“Okay,” I said, even as my heart sank low in my chest. I had a feeling that concern over my stressful week wasn’t as big a worry for Lady Elaine as allowing Eli and I the extra time together. I hoped I was wrong, but she had seemed to flinch when I said his name just now.
But my spirits rose a second later when I spotted my cell lying on top of the rolling tray table shoved in the far corner. I said a quick good-bye, eager for them to leave.
Finally, Deverell switched the lights off and closed the door behind him and Lady Elaine. I waited a couple of seconds to make sure no one doubled back and to allow my eyes time to adjust to the dim glow cast by the small emergency light next to the door. I slid from the bed, grabbed my phone off the tray, and then climbed back under the covers, being careful not to bump into Bellanax.
As I suspected, my phone was off. I hoped that the nurses had done it rather than the phone turning itself off by choice. This was a new phone, shiny and fast, but there was no telling how quickly it would succumb to the animation effect. My last cell, a temperamental ancient device that I had despised with the passion of a nuclear bomb, had been destroyed during the Lyonshold incident. It had nothing to do with the island sinking, and everything to do with Paul Kirkwood, who had rigged the phone to explode if anyone tried to access the hidden files he’d loaded onto it—files containing the names of secret Marrow supporters.
Only, the phone never should’ve exploded the way it had. Not unless Paul had been lying to me about it all along. Suspecting he had lied was the biggest reason I’d been dodging his e-mails. But now, it was time to read them.
First though, I needed to text Eli. Once the phone turned on and found a signal, several waiting message alerts appeared on the screen. I read the ones from Selene but didn’t reply. She would certainly be asleep. To Eli, I sent:
I’m okay. In the infirmary. Lots to talk about soon. I hate that I missed our session.
I pressed send, and then navigated to my e-mails. As before, more than a dozen unread messages waited in my in-box. I decided to start at the bottom and work my way up. But just as I clicked on the oldest message from Paul, my phone buzzed with an incoming text.
I’m coming to see you.
What???
I wrote back, frantically mistyping and relying on autocorrect.
Right now? You’ll get in trouble.
I’ll be okay. I want to see you. Just don’t scream when I get there and leave the light off. What room?
Giddy, I slid from the bed again and crept to the door. I pushed it open slowly, my hands trembling with a potent mix of fear and excitement. The corridor outside was as dim as my room, but I could just make out the number over the door.
Room 12
I typed to Eli as I climbed into the bed once more.
Got it. See you soon.
Be careful.
I leaned back, resting my head on the pillow while my heart stuttered against my rib cage. Eli was coming here. It was a huge risk, but if he pulled it off we would finally have some alone time together. Warmth spread through me at the thought.
Anxious, I tried to focus on Paul’s e-mails again, but it proved impossible. My eyes read the words, but the meaning got lost on the way to my brain. I was able to glean only the basics. He was sorry for what happened at Lyonshold, and he claimed not to be at fault for what happened with the phone. But he didn’t offer any explanations about it either. His e-mails seemed vague and cagey. They read like someone afraid they might get intercepted. Could someone be monitoring e-mails? I knew such things happened in the ordinary world with all that homeland security stuff, but my phone was using Arkwell’s wireless system. Could the magickind government be reading my e-mails? My text messages?
This last thought had me sitting up again in momentary panic. The magickind government was terrible with ordinary technologies. Paul, a computer genius good enough to be accepted at MIT, had proven that time and time again. But Detective Valentine was using DNA evidence against my mother. Perhaps things were changing.
With my mental state teetering between calm and freak-out, I set my phone on the bed beside Bellanax then forced myself to lie back and close my eyes. I doubted I would be able to sleep any, but pretending couldn’t hurt. Yet somehow, I must’ve drifted off, because the next thing I knew I heard the door into my room open. I peered around, groggy and disoriented for a second, until my eyes fell on the figure walking toward the bed.
“You made it,” I said, reaching up.
“Hi, Dusty.”
I sucked in a breath, panic bringing me fully awake. Not Eli. I opened my mouth and started to scream just as a hand fell over my lips, strangling the noise.
“Shhh, please don’t scream, Dusty. It’s me. It’s Paul.”
Thrashing now, I tried to pull out from his grip, but he was too strong. I felt Bellanax lying beside me, and I reached for the sword, ready to fight my way free.
Abruptly, the hand holding my mouth let go.
“Please don’t scream. I’m sorry I scared you.” He held out his hand and a light appeared in his palm, a faint glowing orb, casting just enough for me to see his face.
“Paul?” I said, my breath coming in quick pants. The voice sounded close to his, but the man standing before me wasn’t my ex-boyfriend. The nose was wrong, the shape of the forehead. And he wore a beard, long and scraggly. Recognition struck me. It was the creepy man from the Menagerie who’d stared at me that first day. He was still wearing the green work shirt.
“It’s me, Dusty. Here, I’ll prove it.” He set the orb on the bed, the little ball purely magical and not at risk of catching anything on fire. Then he reached up and unfastened the necklace he wore. It was strangely made, as rigid as a choker with irregularly shaped white beads braided into the hemp-like chain, but long enough that the large green gem at its center had been hidden beneath his shirt collar.
The moment he pulled it off, his face went blurry—the sight making my stomach roil—but then his features righted into something human again. The creepy bearded man became Paul Kirkwood.
I didn’t know if I wanted to hug him or hit him. “You scared me to death, and I can’t believe you’ve been at Arkwell all this time.”
“Sorry for the scare. I wasn’t thinking. But what time?” Paul said, the hint of a grin on his lips. “School’s only been back in session three days.”
I huffed. He was right, of course, but with everything going on it felt longer. Especially combined with how long it had been since I’d seen him last. “What are you doing here?” I said, finally overcoming my shock. Eli was on his way, and the last thing I wanted was for him to show up and find Paul standing over my bed.
“You never read my e-mails.” It came out an accusation draped in a matter-of-fact tone.
“How do you know that?”
Paul shrugged. “I put a read receipt on them.”
“Of course you did.” I folded my arms over my chest. I was fully dressed, but I felt naked with him in the room, vulnerable. But then I remembered that Bellanax was lying between us and that vulnerability vanished. “You’re lucky I didn’t stab you.” Too late I realized my blunder.
Paul arched an eyebrow. “So it’s true. You have The Will sword.”
“What … what are you talking about?”
“Don’t try to deny it.” He brushed back a strand of blond hair that had fallen into his eyes. He was wearing it long again, a ponytail at the base of his skull. “But when you’ve spent all summer being carted around by one magickind policemen after another, you hear rumors.”
My shock must’ve registered on my face. “Nobody is supposed to know I have it.”
“Don’t worry. It was mostly guesswork on my part.” He smiled, reminding me in a very visceral way just how handsome he was. “And I had inside information going in.”
Like what? I wanted to ask, but instead I cleared my throat. “Same old Paul. Always angling, aren’t you?”
A hurt expression crossed his face, and I re
gretted my hasty words, no matter that they were true. “I didn’t lie to you about the code on the cell phone, Dusty.”
“Then why did it explode? I saw your uncle put the code in correctly. There’s no reason it should’ve self-destructed. Not unless you had a time limit for the thing to be secured again.” The words came out easy, practiced. Mostly because they were. I’d imagined saying this to him a hundred times before.
Paul sighed. “You’re right. There was a timer on it.”
“Why did you lie about it?” I was furious that I’d let him trick me again.
“It wasn’t an intentional lie. I just … forgot to tell you.”
“Ha.” I kicked the mattress with the heel of my foot. “Well, wasn’t that convenient.”
Paul crossed his arms. I realized he was no longer wearing the green work shirt but a maroon tee with a MIT logo across the front. The clothes must’ve changed the same time as his face had. “It’s true,” he said. “I realized I forgot to tell you right after we said good-bye that day. We were down in the tunnels, in our old spot, remember?”
Against my sincere desire not to, I felt myself blush. Some of the canals dead-ended into reservoirs. There was one such reservoir where Paul and I had always met when we were dating, a secret place where we could have time together in private, unobserved. Exactly the kind of place that Eli and I needed right about now.
Thoughts of Eli chased away my blush. “Of course, I remember. I was there.”
“Yeah.” Paul started to fidget with the collar of his shirt. “Well, it was a little distracting being down there with you again after … after … everything. You can understand that, right?”
I reluctantly nodded.
“And when I gave you the code you didn’t try to open the data right then. If you had I would’ve remembered to tell you how to close it properly. And so—” He blew out a breath. “It’s gone now, destroyed forever. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that.”
I stared at him for several long seconds. The light orb still glowed, but it was starting to flicker, casting dancing shadows over his face. Reluctantly, I decided he was being sincere. Believing the alternative—that he’d intentionally not told me about the timer—felt beyond my ability to deal with at the moment. Besides, what did it matter? Like he said, the data was gone, and I had so many other things to worry about now.
“Okay,” I said, “apology accepted. But you’ve got to go.”
“Are you expecting someone?” He said it joking at first, but then understanding dawned on his face. “Eli.” The line of his lips went razor thin. “I’ll leave in a second, but I didn’t come here just to apologize. I’ve got info about your mother.”
My heart seemed to falter for a second, like a car stalling out then surging back to life. “What do you know?”
Paul met my gaze, his expression unwavering. “She didn’t kill my uncle.”
I held my breath, braced for whatever he would say next. It was me, I imagined him saying. Paul hated Titus Kirkwood. I didn’t have a single doubt that he would’ve killed him, given the chance. And deep down, I couldn’t really blame him after all the years of abuse he’d suffered at his uncle’s hands. No, I certainly wasn’t sorry Titus was dead, only that my mother was being blamed for it.
“She was there, on the ward,” Paul said, “At least I’m pretty sure it was her. But he was still alive when she left.”
My head spun with shock for a moment. “My mom was there?”
“Yeah, I think so. They were keeping me in the same ward as Titus at the time. For my protection, you know. The night he died, someone came onto the ward between the midnight and one o’clock guard check. I didn’t see who it was. The person put me under a binding spell.”
“Wait.” I raised my hand to my forehead. “If you didn’t see the person, then how do you know it was her?”
“The magic … it felt … well … a lot like yours.”
“Oh.” A blush warmed my skin. Magic did have characteristics unique to the person who wielded it, but recognizing them was tricky. It was the sort of thing that required a lot of familiarity with the magic, a kind of intimacy.
“Anyway,” Paul continued, a flush rising up his neck, “my uncle wasn’t killed until some time between the one and two o’clock guard check, long after I was free of the binding spell. When the one o’clock guard made his rounds, he talked to my uncle briefly. I heard Titus reply. The two o’clock guard is the one that found him dead.”
My hope rose, and I reached for Bellanax, wrapping my hand around the hilt as if for a holdfast. If my mom had visited the ward, then that might explain the DNA. It might even explain her guilt, too. “Did you see anyone else come onto the ward during that time?”
“No, but I might have fallen asleep.”
I bit my lip. “Did you tell anyone about what you saw?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t have any proof, for one thing, just a feeling. And I was trying to protect your mom. To protect you. I didn’t know what she was doing there, but I knew it would be trouble for her either way. And at the time the detective interviewed me, she wasn’t even a suspect yet.”
“Okay,” I said, grudgingly seeing his point. “But what about now? It was Detective Valentine, right? If you tell him he might let my mom go.”
Paul sighed. “It won’t work, Dusty. He wouldn’t believe me. I already lied once, and…”
“And what?”
“He knows how I feel about you. He would just think I was lying now to help you.”
I turned away from him, both in frustration and embarrassment. I didn’t know how to react. I wasn’t sure I even believed him. Paul was so hard to read and so easy to distrust. Mostly because my first inclination was always the opposite—I wanted to believe everything he said wholeheartedly. But that was a bad idea. Paul was a halfkind, like me, but instead of being part human, part Nightmare, he was part wizard, part siren. I knew firsthand how good he was at siren magic. Unlike Katarina, or even Selene, Paul was sly with his siren magic. He could mesmerize without you ever realizing.
Until it was too late.
“Anyway,” Paul said into the awkward silence. “I’m really sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it.”
“Maybe you can.” I bit my lip. Eli would be here soon, but this was too important not to pursue. “I need to get a hold of Valentine’s case file on the murder. The Dream Team is going to investigate.”
Paul nodded, a polite smile creasing his lips. “I figured. But I don’t see how I’m going to get it for you. I’m not supposed to wander far from the Menagerie. This is my witness protection cover.” He held up the necklace again, the green gem twinkling as it caught the light from the orb.
“What is it exactly?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.
“It’s a shape-change necklace. It allows me to change my appearance without the telltale signs of a normal glamour. No blurring around the edges and stuff.”
“It’s a good one,” I said. “I had no idea it was you in there. But I wasn’t suggesting you going to the Rush to get the files.”
“Then how?”
“Hacking Valentine’s computer. Think you can do it?”
Paul raised his hand to his face and rubbed his chin. He didn’t have a beard anymore, not without the shape-change necklace on, but there was a good amount of blond stubble. “I don’t know, Dusty. I’m on really thin ice in general. If I get caught it could mean jail time.”
I pressed my lips together, angry tears stinging my eyes. My mother was already in jail, and she was innocent. Unlike Paul. I took a breath and then blurted, “Valentine says they’ll execute her if she’s found guilty.”
Paul gaped. “You’re kidding. For killing my uncle? That doesn’t seem like justice.”
“Don’t joke about it, Paul,” I hissed. “Don’t you dare.”
He raised his hands as if in surrender. “Wasn’t joking. But all
right. I’ll do it. At least, I’ll give it a try. I can’t promise I’ll be able to get in. This Valentine guy knows his stuff better than any other magickind I’ve seen.”
“So I’ve noticed,” I said. Even still I felt light-headed with relief. “But thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means.”
“Like I said, no promises.” Paul hesitated. “And I’m going to need a couple of things from you.”
“Such as?”
“Computer access, mostly. I’m not allowed to connect to the network. I’m not even allowed to look at a computer for longer than a second without my guards stepping in.”
“You’re being guarded?” It was an all-too familiar scenario.
Paul shrugged. “Sure. Can you blame them? I’ve got two Will Guards that take turns watching me all day.”
“Huh.” I frowned. “Then how did you get away from them tonight?”
“With this.” Paul held up the necklace again. “I finally figured out how to change the glamour at will. As far as my guards know I can only shift into the Menagerie worker you saw before. The necklace defaults to that, but if I concentrate hard enough, I can change it to something else. It was enough to let me walk by them tonight without them even knowing it.”
“Wow,” I said, genuinely impressed. “That’s got to be handy.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “I was starting to go nuts not having any freedom.”
I smiled, utterly sympathetic. “But wait, if you’re not allowed computer access then how have you been e-mailing me all summer?”
“Cell phone. But Sheriff Brackenberry gave it to me, so you can bet it’s not clean.”
“No kidding.” That explained the dodgy tone in his e-mails. I was suddenly very glad that I never answered any of them.
“But as I was saying,” Paul continued. “I need your username and password. I could also use a good computer, and you’ll need to purchase and download some software. Do you have a laptop these days?”
I shook my head. “Just the eTab and my ancient desktop.”
“No good.”
I thought about it for a couple of seconds, frustrated to meet another roadblock so soon. There was no way I could get my hands on a new laptop. I didn’t have any money for it; what little savings I’d had before had taken a hit during my summer abroad. Eli didn’t have one either and neither did Selene.
The Nightmare Charade Page 11