by Zenia, Zara
Colin was kneeling beside her, hand on the hilt of the knife for seconds at a time as he tried to pull it out of her.
My heart thudded in my chest. For a moment I was frozen. Then I dropped to my knees beside him, trying to avoid looking at Nala’s pale, pained face.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“I don’t know,” he said, voice shaking. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do this.”
“I know.” The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d seen the person running away. I knew Colin. No matter how mad he was at Nala, I didn’t think for a second that he was capable of something like this.
I looked back at Nala and the knife sticking out of her gut and realized what the problem was. The knife itself was silver, which would be incredibly toxic to shifters, but it was also worked with cold iron too. Colin couldn’t touch it for long enough to pull it out of the wound.
I gripped the hilt and pulled it out in a clean movement, immediately going to put pressure on the wound and preventing it bleeding. “We need to call someone,” I said.
“On it,” Laurie said, who already had a phone to her ear. Her hand was shaking, but her face was set. When she spoke her voice was calm. “Someone has been stabbed. Yes, we’re in the girls’ dormitory. We need medical assistance immediately.”
I wished I could lace my fingers through Colin’s and squeeze, to do something to reassure him, but I needed to keep pressure on Nala’s wound. Pulling the knife out was the worst scenario because it meant that the blood was free flowing with nothing to keep it in, but because the knife was silver I had no choice. Keeping silver in contact with her would be too toxic.
She made a small noise, and I leaned over her. “Nala,” I said, hearing just how terrified I was in that one word. “Nala you’re going to be okay. Stay away. Stay with me.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Colin murmured, more to himself than to me. “I don’t know how this could have happened.”
“It’s okay,” I said, both to him and her. “Everything is going to be fine. People are on their way.”
Laurie nodded her confirmation. “They said they’ll be here within five minutes.”
Colin was shaking his head and staring with glazed eyes at Nala’s wounds and my hands covering it. “I don’t know what happened,” he said again.
“Laurie could you keep pressure on here?”
Laurie came and did as I asked, taking over trying to stop Nala bleeding out. She looked at the unicorn shifter’s gaunt face with a blanched face herself. Tears were gathering in her eyes, and I looked away before I could see them fall.
Finally I took Colin’s hands in mine. Both were covered in blood that was starting to dry. “Colin,” I said softly, “Colin it’s okay.” I wasn’t sure where I’d found the strength to be calm and giving instructions in this situation, but seeing him falling apart like this made my heart break in two.
He squeezed my hands back, which was a good sign. “I was just talking to her. I didn’t even go into her room, we were just chatting on her door step. I just… I just wanted to tell her that she’d hurt me. What if that’s the last thing I ever said to her? That she crushed me and that she should feel bad?”
I wanted to tell him that Nala was going to be absolutely fine and that they would have another opportunity to talk about what had happened between them, but truthfully, I had no idea if she was going to pull through or not. The wound was big and deep and the silver would have made it even more impactful.
“This isn’t your fault,” I said gently. “You couldn’t have seen this coming. No one could have seen this coming.”
An attack on campus. It was unheard of at Sleepy Hollow. One of the reasons I’d come here was because it was incredibly safe. One of the safest campuses on the planet.
And now I’d been attacked in the town and Nala had been attacked in her own dorm room.
The sense of dread was almost overwhelming. If Nala had been attacked in her room then that meant no one was safe. This could happen to anyone, anywhere on campus.
The armed intruder could have burst into my room instead. It was just opposite the hallway. It could have been me that was laying on the ground bleeding out right now.
But I tried desperately to keep that panic off my face, for fear of sending Colin further over the edge.
“What if she dies?” he whispered.
I squeezed his hand again. “Everything will be okay.”
He pulled his hands from mine and buried his face in them. He was only a step away from rocking back and forth in his seat. I did the only thing I knew how, and gave him a hug. I wrapped arms around him and held him close, letting him cry into my shoulder.
Tears stung in my own eyes too. The back of my throat burned from trying not to sob.
People rushed through the door to Nala’s room and my immediate reaction was to prepare to fight. Not that I’d learned enough from Thomas in the one time I’d met him to actually be any good in a fight.
But it was the medics. They were only college medics for now, but magic meant that the college medics could be just as good as the real medics, at least for now. It was the lack of a hospital that I was worried about. The ambulance would be on its way, but it wouldn’t be as quick as the on-campus doctors had been.
They asked Laurie to step back and applied the pressure themselves, taking a look at the wound and talking quietly and quickly between themselves.
They weren’t the only people who had come into the room, though. Half a dozen members of campus security milled around in the room and corridor just outside it. One man, a Fae with shrewd dark eyes, came over to where I was still holding Colin close to me. He was staring with dead eyes at where Nala was being tended to.
“Can I ask what happened?” the man said, crouching down beside us.
Colin didn’t say anything, so I tried to do it for him. “My roommate and I live across the hallway. We heard Nala scream and came running over. We saw someone running away, and then Colin was trying to get the knife out of her. She was just lying on the floor. She’ll be okay, won’t she?” My last sentence was a stupid plea in a small voice. I hadn’t even meant to say it, but my doubts and fears slipped out. I’d been supposed to be being strong for Colin, to stop him blaming himself or feeling like he should have been able to do something.
“Colin, can you tell me what happened?” the man said, ignoring my question.
He just shook his head. “I… I don’t know.”
It was something in the way that the man shifted that I realized how this was going to play out. I’d come in and seen Colin standing over a stabbed Nala with the knife in his hand after we’d just had a blow up in our relationship about Nala.
“He didn’t—” I started, tightening my hold on Colin automatically.
The man spoke over me. “Colin. I need you to tell me what happened here just now. Okay? Can you do that?”
Colin nodded. “I… I was here to talk to Nala. We were standing in the corridor, she didn’t want to invite me in. She had her back toward the elevator. I didn’t even notice that someone was there until it was too late. I was too busy talking to her. Then she just kind of gasped and slumped forward. I caught her and the person who’d stabbed her had already turned and started running away. I shouted after them, I think, but they didn’t turn around. They were wearing a huge sweater with a hood, and I think a mask but it was hard to tell. It all happened so fast.”
He went back to staring at Nala, who was about to be shifted onto a stretcher.
More people piled into the room then, wearing EMT uniforms. Something in my chest released a little, even though I knew the situation was just as bad. At least she was in the best possible hands now. She had the best possible chance.
“Colin,” the Fae said. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
“What?” I demanded.
“Miss, I—”
“No. He didn’t do this. You can’t blame this on him.”
“I’m not blaming anything on anyone, but Colin here is our main witness. If we’re going to find out what happened here then we’re going to need to get every bit of information out of him that we can.”
I didn’t relax my grip on Colin, who was still shaking a little. “So he’s not under arrest? Can’t you do it here?”
The man’s face was a picture of exasperation, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “This is not the right environment for an interview like that. We need him to come down to the campus security offices, where we can contact the sheriff’s department in town. This is a very serious situation.”
“But he’ll be able to leave whenever he wants?”
“I can’t make any promises—”
“Then he’s not going. He’s going to get a lawyer.” Though I knew that Colin couldn’t afford a lawyer. He was at Sleepy Hollow on a full ride scholarship. That was the only reason he’d been able to afford to be here at all. I couldn’t afford a lawyer for him either.
“Marina it’s fine,” Colin said softly, pulling away from me for the first time. “I understand why this is happening, but when they look into it they’ll find out the truth.”
I wanted to believe it. I had faith in the police, I had faith in the system to do justice, but when it was Colin and he was right there being accused I desperately didn’t want them to take him. “But—” I started.
He gave me a kiss on the forehead and then stood up, on sturdier legs than I’d been expecting. “Really, Marina, it’s okay. I know I need to go and answer their questions. I want to know who did this to Nala and I want them to be caught. That means going and clearing myself of suspicion. I understand that.”
His voice was so hollow compared to how I was used to, and it was terrifying.
He rested a hand on my shoulder for a second before allowing two members of the security team to lead him away. The others stayed behind to secure evidence at the scene, and to take preliminary interviews with Laurie and me.
And then, just as if it had never happened, Laurie and I were back in our dorm rooms by ourselves.
I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the ground. There’d been no confirmation as to Nala’s status from anyone, despite me continuing to ask. I had no idea whether she was even still alive.
Finally back in the privacy of my own room, I broke down. Sobs wracked my body and I coughed and hiccupped while Laurie rubbed my back and cried too. I’d never come so close to death as I had in Nala’s room, and I still didn’t even know whether she was okay or not.
And whoever had done this to Nala, they were on campus somewhere. They had to be, to get into the dorms unnoticed, to even know which building the dorms were and to navigate their way through it. That meant there was an attempted murderer— maybe even murderer —on campus. No one was safe until they were caught.
Then there was Colin. I knew he hadn’t been responsible for what happened to Nala. I’d seen the person running away from the scene just as he’d described.
And yet there was an instant, when I saw him hovering over Nala with the knife in his hand and the eerily disconnected look on his face, when I’d wondered what he was capable of. That was a feeling that hadn’t quite passed yet, and I hoped it would soon.
But for now I just wanted to hug my best friend and cry because someone I knew had been stabbed and possibly killed and someone I was dating had been thrown into a cell on suspicion of it.
So I cried and cried until I was tired out and then fell asleep hoping beyond hope that this mess would sort itself out, and soon.
20
Colin
I was in the cell for days. It shouldn’t have taken days to free me, of course. It was obvious, from both the eyewitness testimony and the physical evidence.
They’d discovered, like I had, that the knife used to stab Nala had been infused with both silver and cold iron and that there was no way I would have been able to hold it long enough to attack her. I’d known as much when I was trying to pull it out and couldn’t touch it for more than a few seconds. Definitely not enough to get a grip on it. I still had blisters on my hands from trying to touch it too many times. They’d leave scars.
CCTV outside the dorms showed the person who had committed the crime, too. Detectives in the Sheriff’s department had determined that the culprit was a woman, but that was about the extent of their knowledge. The campus didn’t have enough cameras, this incident had revealed, and whoever the criminal was had known about it. They’d managed to slip between cameras and disappeared completely. They could have gone anywhere.
One thing was clear, anyway. There was a criminal on campus. It had to be a member of the staff or a student. That was the only way they could have organized something like that and slipped through all the security to find exactly what they wanted without arousing suspicion.
There had been sweeps of the school to check for anyone who wasn’t a student or staff, and unless it was one of the Salem University students, it meant it was one of our own.
The knife had given plenty of clues, too. It had meant being able to rule out a personal motive. The only people that had knives like that were Hunters. So it wasn’t just that someone was an attempted murderer on campus, it was a Hunter, hell bent on destroying paranormals.
They wouldn’t stop.
I’d been told most of this as a sort of consolation prize for having spent seventy-two hours under arrest and stuck in a jail cell in the campus security offices. I’d never argued or fought back, but spending day after day not knowing what had happened to Nala while having accusations thrown at me had come close to breaking me.
I thought they must have seen that eventually and that was why I was now equipped with most of the information in the investigation.
And maybe it was a sympathy prize, too. Nala had survived, but she was comatose. There was no guarantee that she’d make it, and if she did no guarantee that she’d wake up without permanent damage beyond the scar.
As soon as I was freed from the security offices, I headed to the hospital in the town. Nala was laid in a bed with tubes coming out of her mouth and arms. She was pale and lifeless.
I’d never seen her like that before. She was always full of life, always rambling about something and grinning even when it was completely inappropriate to.
Seeing her like this was like a punch to the gut.
She might never want to be in a relationship with me, but for a couple of months I’d been madly in love with her and that hadn’t faded completely just because I was invested in Marina now. I would have still never wanted Nala to get hurt.
I slumped in my seat and buried my face in my hands. I’d figure out who did this. Who hurt Nala, who upset Marina and Laurie, who meant for me to be thrown in jail, and who was going to make everyone at college feel unsafe.
I’d do everything I could to figure out who’d done this, and then I’d make them pay.
* * *
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1
Gardax
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I cleared my throat, pinched the bridge of my nose, and for the third time, inhaled deeply. The many eyes of my brothers were upon me. I braced myself as I prepared to upend their lives. You could hear a pin drop into the abyss of silence swirling through the room, but the quiet would soon come to a crashing and abrupt end.
In any lifetime, there comes a point where one is called to measure up, to rise to the occasion and do what we must to become the person we were meant to be. I was about to ask that of my brothers, and more to the point, myself.
“For the love of Trilynia, do you plan to explain sometime tonight why you’ve summoned us here, Garda
x?” Rawklix asked, rolling his bright blue eyes.
The rest of my brothers grumbled their own muted impatience. Rawklix, the youngest at 18, was still callow enough to give voice to his impudent complaints.
“Mind your place, little one,” warned Manzar, squaring his jaw and leveling Rawklix with an icy stare that begged to be challenged.
Rawklix lifted one side of his mouth into a smirk. “Always such a foul mood, Manzar! You need to take a trip to my islands. If you’d tasted the pleasures of paradise, you might not be so content to sit around scratching your balls. Regardless, I have better things to be doing, and they involve naked women, so if you don’t mind hurrying this little reunion along, I’d be quite grateful.” He drummed his long fingers on the table as if his patience were wearing thin and he were warning us of an impending repercussion to that fact.
The massive square muscles of Manzar’s shoulders tensed, so I held up my hand, stemming the violence before it began. I knew a brewing fight when I saw one, and I had neither the time nor the energy to feed into these men’s egos.
Manzar was a military man and nearly as adept a warrior as myself. Rawklix stood no chance against him, but more importantly, there were matters far more pressing than the posturing egos of my younger brothers. They could clash at each other’s throats on their own time.
“Enough, both of you. Bloody each other on your own time. I will not keep you here long, for obvious reasons, but for now, Trilynian business takes precedence, and you will all sit and hear what I have to share with you,” I said, gaining the attention of all six of my brothers. My voice boomed and barreled through the room, crashing down upon them like waves pelting the sand.
I nodded to Coel, my burly guardsman, and he silently swung open the thick metal door that was the only way in or out of the council room. The room was heavily fortified and operated on its own power source, completely distinct from the rest of the palace, making it the most secure space and ideal for such a conference. If you needed to discuss private matters, the council room was where you could operate under the most discrete of circumstances.
