by Ivy Hearne
Ms. Gayle waited until the shocked murmurs quieted down before she began speaking again. “Please, rest assured that we’re doing everything in our power to both rescue headmaster Finnegan and discover how this happened. If any of you have any information that you think might be helpful, don’t hesitate to come forward. Also, if you think you may have seen something that in retrospect looked suspicious, I would very much appreciate it if you reported it to my office.”
That didn’t seem like a policy designed to make anyone comfortable. I glanced around at the instructors lining the walls, some of whom looked disturbed by the new headmistress’s words.
That was when I realized that Shane didn’t seem to be anywhere in the room—not standing with the instructors, anyway. Perhaps he was simply sitting down somewhere? I couldn’t see everyone without craning my neck around to look, and I didn’t want to draw any additional attention to my search.
“In the meantime,” Ms. Gayle continued, “all classes and exams—including entrance exams—will move ahead as scheduled. All first-year students should be prepared to begin entrance exams next week.” She emphasized the word all, and I could’ve sworn she was looking straight at me when she did it.
I hoped she would choose to honor the extension I’d been given.
I probably shouldn’t count on it, though.
But with headmaster Finnegan captured by the Lusus Naturae, surely Ms. Gayle had more important things to consider than when I took my entrance exam.
The whole situation made my stomach twist and roil.
“The remainder of this class period today is canceled—you may all return to your dorms. And remember,” she said, appropriating words I knew I’d heard before, “if you see something, say something. We can’t let the Lusus Naturae attack us in our own space.”
I pondered her words as we all filed out of the auditorium building, and I headed back to my room. It was all well and good to say that we shouldn’t let the Lusus Naturae get us where we lived and worked and trained. But they had taken our headmaster. They already knew. It was too late to stop them now.
The best we could do was work to get Headmaster Finnegan back and remove the threat of any Lusus Naturae who had information about our location.
I didn’t know how I could possibly help with that, but I was determined to do everything I could.
Chapter 10
A full week passed without any further news about Headmaster Finnegan or the Lusus Naturae. Even Shane claimed to know nothing.
And then the entrance exams began dropping.
Angelica faced hers first—and it was nothing like I had imagined. One minute, we were working quietly in Chemistry for Defense class, and the next, Angelica was shrieking and ducking away from a shadowy figure I could barely make out. I jumped to my feet, casting about frantically for a weapon of some sort.
“Everyone remain in your seats,” Dr. Qazi said calmly. “This is Angelica’s battle. You wouldn’t be able to help her even if you tried.”
Reluctantly, I sank back into my chair, silently cheering on my classmate. Since Erin had chewed her out the night she came to our door asking for my help, Angelica had been much friendlier, even inviting me to study with her one night in the library.
I had begun to think we could be friends.
But if she died during her entrance exam, that would never happen.
“Come on, Angelica,” I urged her. “You’re in a chemistry lab. Use what’s around you.”
“She can’t hear you,” Uriel said with a shrug. “Once the entrance exam drops, you can’t see or hear anybody else.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t cheer her on,” I snapped back.
Uriel rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest to watch the battle raging in front of us.
I gasped when whatever it was she was fighting lashed out toward her and a long, thin red wound opened up on her cheek. My stomach clenched, and I chewed on my bottom lip trying to force myself not to say anything out loud. All I could do was watch and wring my hands.
A second blow knocked Angelica to the ground. But when her opponent lunged toward her, she kicked up with both feet—like the centaur she is, I thought. It bought her enough time to scramble back up.
The fight had only been going on for a few minutes, but it seemed like forever. Angelica’s cheek was running with blood, and another wound I hadn’t seen inflicted ran along her arm and oozed blood, too. She was slowing down. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t be able to fight against this thing, whatever it was.
I wondered if we would see all our classmates’ opponents as shadowy blobs.
As I sat at my desk, wringing my hands, I wished with all my heart that I could communicate with Angelica.
We weren’t friends. But I wanted us to have the chance to become friends.
Angelica, you’re in the chemistry lab. Remember that. You’re in the chem lab.
I repeated it over and over to myself, as if it were a mantra.
You are in the chemistry lab. You are in the chemistry lab.
Angelica froze, her head whipping around as if she were looking for something. Her eyes, which up until then had been focused entirely on her opponent, met mine, and she gave a tiny nod.
She spun around and dove for a bottle of hydrochloric acid Dr. Qazi kept on the bottom shelf of the supplies. In what was perhaps the most graceful move I had ever seen her make, she opened the bottle and flung its contents onto her opponent. The shadowy figure froze, throwing its head back in what looked like a howl.
But Angelica wasn’t done yet. She kept moving, and without missing a beat, picked up a jug of a different chemical from another set of shelves.
As soon as she did, the instructor began shouting for everyone to clear the room. Everyone scrambled out except me. I hung back, pushing my thoughts toward Angelica. Don’t inhale. Get out as soon as it’s over.
I didn’t know if she heard me, but Angelica tossed the bleach into the creature’s face, ducked down low, pulled her shirt up over her mouth, and scuttled out. I followed her, slamming the door behind us. Then I grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the exit.
Someone hit the fire alarm, and its clanging, screeching noise overrode everything else until Angelica and I stumbled out into the courtyard, whooping in laughter.
“I heard you,” she said. “I heard you, Kacie. I couldn’t tell where I was or what was around me, and suddenly I heard your voice reminding me was the chem lab. I knew what to do right then.
“Wasn’t that the same chemical mess that Zanya made?” I asked.
“That’s why I remembered it.”
“You just passed your entrance exam,” I reminded her.
“I did!” She threw her arms around me, laughing and crying all at the same time.
Dr. Qazi watched us warily, but I didn’t care. I’d just had another tiny breakthrough in my ability to send psychic messages—and it seemed like an important one.
For some reason, though, I didn’t tell anyone in my next classes what had happened.
But Angelica didn’t have the same qualms. Apparently, she told everyone in our cohort, so that by the time I got to my next class, everyone was congratulating me.
“It’s not like I passed my entrance exam,” I reminded them. Nonetheless, it felt good to be treated like I was part of the group.
We were all floating on a high from our first member having passed her exam when Uriel’s entrance exam dropped in the hand-to-hand combat class.
Uriel had told me he was no good with anything but ranged weapons.
I’d learned since then that that was often true of elves.
This battle was much shorter than Angelica’s. There was nothing any of us could do to help. I couldn’t even send him a message about a strategy, because I couldn’t see anything that could help him. And whatever he was facing frightened him. It was as shadowy to me as Angelica’s opponent had been. But when he caught sight of it, Uriel’s eyes widene
d in sheer terror.
And the creature he faced wasted no time in attacking. It slammed into Uriel, throwing him back across the room, so he hit the gym wall and slid down to the ground. Immediately, it rushed him, picking him up again and dashing him to the ground.
The crack of snapping bones echoed through the space and we all shuddered in horror.
Get up, I found myself mentally urging him. Get up and fight. You can’t win if you don’t keep going.
Like Angelica before him, Uriel lifted his face to make eye contact with me. But unlike Angelica, he didn’t keep going.
“I can’t.”
I heard him as clearly as if he were standing next to me instead of across the gym. “I give up. I can’t do this.” He buried his head in the crook of his unbroken arm and sobbed.
As if it had been waiting for Uriel to concede defeat, his opponent faded away to nothing.
“Wait here,” Coach Packwood said to Uriel. “I’ll go get the nurse.”
Uriel was carried away on a stretcher. I knew he would be sent down, as Headmaster Finnegan had called it.
He was going home in disgrace.
But at least he was still alive.
By the time I met Shane for my tutoring session, I was torn between excitement at telling him what I had been able to do, and sadness over having seen Uriel lose his fight despite my psychic encouragement. But when I arrived in study hall number four, Shane was not there yet. I sat down on the floor, crossing my legs and breathing in and out slowly, centering myself the way Shane had taught me. But then, instead of following what were usually his next instructions — to focus on a message and try to send it to him, I simply listened.
I held myself perfectly still and waited to see what message might come to me.
That’s when I heard it—the voice of my adversary. It started quiet, tiny, echoing in that silence as if from far away. And it was angry.
I’m going to destroy every last one of them. The stupid centaur, and the fairies, and the magic users, and the elves. And most of all that useless psychic who can’t even send a message.
The words spoken in my mind by that voice were so very close to the things I had imagined Matthew Gibbs saying about me over the last weeks—especially when I failed to communicate mind to mind with him—that for a few seconds, I almost convinced myself the words really did belong to him.
But the voice in my head did not match Matthew’s.
Granted, I was hearing whoever this was as he heard himself—and our internal voices are never what others hear. Still, I almost recognized it. With my hands clasped in my lap and my eyes closed, I reached out from within myself to hear more, stretching my inner vision toward the voice, working to figure out who wanted to take us all down.
That’s when I came up against the block in my mind.
It had been there for years, holding me back from using my powers, keeping the Hunters’ Academy from finding me even when they knew there was another psychic child somewhere in the world, making me sicker than any human child should ever be, stealing years of my life.
When I hit it in my mind, I railed against it, letting loose with an internal scream that echoed through the chambers of my soul.
I beat my fists against that barrier, kicked it, slammed my entire body into it, over and over again, until a crack appeared in the wall. Then I turned and leaned on it, pushing against it with everything I had as it groaned and resisted.
It began to give way, a small bit at a time, pieces of it raining down around me like glass, slicing tiny holes in my psyche as it fell.
I knew it would take only one more shove to bring the whole structure down. But in doing so, I might rip a hole in my soul so big that it couldn’t be healed.
Better wait for Shane, I thought.
As I let off the pressure against the wall in my mind, I could again hear the internal voice of my adversary, of whoever was on campus helping the ones who’d kidnapped Headmaster Finnegan.
I’ll just tell her I’m sorry I’m so late, I heard my opponent tell himself.
The door to the study hall opened, and Shane stepped through. “Hey Kacie,” he said cheerfully.
I opened my mouth to tell him of my breakthrough, of my discovery that we had a spy among us, when the next words he spoke stopped me in my tracks.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.”
Chapter 11
I froze as Shane plopped his own book bag into the desk chair closest to the door.
I couldn’t think of any curse words bad enough to cover my realization that my gorgeous-tutor-and-inappropriate-crush was also almost certainly involved in the kidnapping of the Hunters’ Academy’s beloved headmaster.
And besides that, he was a trained psychic and mind-reader. Maybe worst of all? He was between me and the door, the only exit out of here. I wondered if I could patch up that wall inside me enough to keep him from getting in. I was pretty sure I couldn’t.
No, I would have to try to distract him. It was the only thing I could think of to do.
And distract myself, too. I had to keep my mind as far away from my earlier psychic breakthrough as I possibly could.
“Are you okay?” Shane asked. I felt the rifling of his mental fingers walking through my mind, trying to pick out the information he needed. How many times he done this to me without me noticing?
No. I can’t think of that. Not now. What else? What was that curse word that Mina had used the day she’d show me around campus? And then Erin said it, too. Huffleflit? No. That wasn’t it. Haffafart? No. Hifflefart! That was it.
Keeping an internal monologue going about a fairy’s curse word seemed to do the trick, at least for a minute. Shane’s lip tilted upward on one side, revealing one of those amazing dimples.
No one so evil should be that beautiful.
I wondered how many times he’d picked through my mind as I thought about how gorgeous he was.
He asked me a question a minute ago. What was it?
Oh, right. If something was wrong.
“Just a weird day,” I said, trying to keep my tone absolutely bland.
Shane took a couple of steps into the room and kicked off his shoes, generally a sign that we were going to work on hand-to-hand combat.
I tried to remember what I would do normally under circumstances like this.
Right. Kick off my own shoes and get ready to work.
“Weird how?” he asked.
“Two members of my class had their entrance exams drop today. Right in the middle of class, both times.”
Shane laughed. For the first time since we’d met, his laugh didn’t seem light. Instead, it sent shivers down my back.
He circled a little from side to side, shaking out his hands as if warming up. “Which two?”
“Angelica and Uriel.”
Even without trying, I heard his sneering inner voice in my mind.
The centaur bitch and the little lordling elf.
His mental voice was edgy, evil sounding. I pretended to glance down and concentrate on my footwork, so he couldn’t see how I responded to the thought.
“Both of them pass?” he asked, apparently casually.
“No. Uriel got sent down.”
“But at least he’s still alive,” Shane said aloud. Too bad, he thought. The elves will probably find some way to use him at home in the battles to come.
“So are we going to work on footwork or blade-work today?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from quavering.
Shane’s frown would have seemed sympathetic had I not been able to catch snippets of the horrible things he was thinking. “The entrance exams really shook you today, huh?”
I shrugged. “A little. Mostly left me feeling... antsy. I think I’d rather work it out than talk it out, if you don’t mind.”
“You got it,” Shane said. “Let’s start with a little hand-to-hand, then we’ll move to blade-work and footwork both. It’s about time we put those together for you.”
Gods abov
e and below—his answer would have been perfect if he hadn’t been an evil jerk.
We began circling, each watching for an opening in the other’s defenses. I tried not to think of any particular plan, concerned that he would pluck it out of my mind when I least expected him to. Instead, I concentrated on hitting him. I jabbed at him a couple of times and ducked a few of his strikes. For most of that, he stayed between me and the door.
“Keep your attention on what’s going on right here, right now,” Shane admonished me. “What came before and what comes later, neither of those things matter. What matters is the fight right now.”
It was good advice—except I didn’t plan to fight at all. I shifted my weight away from the door, feinted a jab in that direction, and then another one, and when he shifted his own weight to block them, he left a path to the doorway open.
I grabbed my chance, sprinting toward the closed door. I remembered him saying the rooms were soundproofed, so I saved my breath for running.
But as soon as I ripped that door open, I inhaled to scream.
From behind me, Shane whipped one arm around my waist and dragged me back, his forearm like an iron band slamming into my diaphragm and knocking all the air out of me. He slapped the door shut as he hauled me up against him. His breath ruffling the hair on the back of my neck, he said, “Had a bit of a breakthrough today, did you?” Every ounce of pseudo-friendliness had drained from his voice.
I didn’t answer.
This time, his intrusion into my mind was not gentle. What before had been like fingertips rifling through file folders was now like having the files of my mind ripped out of their cabinet, thrown on the floor, and stomped on with cleats. I could barely think. But I could feel him tearing information out of my mind.
He spun me around and held me at arms’ length by the shoulders, peering into my face. “So you know I’m part of the Lusus Naturae.” He shook his head. “You should join us. The Academy brings you in when you’re far too young, before you have a chance even know who you are or what someone else might have to offer.” His eyes glowed with the fervor of a fanatic.
