He had no choice but to go, his grip slipping from Ethan’s neck. Ethan’s feet hit the ground and he dropped, gasping and coughing.
I twisted and ripped again before letting go, forcefully directing the falling body to the grass. The ground came up too fast and my foot hit it wrong, sending me rolling. Ethan was already up, his wand out and pointed.
“What the hell are you kids doing?” Adam rose from the ground like a cage fighter ready to get even, juiced up with power and strength and grisly know-how. Whatever type of magical he was, he’d gotten those muscles from violence and experience.
Tingles of terror blazed out through my bloodstream, giving me the jitters like a triple espresso. I either needed to run or throw another punch— standing there chatting was not in my wheelhouse at the moment. Thankfully, Ethan had a better weapon at his disposal. Entitlement.
“You’d better have a damn good explanation for grabbing me,” he berated, his wand hand steady and his shoulders squared, an elite member of the magical society talking down to a lesser one, no matter their relative size. “We were walking around the building on our day off, perfectly within the rules.”
Adam’s weight shifted, a small movement. Almost imperceptible. It spoke volumes.
“Let’s go.” I grabbed Ethan’s arm urgently and tugged him back the way we’d come. Adam didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d bow down to arrogant pricks, no matter how influential. This pause was the best we’d get.
“No.” Ethan dug in his heels, his chin raised and his indignation firing on all cylinders. “I want to hear an explanation.”
Adam stared him down, fire glimmering in his eyes.
“Come on.” I yanked Ethan again. “We can go to that other spot.”
“Your superiors will be hearing about this,” Ethan said, finally allowing me to pull him away.
“Best watch yourself,” I heard, low and rough and spreading shivers up my spine. Adam’s gaze had shifted to me, piercing, locking me in so that I couldn’t look away. “Your number is up, and your protection is dead. Best thing you can do is run. Get out of the trials and don’t come back. Run.”
Pain welled up at his mention of Rory’s death. Tears clouded my vision. A laugh bubbled up, out of nowhere.
“Then what?” I asked, rage quickly replacing the sorrow. I shook with it. “Run and hide? Cower in the shadows?” I spat, something I despised, but it really got the point across. “That’s not my style.”
I turned and shoved Ethan in front of me.
“Heed my warning,” Adam said, the words trailing after me like tin cans.
“Make yourself useful, and catch whoever is stealing kids and threatening my life, or do your reflexes only work when teenagers are sneaking after you?”
Silence stretched as we distanced ourselves from Adam. I didn’t look back.
Finally, faintly, delivered directly to my ear, I heard, “I’m working on the kidnapping. There’s nothing I can do about the other. It’s beyond me, now.”
I stopped and spun, taken aback. Emptiness greeted me.
“I hate this place. Everyone always disappears,” I said, wanting to run back. To chase Adam around the corner and beg for answers.
“Come on.” Ethan plucked at my sleeve. “We have to let him go for now and pick him up somewhere else. He probably smelled your arousal earlier. That’s how he knew we were around.”
“Gross. I don’t even have a comeback, I’m too busy trying not to gag.”
He huffed out a laugh. “Nice way to step up back there. Perfect. I couldn’t have coached you better. You might not be completely useless, for a Shade.”
“Way to step up?”
“Pulling me away before I had to threaten something I might not be able to deliver. I can let the director know what he did, easy. Getting him fired, on the other hand…”
It dawned on me what he was saying, and surprise flitted through me. “You were playing a part,” I said with a grin. “I wondered how one person could be so entitled. I was thinking about getting you a cape.”
“I’m always playing a part. How do you think my family maintains status? But I might have overdone it a bit that time. That guy…”
Another shiver crawled up my spine. I nodded, unable to form words. That guy was more of a feeling than something to be explained.
“What is he?” I asked, still feeling the intuition tugging at me.
“Shade, obviously.”
“No, couldn’t be. There’s no way he could be an assassin. He’s much too loud.” I pointed toward the trees, feeling the need to head back there. To follow the trail I should’ve followed the other day instead of dallying with Colt and getting caught by Rory. To sit down and cry until I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s not just assassins in the House of Shade.” He huffed. “All of them are low-level grunts, as far as magical society goes, but still highly useful in situations the civilized world doesn’t like to speak of. Some of them specialize in getting information out of people the hard way, some of them are poison masters, some excellent thieves, and some, like him, are adept bodyguards, able to read people and threats. The good ones can mask their whereabouts, like a shadow. The great ones can mask themselves and others. Often, a Shade is brought in to protect someone against a fellow Shade.”
I slowed as we neared the trees I’d hidden in the other night. My mind shifted to Rory. To the way he’d covered me with his body, slowed my heart rate, and masked us from danger. Saved us. Me.
“Why would a Shade go against their own people?”
He shrugged. “Why would a magical person go against another magical person? A human against a human? The world is complex, the magical world more complex.”
“Still, why do you think Adam’s playing detective? Is he actually working for the director or himself?” I walked around the trees and surveyed the direction in which Gregory had been carried off.
“No way to know for sure. But did you see what he had with him?” Ethan asked. “He’d set it next to the fence. A memory ball.”
“What’s that?”
He scoffed. “Under what crusty rock were you living before you came here?”
And just like that, helpful Ethan vanished, and douche Ethan resurfaced. An act, my butt.
“A memory ball is a magical photo album, but instead of pictures, it records feelings, sounds, smells, images… It’s the whole memory, not just a flat version of it.”
“He’s probably planning to go through it for clues. If she’s gone, maybe she took a…memory selfie right before it happened.”
“Do you realize how dumb you sound?” He shook his head, waiting while I took in the landscape. “Besides, if she has disappeared, he’ll never get it open.”
This side of the mansion had more trees with the woods creeping up within fifty yards of the building. A few benches dotted the way, a couple horseshoe pits sat off to the side, and a green wooden shed with the door closed pushed up against the wall down the way.
Ethan’s last words filtered in through my head, taking a second to register.
“How do they open?”
“With a matching retina. Memory balls are connected to the user. He’d need her eyeball.”
I turned to him slowly, my own eyes widening. “Can you magically bypass it?”
“Only if she died, and only then if you were the registered next of kin. Memory balls are personal. Like phones.”
I clutched his arm. “Maybe he has her eyeball.”
“I thought about that. We can work back around to him. Finding him again shouldn’t be a problem. He’s a blunt instrument. No wonder the director is always one or more steps behind.”
Once again, I had to ask, “Why? What do you mean?”
“He’s a bodyguard, not a detective. It’s like giving a garbage man a chemistry set and saying, ‘here, make…’” His example tapered off.
“Do you know how dumb you sound right now?” I asked.
He scowled.
I started forward, not really knowing where I was going, just feeling things out. I wasn’t a detective, either, but when the fox got into the henhouse, you found the threat, or you went hungry. I’d spent my whole life rooting out threats, large and small. That wasn’t about to change now.
Windows lined this side of the mansion, all four floors of it.
“Screaming would draw people to the windows.” I pointed up at them, imagining the darkness pressing in from all sides as the guys jogged the kicking and yelling Gregory through the lane of grass. Sound would bounce off those glass panes, and it hadn’t been quite late enough for the attack to go unnoticed.
But then, I’d only heard the two shouts. Was that because Rory had knocked me down and dragged me into the trees? Or maybe they’d knocked Gregory out?
I scanned the tree line across the expanse of small clearing.
Or could it be because they were nearly at their destination?
“Come on,” I said, jogging left.
Trees welcomed us into their shade, the air cooling immediately and the sun’s potency reducing down to a warm glow.
“Why not have a place near campus?” I said to myself, feeling excitement unfurl in my gut. I was close, I could tell. My intuition was practically vibrating through me. “You can take kids at your leisure. Draw them out to chat, then snatch them when everyone else is headed back to their dorms. If all went to plan, no one would be the wiser.”
“Do you need me here for this conversation?” Ethan asked, trailing behind me with his wand out. I was thankful he was still taking this seriously.
“No. You’re no detective, either. Not without your cheat sheets, at any rate.” I scanned the shaded ground, rocks pounded into the soft earth. I held up a finger and backtracked, hitting the tree line again and hooking my arm into his.
“It’s back on, then?” Ethan asked, but I knew he didn’t really mean it. His grip was too tight on his wand. His body too tense. He might ignore it, but he had intuition, too, and it was telling him exactly what mine was telling me.
Here. Somewhere here!
“Lovers’ stroll,” I murmured, scanning the ground as we walked, trying not to make it obvious. Three guys running through, struggling, carrying a load of any kind, would leave prints, and since there was no rain, those prints weren’t getting naturally erased. Would they think to erase them themselves? Or were they too cocky for that? “Bingo.”
Boot prints, their tread obvious. Deep marks scored the soft dirt on the side of one print, indicating the person who’d left it had held something heavy. Then on the other side, the same thing, the weight shifting. Four times they would have brought someone here. Heath. Gregory. Lisa. Mason.
I let Ethan go and followed, pointing at a disturbance in the leaves, a small drag mark, and then the continuing tracks. “They dropped him, picked him up, and kept running. Slower, though. See how the tracks change?”
“You sure you don’t change into an animal?”
“Only a she-devil in the throes of passion.” I frowned at myself. “Stop putting dirty thoughts in my head.”
Broken twigs littered the ground in one place and the tracks lightened before disappearing totally.
So someone did care enough to try and conceal where they’d gone.
“They turned through here. Through these…” A broken branch led the way. Then another. At a dead end, I looked around, momentarily lost. It was Ethan who spotted it.
“Is that stone?” He pointed through a narrow gap between two huge trunks, each fighting for space in the crowded forest.
A surge of adrenaline flooded me. My breathing sped up.
“Yup.” I jogged around the tree, feeling no warning and therefore not being as careful as I should have been.
My breath left me as I fell. Blackness enveloped me. Ethan’s fingers curled around my wrist, halting my descent with a jerk, popping my back. His strong hand pinched the skin of my wrist, and my feet dangled in the empty air.
“Help.” It was barely more than a whisper. Blackness pulsed all around me.
Chapter 10
“This is a glamour, you idiot,” he said through the strain of holding me. A second hand joined the first. All that working out served a purpose after all—he hauled me up out of the black nothingness I’d fallen into.
I clutched at the forest floor as soon as I could reach it, breathing heavily, my toes tingling. I hadn’t gotten one flare of warning. Not a twinge of uncertainty. Was it only living things that alerted my internal warning system?
“There are stairs.” Ethan, out of breath, grabbed me by the waistband of my sweats and yanked me the rest of the way up.
I slid onto my stomach and face, reaching back to shove his hand away from my half-exposed butt cheeks, but he’d already let go, stood, and flicked his wand. A few words and the ground cover cleared away, revealing a large hole in a solid mass of black stone. On the side, stairs descended into the cavern of unnatural darkness below.
“That’s dangerous,” I said, out of breath. “Someone could just fall down that.”
“Yeah. Maybe one of the missing students did.” Ethan jerked his head to get me moving. His tone suggested he didn’t believe his own words any more than I did. He descended the stairs, wand out. Clearly, he wasn’t going to make me go first, this time.
Halfway down, the darkness clung to his legs, then crawled up his body, so thick it looked like a physical thing. When it reached his waist, he lifted his arms, as though inching into cold water. He shivered, completing the image.
“Can’t you dispel that darkness?” I whispered, following him down.
“I don’t know how. I’ve had tutors to give me an edge for the academy, but I’m still freshman level, maybe sophomore at best. This is beyond me. I don’t know how they did it.”
“You need to talk to your dad about cheating a little more thoroughly,” I said as I closed the distance between us and put my hand on his shoulder. If this murky shadow blinded us, I didn’t want to get separated.
“Apparently so,” he said, and I didn’t think he was kidding.
The inky fingers reached his chest, then inched onto his neck. Right behind him, it slid over my breasts, dousing me with a chill that couldn’t be explained by a mere change in altitude.
“Here we go,” Ethan said softly as the darkness slid over his full lips. “Gregory better be worth—”
The shadow cut off his volume, or maybe stole his words. I dug my fingers into his muscled shoulder and pushed up close, my front glued to his back. Black slid up my nose and then stole my sight.
“Oh God,” I said, clutching Ethan with two hands now, both of us stopped dead still, the warmth between us the only thing grounding me. I didn’t hear the words I’d just uttered. I was either deaf or mute, and we were both trapped in our fear of the unknown.
I came to first, fighting through the paralysis. Fingers relaxing on one hand, I shoved him with the other, forcing him to move forward. He staggered, clearly missed a step, and fell, yanked from my grip. My heel hit the step I’d been steering him toward, and I careened forward.
His body hard but thankfully not bony, a prone Ethan caught my fall.
“Oomph,” I grunted, and thankfully heard the noise. He groaned and I rolled off, allowing him to sit up. Blood dripped from his nose. The ground wasn’t as forgiving as the backside of his body had been.
We’d reached the bottom.
Darkness pressed in around us, but it was the kind caused by an absence of sunlight, brightened only by a small glow from a distant torch flickering from its bracket on the stone wall. A narrow corridor into the earth led away from us and a funky smell tickled my nose—stagnant water, mildew, and gym socks, if I had to guess. I leaned closer to Ethan to inhale his pleasant-smelling cologne and dispel the stink of the place.
“Whatever this place is, it isn’t open to students,” Ethan whispered, wiping his nose and standing slowly. “They wouldn’t have hidden it so well if it were.”
“Thank you, Professor, for your fantastic insight.” I moved around him, peering down the long corridor and spying three more flickering torches perched against the wall, two on the left, and one on the right. Green lined the cracks of the old stone, pock-marked and dingy, which looked like it predated the mansion. Who’d built this place, and why? “Shall we?”
“I don’t think winning the trials is worth all this,” Ethan murmured under his breath, but he started forward anyway, his wand slightly shaking. Entitlement wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good down here and we both knew it.
“The director must know this place exists,” I said. “It’s old—really old—and it wasn’t hard to find.”
“It wasn’t hard to find for you,” he replied as we inched down the long corridor. The dank surroundings seeped into my bones, sending a chill down my spine. “You’ve already set a record at the school. You’re the first female to win three trials, and the second person to do so in history.”
“We all won.”
“You’re the driving force. I won’t admit it in public because—”
“Your reputation, yeah.” I rolled my eyes.
“What everyone has said is true—you’ve brought us together as a unit. Even with my cheat sheets, I wouldn’t have been able to get through some of those challenges. And you would’ve knocked out four, not three, if it wasn’t for that ambush yesterday, which was...”
His words died away.
“What did your father really say about it? Not what you told everyone in public, but what he really thinks?” I finally asked as a gap in the stone came into view on the right, draped in fuzzy lines of deep shadow. A familiar warning vibrated through my body, slowing my forward progress.
“He’s looking into it. No one knows who is behind it, which usually points to one person.”
“Who?”
He made an exasperated sound. “You really don’t know anything about this world, do you? We’ll just say, a very bad dude.”
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