“Geez, what’s up with you, man?” Dray says. “You’re even quieter than Thorne here. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever known you be so fucking quiet. It’s unnerving.”
“I was just… What was the question?”
“I said,” Dray repeats, shuffling around to face me in frustration, “what do you think – you know, about the professor?” His eyes shoot towards Tudor and Briony.
“You still don’t trust him?” Thorne asks.
“Nah,” Dray says. “I don’t know if I do. Then again, this whole thing seems fucked up.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, noticing the way he’s eyeing me with obvious suspicion.
“I don’t know. Everything,” he says. “It gets my wolfy senses all messed up and has me on edge. It was that way when the Empress first gave us this mission, when we turned up at the border and those soldiers weren’t there, when we found that fucking tornado thing. They were tingling like fucking crazy when we were talking to the headmaster and when you disappeared down into that mist, but it’s tingling all the freaking time.”
“That’s because we’re out here in the demon wastelands,” I say. “What did you expect?”
Dray straightens his back and climbs over a large bone that blocks our path. “You haven’t answered my question, Beau,” he says. “Do we trust the professor or not?”
I let out a long sigh. “I don’t know who the fuck to trust.” That’s the honest answer. If you’d asked me the question yesterday, I’d have known for sure that my mother had the realm’s best interests at heart, that Bardin was evil. Now… now I don’t know what to believe. “I trust you. I trust Thorne. I trust Briony. Briony trusts the professor – by extension I have to trust him as well.”
“That’s fucked-up logic,” Dray says. “Briony’s in love with him. Fuck, for all we know, he’s done that vampire-y thing – you know, where they entrance their victims, make them fall in love with them.”
“He hasn’t entranced her,” Thorne says. “She loves him and he loves her. It’s obvious.”
“What do you know about love?” Dray says. “You’re emotionally fucked up.”
“Says the wolf who can’t stop talking about his mate’s pussy,” Thorne deadpans.
Dray stares at him in disbelief. “Did the two of you have a personality transplant or something? Did Bardin hex you? Andnow Beaufort’s walking around in Thorne’s body and Thorne’s walking around in Beaufort’s body.”
“You’re such an idiot sometimes,” Thorne says.
“Something’s not right,” Dray says, eyeing me again.
“It’ll all be right when we reach the border,” Thorne says, “when we’re safe again.”
“Yeah, except they’re going to send us back to the academy, aren’t they? And we’re going to have to go through a hell of a lot more trials. Each one of those is a danger to Briony, even if Bardin’s gone now.”
“She’s a powerful light weaver. She saw off demons and the Madame in the last trial. She’s going to be fine,” Thorne says.
I rub my hand down my face. I want to tell them that I don’t think she is going to be safe, and it has nothing to do with the academy or the trials. I need to warn them about what we might face when we cross the border. But how do I find the words? And will they even believe me if I tell them? They’ll think Bardin entranced me, that she got inside my head and warped my thoughts. No, I need a better plan. I need to… I need to talk to Tudor.
I wait until we’ve made it through the valley of bones, and Dray and Thorne have replaced Tudor by Briony’s side, striding ahead of me and the professor now.
I take my opportunity and say to the professor, “I wanted to talk to you.”
“If this is another interrogation–”
“It isn’t,” I tell him. “It’s something else. It’s something I’m not sure I can share with the others – not yet. You don’t trust Bardin, do you?”
He laughs bitterly. “Not one little bit.”
“And yet she told me something down there, down there in that chasm in the earth, and I can’t help feeling – I can’t help thinking – that it was the truth.”
“She’ll take what little truth there is and she’ll warp it,” he warns me. “You shouldn’t believe anything she says.”
“It was about my mother,” I tell him.
He frowns, amber eyes staring at me acutely, but he waits for me to go on.
