It was a hidden door, like the one at the museum.
Before she could touch anything else, something yanked her backward. She hit the filthy floor hard, new aches and pains exploding across her ribs. A clawed foot pressed against her throat, squeezing her windpipe, emptying the air from her chest. It was attached to a corpse-gray leg, thick with muscles and visible veins, and a body that hunched over her to create a shadow larger than any human could. The monster—the assassin—tilted its featureless face down to her, and a seam opened near the bottom of the blankness, widening into a black void of serrated teeth.
Its breath smelled of death.
“No,” Ellory whimpered. Those needlelike talons pressed into her throat, bruising her skin, drawing blood. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t breathe. Black spots danced before her eyes. “No.”
Her heart slowed. The world grew dark.
She had made it this far and would go no further.
This school would be her grave.
“NO!”
She conjured fire, detonating it outward from her chest like abomb. Red and yellow flames struck the monster through the gut, and it flew backward until it hit the opposite wall. Air. Precious air. Ellory wheezed, her neck stinging with every shaky breath. Her hand stretched out, increasing the temperature of her blaze, searing the beast from the inside out as it writhed above the portrait of Arthur O’Connor. The monster was large enough that part of it extended to the ceiling, but she could see its skin flaking over the light and power tearing through it. There was no screaming, no sound at all but her own breathing.
The beast crumbled. Ash rained to the dusty ground.
Ellory took a moment to collect herself, to wipe her tears and heal the pain of her neck. Her nerves shook for longer than she wanted, but she’d come close to death too many times this year to blame herself for it. Swallowing hard, she pushed herself to her feet.
She continued on.
Behind the hidden door, a set of dark stairs led upward. Ellory replaced her flashlight with her Taser, keeping one hand on the wall to guide her while her eyes adjusted. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own shrieking heartbeat. The scent of mildew and disuse was thick, but a single line of light lay ahead—another false wall, another door, another room she could explore. She realized that she was trembling from something worse than the cold, but even still she couldn’t stop.
They’re coming for you, said a nasty voice in her head.Liam can’t stop them. They’ll come for you. They’ll kill you. You’ll die here with no one to mourn you.
She kept going until the spiral steps turned into a concrete floor. The door swung outward silently, revealing a hallway lit with fluorescent bulbs. There were three closed doors on either side, as well as one opposite her that opened onto another set of stairs.Each door was labeled, and Ellory read the markers as she passed: DEAN, CLASSROOM 1, CLASSROOM 2, LABORATORY 1, STORAGE, and LABORATORY 2. She tried each knob, but they were locked. The brass of them looked newly polished, in contrast to a bottom floor that was doing its best to persuade her that no one had been there in centuries.
“Morgan.”
She turned. Boone Priestley had emerged from Classroom One dressed all in black, his tattoos coiling around his bare arms and the sides of his neck. He looked both terrified and resigned, like he’d been hoping not to find her here and didn’t want to be the one to do something about it.
“You piece of shit,” she accused. “Youdiderase yourself and Hudson from this world.”
“It wasn’t me, goddamn!” said Boone. And then, quieter: “I get why you think so, though. I mean, I deserve that.”
“What’s down there?” Ellory jabbed her flashlight at the final door. He was lucky he was too far away for her to beat him with it. “Is it Hudson? Is this where they’re keeping him?”
Boone bit his lip and didn’t answer.
“They don’t care about you!” Ellory snapped, frustrated. “They care only about your magic. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they’ll make you disappear, just like Letitia Rose, Manuel Sharp, Angel Mclaughlin—”
“Morgan, come on—”
“—Olivia Holloway, Tasha Butler—”
“You don’t understand, okay? You weren’t born into this shit like we were. Sometimes, you have to take the hits so someone else doesn’t!”
“—Eugene Kang, Kristopher Douglas—”
“I told you these people were dangerous, and you still—”
“Joel Carroll, Malcolm Mayhew. Me.” She stared him down, her jaw set. “Are you going to let me take the hits so you don’t, Boone? Do you think that’s what Hudson wants?”
Surprise flickered across his face. “You remember.”
“We were together. Before. Weren’t we?” When he didn’t answer again, she ranted onward, stepping closer and closer to him. “We were together, and the Old Masters found out, and now I’m here and he’s not. And I know it’s because we fell in love again. I know I did this to him. You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen, and I’m sorry for that. But if you want to protect him, if you actually want to save him, then you’ll stop doing their bidding andhelp me. If we end this, no one has to suffer again. Not him, notanyone.”
