Holly sighed. “My roommate is on an anti-vampire kick now. She claims her father told them a student did it to become a nosferatu.”
Since Ben made the best pancakes, we put him on the task while the rest of us collected on the couch to exchange the little gossip we had.
“Someone told me similar. What I heard,” Radha said, “is that it was a nosferatu from the Most Wanted list who snuck onto the campus grounds and now every sentinel in North America is here seeking them.” She twisted a strand of hair around her finger and nervously chewed the inside of her cheek. “There’s never been a murder on PNRU grounds.”
“My parents spoke of bringing me back home for the semester,” Liadan admitted. “I told them I want to stay.”
I frowned. “After I talked with Gabriel about what we saw, mine called too. I thought they’d want me to come home, but they didn’t say anything about it. Just asked if I was all right.”
“Why can’t my parents be cool like yours?” Holly muttered. “They threatened to drive over and pick me up, but I guess the provost talked them out of it.”
Due to spending time in the campus medical center during the night, Pilar arrived after breakfast in the escort of an enormous bear shifter. Tendons stood out against his tree-trunk biceps like steel cables, and the shotgun he carried in his gloved hand seemed as small as a handgun by comparison.
Holy crap.
Once I tore my eyes away from him, I moved to Pilar’s side and slipped an arm around her shoulders.
“Remember, you may call if you need me,” the bear said. His deep, Russian-accented voice rumbled.
“Thank you, Ilya,” Pilar said.
Liadan shut the door behind Sentinel Ilya then hurried back to us.
Holly stared at the door after the shifter was gone. “I’m going to be the inappropriate one and say looking at him gives me all kinds of needs. Can we call him back yet?”
Liadan shushed her.
The blonde dropped her shoulders and sighed. “Sorry. Just wanted to lighten the mood. How are you, Pilar?”
“Tired. They asked me a million questions about what I saw and then wouldn’t allow me to leave the student infirmary.”
Liadan and I guided Pilar to the couch. Then my Irish friend hurried away to find Pilar’s favorite tea. “Are you okay now aside from being tired?” I asked. “What did you see?”
Pilar sank down at one end of the couch and drew her legs up beneath her. Ben peeked over from the kitchen counter, eyes shining with curiosity.
“I went to see Professor Gaspar about an assignment. I knocked, was called in, and the door opened. That’s when I saw her.”
“Her?”
“The vampire,” Pilar whispered. “Professor Gaspar was hunched over on the floor with… with blood on her face.”
Holly gasped.
“What? No, the professor wouldn’t hurt anyone,” I said in automatic defense.
“I saw it!” Pilar shrieked, immediately dropping her head and voice. “I’m sorry. I know you and Dedrik were… were close.”
Guilt flashed through me and I reached out, settling my hand over hers. “No, it’s my fault. I’m not calling you a liar, Pilar. I just… It’s so hard to believe one of our teachers could have done this. I’m so sorry you had to be the one to see it.”
“I still can’t believe it. I ran out of there scared to death, certain I would be next. The sentinels think she escaped out the window. She even took most of her artifacts with her.”
“What were the sentinels like?” Radha asked.
“Terrifying at first. They asked me the same thing over and over but in different ways. What did the vampire look like? What was she doing? What was she wearing? They couldn’t believe it was Gaspar either, but then Simon and Sebastian left to track her down.”
Liadan stepped over and pressed a mug into Pilar’s hands. “Drink, it’ll help calm you down. Do you want me to run you a bath?”
“No. I think I’d like to lie down for now.”
“All right. C’mon, I’ll tuck you in.”
Lia helped Pilar to her room while the rest of us mulled over everything we’d learned. Ben’s crinkled brow and flabbergasted expression matched the way I felt.
“Gaspar?” I mouthed once Pilar was gone.
“I guess you never really know someone, no matter how nice they seem,” Holly whispered.
Gabriel met me on the edge of the quad near the recreation center, dressed like he planned to knock over a gas station. And because I only knew crime from what I watched on the television and in movies, I wasn’t much better. I’d worn dark sweats, tucking all my hair beneath a matching black beanie.
“It was Professor Gaspar,” I whispered the moment I reached him. He looked down at me without surprise, his face solemn.
“I know. I overheard Sebastian saying they’d sought her for arrest but she evaded capture.”
I shivered. The wind cut right through my clothes. “So it really was her? I’d hoped Pilar was wrong.”
“The investigation is still ongoing.”
“Right. Investigations. Which is what we’re going to do.”
Gabriel’s gaze swept over me from head to toe. A moment passed before he tugged off my cap and tossed it aside. “You look a little less like you’re up to mischief now. Remind me to teach you how to dress for an op.”
“Oh, like you don’t look like a burglar too,” I snapped back while moving close enough to use his taller, broader body as a windbreak.
A big grin spread over his face. “The difference is I wear black every day while you always dress like a unicorn puked on you.”
“I do not.”
“Only at bedtime, right?” He winked.
Since I couldn’t punch him in his smug face if I wanted to learn some sentinel tricks, I scowled instead and shoved my hands in my pockets. “Will you just get on with this?”
“Fine, fine. No need to be impatient.” The smile dimmed to the somber expression I’d grown accustomed to receiving from him. Apparently Gabriel only had two moods—serious and arrogant. “Curfew’s on, but if they find us, we’ll have to lie about why we’re together.”
“I tricked you outside of the dorm to be your wicked seductress obviously.”
“Get serious.”
“I was being serious. For what other reason are a guy and a girl going to sneak out at night?”
“We’ll say your charge needed you for an emergency and you forgot to call it in. No one’s going to believe your excuse.”
The dire circumstances—a critical need for intel related to Gaspar and the school’s strange occurrences—tempered my desire to take offense. Thanks, dude. Really.
Leading the way, he moved off the lantern-lit path, stepping into the shaded grass. “Come on. There shouldn’t be anyone there but a couple stragglers and the janitors. You sure you wanna do this?”
“I’m positive. They’re hiding shit, and I wanna know what the hell was in that coffin. I want to know what the school isn’t telling all of us.”
“All right. Then you need to cloak us both, and we gotta stay upwind of the sentinels near the door. You smell kinda good and you’ll get us caught.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“What do I smell like?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “You shouldn’t wear perfumed lotions on a mission. You’re wearing more than usual tonight.”
“I’m not.” I scowled. “It’s just the way I naturally smell.” The persistent aroma of open meadows surrounded me, although it varied from fae to fae and some of my fortunate brethren hadn’t inherited the gene to always smell like a greenhouse.
“Well, learn to do something with that.”
“I am,” I hissed back at him. Pilar was supposed to teach me to mask it.
He brushed past me, but not before I saw the red flush in his cheeks. It had to be a trick of the light—the nonexistent light—because Gabriel Fujimoto never blushed.
Keeping
up with him, I crouched low and avoided the pools of silver-blue light cast by the campus lamps, keeping to the shadows while veiling us beneath my Prismatic Cloak. I’d never used it on two people before, and it hurt, creating a dull throb at the back of my mind.
“Each type of sentinel has his own strengths and weaknesses,” he whispered in my ear when we stopped beneath an oversized tree. “Vampires can smell blood and hear your pulse. The closer you are to one, the more likely he’ll bust you. You want to give them a wide berth no matter what.”
“The shifters can smell us.”
“Right. Stay upwind of them always. And mages like Simon have Detection spells to reveal auras in a nearby vicinity. But they have to be activated. A good sentinel always has one turned on. It’s a drain on their powers, but a necessary one.”
“How do I know who has one?”
“They all have one. A good rule of thumb with a mage is to stay behind him at all times. They don’t have extraordinary senses and rely on their spells, but if he’s paired with a wolf…”
I breathed in a few times in an effort to force my erratic pulse into a normal, sedate rhythm. It wanted to tap out the pace of a snare drum instead. “Right. So avoid all the sentries.”
Using the hedges as cover, we took the long way around the building and hunkered down beneath my Prismatic Cloak any time a sentinel wandered in the vicinity. A mage scoured the lawn near the front steps, and according to Gabriel, a raven perched on the eastern edge of the roof. I didn’t need to see him to believe he was there. Eventually we rounded our way to a side door after the vampire lurking nearby ventured off to investigate one of Gabriel’s illusions.
We found the door unlocked, a fortunate turn of luck since it was operated by a magnetic slider. Gabriel shut it behind us and we hid in the stairwell to devise our plan.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“If you want info, you wanna be in the provost’s wing. Her receptionist leaves at six each evening, and considering what just went down, I doubt Riordan is in her office either.”
“What about Gaspar’s office? Is that anywhere near the provost?”
“No, it’s one floor beneath her and a good thing. It’ll be under guard still since that’s where the murder took place.”
No one patrolled the stairwell, and the third floor east wing looked as empty and silent as a morgue.
“Jinx the lights,” Gabriel whispered.
As I concentrated on the glamour, little balls of energy raised from my palms and zipped toward the sconces on the walls. They went black, and the fluorescent fixtures above us flickered out. Under the cover of darkness, we crept down the hall and crouched outside the provost’s department.
“Crap, it’s locked.” I crouched down and peered at the hole, wondering what spell I had in my arsenal capable of unlocking it.
Gabriel snorted. “Didn’t expect us to encounter some locked doors?”
“Well, I did, but I just figured I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.”
“Move out of the way, kid.”
When I moved aside, Gabriel crouched down and popped the lock in under five seconds. He nudged the door open while I stared at him, but he provided no answers about his unusual skill. Or why he even had a pickset. Either it was magical or he had a shit-ton of practice, and even if it was the former, I doubted the school knew he had it in his possession on grounds.
He stepped into the room first, his body tensed and prepared to move. He inhaled a deep, testing sniff of the air like an animal scenting for danger. Then he glanced back at me.
“It’s safe, c’mon.”
Once we’d both hurried inside, Gabriel tugged the door shut behind us and we fanned out over the office. “You check the cabinets. I’ll look over here on the desk.”
The filing cabinet, like almost everything else in the office, radiated magic. I opened the drawer and it kept sliding out, further and further, a good five feet longer than was possible based on its size. Crap. I’d figured I’d have to look through maybe a hundred files, but this was closer to a thousand.
“We need to narrow our search,” Gabriel muttered. He abandoned the desk to help me.
“Okay, you focus on the cemetery, and I’ll look for the report on Dedrik’s death.”
With so many files, finding what we needed became an impossible feat. The folders had been sorted without rhyme or reason instead of alphabetical order. “Are you sure it’ll be in here?” I asked.
“You better hope so. There’s no way we’re getting into Riordan’s private office. In fact, stay away from her door because if you get knocked out of your shoes, I’m leaving you here and claiming I don’t know how the fuck you got in.”
I glowered at him and shut the drawer, prepared to test another.
Footsteps thudded in the hallway beyond the door. We both froze. Gabriel rushed away from the desk as I drew a Prismatic Cloak around myself and crawled beneath it. The knob jiggled then the lock turned.
Provost Riordan would find and suspend both of us. We’d be berated and kicked out of the school, doomed to a life as Talentless.
My pulse pounded, mouth went dry and palms clammy.
The janitor hurried through the room and into the secretary’s personal bathroom without a glance at his surroundings. Frozen with terror, I cowered in my hiding spot while listening to the streaming sound of a man pissing. He hadn’t even shut the door behind him.
“Ahhhhh.”
I didn’t realize I’d held my breath until I went lightheaded and the world around me blurred. The janitor washed his hands and left as quickly as he’d come in.
Once the door locked behind him, I eased out of hiding into an empty office space.
“Gabriel?” I whispered. Where the hell had he gone?
As I searched the room, sweeping my gaze from corner to corner, I saw no sign of him. There was nothing to see but the window, a row of chairs by the entrance, a bookshelf, the bathroom door, and a tall palm with a slender trunk and mass of bushy green leaves.
He’d bounced on me.
“Figures,” I muttered.
“What figures?” Gabriel asked from my direct left, melting out of whatever disguise he’d used to look like a damned tree.
I stumbled back from him with a hand to my heart.
“Pretty good, yeah?”
“You asshole,” I hissed between my teeth.
“What?”
“You scared the hell outta me.”
Instead of apologizing, he laughed at me and moved away. “We’ll have to work on your illusion detection.”
After sticking my tongue out at his back, I moved toward the desk and slid it open, only to notice a glimmer from the corner of my eye. During our initial search, a sheet of starlight parchment had gone unnoticed, partially concealed beneath a pile of stacked papers.
“Here. I think I found something.”
Gabriel edged up to my side and peered over my shoulder, so close I could smell his cologne. No, not his cologne. It was just that unusual shifter smell. It wasn’t offensive, but it was different, wild and wondrously masculine, like the deep forests after a glorious rainfall blended with musk and warm skin.
“I can’t read a word of that,” he muttered.
“Huh? Are your eyes bad?”
“No, it’s just a bunch of elegant lines and swirls. Which means it was definitely written by a fae from Tir na Nog. Only faeborn and high wizards can read it.”
I looked down at the report again. My friend saw gibberish, but I read perfectly legible script in beautiful penmanship. “Lucky for us I’m a fae.”
Since creating a light would no doubt summon a dozen sentinels to our location, I edged closer to the window and tilted the paper toward the moonlight. The ink glimmered gold and pink like the note I’d received with the necklace.
“Looks like Bachelor’s Grove is more than a local graveyard. The elders used it to hold a prisoner under the watch of a fae named Torcuil.”
“That’s
the cu sith who used to stand guard over the cemetery.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
Gabriel nodded. “He was a big dude, like even taller than me despite being fae. Had only one eye. He’d tell us all these war stories about the good old days and never treated us differently for being shifters, you know? He even went on the Wild Hunts with us a couple times last year.”
“Did he ever mention who he guarded?”
“Never. Maybe it’s in there. Keep reading, and just give me the highlights.”
Fae never did anything straightforward or simple. The formal language made my head hurt while I tried to filter out the fluff and get the actual pertinent information.
“Okay, here it is. Torcuil guarded the remains of Countess Mircalla Karnstein… Mircalla Karnstein.” Reading the words aloud sent a bone-deep chill coursing through my body, and all I could imagine was this hellacious ancient vampire rising from the grave.
Gabriel shivered. “Better known as Carmilla, niece of King Konstantin. She used to change her name a lot back in the day when preying on humans.”
“I know the name. I was always told she killed one of my grandmother Madalena’s charges a couple centuries ago. At least, that’s what I remember hearing once. I think Grandma and Queen Titania had her punished by the Sanguine Court.”
Gabriel whistled. “Bitch is holding a long-ass grudge then if she put those two statues on you for whatever happened back then.”
“Well, yeah. I only know a little. Like, supposedly Laura was a really talented mage. Like, one of those mages that gets their own faerie godmother.”
Despite his inability to read Ancient Fae, the raven lurked over my shoulder close enough for his shirt to brush against me. The warmth of him seeped through to my skin, a comfort I didn’t shy away from after the grim revelation. “What else does it say?”
“They believe Gaspar is working alongside her and leading this chapter of the Hidden Court. They think she set the attack up at the museum.”
“Gaspar is the one who assigned it as extra credit,” Gabriel murmured.
“Right. And you testified that you sensed a vampire there, remember? They don’t mention you by name in here, but have the statement you made to Ms. French.”
The Hidden Court Page 22