by Elise Noble
Yes, things were finally slotting into place in his life. Family, friends, work… The only thing missing was that damn painting.
CHAPTER 19 - SKY
ON TUESDAY MORNING, we all got together and had another meeting. Emmy and Mack and the rest of the bigwigs had analysed the footage me, Alaric, and Beth got from walking around the academy and come to the conclusion that we were screwed. Various suggestions were put forward, everything from Emmy dressing up as a schoolgirl, which was vetoed because she really was too old—although I noticed Black did look kind of interested when somebody mentioned the uniform—to Nate flying a remote-controlled cockroach around the hallways. Again, that was ruled out because apparently there’d been glitches in the feed yesterday, and if the signal disappeared, several thousand bucks’ worth of gadget would either get stomped under someone’s foot or swept up by the janitor.
“You’re forgetting the other obvious option,” Emmy said.
Black raised an eyebrow.
“Sky aced her entrance exam. There’s a good chance she’ll be offered a place at the school. We can have her wander around with a camera for a few weeks.”
What? No way.
“Are you kidding? I’d go crazy in that place. You said it was just an interview. A little chat. And the only reason I passed the test was because Rune was telling me the answers. I didn’t even understand most of the questions.”
“Fall term at Shadow Falls has already started. Rune, when do you go back to school?”
“September twelfth.”
“So you could coach Sky for almost four weeks?”
“Sure.”
“Emmy, Rune’s meant to be on vacation,” Alaric pointed out. “You know, rest and relaxation?”
“I don’t mind helping. Learning’s fun.”
Emmy grinned. “There we go.”
No, no we didn’t go. Not if I could help it. “Don’t I get any say in this? I’m only three months into my training. I’m still on probation. What about all the other stuff I have to do? Shooting? Running? Climbing?”
“You can pick that up afterwards. Right, Rafael?”
He hesitated for the longest moment. Part of me wanted him to tell Emmy that I wasn’t ready. That she shouldn’t send me out on my own to spend weeks undercover. But I also wanted him to think that I was good enough to hold my own in this team. I’d already let him down twice and somehow got away with it. I wouldn’t get a third chance.
“Can we run through the alternatives once more?”
He didn’t think I was good enough, and that felt like a knife to the heart.
“Nothing we’ve spoken about so far is viable, but if you’ve got a new idea, I’m all ears.”
“We should wait for a support staff vacancy.”
“And draw this out for even longer?”
Alaric’s phone rang.
“It’s the school.”
Everyone sucked in a collective breath.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
Emmy turned to me. “Sky?”
Shit. I was stuck between a rock and a bigger rock. But when it came down to it, I wanted to prove to Rafael that I could do a job without screwing up more than I didn’t want to spend a month in academic jail.
“I’ll go.”
“Super. Alaric, would you do the honours?”
And there it was… The portal to hell had opened up, and I had no choice but to step through.
When Blackwood moved, they moved fast. By six a.m. on Thursday, I not only had a school uniform that fit me, but I also had a full complement of electronic widgets, all disguised to look like something they weren’t. Basically, I had two jobs at Shadow Falls. Well, three if you counted not getting expelled. I was to map out as much of the buildings and grounds as possible, and also install recording devices all around the academy, focusing on the staff offices and any areas off limits to students.
Nate had built bugs into everything—air fresheners, plug adaptors, lightbulbs, pens… I only hoped nobody checked my suitcase because they might wonder why I was carrying five wall clocks. Claiming I had a fetish for punctuality probably wouldn’t cut it. And then there were the three smoke alarms. He’d also designed a box of tricks to amplify the signals, and the fake forestry guys had hidden it in a pile of fake logs near the school’s entrance.
A shadow darkened my bedroom doorway. Rafael.
“So…” he said.
“So.”
We’d barely spoken on our run yesterday morning. I’d apologised—again—and he’d told me I’d been slow on the last mile and I needed to speed up. And then when we got back, he’d vanished while I was taking off my trainers. Perhaps I should have gone to find him, but I had too much to do. I’d needed to call Lenny to explain I’d be busy for the next few weeks, then meet with Rune and Beth for a briefing on boarding school etiquette.
“Be careful, Sky.”
“It’s a school, Rafael. Hundreds of people my age manage to survive there every day.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what? You think I’m going to melt down every other day? I’ll be staying in an all-girls dormitory. There are actual rules if we want to have a boy over to visit.” I’d studied the welcome pack yesterday evening. The school handbook ran to almost two hundred pages. “Bedroom doors have to remain open, and at least three feet must remain on the floor at all times.”
Rafael’s eyes darkened. “There’s plenty a man and a woman can do together with three feet on the floor.”
“For fuck’s sake! I’m not going to be doing any of it.”
“Good. We still have desensitisation to work on. But that wasn’t what I meant when I said to be careful, Sunshine. You’re going to be snooping around, and these aren’t nice people.”
“There’s literally a whole team who’ll be listening to my every move. They’ve rented a house three freaking miles away.”
“A lot could go wrong in the time it takes to drive three miles.”
“I’ll be careful, okay? I promise.”
Rafael ran a finger over the back of my neck, and I shivered. Which was better than having a panic attack, at least.
“I’m gonna hold you to that, mi pequeño rayo de sol.”
CHAPTER 20 - SKY
AT SEVEN THIRTY on that rainy Thursday morning, we pulled up outside Shadow Falls Academy for the second time. Today, I had on a perfectly tailored uniform, and the boot of the car was filled with three suitcases of clothes, toiletries, stationery, and assorted surveillance gear. If I needed more, one of my minions would deliver it to the gates within the hour.
Alaric helped me to get my luggage out. “Thanks for doing this, Sky. I know this isn’t your battle to fight.”
“Hey, at least I get a few weeks off combat training.”
The bruises might even have faded by the time I got back to Riverley. In the meantime, I’d just have to be careful around the showers. I didn’t want to face awkward questions about where the marks came from.
A lady with pink hair walked down the steps at the front of the main building and headed in our direction. A teacher? She didn’t look that old. Maybe thirty-five?
“You must be the Milburns? I’m Miss Potter. I teach in the art department, but I’m also one of the house leaders over at New Hall. It’s not often we have a student start late, so I’ll quickly show you to your room, and you can meet your roommate after today’s classes. Do your parents want to walk with us?”
“Why not?”
Every bit of surveillance counted. The faster Blackwood managed to put together an operation to find the stolen paintings, the faster I could get the hell out of there.
New Hall, it turned out, was something of a misnomer. According to the plaque over the front doors, it had been built in 1947. I could only guess that it was less old than the other buildings. Outside, I hugged my “parents” goodbye because it would have been weird not to. When I got to Alaric, I whispered, “Hurry up and do your stuff.”
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br /> “Rest assured, we’re trying.”
Then they were gone, and I was on my own. Well, this wasn’t quite what I’d envisaged when I moved to Virginia. On balance, I’d rather have been in rehab with Lenny. His group therapy sessions were probably easier than socio-emotional learning, whatever the hell that was. According to my schedule, I had a class on it every Wednesday afternoon. In all honesty, I’d rather have had a detention. The rest of the timetable was the stuff of nightmares—four eighty-minute classes per day, Monday through Saturday, with the final class each day being part of the school’s Afternoon Enrichment Program. Something sporty or arty or social, basically. And the first session each Monday was an assembly that everyone was expected to attend, usually with a guest speaker or a performance by a group of students.
Classes ran from eight o’clock until three, and most students signed up for club activities after that. Not me. That would be my snooping time.
Marigold had shown Beth and me around a different dorm when we came to visit, but New Hall was much the same. A bunch of bedrooms, each with two single beds, two desks, two chairs, two closets, and two corkboards. Basic but functional. Some of the doors were open, and I saw the girls had personalised their spaces with posters and keepsakes and… Oh, yuck. One of them had a duvet cover with Brock Keaton’s face on it. I suppressed a shudder and hurried past.
My room was at the back of the building with a view over the forest—kind of pretty, I had to admit. Downstairs, there was a communal sitting room with a kitchenette. There didn’t seem to be a stove, but that didn’t matter because we all ate our meals in the dining hall, which was in the east wing of the main building and resembled a scene from Harry Potter. Hmm. Was the art teacher a relative of the boy wizard?
“I’m afraid there’s no time to look around,” Miss Potter said. “You’ll need to grab your textbooks and pencil case. Which class do you have first?”
“Creative writing in room A7.”
Creative writing was just making stuff up, right? I could manage that. Especially since Emmy had seen my timetable and arranged to have Sapphire freaking Duvall on the other end of the phone. I used to buy her books from charity shops back in London. They’d given me hope that good men did exist, that one day I’d find a white knight who’d sweep me off my feet, but then I’d met Brock Keaton and I hadn’t read a romance novel since.
“All the ‘A’ rooms are over in the main building. I’ll show you the way.”
There was one wooden desk left, right at the front of the classroom, and all eyes followed me as I took my seat. Eleven others shared the class, eight girls and three boys. It felt weirdly intimate. On the rare occasions I’d been to school in England, there had been almost forty people in each lesson, three to a textbook. How would life have turned out if I’d attended a school like this for real? I might even have learned something. As it was, I made sure to film every corner of the room as Sapphire dictated my essay. She was funny. Every so often, she’d accidentally say something dirty, then gasp and tell me to “scratch that, scratch that.”
After creative writing, it was time for chemistry. Since I’d stupidly said I wanted to be a doctor, I’d been put down for biology, chemistry, and physics as well as drama, English, and maths. Or math, as the Americans called it because they couldn’t bloody spell. Plus there was “art enrichment,” which was the class that scared me the most. Nobody else could do the work for me, and the closest I’d got to painting was spraying graffiti tags all over Whitechapel. I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but Squelch, the de facto leader of that little gang, always had food and he was willing to share. But then the Keaton episode had happened, and the guy who’d scooped me out of the gutter that night ran a parkour club. They’d sort of adopted me, and I’d been only too happy to toss my spray cans straight into the nearest dumpster.
The science lab at Shadow Falls Academy was state of the art, filled with white benches and fume cupboards and gas burners and glass flasks. It was also in the centre of the main building, or A-block as people seemed to call it, and there I discovered a fatal flaw in our plan. Until I got to the door, I had the comforting chatter of the team back at Blackwood. Rune for the most part, but occasionally one of the others would chip in. Then I walked inside and…nothing.
Silence.
Ah, crap.
Every atom in me wanted to turn around and leave, but the entire class was staring at me, and the teacher too. Only pride and the thought of a three-hundred-grand payday made me keep going to the nearest empty space. Each bench had room for two people, and the other half was already occupied.
“Is this seat taken?”
The girl turned to me, and I felt my eyes widen. Dammit, Sky. Don’t stare. The girl was beautiful with smooth chestnut skin, but she had an odd white patch that sliced across her left cheek. Her hair was tied up in a topknot, and when she smiled, I saw she had braces. Proper train tracks, the kind I could never afford even with the NHS subsidy. I’d just learned to live with slightly wonky front teeth. Her glasses were metal-rimmed, much finer than my clear-lensed chunky-framed pair.
“No, it’s free.”
“Uh, I’m Sky. It’s my first day here.”
“Vanessa. It’s vitiligo. Don’t worry; you can’t catch it.”
“I didn’t…”
“Class, settle down,” said the teacher, a gnarly old guy whose lab coat came almost to his feet. “For the benefit of those just joining us, I’m Dr. Merritt, and today, we’re going to talk about the transition metals. Who can name those for me?”
A bunch of coloured boxes appeared on the SMART Board, and a distant memory told me it was the periodic table. Gases at the top, metals at the bottom, something like that?
Vanessa spoke first. “Manganese.”
Another voice piped up. “Palladium.”
Wasn’t that a theatre in London?
“Iron.”
“Platinum.”
“Gold.”
“Sky?” Who told Dr. Merritt my name? “Would you like to have a try?”
Not in the slightest. My mind went blank as I prayed for a signal to somehow wiggle its way through the wall, but my earpiece remained silent. Was Rune freaking out as much as me?
“Uh…”
“Sorry I’m late.”
Oh, thank goodness—an interruption. The newcomer looked as if he’d only just climbed out of bed, and he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair either. Or knot his tie. Or tuck his shirt in.
“Asher Martinez, if you were sorry, you wouldn’t be late every single time.”
Asher merely shrugged.
“Now that you’re here, perhaps you’d like to tell everyone the definition of a transition metal?”
“The ones in the middle part of the periodic table.”
Thank you.
“And can you name some?”
Asher turned to the back and flashed a smile. “Ladies, you want to help me out here?”
Before Dr. Merritt could cut in, four blondes at the back called what sounded like all of the answers, and the teacher let out a long sigh. I got the impression that this was the start of a typical day for Asher. But since he’d saved me from a world of embarrassment, I couldn’t complain.
Dr. Merritt tried to get us back on track. “For today’s practical, we’re going to compare the colour changes demonstrated by transition metal ions in solution. I’ll pass out instruction sheets and answer grids. Asher, you can turn around to work with Vanessa and Sky.”
“Great,” Vanessa muttered. “Asher’s a bum.”
Asher didn’t look like a bum. He looked like the sort of boy your mother warned you about. Not my mother, obviously, but most mothers. Messy dark-blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and a mouth that did bad, bad things. Such as talking in class.
“You’re new here?” he asked.
“Just arrived this morning.”
“Where from? You’re English?”
The teacher tutted. “Asher, this is a classroom, not a bar
.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
No, he wasn’t. Asher Martinez was boy-next-door meets juvie. The blondes at the back seemed to like that, though.
The teacher talked us through the experiment, but most of it went right over my head. Cobalt chloride, ammonium ferrous sulphate, sodium hydroxide, deionised water… The colours were pretty. Blues and greens and pinks and violets. Vanessa did most of the work, and I felt kind of guilty about that.
“Can one of you take notes if you’re not going to help?” she asked.
“Sure, I’ll do it.”
What was I meant to be writing?
I must’ve looked like a deer in headlights because Asher took pity on me. “Just write down what colour the stuff goes. Whether there’s a precipitate or whatever.”
A precipitate… That was lumps, right? I’d been to a couple of chemistry lessons about five years ago—they liked to start us on the hard stuff young in England—but those had in no way prepared me for this. I bumbled my way through the notes. Next time, I’d pretend I was sick if the lesson was in the same lab. Or Nate would have to find me an earpiece with a better signal.
At least I only had drama and PE left today. I stood a chance of surviving those, especially since Dan had promised to have a friend of hers coach me for the acting parts. I had no idea who he was, but he had a nice voice. Thanks to his advice, I made it through to lunch break, which allowed me enough time to gulp down an individual chicken pot pie—no mass-produced slop here—and get back to my room to change.
Except when I walked in, I found Vanessa standing there, staring at my suitcases.
“Uh, hi.”
“Guess I’ve got a new roommate, then.”
She turned and walked out.
I’d done my best to block my schooldays from my mind, but every interaction I had at Shadow Falls reminded me why I’d hated them. The cliques. The pressure. The sniping. The awkwardness. The feeling that I was dumber than everybody else.