I should have thought of that before. Why would Other Elodie risk anyone recognizing her while she’s up to her questionable activities?
“What’s it to you?” the girl says, cutting through my revelation.
I don’t think it’d go over well to tell her my “friend” is dead.
I grope for a reasonable alternative. “She’s gone missing. I thought, if she was friends with you too, you might have some idea where she went.”
The girl stares at me, her lips parting. “She’sgone too?”
Wait, what?
My forehead furrows of its own accord. “Is someone you know missing?”
“It’s not really...” She pulls the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her hands in an awkward motion, but something hungry has come into her expression that overrides her fear. “My olderbrother. He got taken out of school for some extra training or something... I don’t see why he couldn’t do the extra traininghere,but that’s all the principal told us.”
“Then you know where he is.”
She shakes her head. “That was weeks ago, and we haven’t heard from him since. The teachers get mad when I ask.” She touches her chest again. “A couple of days after he left, I found this in an envelope on our back step. There was a note that said to hock it so we’d have a little more money to get by on. But I wasn’t sure if it had something to do with Evan, and... I’ve never had anything anywhere near this nice... I thought it couldn’t hurt to wear it for a little while.”
It’s my turn to stare at her. As the pieces shift in my head, a thread of shame winds around my throat and squeezes tight.
Is that what Other Elodie was keeping track of at Beacon Prep? Not covert lovers or illicit deals, but odd disappearances of the students?
And then leaving valuables as compensation for their families?
How did she even find out the students were being taken away? Why would a girl like her evencare?
Unless all along I haven’t been giving her enough credit.
What if this is the secret that was big enough to get her killed?
I recover my smile for the girl’s benefit. “Do you know anyone else from Beacon who’s gone off for ‘extra training’?”
“Maybe.” The girl assesses me. “Evan mentioned a girl who stopped coming to his classes last year. He wondered what happened to her. I don’t know if it was the same thing.”
With the students who’re living in the dorms without family nearby, the principal wouldn’t even need to give an explanation to anyone. They could simply vanish.
In my silence, the girl backs up a step. “I—I really should get home.”
I’ve overstayed my welcome. As much new information as I have to chew over, I can’t resist asking one more thing. “Would you tell me your name?”
I push another ribbon of cooperative energy toward her, ever so carefully. You have to use a light touch with influencing magic. If you push too hard, the brain goes instinctively on the defense. You can end up pissing the other person right off rather than calming them down.
Her jaw goes briefly slack. “Josie Moore.”
“Thank you.”
“Um, yeah. Just—don’t bug me again, okay?”
She frowns at me, her apprehension surging back at full force, and rushes on down the street.
I turn her revelations over in my head, stewing in a growing swell of nausea. I might have gotten Other Elodie completely wrong.
Which means I could have missed whatever it is I need to know to find her killer.
Thirty-One
Colson
