by Sarina Dorie
“Tell me the truth, you insolent nincompoop, or I will dismember you myself,” Thatch growled.
I froze, afraid I had been caught by Thatch and was about to get in real trouble now.
He went on. “Is it really such a coincidence that you were dating Agnes Padilla and friends with Lisa Singer, and they both ended up dead?”
Confused, I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I tiptoed closer to the corner.
Someone managed to get out a raspy response. “I wasn’t dating Jorge or Abebe. Are you going to blame me for their deaths too? I have it on good authority, they found you with blood on your hands when Lisa’s body was found by—”
“You’re lying about what happened to Miss Lawrence today.” Thatch’s voice held an edge of warning.
It dawned on me who Thatch spoke with now. Julian hadn’t told me he’d dated one of the former art teachers. No wonder he hated Thatch if he thought the alchemy teacher was behind their deaths.
Julian’s voice came out a raspy hiss. “You’re lying about that book. I know it was you who broke into Jeb’s—” He choked.
No way! That was what I had suspected too.
I peeked around the corner. Without touching him, Thatch lifted Julian in a Darth Vader choke hold against the wall. Julian’s feet dangled above the ground, kicking frantically as he clawed at his neck.
Whoa, hello dark lord.
“Stop!” I said, rushing forward.
Thatch turned to me. He lowered his hand, and Julian fell to the ground. Julian stumbled to his knees and coughed.
Thatch’s eyes roved up and down my attire before settling on the remainder of muffin I’d squished in my panic. “I see someone is alive and well enough to be pillaging from the kitchen again.”
I hid the muffin behind my back.
“Clarissa! You’re all right!” Julian panted, doubled over with his hands on his knees. “Thank goodness. I was so worried.”
Thatch eyed Julian disdainfully. “How fortunate for you.” He inclined his head in a curt bow to me before slipping off into the shadows.
From what I’d just witnessed, I was further from understanding Thatch’s motivations than ever.
Khaba rounded the corner, whistling cheerfully. He eyed me with interest. “Wow, love the wild woman look. It would be perfect for riding unicorns. Did you know your mother tamed feral unicorns?”
I shrank under his scrutiny. Julian coughed. Just one more thing that made me like my mother.
“By the way, we’ve got another box of recycling for you to pick up in the office if you need more art paper. No magic lamp rubbing necessary,” Khaba said. “But you’d better get that recycling before Miss Bloodmire does. She claims she needs scratch paper.”
As much as I didn’t want Vega to get that paper, I hesitated. “Maybe I should change first. Jeb or Mrs. Keahi might think I look unprofessional.” I waved a hand at my attire.
“Have you seen what I wear, darling?” Khaba laughed. “In any case, Mrs. Keahi is on holiday this weekend, and Jeb won’t be back until dinner.”
I excused myself and ran off. The box of recycling was on Jeb’s desk. When I was coming out of the office, Balthasar Llewelyn was walking by in the hallway.
He jumped back. “Holy shit! Is this what teachers wear on weekends?”
“Only when she rides unicorns, dummy,” a girl I didn’t know said.
During dinner, wild unicorns were all my students wanted to talk about. After dinner, Vega endlessly complained about someone getting the recycling before her. I tried not to smile.
Now that we were seven and a half weeks into the school year, just over a week away from the end of first quarter, I’d gotten used to waking at the butt crack of dawn. I went to bed every night by ten and got up each morning at six.
In the days that followed my wild ride with the unicorns, I was stiff and ached. At night, I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable. I had just managed to fall asleep when someone pounded on my door at midnight.
“See who died,” Vega said, rolling over in her sleep.
I stumbled out of bed in the dark, stubbed my toe on the foot of her bed, and flung the door open.
“Miss Lawrence, Miss Bloodmire, you’ve got to come. Quick,” Julian said, his words coming out in a rush. My sleepy brain could hardly decipher what he was saying. “It’s the students. Some of them have left their beds. They’ve gone under the school to look for the answer keys.”
“Does the principal know?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find him in his private quarters, nor Mr. Khaba. Besides that, two of the students are young ladies. I thought it would be best to fetch you both to see to the girls. Miss Bloodmire?”
Vega lifted her hand and flashed the bird at him.
I threw a robe on over my pajamas and stepped into my slippers.
“Hurry. I found a secret passage they used.” He grabbed my hand and led me down the hallway.
I’d just gotten used to the twists and turns of the passages during daylight hours. At night with the curtains drawn and the only lights coming from an occasional sconce, I lost my sense of direction. We raced down the stairs. At the ground level floor, Julian lifted a tapestry of a knight battling a dragon on the wall. Under the textile, he revealed a dark passage. I ducked under. He held up his wand and lit the way.
“Be careful,” he said. “It’s rumored there are boobytraps in some of the secret passageways.”
“Who are the students?” I asked.
“Hailey Achilles and Balthasar Llewelyn. There was another student with them, but I couldn’t tell who.”
“How did you find out about their plan?”
“Stealth.” He pulled something out from underneath his cloak. It looked like a wad of plastic wrap until he shook it out and it disappeared from sight. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, lifting one arm in the air and then the other. His arms disappeared, then his head, and then his torso. His head appeared again, discombobulated from his chest. He reached behind him, and his head was gone again.
“The hoodie of invisibility.”
“Hmm,” I said. His legs were still visible. “Are you sure about this? Maybe they knew you were there, and it was just a joke they were playing on you.”
“I heard them plotting in the corridor outside the girl’s dormitory. They didn’t see me. I made sure of it.”
My brain was groggy with lack of sleep, but not so sleepy I couldn’t grasp his words. Blame it on the unicorns for putting the suspicion of potential depravity in my mind. “Wait, what were you doing at midnight outside the girl’s dorm?”
He lowered his voice. “I wasn’t at the girl’s dorm initially. I was in the dungeon, spying on Thatch. He’s been acting suspicious. While I was spying, I heard students, and I followed Balthasar to the girl’s dorm.”
Julian had accused Thatch of breaking into Jeb’s office—and possibly he had done so using my lockpick kit.
“Did you discover anything interesting about Thatch?” I asked.
A shriek down the hallway drew my attention. We both took off running toward the voice. It occurred to me that if we came face to face with some kind of savage beast that wanted to bite our faces off, I wasn’t armed with much. I hadn’t even grabbed my cell phone.
Julian tugged on my sleeve. I couldn’t see him with his invisibility hoodie other than his wand raised in the air illuminating the path. He ran faster than me, and I struggled to keep up. My slippers flopped noisily against the stone. I wished I had an invisibility hoodie. And longer legs.
“If we can catch the students who stole the answer keys, we’ll be heroes,” Julian said. “No one will ever turn away my help because I’m a mere history teacher.”
Oh boy. This went back to his rivalry with Thatch. It was hard to say who hated him more, Josie or Julian.
Julian’s light rounded a bend, and I followed a second behind him. I tripped over an uneven stone and collided into
a set of armor. Stone grated against stone, as though a door made of bricks was opening. The metal armor clanked and loudly echoed, but it didn’t fall over.
Unlike myself.
I climbed to my feet. The hallway was dark and silent. The air was cold. I didn’t see wand light anymore.
“Julian?” I called.
No answer came.
I glanced behind me. It was dark. A slight glow came from around the corner up ahead. A line of light shone from under a large wavering rectangle. I smoothed my hand over the surface. It felt like fabric. Another tapestry? I didn’t see the light from Julian’s wand down the hall, so that must have meant he’d gone under without me, though I didn’t understand why. I shifted the tapestry aside, following the glow of light from up ahead.
“Julian?” I whispered more quietly, not wanting to draw attention to myself in case this was the part of the school where corpses from centuries past were about to stalk me down the hallway.
The only sound was my labored breath.
The moldy hallway up ahead brightened, blue light shining in from what looked like windows. Smooth polished panels in the wall shimmered like quicksilver. On the other side of the first glass was someone’s bedroom, a figure curled up in the bed. From the peace pipe decorating the wall and the leather moccasins on the floor next to the window, I guessed this was Professor Bluehorse’s room. Her windowsill was open, moonlight spilling across the jagged edge of the plants in the window box. They kind of looked like strawberry plants. Only the leaves were longer and narrower. I squinted. Maybe that was marijuana.
The room was cast in a bluish light that reminded me of a computer screen lighting a dim room. I touched the surface, the window rippling like water. It felt cold and tingly, and my fingers passed through. My hand turned pale silver in the light.
I backed away and went to the next one. From the guillotine in the corner next to the desk and the vacant birdcage hanging from the ceiling, I recognized this as my room. Vega lay asleep in her bed. The perspective of the room came from the spot where the full-length mirror stood against the wall. The shape and size of the window was the same oval of the mirror. Everything was blue through the mirror, the true color of the room diffused by the light of this spying enchantment.
Vega didn’t stir as I watched her. A shiver stole down my spine at the idea anyone could spy on us this easily without getting caught. I remembered that time I’d been meditating at night and had thought I’d seen movement by the mirror. Surely, someone had been watching me. How many times since then had I looked in the mirror and not thought anything of it? What was this place, a spying hallway?
Mirror, mirror on the wall… .
More window mirrors lined the wall like those I’d seen so far. Most were ovals like my room’s, but some were rectangular. A child-sized ladder dangled from a small square that was level with my face, showing a view of the boy’s dorm. A young lady sat on one of the boy’s beds. They were making out in the dark.
I didn’t know who those students were, but I was going to report them to the dean of discipline. After I found my way out of here. Though, maybe it would be a little suspicious if I said I’d been spying on them in the boy’s dorm.
A few feet further down the passage I stopped when I saw Jeb in his office. He sat in an easy chair in the corner, a tumbler of amber fluid in his hand. Khaba lounged on the settee, feet kicked up on the table. Julian had said the principal hadn’t been in his bedroom. I could only guess he must have been in his office and not heard Julian’s knocking. Khaba’s voice was muffled, but I could mostly understand what he was saying.
I should have just walked through the mirror and told them about the students out of bed, stealing answer keys and making out, but I hesitated. I wondered if I was going to get in trouble for performing magic if I walked through a mirror. I was banned from magic.
“It has to be him,” Khaba said. “All the evidence suggests it. He’s the only one who’s been here long enough. Last year, the year before, and the year before that. These accidents are not coincidences. Someone has been murdering staff members for years and trying to sabotage our school. I think that person figured out Jorge Smith was snooping around on your behalf and killed him.”
Jeb shook his head. “It ain’t Felix Thatch who’s behind this. He’s loyal to the school and our mission. Why do you reckon he would play turncoat now?”
Guilt seized me that I was eavesdropping. Then again, this was good material. If someone had dirt on Thatch, I wanted to be the first to know.
“That’s what I’m saying. This isn’t anything new. You’ve let your pity for him get in the way of your judgement,” Khaba said. “I can only hope I’m incorrect.” He swished the ice around in his tumbler. “If you’re wrong about him, and he’s still working as an agent for the Raven Court, that puts all our students and staff at risk. Especially Miss Lawrence.”
I sucked in a breath and forced myself to breathe slowly, quietly, not to draw attention to myself. Could it be that Thatch still worked for the Raven Queen? I held my breath, afraid I might reveal myself.
Jeb looked up. “Lord have mercy! I smell what you’re steppin’ in. You don’t think he’s going to kidnap her and skedaddle over to the Raven Court, do you?”
“It’s a possibility. More likely, he’ll teach her dark arts and resurrect the demon her mother summoned all those years ago.”
“Khaba, darlin’, you hush up. Thatch weren’t never involved in none of that. He was a victim of a heinous crime. Loraline used him and his magic and left him for dead. It took him years to recover. He’s lucky she didn’t completely drain him and turn him into a Morty for good.”
My eyes widened. That’s what my biological mother had done? She’d summoned a demon and used Thatch’s magic to do so? He must have suspected I might let someone do the same to me. Or feared I would fall in her footsteps and use others, hence the reason he had wanted to drain me.
Khaba walked across the room and poured himself another drink, his back to me. “No, she didn’t completely drain him. She didn’t kill him. That’s why I’m suspicious.”
“You’re in a cantankerous mood tonight. Why do you got to be like this?” Jeb set his drink down. “Come over here, and make an old man’s wishes come true.”
I covered my mouth, stifling a gasp. He couldn’t be implying what I thought he was.
Khaba tsked. “I know how you are with your wishes. They’re going to take a lot of … friction.” He unbuttoned his shirt, facing Jeb. The lamp that had been inked between his shoulder blades was no longer there. He cleared his throat. “What do you know? My lamp seems to have migrated south today.”
Khaba unfastened his belt. I rushed away before I could get an eyeful of Brokeback Hogwarts. Khaba, I had always known about, but Jeb? He was gay? Not that there was anything wrong with that, but who would have thought?
I couldn’t help feeling a little miffed too. After all that business about not releasing sexual energies around the school for my benefit, making all the other teachers resent me, these two hypocrites were getting it on in Jeb’s office! I couldn’t even confront them about it without admitting I knew because I’d been eavesdropping. Nor could I interrupt and tell them about the students out of bed until I found a way out so I could knock on the door to his office.
At least Mrs. Keahi wouldn’t be guarding it for once. I didn’t doubt Jeb and Khaba would both be in foul moods when I did interrupt them, though.
Then again, if I caught the students myself and brought them to Jeb, I suspected the principal would forgive me for interrupting. Or better yet, if I caught the students and reasoned with them about the folly of their plans, I could make them see stealing answer keys wasn’t the way and that they should return it voluntarily. They might pass the test the Fae Council mandated they take by using the answer key, but they still wouldn’t have the skills they needed to survive in the real world.
They needed to study magic. I
could help them. I would be the good witch my mother had once been before she’d turned bad.
I looked through more mirrors, finding an empty room I suspected to be Julian’s from the portrait of himself hanging on the wall. I wondered if someone special had given it to him like the former art teacher he’d been close to. Julian wasn’t in his room, but I hadn’t expected he would be. I still didn’t know where he’d gone off to.
Josie was asleep in her room.
Another room held a canopy bed with burgundy curtains. No one slept there. On the walls were tasteful art of eighteenth century landscapes that reminded me of Rembrandt’s use of light and shadow. I peered closer at the oil paintings. The sheep in the meadow looked peaceful enough, but the dragon setting fire to the village in the background was a little morbid. As for the other painting of dappled unicorns running free in a forest goring a knight, well, that one was pretty dark too. A large unfinished painting leaned in the corner next to a trunk. In the painting, a skeleton reclined on a brocade couch. Thatch was the only other artist I knew of at the school, so I guessed it might have been his.
Everyone’s room seemed to be visible from this hallway, which was weird because all the staff rooms were spaced so far from each other and on different floors. I came to a mirror showing Thatch next.
He stood in the middle of a marble bathroom with Grecian columns behind him. His eyes were closed, and he muttered under his breath too quietly to hear through the barrier. He held his arm over a stone sink. Blood dripped from a razorblade. A thin stream trickled down his wrist.
Emo much? Why didn’t it surprise me he was a cutter?
On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t a cutter, and this was magic. It looked like blood magic or pain magic, not that I knew exactly what that was from the vague descriptions in books. It’s not like they explained how one did it. I just knew it was forbidden. He was as much of a hypocrite as the principal.
The next room held Pro Ro sitting in a circle of candles on a hardwood floor. He was awake too. I swear, Vega and I had to be the earliest to go to bed around this place. A skylight of stars shone over Pro Ro’s head as he chanted. I couldn’t tell what language he spoke. In the center of the circle where he sat, symbols had been written in chalk.