She had never heard anyone mention a building like this on Riverside Campus. It hadn’t been on her map either. Ellory was sure this clearing hadn’t existed before she’d drawn her summoning circle, and the fact that the light continued to hover at her shoulder lent credence to the theory. Tabby’s spirit may not haveshown up, but perhaps she had sent the ghost light to show Ellory the truth.
Overgrown grass tangled around her boots as she fought her way toward the building. Arched windows with dirty, broken glass hung on either side of the door. A thick spider had made an elegant web in one of the remaining sections, and its legs twitched at Ellory’s approach. She gave it a wide berth as she circled the schoolhouse, looking for a way in. At the back, she found a door with a hummingbird knocker that had rusted with time. It creaked open easily, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
Ellory coughed into the bend of her elbow. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
The first floor was one long room. She saw misshapen rows of desks with attached chairs, each one of them broken; a domed ceiling, and a ladder that led to an overhang; an abandoned blackboard, cracked into three pieces; and several filthy textbooks with holes in the equally filthy pages.
Rectangular objects leaned against the walls, covered by tarps. Ellory tugged one free to reveal a portrait, newer than anything in the room. It was painted in the same style as the ones of the Warren founders in the museum, but this one was labeled DEAN ARTHUR O’CONNOR I. Stasie’s grandfather frowned at Ellory from the center of the oil painting. A crow was perched on the windowsill behind him, which, like the painting of Howard McElking, had sunlight streaming through the glass.
Ellory freed another portrait. This one read DEAN PRESTON COLT and featured a younger version of the professor she’d come to know so well, a snow owl cupped between his hands. He was in front of a stained glass window that she recognized from theWarren Communiquéoffice, and, like in Richard Lester Odell’s portrait, amoonless starry sky in different shades was on the other side of the glass.
The third and final portrait was of Dean Nathaniel Graves, a stern-looking white man with curly black hair and narrow black eyes. A hummingbird hovered by his shoulder, and he gazed out a window into a midnight sky empty except for a crescent moon.
My father is a cruel man, Hudson had said. Ellory was looking at a painting of Hudson’s father, a man deeply entrenched in magic, who had, nonetheless, gaslighted his own son into believing it didn’t exist.
Disgust made her hands shake. She wanted to carve his portrait up, but she took pictures of all of them instead. Arthur O’Connor was the only one of the three who had ever been dean of Warren University as well, and there was no reason for these portraits to be commissioned, let alone here, if Colt and Graves had been deans at other schools. They had run one of the three magical disciplines of the School for the Unseen Arts: evocation, incantation, and divination.
Colt was part of this, just like her vision had warned. And he was, at least, close enough to answer her questions—whether he wanted to or not. If she could figure out how to tie this back to the paper, to weaponize the silence between his answers, she might get him to reveal more than he’d intended. It had worked for interviews with tight-lipped sources during high school. The trick was never revealing how much you already knew.
A scream cracked the silence of the schoolhouse.
Ellory jumped, whirling around, but she could see no one in the dim room. The scream ricocheted off the walls, building upon itself, until it sounded like a chorus of panic. She turned and turned, but no matter where she looked, there was nothing. Just that endless clamor, a ghostly wail of ancient pain.
Clapping her hands over her ears, she stumbled toward the door. A rectangle of light beckoned her to freedom until a shadow filled the space. Ellory skidded to a halt, her ears still covered, squinting at the figure limned by the sun. She could feel eyes on her, but the person was silent, and if they heard the screaming, they were unaffected. She got the sudden urge to put some distance between her and this stranger, and she gave in with three large steps back. The figure didn’t move.
“H-hello?” she said, her voice swallowed by the screams that still deafened her. “Who are you?”
The shadow charged toward her. This time, Ellory was the one to scream.
She threw herself to the side, narrowly avoiding being tackled by a person she still couldn’t see. She could no longer blame the sun for casting them in shadow. Their form was nondescript, as if her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness. Their face was blank, not in expression but in features: They had no nose, no eyes, no mouth, just sunken crevices where those things would be. Their skin was corpse gray, and as she watched, their muscles swelled and their legs elongated until they were six feet, seven feet, eight feet tall. Their nails were needle sharp as they reached for her.
But this was not the person who had attacked her on the quad or at Moneta.
This was no masked enforcer. This twisted creature was an assassin.
Ellory rolled back onto her feet and ran.
The floor shook as the monster chased her down. The scream that had weakened her abruptly cut out, leaving Ellory with nothing but her quick breaths and desperate steps to keep her company. Her pursuer was as silent as a cemetery: no breathing, no growling,no threats. Her heart leaped to her throat as every rumbling step brought it closer and closer and closer…
The door had never been so far away.
Talons pierced the back of her jacket, scratched her spine.
Ellory threw herself into the sunlight, her face wet with tears. A clawed hand stretched out, only to dissolve upon contact with the outside air. One minute, the monster was stretching the foundations of the door, desperate to drag her back into its lair, and the next minute, it was gone in a flutter of black spots that clouded her vision. Still, she kept running, cutting through the tall grass and past the tree line. Then and only then did she slow enough to glance back again.
The monster was gone, but so was the clearing, the building. In their place was a thicket, and the winding path that led deeper into campus. Her heaving breaths combined with the sound of rushing water, a sign that she was close to the riverbank.
If not for the sting of the scratches and the chill wind that had already found the hole in her only winter coat, Ellory might have thought she had imagined it all.
She fell into the grass beside the path, pressing her hands against her closed eyes. “Holy shit.”
“Are you okay?!”
Her blurred vision resolved itself into an upside-down Hudson Graves. There were twigs and dirt in her hair, and she was pretty sure she was bleeding, but this was just as unbelievable as the danger she had escaped. Ellory was so confused that she allowed him to pull her to her feet. He dusted off her sleeves and then reached for her hair before seeming to realize what he was doing. He cleared his throat, stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“I followed you,” he said gruffly. “I saw you heading into thewoodsalone, and I thought maybe—you might need—I don’t know.”
Ellory noticed, belatedly, that he was dressed in the kind of clothes people typically went running in: stretch leggings and comfortable sneakers, a long-sleeved breathable shirt and headphones wrapped around his neck. Sweat beaded at his temples, and his coat was nowhere to be seen.
