“That’s weird.” I looked down and noticed the burn kit tucked beneath Paul’s arm. “But I’ve got to get back to class.”
“Right.” Paul handed over the kit. “Before you go, I’ve got an idea on how we can investigate Corvus.”
I glanced at the door, getting nervous about my long absence. “How?”
“Well, neither you nor Eli are going to get away with a lot of sneaking around this year, not with the Will Guard tailing your every move.”
I scowled, my hands tightening into fists. The two flash drives pressed against my palm. He was right about that. The Will Guard had dogged us every step, from our evening homework sessions to our Dream Team meetings in the library.
“What if I can get you a shape-change necklace like mine?” Paul said.
My mouth fell open. A hundred questions darted through my mind, but I couldn’t seem to snatch one long enough to ask it.
“Eli won’t like it, I know,” Paul pressed on. “But I think it’s our best shot. I can only get my hands on one, but I don’t want to give it to him. It wouldn’t work. He doesn’t trust me enough, and investigating Corvus is going to be a two-man job.”
“Why a two-man job?” I asked. “All it takes is a key to get into his office, and I know how to get it.” At least, I hoped I did. Last year I’d been able to convince the school janitor, Mr. Culpepper, to let Eli and me in. I’d spotted Culpepper once or twice so far this year, and each time he’d cast me a very faint, hardly there smile. But for Culpepper that was practically a hug.
“I’m not talking about just his office,” Paul said. “We need to break into his home. And get this, it’s off campus.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. Pretty much every other teacher lives on campus, but not Corvus. He’s renting a house off Canal Street.”
“Weird.”
“You mean suspicious.”
I frowned.
An exasperated look crossed Paul’s face. “Don’t you see? By having a house off campus, there’s no way of tracing his activity that night. Or any other night for that matter. Every vehicle leaving campus and coming onto it gets recorded, standard security. But he would’ve left Arkwell at like five that day and could’ve gone anywhere.”
I slowly nodded, catching on. “So if he did live on campus, the police could’ve figured out when he left and came back, but not in this case.”
“Right,” Paul said. “It gives him a lot of anonymity. So long as he comes and goes about the same time each day, nobody would question it.” He hesitated then blew out a breath. “Marrow did the same thing when he was teaching here.”
I winced at the name, and even more at the reminder that Paul had once been Marrow’s supporter. The enormity of what he’d known and had let happen struck me anew, and I shook my head. “I don’t know, Paul. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Oh.” Hurt flashed across his face before he hid it behind a falsely pleasant smile. “I understand. Just let me know. I’m still going to get it. If you decide you’re in, we’ll need to take some time for you to practice wearing it. It’s hard to be someone else at first. You don’t have your private lessons with Mr. Deverell this week, right?”
“Right,” I said automatically. Deverell had been out sick since Tuesday. “How do you know about my lessons with Deverell?”
“You mentioned it to Eli the other day. I overheard.” Paul smiled again, this time it wasn’t false. “I promise I’m not spying on you if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It was, but I wasn’t about to admit it now. “Okay, but so what about my lessons?”
“If he’s still out tomorrow, we can meet up and I’ll show you how to use it,” Paul said.
I nodded. It really was tempting. Even if I didn’t go snooping Corvus’s off-campus house with Paul, I still could use the necklace. It would make a lot of things a whole lot easier—like secretly meeting up with Eli.
I exhaled, glanced at the clock, and nearly shrieked. “I’ve got to go. I’ll think about it. Probably yes, but I’ll text you for sure.”
“All right,” Paul said, and I could detect the hopeful note in his voice.
Its presence gave me pause. I stopped in the doorway and turned around, narrowing my eyes at him. “Why are you being so helpful with all of this? I mean, if you get caught, it’ll be big trouble, right?”
“Yes.” His expression turned grave for a moment, then he shook it off. “But it’s worth the risk.”
“Why?” I pressed, eyes still narrowed.
He glanced away a moment, then met my expression head on. “Because I care about you, Dusty. And I know how hard it will be on you if your mom is found guilty. I’ll do whatever I can to protect you from that.”
I swallowed, a cocktail of sudden unnamable emotions churning in my stomach. I turned and left the classroom without replying.
* * *
I didn’t tell Eli at lunch about Paul’s offer to get me a shape-change necklace. I decided to wait until I’d made up my mind what to do.
“Did you get it?” Eli said as soon as he arrived at the table.
I tapped my pocket. “Flash drive.”
“Good. We need to dive into it right away.”
I nodded. “I’m going to go through it while you’re at gladiator training. Deverell’s out again today.”
“Oh.” Eli’s look was almost comically disappointed, like a puppy being put in its cage for a nap.
“You don’t mind, do you?” I said. “I’ve come to the last two, and you’re doing great.”
He grinned. It was a true enough statement. He certainly wasn’t the best player out there, but he wasn’t the worst either. And considering how much less time and experience he had compared to the others, that was quite an accomplishment. “I don’t mind you not being there,” he said. “I just wish I could skip and go through it with you.”
I smiled, trying not to ignore my own disappointment that he wasn’t going to skip. But tryouts were coming a week from Saturday, and I knew he was too anxious to ease off now.
It seemed Lance was getting anxious, too, because he asked Selene not to come to practice tonight either. “You make me distracted,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead.
She rolled her eyes. “How are you going to handle it when I try out for the team then?”
Lance clucked his tongue. “Ha, ha. Very funny.”
Selene gave him a look to cut ice. I stared at her, brow furrowed. She wasn’t joking. I knew her well enough to see that. Lance clearly didn’t—or was choosing willful ignorance—as he planted another kiss on her forehead. “See you at dinner.”
I said good-bye to Eli and then made plans to meet up with Selene after classes in room 013. She’d offered to help me go through Valentine’s files even before Lance asked her not to come.
“So,” I said as we rounded the corner into the room later that day, “you’re trying out for the team?” The question had been bugging me since lunch. I couldn’t quite accept that she really meant it.
She rolled her shoulders, not meeting my eyes. Mostly this was because Buster had commanded her attention the moment we entered.
I set my backpack on one of the desks. “Why are you? You’ve never expressed any interest in the team before.”
Selene sat down on Buster and crossed one leg over the other. “Actually, I’ve always wanted to play. I just wasn’t motivated to go through with it until I realized there wasn’t going to be a single girl on the team this year.”
I beamed at her. “You’re my hero.”
“Heroine,” she corrected me. “And you should try out, too. We’ll kill them.”
I snorted. “I’m not interested in public ridicule and disaster, thank you.” I pulled out Paul’s flash drive from my pocket and plugged it into the computer.
“I think you’re just afraid you might be great at it,” Selene said, rolling Buster over to get a better look at the screen.
I sat down and
began pulling off some of the files, saving them to the desktop for the time being. Once done, I ejected the flash drive and moved to another computer while Selene took my place behind the first one.
Fortunately, the files on the drive were labeled by subject and not something less convenient like date. I’d given Selene a couple of folders with names I didn’t recognize but could guess had been suspects at one point. The three folders I was most interested in, I kept for myself: Moira Everhart, Ian Corvus, and Titus Kirkwood.
I started with the latter one, not quite ready to face the stuff on the other two just yet. In minutes I discovered that Titus had indeed been killed by ordinary means. According to the autopsy report, he died from a single stab wound to the chest that pierced his heart. Death had been instantaneous. An execution, according to Valentine’s note. The crime scene technicians estimated the knife to be six inches in length with a serrated blade made from a human femur bone.
I read this detail three times before I was finally able to accept it as real. It appeared a small piece of the blade had broken off when the killer wrenched it free of Titus’s rib cage. Shivering at the idea of how much it would’ve hurt and how hard it would’ve been to do, I resisted an impulse to de-glamour Bellanax and examine the hilt. It too was made of bone, but it was polished smooth, comfortable to touch and hold. But then again I could easily imagine someone carving the material into something sharp.
A knife with a bone blade. My mother owned no such thing. Not that I had ever seen. And how would she even get one? Surely something made from a human femur bone wasn’t an object you could order off eBay. It sounded like a black magic item. She could’ve gotten it from Culpepper. The realization increased the chill spreading over my skin. Especially when I read Valentine’s note below the knife’s description—finding it is crucial.
Yes it was. The smoking gun. It would be the key to getting my mom off this. Assuming, that was, Valentine hadn’t already found it. It was a guarantee he hadn’t told me everything about the case against her in our short interview.
With dread now pulsing in my temples, I opened my mother’s file and began to scan through it. In seconds I came across the details of her alibi. Like Mr. Corvus she claimed to have been home all night—watching my unconscious daughter, the transcript read. I could almost hear her saying it, face drawn in anger, teeth flashing. My mom was fierce on any given day, but doubly so when it came to me.
I swallowed down guilt. It was my fault she didn’t have an alibi. If only I’d been awake by then. But it didn’t matter now. What did was the presence of her DNA on Titus’s body. How did it get there? I scanned the rest of the transcript and saw that Valentine had asked the same question.
MOIRA: How should I know? Perhaps those ordinaries who ran the test are idiots and made a mistake. Or perhaps you are the idiot who collected it wrong. Or maybe I just make an easy target for the real killer.
VALENTINE: There’s no reason to be hostile. This is just an interview.
MOIRA: The hell it is. This is a witch hunt.
I winced as I read it. My mom was usually more clever than this, less prone to emotional outbursts. Beneath the last line of dialogue, Valentine had written a note about Moira’s “visible agitation” and her “clearly spiking guilt.”
Fighting back a growing sense of despair, I scanned the rest of the files until I came to an inventory of the “items of note” the police had collected from my mother’s house. The knife wasn’t there.
Satisfied at least by a small degree, I clicked on Mr. Corvus’s folder and glimpsed the contents. Paul had been right about the skimpy background check. Actually, the whole thing was skimpy. Aside from transcripts of the one interview, there was little else in there. That was, until I noticed the part of the background check that listed “Distinguishing Physical Characteristics.” The missing eye was mentioned, of course, as well as a tree tattoo on his right shoulder. That was a weird idea—a teacher having a tattoo, especially one as old as Mr. Corvus.
But the final characteristics gave me pause and set my teeth on edge. Corvus had a scar over his breastbone that had been “made by a brand” according to the note. A brand? At first, I couldn’t make sense of it, but then I clicked on a link to a photo and realized they were talking about a brand like the kind used to mark livestock. The picture showed a man’s bare chest. On it was a puckered, red scar shaped like the Borromean rings.
Once again those strange words he’d made me translate came to me—Only the blood of the twelve can undo the circle. Was it related to the Borromean rings? They’d been pictured on the same page.
I scanned the rest of the file, looking for some clarifying remark, something to explain why a man would willingly brand himself with a hot iron. Unless it was unwilling. I shuddered.
But the file contained nothing else of note. And I realized that despite Corvus’s lack of a verifiable alibi, Valentine hadn’t gone through his house the way he had my mother’s.
Which meant Paul was right—we needed to go through it.
“What’s wrong, Dusty?” Selene called from the other computer.
I turned toward her, running my fingers through the loose hair of my ponytail, yanking at the snags just to keep my hands occupied while my mind churned. “Paul thinks Corvus is responsible, and I’m starting to agree with him.” I motioned toward my computer screen, and then filled her in on Corvus’s nonexistent alibi, the house off campus, and finally Paul’s offer of the shape-change necklace.
Silence descended as I finished speaking. Selene didn’t react outwardly at all while she processed everything I’d just told her. I resisted the urge to break that silence as long as I could—about ten seconds.
“What do you think? Should I do it? Eli will freak out if I say yes. I guess I could always just not tell him but—” I bit my lip before I started babbling in earnest.
Selene cleared her throat. “I think you should do what you decide to do regardless of what anyone else thinks. And yes, you should tell Eli, but don’t let him stop you. You are your own boss. No one else.”
I inhaled, feeling a thrill of exhilaration at the idea. It seemed so opposite of my reality. Every moment someone else was making decisions for me—when to eat, where to be, what to do, what not to do. I let my breath out slowly. “What about Paul? Do you think it’s safe to trust him?”
There was another long moment of silence, and this time I managed not to break it. Finally Selene said, “I trust you to be able to take care of yourself, no matter what Paul might be up to. Especially with that sword you’re carrying. I wasn’t kidding that you would make a great gladiator.”
I laughed, the sound coming out a snort thanks to my nerves. “Not a chance.”
Selene shrugged. “Suit yourself. But they have small team matches you know, two on two. We’d make a great team. The boys wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Laughing again, I turned back to the screen. My humor quickly faded, giving way to determination. I would take Paul up on the offer. We had to get into that house and look around. I clicked on the Titus folder again, scrolling down until I came across a picture of the knife. I clicked on it, feeling exhilarated once again. We needed to search the house, and I knew exactly what we were looking for.
16
Here Be Dragons
I held off telling Eli about my decision until lunch the next day. He did not take it well.
“Please tell me you’re joking, Dusty,” he said, a fork gripped tight in his hand. I had a feeling he was thinking about stabbing someone with it. Thank goodness Paul wasn’t around.
I took a deep breath, trying not to overreact. I knew he would see reason, once he got past his worry for me. “I’m not. It’s a good plan. And we don’t have a lot of options with the Will Guard breathing down our necks. Sneaking off campus would be impossible without a shape-change necklace.”
“We could get a weekend pass.”
I offered him a patient smile. “We don’t have time. They don’t start
approving those until next month.”
“What about the tunnels? Isn’t that how your mom got on campus?” Eli pressed.
“Well, yeah, but we don’t know the way, we don’t have a boat, and even if we managed to get out onto the lake, how do we get to Corvus’s house without a car? It could be miles and miles, and it’s not like there’re cabs on every corner. This is Chickery not New York.”
Eli’s jaw worked back and forth, muscles quivering in his temple, cheek, and neck. “Fine. Then he can give me the shape-change necklace, and I’ll go with Paul to investigate Corvus.”
I shook my head. “Paul already said no to that.”
“He what?” Eli’s expression darkened even more.
I shifted in my seat, completely understanding his reaction but being powerless to change anything. “He doesn’t think it would be a good idea for it to be you and him. You don’t play nice together.”
Eli snorted, the sound dangerous, akin to a wild animal growling. “Just because I don’t like him doesn’t mean I would do something stupid and get us caught.”
“I know that, but I can’t make Paul do something he doesn’t want to.”
Eli grunted. “He’s just looking for an excuse to be alone with you.”
I sighed. “Maybe, but he’s the one taking the biggest risk in all of this. If I get caught it’ll be a slap on the wrist. If he does…”
“I get it.” A grim expression crossed his face. Eli glanced to his right, where Lance was listening in on our argument with palpable interest. Next to me, I suspected the same from Selene, although she was doing a better job at hiding it.
Eli ran a hand over his head. “Can we talk about this outside?” He smiled at the others. “No offense, guys.”
Lance slapped him on the back. “None taken. Wish I could keep every argument private, too. Makes for better making up options afterward.”
Selene shot him a dirty look, but Eli was already standing up, motioning for me to follow.
We dumped our trays and then headed out into the hallway. It was mostly empty, except for a Will Guard standing at the juncture of the nearest hallway. Eli took me by the arm and guided me in the opposite direction, just far enough to let us talk without being overheard, but not so far that the Will Guard felt inclined to move in and push us apart.
The Nightmare Charade Page 17