“I’ve already texted Headmaster Mykene. They found his body and confirmed he’s dead. They don’t know what it means that he’s not in the veil, either. With all the death that keeps happening here, anyone who hadn’t figured out they were a death god yet would have had a rude awakening.”
Ivar seemed to not know what to do now that he’d found one of his mates, but lost another. It was almost like there were sparks coming off of him. He stalked over to my open window and muttered something in a language I didn’t understand just as there was a loud clap of lightning.
Ivar’s eyes were glowing an intense blue. I heard a crash somewhere in the distance and Ivar just flung his hand out. An ornate hammer came sailing through my window and landed right in his hand. I knew he wanted that hammer more than anything, but I was pretty sure we were about to be dealing with the reincarnation of Thor in his battle lust.
“Who killed Adrian and everyone else here?” he demanded.
“Radames,” Iman said.
What? I never got a bad feeling around him.
No one knew what to say. When I first met Radames and Mazen, I judged them both on their appearance. Mazen had gang tattoos and Radames wore a Coptic cross. Even if I hadn’t judged them on appearances, Mazen was a hot head and Radames came off as calm and polite. Yeah, I guess it was easy to be calm about a violent psychopath on campus whenyouwere the violent psychopath.
Sage and Morgana were both shocked because their magic gave them supernatural intuition and they weren’t picking up anything around Radames. Ivar, Ari, and Alexios didn’t talk to him because he teamed up with Lola, but they could respecthe seemed to have his own mind and opinions aside from her nonsense.
“Itoldyou there was something wrong with that boy,” Liam said.
Liam was the only one of us who didn’t seem surprised and I was confused. Liam didn’t have enhanced smell, and he didn’t see auras. He also had no foretelling abilities.
“You just said he was too nice,” Lucian said, throwing up his hands.
Exactly. Liam said he didn’t trust Radames because he was too polite. Which didn’t mean a damned thing because Liam was rude to everyone except Sage and my parents didn’t raise a savage, so I was polite, too, even when I shouldn’t be.
“Shh,” Liam said, putting his whole hand over Lucian’s face. “What else did you learn while you were following students as a cat?”
“Lola and Radames aren’t meeting in person. She has a second phone. I saw her with it once. It’s one of those pay as you go things with no internet. That has to be how they are communicating. I’m not sure if they are romantically linked in this life. Lola has been taking booty calls with a lot of men. I’m nottryingto watch anyone have sex, but I was trying to figure out if she was going to kill them or not.
“All of them know she still hasn’t mastered her birth control spell because word spreads. They’ve all mastered theirs but want to use condoms just in case. She gets pretty insistent they don’t. If they refuse to fuck her bare, she leaves. Shereallywants to get pregnant.”
“She really does,” Mazen said. “And I’ve spent more time around Radames than all of you. He’s my roommate. He’s constantly studying, which why would he need to if he’s awake? Radames is looking for an answer to something and it was never who he was.”
“What are they going to do with Adrian?” I asked.
Yeah, I was shocked Apep was Radames because I hadn’t gotten any weird feelings around him, but I couldn’t believe anyone would hurt Adrian. Everyone loved him. I got that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but killing him meant Iman got away to tell his secret. It was senseless.
“There’s a graveyard here,” Ivar said. “The other students were sent home to be buried with the family, but Adrian was an orphan. It’s a sad story. His parents abandoned him at a dirty warehouse and then set it on fire on the way out. Headmaster Mykene has been trying to find out who his parents are, but the Australian police looked into that, too, since they tried to kill him. No one knows. He’ll be buried on the grounds here, probably.”
“It’s the reason he was the way he was,” Alexios said. “If he wasn’t easy going and got along with everyone, his foster families wouldn’t keep him and would send him back to the nuns. Adrian didn’t particularly like being under their care. It’s why he always jokes about being the reincarnation of Jesus.”
“If there’s a funeral, I want to be there,” I said.
“We will all be, but what are we going to do about the Forsaken Ones? Radames broke the bindings if he was able to kill Adrian and he’s going to be on the hunt for Iman.”
“He’s only seen me as a cat and as far as he knows, all I saw was him shifting into a snake and no one knows about Hemlock and Apep returning from Fairy in this life. If you’ve all been able to keep your mouths shut around him, he doesn’t know what we know.”
“I’ve been careful during my work study with Headmaster Mykene. We don’t discuss any of this until he leaves.”
“He just thinks I broke up with Lola because she cheated on me,” Mazen said. “I told him he should probably stay away from her because she drugged Liam and tried to rape him. He actedlike that was just a story Liam gave so I wouldn’t gut him for fucking my girlfriend.”
“We have to act completely normal until we know how to kill them both for good,” Khalid said. “I know several of you want revenge for various reasons, but it’s going to have to wait.”
We all looked at Ivar. I knew Liam was content to bide his time for what Lola did to him, but could Ivar wait for what they did to Adrian?
The only thing that seemed to calm Ivar and even Ari from avenging Adrian was Iman, who apparently knew they were her mates the entire time and never shifted back. She said it was all part of her plan to oust Apep and figure out what was going on, but personally, she could have shifted when they were alone.
It was hard going to class and doing my office hours and pretending Radames hadn’t snapped my friend’s neck and murdered a bunch of other students here. It was harder than pretending I didn’t know Lola could eat someone’s shade with her void powers because I’d always had a bad feeling around her.
I was upset about Adrian, but I wasn’t his mate. Ivar, Alexios, Ari, and even Iman took it hard. So did the rest of the school. My class, not so much because they’d been enchanted by Lola, but Adrian seemed to be friends with nearly everyone. Now that I knew why, it just made me sad because Adrian had found his family here.
