“Oooooh! Congratulations!” Charlie flung her hands up in celebration, splashing soapy water in the air as she did it and startling the raccoon. “What is it? Can we see it? Will it fit in here?”
Marie agreed, but it took a while for her to get her nerves under control. Even with Charlie exuberantly scrubbing a filthy raccoon, she still worried about the judgement of her roommate.
Kuro took that time to leaf through the books he had taken out. He heard the spell conclude just as he found the page he was looking for.
He looked up to see his friends slack jawed and silent.
Arthur was the first to speak. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Marie. “Just a crow.”
Charlie burst out laughing. It helped confirm Kuro’s suspicions but was extremely unhelpful.
Marie fought to keep her composure. “Don’t laugh at me,” she said, her voice cracking.
Charlie didn’t stop. Instead, she threw her arms around Marie and all but collapsed in hysterics on her roommate. “You city kids,” she managed to say between outbursts.
Marie pushed her off. “So what if I am?” she demanded.
Kuro thought it was time to intervene before the shouts brought attention. He tugged gently on Marie’s sleeve and pushed the book into her hands. “It’s not a crow,” he said, trying to strike a gentle tone that she wouldn’t take as an insult.
She looked between him and the book he’d just given her in bemusement several times before her upset died enough to read the page heading. “Identification of Corvids: Distinguishing Crows and Ravens.”
Marie still looked around confused and ashamed at not understanding.
“It’s a raven,” Arthur explained unhelpfully.
Kuro pulled out the library book on familiars and found the page on ravens.
“Oh, please let me tell her,” said Charlie, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I feel really bad for laughing.”
Kuro handed over the book, and Charlie cleared her throat. In her best story-reading voice, she recited, “Ravens are among the most prized familiars, being associated with wizards of great power and genius, creators and destroyers of kingdoms. Known wizards with raven familiars include Stolas, Odin Borson, and Morgan le Fay.”
Marie didn’t know how to react. She just stared at the big black bird before her, which she’d spent months trying to change. “I have heard of some of them,” she said after a while.
“Of course, this book is mostly nonsense,” Charlie said smugly, reminding Marie of her earlier evaluation of the work. “Mostly. Anyway, your familiar is super cool. Want to go flying with Henrietta tomorrow after class?”
Marie took her time deciding whether she was ready to let go of her jealousy of the majestic winged unicorn but eventually conceded, with conditions. “Will you let me give her rainbow-coloured wings?”
“Oh! My! Gosh! Yes!” shouted Charlie. “Are you going to name your familiar? Can I name it? What do you think of Ravenous, Queen of the Night, or maybe Betty?”
Marie ignored her roommate and turned on Kuro. “You knew,” she accused him. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”
“I suspected,” Kuro defended. “That’s why I needed the books. I’ve only ever seen one crow and one raven up close.”
She growled at him and hugged him at the same time. “It’s a good thing I like you,” she said.
With all his friends smiling with each other for the first time in months, Kuro slept easily. Even with a damp raccoon sleeping next to him and a fussy dragonfey chained to his bed, he didn’t stir until morning.
Twenty-seven
Chasing Memories
Kuro woke with a paw being jammed up his nose. He didn’t know whether familiars needed to sleep, but his at least put on a good show. It was laid out on its side with its tongue hanging out, leaving a spot of drool on his bedding. It was also, apparently, dreaming. It pawed at the air and kicked out as it navigated whatever it was that magical replicas of raccoons dreamed about.
Kuro wiped the drowsiness out of his eyes and rolled out of bed. He had no idea what time it was, but he guessed it was quite early since Arthur hadn’t stirred, or maybe they had just kept him up too far past his usual bedtime.
Kuro dressed and wandered out to see if breakfast was ready. When he found the dining hall already bustling, he dashed back to wake Arthur, who would be mortified at oversleeping.
Arthur was extremely hard to rouse. When he finally yielded to Kuro’s urgings, he had difficulty assembling his face. His eyes kept drifting, and his jaw wouldn’t stay straight.
“Are you okay?” asked Kuro.
“What time is it?” replied Arthur as he nearly fell out of his upper bunk. “When did Charlie and Marie leave?”
Arthur was clearly not well. He knew there was no way to tell time accurately in the lodge, and he had been awake when the girls left. Also, Arthur never got out of bed with an unstable face. He tried to put his tie on before his shirt and couldn’t remember why there was a raccoon in their room.
Kuro helped him get dressed and walked him out to the hall to get help, but not before coaxing the sleeping familiars into his book bag and slinging it over his shoulder. He didn’t need them escaping while he was trying to help Arthur.
As they left their room, they ran into Magnus Singh leaving his. He was similarly befuddled. He had a toothbrush in hand but was just standing in the dormitory hallway scratching at a bug bite on the inside of his elbow and looking lost.
Kuro’s worry redoubled when he found Katherine Hammersmith helping one of the first years out of the girl’s dorms. Soon every senior student in the lodge was helping to get the juniors out of bed. Every single first- and second-year student was bleary and confused.
Everyone except Kuro.
Rather than bringing them to the nurse, old Pete sent one of the lutin, Ingot, to ask him to come to them. Ingot returned a few moments later to let them know that the nurse was already busy at another residence. He couldn’t go inside, but some students told him the same thing had happened there.
Kuro started to worry less about his friends and more about himself.
He went to check on Marie and Charlie, who were being led out to the lounge by Meredith. Marie was a bit dopey, but Charlie was a mess. She couldn’t get her limbs coordinated, and Meredith was almost carrying her.
“This is worse than getting memories back after summer break,” commented Marie as she clambered onto a sofa. Jennifer Tanaka dozily agreed as she fought to stay awake and rubbed absently at the crook of her arm.
“Does anyone else’s mouth taste like frogs and electricity?” asked Sean Cassidy.
Those comments in isolation might not have caught Kuro’s notice, but right next to each other, they triggered a memory, or rather they triggered a lack of memory. Kuro had been a regular assistant in the creation of, and a test subject for, Phineas’s potions. He was familiar with these aftereffects.
It was an anaesthetic. Just a couple of drops would knock someone out for hours and have them forget anything that happened around that time. Phineas had found it useful if he ever needed to have Kuro root through someone else’s possessions while they were still home. Kuro would sneak in, add it to a drink, and wait for them to fall asleep. Once they were unconscious, he could loot with impunity.
Kuro even knew how to make it. The only ingredient not easily available in the alchemy lab was luminous slime mold, which is what gave the distinctive sparks and slime flavour, and Kuro knew where to get loads of that.
In the fretting over all the delirious young students, nobody had yet noticed that Kuro was the only one of his classmates who hadn’t been affected. Kuro didn’t know how long that would last. He had to figure out what had happened before attention turned to him. He was less worried about a false accusation, and more concerned that they might be right.
He didn’t know what he had done, or how or why he had done i
t, but he couldn’t help but conclude that he was to blame. This had Phineas’s fingerprints all over it, and Phineas didn’t do his own dirty work.
Kuro tried to remember something from the night after he’d gone to bed, but it was a blank. He’d slept soundly. He almost never slept soundly. There was always a nightmare or a sound that woke him with a start. A good night’s sleep just made him more suspicious of himself.
He tried to work out what could possibly have happened, but he needed his friends’ help. He needed Arthur’s notes, Charlie’s imagination, and Marie’s cleverness. He gathered them, but they were so dopey that they weren’t of much use.
When Kuro suggested that he might be to blame, Charlie responded with a yawn and asked, “Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Kuro. “Probably to steal something.”
Marie shook her head to dismiss the idea, and then regretted the vigorous motion. “What would you want to steal from everybody all at once? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Attend to the details,” insisted Arthur. “We should inspect the scene of the crime.”
Getting all four of them to the girls’ room was a bit of an ordeal. Kuro had to support Charlie while guiding Arthur along. Upon arrival, Charlie flopped into her bed and promptly fell asleep.
“Okay, Marie, is anything missing?” asked Kuro urgently.
Marie dutifully went through her possessions. Despite her sleepiness, she was quite convinced that nothing of value was gone. “Unless they took some socks, I think everything is here.”
“We should inspect the bed for clues,” said Arthur.
“You are not inspecting my bed,” replied Marie with finality.
Charlie was less resistant to the idea but also impeded progress by refusing to leave her bed for the inspection. While Arthur tried to search for stray hairs or unexplained bits of lint around Charlie’s uncooperative limbs, Kuro’s attention was drawn to Marie’s arm.
She was scratching at her elbow inattentively, and a small red spot had appeared on her shirt.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
Marie looked down and was surprised to find he was correct. She rolled up her sleeve to find a small red dot with a little bruise around it. Kuro recalled seeing Magnus with the same mark.
Quickly, the others checked their arms and found they each had a matching wound. It looked like a bug bite. If Kuro didn’t know better, he would have thought it was. But he’d seen marks like that, in that location, before. That was the kind of mark left by needles. Kuro had seen them on some of the people in Detritus who had gotten hooked on potions like bliss and contentment, and on his own when Phineas had taken Kuro’s blood for tests and experiments.
“They injected us all with a drug?” Marie was horrified, somehow thinking it was worse if it came from a needle than if she’d drunk it.
Several pieces fell into place for Kuro. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the anaesthetic was so you wouldn’t wake up from the needle.”
“What’s the needle for?” she asked. “Did they drug us twice?”
“Maybe for drawing blood,” proposed Kuro.
“What would they want all of our blood for?” Marie was horrified.
“Lots of things,” said Kuro. “Tests, potions, spells. You can do very personalized magic with someone’s blood.”
That failed to comfort Marie at all.
“You must be a really sneaky burglar,” said Charlie. She’d rolled so her head hung off the edge of her bed. “How did you get into everybody’s room in one night?”
Kuro hesitated to admit what he could do to his friends. It was his escape plan if things turned out badly, but they were his friends, and if he did have to escape, it didn’t matter who knew, they wouldn’t be able to follow him. “I can sort of blink,” he said. “The lutin thing, I mean.”
“Cooooool,” said Charlie, flopping over to get a better view. “Since when?”
“Just a little while,” he said. “And I’m not very good at it.”
“I thought Mr. Widdershins said lutin could only go places they’d been before,” said Charlie, astonishing everyone that she’d actually been listening in class. “Have you been in everybody’s bedroom?” It was partly a question and partly an accusation.
“I don’t think so,” said Kuro. “Or I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what the burglaries before were for. Sneaking into a room so I could blink there later and stealing things to make it look like a burglary. Maybe that’s why my familiar knew where to find the stuff.”
“You are working really hard to blame yourself, Kuro,” said Marie. “But it doesn’t make sense. Why would you break into a room and make a big mess, just so you could go back later? You didn’t even know you would be able to blink.”
Marie was right. Kuro was so worried that he was being controlled by Phineas that he hadn’t been thinking clearly. He could barely blink at the best of times and only with Bindal’s help. Even if he had been sneaking into rooms, it didn’t make sense to tear up the bedding. Nothing about those burglaries made any sense. They might not be connected at all.
“Maybe it was your dragonfey the whole time,” suggested Charlie, apparently having also forgotten much of the previous evening. “I bet it got all the sneakiest thiefy parts of you and can’t stop stealing!”
Arthur rescued Kuro with inconvenient facts. “We established already that familiars cannot get in or out of residences. Like lutin and other fey creatures, it is impossible.”
“Oh yeah,” said Charlie, still foggy.
“No, it isn’t,” said Kuro. He had a pair of familiars in his bag that had come into a residence. It was possible to smuggle salt into the fairy realm and gold out to the Blandlands if you knew how and had the right ingredients. “Luminous slime mold, carnivorous lichen, and grave moss,” said Kuro.
He was met with blank stares.
A terrible idea had just struck him. He grabbed one of Charlie’s pillows and tried to tear it open. When he found he lacked the strength, he pulled the dragonfey from his bag, which made short work of the fabric.
“What are you doing?” demanded Marie, moving to protect her own pillows from Kuro’s sudden destructive fit.
While a more robust experiment would have required him to dissect multiple pillows to be certain he got a representative sample, one was enough for Kuro’s purposes. He took a feather and licked it, then put it in his mouth and sucked on it just to be sure.
It was all but tasteless.
The feathers that had coated Evelyn’s room after her burglary had been bitter and salty.
“What if,” Kuro started, finding pieces to the puzzle that he hadn’t recognized as being part of the same picture, “the burglaries weren’t to steal anything at all? What if they were to sneak something in?”
The shifting gazes of his friends demanded more explanation for why he was rambling about moss and mold with a mouthful of pillow filling.
“Fey creatures can’t get in or out of the residences because of the salt-laced bricks. If someone wanted to get one in, they’d need to smuggle it through that barrier.
“That’s impossible,” said Arthur.
“Lots of things are impossible unless you know how they’re done,” argued Kuro. “I can get a familiar in with just my bag, you can get salt in from the Blandlands and other stuff out that shouldn’t go. If you knew the recipe, I bet you could get a lutin into a residence room hidden in a pillow filled with feathers infused with a magical field-disrupting formula.” He realized he was starting to sound like Phineas, and his stomach turned.
“That’s a bit of a stretch, Kuro,” said Marie, trying to calm him and bring him back from his wild speculation and growing agitation. “A lutin wouldn’t even fit in a pillow.”
A very small one would, though; a small lutin who knew where to find the kind of materials needed to smuggle gold through the veil; a small lutin who was forbidden from interac
ting with wizards and had never eaten chocolate; a small lutin who had just gotten Kuro to let his familiar tour the lodge before returning all its experiences to its owner.
“I need to go,” said Kuro, and ran out of the room, leaving his addled and baffled friends without an explanation.
He ran past the lounge, filled with concerned seniors trying to manage their slowly recovering younger students, through the nearly empty dining hall, and invaded the kitchen. His presence caused a wave of discomfort to wash over the lutin working there. Kuro hadn’t even tried to talk to one of them in months, not since Bindal had told him they thought him a monster.
“I’m sorry, but I have an important question,” Kuro said.
The lutin fell silent and backed away from him, but their reluctance to blink away while Kuro was looking kept them pinned in the room.
“Where do the young lutin stay on Avalon?” he asked.
The lutin trapped in the kitchen traded looks of concern and confusion before one stepped forward to brave the conversation with Kuro. It was Ingot, a veteran lodge lutin, the one who had helped rescue him from Phineas the year before. “There are no lutin children on Avalon,” he said. “Why would you ask that?”
That was the answer Kuro had feared. “I think I’ve been replaced,” he said. It was a notion that had been assembling itself, and with it a terror that he would have to do something about it.
Bindal had obligations that kept him hidden from others, busy with unexplained activities, and promises that he could not break, just as Kuro had. Phineas was a very smart man but wasn’t very creative. If he’d been denied Kuro, it was just like him to replace his lost possession with the next best thing. It was a stretch, as Marie might say, but if there was even a chance that Bindal was under Phineas’s thumb, he had to save him. He had promised. “Do you know someone named Bindal?”
The lutin did. The tenor of the silence in the kitchen changed. They moved from fearfully refusing to talk to Kuro to angrily lacking the words to do so. Ingot was again the only one to speak to Kuro. “How do you know that name?”
Volume 2: Burglary Page 29