A shudder rippled across my shoulders as I threw open the door.
But Seph wasn't there.
I blinked around our room, noting the rumpled blankets on her bed and her boots still next to her desk.
“Nebbles?” I said, placing the plates on my desk.
I found the cat under the bed, and when she saw my face, she hissed and spat. Her ears lay flat and her eyes were enormous.
“Where is she?” I asked.
That earned me a swipe, but she was too tucked into the back corner to land it.
“Look,” I said as calmly as I could, “I know you want to chew my face off, but I’ll find her, okay? And then maybe you’ll let me smoosh you with a cuddle?”
She let out a sound I had no idea cats could even make. No smooshing, then.
I stood. The bathroom. Of course she was there.
“Be right back, Nebbles,” I called.
I hurried down the hallway to be sure, in my real form, not in shadow, dodging girls coming and going from the room at the end of the hall. Since she wasn’t wearing her boots, I checked underneath the stalls for bare feet and waited a bit in case she stepped out of one of the four bathtubs curtained off in the corner.
She wasn't in there.
Dread gathered in a knot inside my gut and pulled tighter with every second I didn't spot her. After her fainting spell earlier... I didn't trust this. And I sure as hell didn’t trust Ramsey. If she were with someone else, I didn't trust them. Where else would she have—
There. Down the hall, she was coming out of a room that wasn't ours and strode toward the door to the stairs. Her thin, colorful dress fluttered around her bare feet. How she wasn’t freezing to death, I’d never know.
"Seph," I called, relief shaking my voice.
But the feeling was short-lived. She moved with singular focus, her steps hurried, her gaze straight ahead. A pang of familiarity hit me as I rushed after her, simultaneously clinging nervous sweat to me and drying out my mouth.
But it couldn't be like that. It couldn't be like what had happened to Leo before he died. That and his death were two separate events, and yet...
I zipped past the room she'd come out of, empty except the usual dorm furniture, half-emptied trunks...and a bunch of flickering black candles arranged in a circle cut through with zigzags of salt on the floor. I didn’t know that symbol or if Seph had made it.
She was nearly to the staircase door, and I was nearly to her. I whirled in front of her to block her path and then gasped at her glassy-eyed stare.
Oh no. My stomach flipped violently. She was sleepwalking, like Leo had started to do about a week before his death. I recognized the blank look, the emptiness. This was just a coincidence, though, right?
“Seph,” I whispered, in the same calm tone I’d used with him. “You’re sleepwalking.”
She pivoted as if to scoot around me, her movements automatic, but I sidestepped in front of her and took her gently by the elbows.
"Seph, I'm going to put you back to bed, okay?”
Leo, I'm going to put you back to bed, okay? This was an exact replica of all those nights where instead of Leo taking care of me, I took care of him. Now, I was taking care of Seph. Or trying to. Without so much as a blink, she wriggled free from my grip and started for the door again.
What did this mean? Was Ramsey doing this? Was he planning on murdering Seph too? But why?
I dodged in front of Seph again, but she cut around me too fast and slipped out the door to the stairs. As helplessness squeezed my chest, I followed. Immediately after I'd fought Leo back into his bed where he'd passed out cold, I’d pulled every book I could think of about sleep for some kind of explanation of why this was happening to him. I hadn’t found any that applied to him, but I'd also read that sleepwalkers weren't supposed to be awakened if the cause was unknown.
So now, all I could really do was gently coax her back to bed.
"Seph," I whispered, but even that echoed in the silent staircase. I glanced over the banister at the torch-lit entryway below. It appeared empty from this angle except for the flames dancing across the stone floor. It wasn’t the dark hour yet, but I didn’t see a single soul wandering the school except us.
"Seph," I hissed and then sped past her down the steps so I could face her. I held my arms out to my sides to block her path. "Please—"
Someone was coming from a couple floors above, their footsteps not even close to quiet. A professor, maybe. And they were coming fast.
I took Seph's hand and hurried her down the stairs, away from whoever it was. Away from our dorm. I leaped off the final step and hauled Seph around the staircase and into a squat within a deep pocket of shadows. Real ones, not mine.
Seph struggled against my grip, but kept eerily silent for her normally chatty self.
Maybe I could've trusted the person trailing us, could've asked them for help, but I didn't. I wouldn't. Maybe Seph could provide me with some answers, and I’d glue myself to her side for protection.
I quieted my breathing as the person clomped down the final set of stairs. Nothing I could do about the thudthudthud of my heart. A female professor I didn’t know appeared, striding quickly toward the classroom wing. As soon as the double doors clicked closed behind her, I released Seph. She popped up and headed straight for the exit doors.
Shit. This was exactly like Leo. He’d gone outside, too, but at home, someplace safe, so I’d thought. Not outside Necromancer Academy where everything was dead...or not dead.
Seph stopped in front of the doors, her blank gaze sliding over the various bars and contraptions that locked us in. The whole thing looked complicated, a maze of levers, pulleys, and wheels.
"Okay, Seph," I whispered. "It's not meant to be. Back to our room we...go."
But she was already pulling this and that, so quickly that her arms blurred. Like she'd done this a hundred times before instead of this being her very first day here.
The double doors rumbled softly out into the cold night. It had been a full day since I'd been outside or seen any traces that it still existed beyond our windowless school. The dead trees swayed and devoured what little moonlight there was. The sea breeze whipped against my face and threw the torchlight in the entryway into chaotic leaps. I quickly closed the door behind us so the torches wouldn't go out. The resulting click sounded so final, and I winced. Thankfully the lock didn't engage again so we could go back in.
When I turned around again, Seph stood a breath's distance from me. I shrank back against the door, my heart beating furiously. The deepening shadows hollowed out her cheeks and eyes, and the faint light shone on the tattoos on her face, which gave her a frightening, skull-like appearance.
"It's here," she said at normal volume, but it sounded so loud in the quiet night.
I swallowed thickly, not at all sure I wanted to ask this: "What's here?"
Without a word, she turned and stepped down the steps toward...what? Where was she leading me, and did I really want to go there in the dead of night? But I couldn't let her go alone either.
Things had never escalated quite this far with Leo. He'd go outside and stop as if he'd hit a wall, never saying anything, never with any recollection what he was doing the next morning.
At the bottom of the stairs, Seph took a sharp right off the path and directly between the trees. A jungle of sorts, a wild, twisted one with strangely bent branches and rough, uneven ground.
"Where are you going? What's here?" I panted and tripped trying to keep up with her, but she seemed to know exactly where she was headed and where to place her bare feet. Her poor feet. They must be frozen.
"It's here," she said again.
Frowning, I threaded my fingers through hers so I could better keep up. Rare shafts of moonlight slanted between gnarled limbs and shined on the tops of skulls half buried in the ground. Tree roots had grown through a few empty eye sockets and appeared to have pulled so hard that long fractures had split the skulls almost in two. I
shivered hard.
Up ahead and to our left, several headstones poked up from the ground contained within a low iron gate. Five thick cages had been built up around the five graves. Two angelic statues stood at either end of the little graveyard with bells on red ribbons dangling from their stone fingers.
Someone really didn’t want these people coming back to life. And if they did, the academy wanted to know via bells? Who were they?
But Seph ignored that area and kept to the right where I saw glimpses of the school and all of its bizarre angles. My footsteps cracked loudly over the dirt, twigs, and, I guessed, all sorts of bones. Just because I couldn't see them didn't mean they weren't there.
Seph twisted her fingers from mine and rushed on even faster.
“Wait...”
Her silhouette blended in with the dark in front of me, her footsteps much quieter than mine, and behind...
Behind. It felt like someone had pressed in close to my back, matching the rhythm of my steps but not quite. My breaths grew ragged. Goose bumps peppered up the back of my neck, and pure fear soured my tongue. Coiling my muscles in case I needed to grab for my knife, I risked a look back.
Shadows swarmed with movement, possibly with life, possibly with death. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
But when I turned around again, I slammed nose-first into Seph. She'd stopped.
"Seph?" I asked, coming around to see her face.
Tears leaked down her tattooed cheeks, and she shook her head as she stared up at the academy.
"I can't go in there," she whispered.
"But...you already have."
"It's here." Her face crumpled then, and she buried her head in her hands. "It's coming at me from all angles, inside and out, up and down." Her shoulders heaved with desperate sobs, the sound so unlike my cheery roommate that it split my heart in two.
All angles... All angles of the school? I had no idea what she was talking about. But I couldn't let Seph suffer through what Leo had for a full week. The similarities frightened me, but I resolved that she would never meet the same fate he had. That was for damn sure.
This had to be Ramsey’s doing. I just didn’t know why.
"Ladies," a tight voice said behind us.
My stomach clenched and then bottomed out through the skull-covered ground. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
Seph and I turned. Headmistress Millington stood there, her back to the little graveyard as if that had been where she'd come from rather than from inside the school. Her fists perched on the hips of her gray patterned cloak, and her lips were so pinched that it appeared they'd been swallowed by the rest of her head.
Her eyes shrank to slits as she ticked them back and forth between us. "What in the name of all that is dark and holy are you doing out here at night?"
Chapter Six
When in doubt, tell the truth. We weren’t out after the dark hour, but still, we were at Headmistress Millington's mercy.
I threw an apologetic glance at Seph, who was thankfully blinking the glassiness from her eyes, and hoped she understood this was for the best. "Headmistress, Seph here was sleepwalking. I followed after her to make sure she was okay while at the same not waking her forcefully since I've read that's the wrong thing to do when the exact cause is unknown."
"Seph, is this true?" the headmistress asked, with a slightly less bitchy accusation in her tone as before.
"I..." She looked around at the trees soaring above us and shook her head as if trying to clear it. A splash of moonlight glinted on her still-wet cheeks and on the top of her bald head. "I have no idea how I got out here. I'm sorry, I...I was sleepwalking?"
"You were," I said, putting my hand on her shoulder.
"Oh..." She sounded so lost, so gut-punched with the shock of finding herself somewhere she didn't remember going.
"Have you done this before?" A note of apprehension slipped into the headmistress's voice.
I looked at her sharply. What did she know and how did she know it?
"No, never. Um...” Seph scrubbed the tears from her cheeks. “Is this something we could keep between ourselves and not tell my family?"
I wanted to second that, but I sealed my mouth shut since my family thought I was attending White Magic Academy.
The headmistress looked to both of us and then waved her hand for us to follow. "Let's take this inside so we can discuss it further."
Seph and I shared a look, and then followed Headmistress Millington's brisk steps toward the academy's entrance. With the headmistress and Seph alert and crashing through the forest with me, my heart didn't feel like it was going to crack open a rib to escape, but unease still scraped down my back nonetheless.
I didn’t like this. Any of it. I reached into my pocket only to find the dead man’s hand closed. I needed answers, but when would I get them? And would Seph survive that long?
The headmistress tapped open the door, just a touch rather than twisting one of the large knobs, and then turned to Seph with a gasp as she seemed to realize something. "How did you get the door unlocked?"
“I..." Seph blinked and then looked at me.
"She unlocked it like she had a hundred times before. Is that important?" The question snapped through the night, louder than I'd intended.
Headmistress Millington swept us inside, floating in her billowing gray cloak across the stone floor so fast, we had to hurry to keep up. With a wave of her hand, the door closed and locked us up tightly again.
"Headmistress," I said, unwilling to let my question go unanswered.
She led us into the Gathering Room, empty and dark and creepy as hell, but as soon as she stepped in after us, the torches lit along the walls.
"Gustafson, tea, please," she said.
A metal-spiked black pot of tea and three cups with saucers appeared on the freshmen table as well as a plate of cookies. No Gustafson in sight. Odd, and deeply unnerving. Who else lurked around us that I couldn’t see? Who else had seen me when I thought I was alone?
"Help yourselves, ladies." The headmistress crossed to the table and sat, and we settled in opposite her, filling our teacups and each taking a cookie, more out of politeness than anything else. "Did you see anything out there? Hear anything?"
Seph nibbled her cookie. "I was sleeping, so...not really."
I picked up my teacup with both hands, my nerves pulled so tight they trembled. "I don’t know. It might have been a trick of the shadows, but mostly I was focused on Seph."
She caught my eye and turned the corner of her lips up in a tiny, grateful smile.
"Did Sepharalotta say anything?" the headmistress asked.
I sawed my teeth over my bottom lip and stared into the depths of my tea, then glanced at Seph with a wince. Why did it feel like I was throwing Seph to the wolves by talking about her as if she weren't here? "She said 'It's here' and 'I can't go in there.'"
"And you have no idea what she was referring to?"
"Well..." I cleared my throat and shot Seph another apologetic look. "She also said she couldn't go into the gym earlier today before she fainted."
“She fainted?” Headmistress Millington paled, and she covered her nonexistent lips with her hand, her fingers shaking.
Her reaction snagged the breath from my lungs. I could only guess what Seph must be thinking. Something was definitely wrong.
"Please, Headmistress, my brother..." I blurted, my voice so shallow that I wasn't even sure what I'd said. I snapped my mouth closed, wanting to continue but at the same time not.
"Your brother..." The headmistress stared at me for a long moment, and then recognition dawned in her sharp dark eyes. "Leo Cleohold?"
I nodded, wilting a little at all the stirred emotions just at hearing his name. Seph watched me closely, likely wondering what Leo had to do with her, and I set my teacup down before I dropped it.
"He came here for an interview,” the headmistress said, and the same delight that filled everyone’s faces when they talked about him lifted hers.
“I offered him a job on the spot. He had a stellar background in all kinds of magic, but I'm sure Graystone is glad to have him."
She didn't know. Of course she didn’t know. I picked up a cookie and jammed it into my mouth to stall.
Headmistress Millington must've seen the flicker of hurt in my eyes I was sure was there, because she leaned forward, her forehead creased. "Did something happen to him?"
The bites of cookie lodged halfway to my stomach, and I set it back down on the plate, my insides churning. "He's dead."
The words sounded so empty, so...flimsy, because he wasn’t just dead, he was gone. Forever. Even if I could, or wanted to, necromancy didn’t work well with people. They came back...murderous, which was why we had a whole class of cautionary tales. Except this Ryze guy apparently could raise people with no problem.
Seph covered her mouth and blew out a heavy breath. "Oh, Dawn. I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too." The headmistress put her hand over her heart and stared down at the table, bewildered. "Your family must be devastated.”
That was one way to put it. My parents cried almost constantly while I immediately started plotting revenge.
“Before...” Headmistress Millington began, “you said 'my brother' when we were talking about Seph. Why? Did your brother sleepwalk?"
I looked at Seph, not sure if I should say because I didn't want to scare her, yet if I didn't, I might not get the answers I didn't know I needed until tonight. She and Leo were linked...somehow. Gently, I curled my fingers around Seph’s hand and squeezed.
"Yes," I whispered.
Seph stiffened, and her hand felt like ice in mine.
"He's not you, though. It was different for him," I blurted, trying to reassure her.
"When did he start sleepwalking?" the headmistress asked.
"The night after he came back from his interview here."
"And he died when?" Seph asked, her voice fading in and out.
I winced, hating this whole situation so much. "A week later. To the day."
"A week..." Seph laid her palm flat on the table like she was about to launch out of here, for good.
Necromancer Academy: Book 1 Page 6
