics of the case helped to calm me down—at least a little. “I want to grill Wyatt about it tomorrow, see if he knows more. If that’s true, it would significantly narrow down our possible time of death.”

  Knowing the time of death was of the utmost importance because it could point us in the direction of our suspect. While who had motive was important, who had opportunity was vital too.

  With everything else going on—Roan Black’s disappearance, although I couldn’t let my mind go there, much to my jaguar’s dismay since she demonstratively clawed at the door. Mannix’s involvement; my mother’s political power threatened—I wanted to wrap this case up as soon as I could. It shook me in ways no case ever had. For the first time in forever, since solving cases was pretty much my obsession, I just wanted to get it over with, go home, snack on a greasy Big Mac, and sleep for days.

  Now my jaguar nodded in agreement. At least we could agree on that nowadays.

  “Isn’t there anything about it in the police reports?” Indra said. “About Elise’s time of death.” She grabbed the stack of papers we’d received from the Conclave.

  “I would remember if it was in there. It’s not. With poison, it always gets a little tricky, so I think that’s why Morant didn’t specify it, either.”

  “Hm.” Indra browsed through the papers, quickly giving up. “Anyway, I talked to the Conclave about our progress and our theory about the murder being set up to appear as if it was committed by a jaguar shifter.”

  “What did they say?” This piqued my interest. I doubted Balthazar Rollins, once he found out, would be too pleased to hear a jaguar wasn’t involved at all. I could already imagine the look of dismay on his face when his evil scheme was ruined before it even started.

  “My contact said he’d send over all the files on Roan Black they could find, and a detailed list of everyone all the shifters at school, especially the venomous or poisonous species.”

  “Wow.” I whistled. “I’m impressed you thought of asking for a list.”

  “It should’ve been included in our files already,” Indra said, “but the Conclave needed more time to investigate, considering this all happened so fast. My contact promised we’d have the list by tomorrow.”

  “Okay, good. We can get some sleep first, then. I’m exhausted.” I headed over to my suitcase and grabbed my pajamas. Considering we’d only stay here for a while, or at least that was the plan, I hadn�
�t bothered to unpack yet. Indra had, though, and her clothes were all lined up neatly in her closet.

  “Something is bothering me about the door,” Indra said. “It’s so basic. Check if the doors are locked at night. Why didn’t the police do that?”

  “Well, to be fair, we didn’t think of it either until now,” I said while I crawled under the blankets. “It’s also fairly easy to sneak through the hallways at night, by the way. So, while security to leave the premises may be top-notch, that’s definitely not the case for sneaking out to the school grounds. I made it from the library to this floor without running into a single teacher or hallway monitor.”

  “Still, it bothers me. Security shouldn’t be this lax, not with what happened.” She sighed and climbed underneath her blankets, too. “Are you planning on sneaking out on me again tomorrow morning?”

  “I doubt you’ll let me.” I pulled the blankets up to my chin. “Make sure you’re not in a bad mood from lack of sleep, or I’m not taking you along on my morning jog.”

  “Fine. Good night, Marisol.”

  “Good night.”

  As I lay there, my eyes shut, thinking about the past day, I only felt slightly guilty for not telling Indra about Mannix’s message. She may be my supervisor, and I thought the whole notion of having a supervisor was annoying, but her “act like I’m a soundboard” idea was actually pretty good. It helped to say thoughts out loud to someone who could respond to them and give feedback, rather than just obsess over them in my mind.

  But I couldn’t tell her that the reason my detective career was almost ruined had returned. That the one person I should never talk to again had reached out to me, and even more, had left me a clue.

  I couldn’t even begin to explain to her that the one person I’d ever fallen in love with, the one person who had seemed so much like me that we could’ve been crafted from the same soul, had turned out to be nothing like the person I thought he was. That he’d betrayed me so much that it still hurt like a knife to the chest.

  How could I explain that to anyone?

  I turned my back toward Indra and waited until her breathing became slow and steady. Under the blanket, I held my cell phone close to my face so I could read the screen and did a Google search for Calliophis Bivirgata.

  The blue coral snake.

  One of the deadliest, most venomous species of snakes roaming this planet.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  That night, I dreamed about Roan again.

  Several months after I’d first met him, my father passed away. His funeral was a hazy memory in my mind in my waking hours, but became a more vivid, haunting memory in my nightmares as it did now.

  In my dream, I was a child again, clad in all black, cheeks strained from crying, and my hand trembling in my mother’s. Rain poured down in gallons as we all stood in the cemetery, staring at the coffin as it was lowered into the ground.

  The day seemed to both stretch on forever and be over in the blink of an eye. My father was gone. One day, he’d been alive, and the next day, he wasn’t, ripped out of my life so fast I hadn’t been able to fully register it yet. However, already the world seemed bleaker, a few shades darker.

  After the funeral, clan members of all clans came to our apartment, people who’d known my father and people who knew my mother and wanted to show their support. I greeted all of them in a numb haze, never really registering any faces, until suddenly, Roan Black popped up in front of me.

  He was dressed in a black suit that seemed to make him look older and wiser than he really was, and he’d grown a few inches from the last time I’d seen him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said as he pushed a piece of paper into my hand. Our hands touched, and a bolt of electricity rushed across my fingers as we touched.

  I stared at it, my mind too lost to register what was happening.

  “My mother died when I was five,” Roan said with a hint of sadness in his voice. “If you want to talk, I’m here.”

  I looked into his eyes, and for a second, our gazes met. As I peered into his eyes, I felt slightly better, slightly less sad. I felt protected. Warm.

  Then, he moved on to make room for the next person in line, and seconds later, he vanished from sight. Without looking at it, I put the paper in my pocket.

  After the service, when all the visitors had left and my mother and I were the only ones still there along with a sadness so immense it seemed to fill the entire room, I remembered the paper. When I opened it, I saw a street and a number. Roan’s address, in London.

  It took me weeks before I started writing to him. In those weeks, the grief inside of me grew like a balloon until it felt so enormous I was afraid I would burst. My jaguar had curled up into a ball and refused to move, brought down by a grief too large to bear.

  Then, on a whim, I wrote Roan a letter and sent it right away, afraid that if I waited too long, I would chicken out and not do it.

  It didn’t take long, less than a week even, before I heard back from him. And so, we became pen pals. We saw each other maybe once or twice a year whenever our parents’ busy schedules allowed it, when his father had business in Paris or my mother had business in London, but we wrote over a dozen letters a year. I told him things I hadn’t told anyone else; I told him things I didn’t even share with my mother.

  I told him about my doubts about being a half-blood and heir to the throne. I told him about how I was afraid I wasn’t cut out to be royalty, about how I missed my father, about how much my mother changed after that. I told him about how hard it was not going to a real school, not really fitting in anywhere. Sometimes, I told him about cases I was working on, about how obsessed I would get, about how those cases would consume me.

  And he told me things, too, in turn. He told me about the struggles with his father and stepmother, who he didn’t always get along with. He told me about how he’d applied for a scholarship to a fancy boarding school, but hadn’t received it, and how upset he was about that.

  Then, as time went on and we grew closer, I told him about how I missed him. How I wished he was there, with me. On cases. During social events my mother made me attend. Sometimes just…there.

  He said he felt the same. That one letter, in which he said, “Not having you here is like not having part of myself here” I must have read a thousand times.

  Then Mannix came into the picture, and everything changed.

  The dream flash-forwarded to the last letter I’d even written him, several months ago. The whole ordeal with Mannix had just gone down, and I had to tell someone. Roan was the only person I could think of. I hadn’t told him anything about Mannix yet. It had all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to write, and besides, for some reason, telling him I was in love with someone didn’t seem right.

  Still, after Mannix’s betrayal, I had no choice but to tell Roan. Sooner or later, he would find out anyway, and I rather he heard it from me, not through the grapevine. On top of that, the Conclave had decided to put me on trial, since they thought I had conspired with Mannix rather than being tricked by him the same way they were. Saldor had told me I should reach out to anyone who knew me, so they could come give a character statement on my behalf and tell the Conclave I would never do the things they accused me of.

  Roan was the only one, besides Saldor and my mother, who could do that, so I had no choice but to reach out to him.

  Writing that letter was the most difficult letter I’d ever written to him—even harder than the first one. I felt as if I’d let him down. He had so much faith in me, so much trust, and in a way, I had betrayed him, too, because I hadn’t been the person he thought I was. I had been too naïve. Too trusting. Too stupid.

  When Roan didn’t reply, I worried he wouldn’t come. I worried he hated me.

  Yet, the day of the trial, he was there, seated on the other side of the room. He looked sullen, disappointed, everything I imagined he would look like. The scrawny little boy I’d gotten to know ten years ago h
ad grown into a handsome, intelligent man, yet I would’ve given everything in that moment if he would’ve just looked at me once more the way he had when we were kids. Hopeful. Caring. Now, he seemed cold and distant, and that made my jaguar curl up inside me, worried and scared.

  When he took the stand, I worried that he would have no good words left for me, judging by the harsh look in his eyes. It broke my heart to see him look at me that way.

  “Marisol Holmes,” he said, looking straight at me, “would never willfully commit an evil act such as the one she’s being accused of. She would never hurt anyone in such a way, not for any possible gain in the world. She is clever and smart, and extremely dedicated to her work. She’s the most dedicated person I know. She would do anything to help others.” Then he turned away from me and faced the judges of the Conclave—a three-headed hydra of honorable judges who were to decide my fate. “As you know, my mother used to be one of the Conclave Sigil Bearers until she passed away. She worked for this agency diligently for over twenty years. Before she came a Sigil Bearer, she was a field agent who solved an extraordinary amount of cases.”

  A few grumbles of approval resonated through the vaulted room. The room was packed—every single field agent, Council member, and Sigil Bearer had been summoned to this trial.

  “Yet, when I researched the cases Marisol Holmes has solved, she has pulverized my mother’s record,” Roan said.

  Tears prickled in the corners of my eyes. His speech stunned me, mesmerized me, and it also made me feel sad, because I had disappointed him, disappointed the person who believed in me the most. “She is by far one of the smartest field agents the Conclave has ever had, and certainly one of the most dedicated agents, too. In all those cases, she hasn’t messed up once. You can’t fault her for making a single mistake; she is human, after all. How many of you can truly say you’ve never messed up? Never made any error? Sure, the consequences here are disastrous, and there must be some kind of repercussion, but to even consider the possibility that Marisol Holmes willingly participated in this kind of crime is ludicrous.”