Necromancer Unleashed

For nearly three months, Necromancer Academy left me to rot in a cold, dank dungeon below the school while it was decided what to do with me. Three months locked away from anyone but the rats nosing around my cell for scraps. Other than visits from Headmistress Millington and the Ministry of Law Enforcement, the rats had been my constant companions. Them, and all my worries that roiled and festered and darkened until I feared they, and not the rats, would eat away at me until there was nothing left.

According to the headmistress, rough storms kept delaying the Ministry of Law Enforcement, and by the time they finally got here to throw questions at me like hard stones and question every single student, my hope had shriveled up and died.

I wasn’t a murderer. Not in the official sense anyway. But my future, at least from within these stone walls, looked grim.

A door at the far end of the dungeon creaked open. Footsteps hurried down the steps.

Someone was coming.

My heartbeat matched their footfalls while unease slithered across my shoulders. I hugged my knees tighter to my chest with my back against the wall, my gaze sharp, my ears even sharper. It didn’t sound like the headmistress’s heels clicking over the stone unless she’d changed into winter boots.

She’d assured me a hundred times that my roommate, Seph, was fine.

“She hasn’t been sleepwalking,” she’d told me. “She wishes you were there to keep her company, is all. If I were you, Dawn, I would be more concerned about myself. Are you eating enough? Would you like to write a letter to your parents explaining what’s happened so they can be here for you?”

No and definitely no. Since I was of age, the Ministry didn’t have to tell my parents anything. One positive in a massive sea of shit.

But never mind me; it was worry for Seph that had chewed through to my soul these last few months, despite what the headmistress said. She was alone and vulnerable. She’d been sleepwalking all over the school and listening to the whispers of the onyx stone hidden here, telling her to find and activate it. And nearly killing herself in the process. What kind of horrors had she stumbled upon without me there to protect her?

The footsteps slowed. The torchlights in the hall threw a long, lean shadow across the bars of my cell, and then a pair of flinty gray eyes met mine.

Ramsey. The guy I’d almost murdered. The sight of him coiled the darkness inside me and wrapped it up in the inferno called my rage, and I fisted my hands, prepared to strike. What was he doing here?

He came to a stop, his black cloak billowing around him, all bored arrogance and grace.  Even the slight lift to his right eyebrow practically screamed it. We stared at each other for an agonizingly long moment.

"You still think I murdered your brother," he said finally.

"I’ve been too busy to think otherwise," I snapped. Or I tried to. My voice came out rusty and unused, so I cleared my throat.

"Are you thirsty?"

Why would he care if the girl who'd attacked him with a dagger was thirsty or not? I stared at him, unmoving but flinching on the inside. I wished he’d just leave, or kill me, or whatever it was he planned on doing.

He picked up the pitcher of water that sat next to my uneaten dinner on the low table outside my cell and poured me a glass. Then he knelt, reached the glass through the bars, and set it on the stone ground, his face half hidden in shadow.

I followed his every move closely, picking him apart so I knew what was coming. But I didn’t.

"I brought you something," he said, still kneeling. "Tylvia Snider, the sophomore I told you about when you…well, when you came into my room that day. She found a way to retrieve a vision from her crystal ball and put it inside another so I could take it to you." He fished inside his cloak pocket and then rolled a small glass ball about the size of my fist along the ground.

It struck my boot. I stayed motionless as I glared at him.

Heaving a sigh, he stood. "It's right there, Dawn. Proof I didn't murder your brother. Don't you want to know who didn’t do it, so you can focus on who did?"

I didn’t know the answer to that. All I knew was that I hadn’t killed him because he’d planted a seed of doubt that I had no idea what to do with.

"Fine. Have it your way." He ground his teeth together and turned to leave.

The door at the end of the hall creaked again.

"Ramsey Sullivan," a distant voice scolded. "I told you not to come here without my permission."

He angled his body, so his hand flicked through the bars of my cell behind his back, gesturing at the crystal ball. “I think they’re going to let you go,” he murmured, “but when you get out there, don’t trust anyone.”

What? Let me go? Why was he telling me this?

"I'm sorry, Headmistress Millington." He smiled warmly down the hall, all innocence and charm. A real smooth guy, this one, but I was onto all his tricks. "I must've misunderstood."

Clipped footsteps rushed toward us, the same ones I’d grown accustomed to. "There's not a whole lot to misunderstand about the words ‘don't do that.’ You requested to come down here with me as a show of support for Dawn, and you couldn’t wait a few minutes while I spoke with a student?"

"I’m so sorry about that, Headmistress. It'll never happen again. Mom says I have selective hearing, but I’m trying to work on it.”

Lies.

Still, though, I scooped up the crystal ball by my boot and slipped it into my pocket.

Ramsey caught the movement and smiled crookedly.

When the headmistress stopped in front of my cell, appearing to float in her plaid wool dress, she seemed to melt into his charm when she offered a motherly smile. "See that it doesn't happen again." She turned to me, and the smile dropped into a slow grimace. "Dawn, the Ministry of Law Enforcement has concluded their investigation. They would like to speak to you."

"Again?" I rasped, sounding far away from myself. I'd never really thought too much about what I would do after I killed Ramsey. Leave here, sure, but at the back of my mind, I knew there was a chance I could be caught and questioned. I'd just thought Ramsey would be dead if that happened, not standing outside my cell staring at me.

She nodded. "In my office."

"Are they charging me?" I asked. 

The headmistress retrieved a ring of keys from her dress pocket and stuck one into the cell's lock. "That’s for them to tell you."

“I told them my story countless times,” I said.

"And it's the same as mine," Ramsey insisted. "We had a misunderstanding, but I'm not hurt in the slightest."

A real shame. If I hadn't hesitated, hadn't been crushed by my own emotions, I'd have killed him. I know I would have.

“There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle you don’t even know about, Mr. Sullivan.” The headmistress pulled open the gate, which creaked loudly. “They’re simply trying to fit them together in a way that makes sense.”

I stood on tingly legs. The cell dampened my magic, and everything I’d had hidden on me like my death charms, my dagger Leo gave me, and my dead man’s hand had been taken. I’d grown so used to their comfort that I almost felt naked without them. Naked…and hollow.

"Come along,” she said, her voice tinged with regret. “I demanded that the Ministry wait until the students were finished with dinner, but they’re in a hurry to wrap this case up and leave before the next storm hits the island."

Ramsey backed away to let us out. "So, she's to be paraded in front of the whole school like a pig to slaughter?"

I drilled him with my darkest look.

He sliced his stormy gaze to mine. "Yeah, yeah. You're not a pig. Not what I meant."

"I'm afraid so,” the headmistress said. “Come along."

I started after her and made it four steps before the blood surging through my legs made it to my head in a rush. My vision swam. I started to tilt, but a wall of strength gripped my elbow before I bounced my face off the floor.

"You okay?" Ramsey asked, his breath catching my ear.

I yanked away from him. "Fine."

"Yeah." He rolled his eyes and pulled back, taking the rear as we followed after the headmistress. "I can tell."

Headmistress Millington regarded the both of us coolly over her shoulder, her lips pinched into nothingness. "As always, you'll want to tell them the truth of course, Dawn. Try not to leave any detail out if they have further questions.” She faced forward again, nearing the long staircase at the end of the hall. "We'll await their decision first."

"First before what?" I asked.

"Before my decision,” she said, her voice clipped. “Unless they arrest you, that is."

A tremor ripped down my spine and ended at the block of ice forming in my gut. If I wound up in jail, I really couldn't argue. I'd tried to kill someone after all, which made me a criminal. A villain. The same girl who'd been so full of white magic and high on life that she used to dance while brushing her hair and had earned a full scholarship to White Magic Academy. Would I rot in prison, or would I slip even further into the comfort that my dark thoughts had given me since Leo’s murder?

But I couldn't go to jail. Because Ramsey was still alive, and if—IF—what he said were true, then a murderer still lurked out there. Their next target? Well, Seph had made it past the one-week point of sleepwalking. Leo hadn't. It curdled my blood at not knowing why though.

We climbed the steps in silence, and I felt like I was marching to my doom. Ramsey’s gaze prickled along my back, his fingers almost brushing mine on the banister. I jerked them away and rubbed fiercely at the dirt and coal from my hair that surely streaked my face.

Headmistress Millington stopped at the heavy wooden door and rested her hand on the knob, looking over her shoulder at me. "Ready?"

I nodded automatically, but of course I wasn't. As soon as she opened the door, there was nothing I could’ve done to prepare myself for the instant stillness in the entryway. The students’ silence suffocated. Their stares cut deep. Shame beat through me with the rapid thud of my heart and flushed my skin. I kept their gazes and searched for the one face I most wanted to see, but she wasn't anywhere.

One thing I did notice was how few students milled about at such a busy time of day. Where had everyone gone?

"Don't get too close," one guy who I thought was a senior Diabolical muttered after the headmistress had passed. He shoved a nearby girl behind him. "She'll chew your face off and feed it to the ravens."

"Oh yeah," a blonde murmured, gazing at me out of the corner of her eye. "Just look at her. She's got killer written all over her."

A girl who could've been her twin nodded. "That's called filth, but I see your point."

Trial by my peers. No matter what I said or did, I would always be guilty to them. 

I glanced over my shoulder, realizing that Ramsey had conveniently vanished before being seen with me. The girl who'd tried and failed to kill him. I was no expert on the fragility of male egos, but it must've bruised his. Maybe more than his balls after I'd kneed them during my attack. A girl could hope and dream.

As we stepped through the double doors into the classroom wing, I rubbed my elbow against my pocket where the crystal ball was, and then all my doubts and worries built higher and higher, stone by stone, just like the tall arched door we stood outside of to a room I'd never been in before.

Headmistress Millington rapped on it and then opened it. "Oh. All done, Echo?"

Echo came out, all brawn and height and definitely not my biggest admirer. She'd been in there talking to the Ministry? She'd gotten so mad at me during the séance that I still felt her punch in my jaw sometimes.

"Yeah, I told them everything," she said, a knife's edge to her tone. "I keep asking them why they haven’t charged and arrested you yet." Then she stalked off without another word, her long blonde hair bouncing behind her.

My shoulders sagged as the hard truth lowered over me with crushing weight. I was a terrible person, proved yet again when I didn't close the spirit door when I should've during our séance. The ghosts had nearly dragged her over to the other side just so I could get answers from Leo. Whatever happened on the other side of this door, whatever sentence waited for me, I deserved it.

Headmistress Millington held the door wide for me, a frown on her pinched lips. "I can't pretend to know what you've gone through with the death of your brother, but…good luck, Dawn."

I nodded, only kind of hearing her over the crash of my heartbeat as I entered the room, my chin held high.

Three men sat behind the headmistress’s desk, parchment and ink and quills spread in front of them. Despite the size of the office and detailed paintings of past headmasters on the walls, the room was surprisingly bare. Just a desk and chairs and a chill in the air.

"Ms. Cleohold," the man in the middle said, waving to the empty seat in front of him. He was the one I’d spoken to most often, the one with kind brown eyes and a mustache.

I sat, the sound of the door closing behind me making me jump a little.

“We’ve been over and over your testimony regarding the events of what happened on September thirteenth, but we do have some follow-up questions before we wrap up this case. Do you know anyone who would want to hurt Vickie Sloane?"

My stomach bottomed out through the cold stone floor even though he’d asked this same question before. Vickie had been violently murdered, her body twisted in a similar fashion as the doll I'd put in my pocket when I attacked Ramsey. My target had always been him, though, not the vicious girl who liked to dangle me off staircases.

"No," I said.

"Why was a doll with her hair in your pocket?"

"Because I put it there and forgot about it."

"Was the doll yours?"

"No, it was…" I couldn't throw Seph to these wolves, and she hadn't done it anyway, because she'd been with me. Unless she'd had the doll with her when we'd gone to the library and then set it down on her desk when we came back to our—No. Seph wouldn't do that. She wouldn't kill anyone. "No, it wasn't mine. I don’t know whose it was." 

He made a mark on one of his parchments, which was rolled at the top so I couldn’t see. "What happened between you and Ramsey in his dorm room on the afternoon of September thirteenth?"

Yet another question he’d asked me again and again. I sucked in a slow breath to put out the flames in my battling conscience. True, I'd made some mistakes. Some might argue many. But nothing had really changed. Leo was still dead, and Ramsey…I felt the bulge of the crystal ball hugging my hip, the same place where the dead man's hand had been. A ball of doubt had literally taken the place of shadowy revenge.

"It was a misunderstanding."

"A lovers' quarrel?" 

My eyes widened, but I quickly looked away to hide my shock. Lovers? "Um. Sure. Yes."

The man sat back in his chair and nodded, a wistful smile curling his mouth and mustache. "I've been married for thirteen years, and if I may offer you some advice. Talk whatever problems you're having out first. Rubber knives just don't get the point across."

The men at his sides howled with laughter.

I blinked. "Rubber knife?"

Shaking his head, he rolled up his parchment. "We're done here, Ms. Cleohold. You’re free to go."

"But…" The knife I'd held to Ramsey's throat could cut through almost anything. Not rubbery in the slightest. Had…had someone put a spell on it? My mind went round and round, highlighting too many things at once about what had happened, and not just about the knife.

He'd said we were done, that I was free to go. The three men were already dismissing me, as in…letting me walk out of here?

"But what about Vickie?" I blurted.

"A terrible accident. She must've hit a step wrong and took a tumble." Frowning, the man glanced up, seeing that I hadn't made a move to stand. "There was no sign of foul play. No magic on her or that doll you found with her hair."

“Are you sure? I mean…can magic be hidden?” I already knew the answer though.

“No. Magic can’t be hidden, even with a blocking spell since the spell itself is magic. The dark, murderous kind of magic leaves a sticky residue on objects and in the air itself around where a murder happened for months.” The man frowned. “There was nothing like that here.”

The same as when Leo had died. There’d been no magic around him either.

So, that was it, then. I could go. The Ministry was already shrugging into their cloaks, packing it in here so they could move on to the next case. I stood and got out of there quickly in case they changed their minds.

A rubber knife…

I turned into the hallway and nearly barreled into Ramsey who was leaning against the wall by the door, arms crossed.

"You…" I swallowed, not sure what else to say.

His mouth twitched as he shrugged, understanding sparking across his thunderstorm eyes.

It was him. He’d turned the dagger to rubber, but when? After the headmistress and the Diabolicals had come and found me with a knife at Ramsey’s throat, everything had happened so fast. But if he’d done it, then why had I been in a dungeon for three long months? Had it really taken that long to declare Vickie’s death an accident? Of course, there were storms that slowed things down and other cases the Ministry was involved in, but…still.

I supposed I should’ve felt angry for being robbed of that time, but I only felt numb.

Headmistress Millington, who stood in the middle of the hallway, regarded the both of us and then flicked her attention into the room. "No more questions?"

The mustached man appeared at the door with a stack of parchments under his arm and shook his head. "I'm sorry about your streak of bad luck at the school, Headmistress, but we're done here. We'll be in touch if there’s news about Professor Wadluck."

I sucked in a breath. The Psycho-Physical Education professor was still missing?

The headmistress nodded sharply, the tension in her shoulders easing some as she turned to us. "Don't think I'll let you off the hook so easily. I don't know what kind of disagreement you two had, if that was even what you were doing when I walked in." Her cheeks flamed.

Mine did too. Ramsey, on the other hand, just grinned. Sonofawitch.

"You gave me a scare when I heard the alarm in your room, Ramsey, and then seeing Dawn with the knife, whether it was rubber or not, on top of Professor Wadluck missing, Vickie’s death, trying to keep this school going, and everything else that's been going on…" Her voice warbled at the end, and she looked away, smoothing a strand of brown hair back into the pile on her head.

A pang of guilt struck my heart.

"I'm sorry, Headmistress," Ramsey and I said at the same time.

"You should be,” she snapped. “Until the last snow of the season, the both of you will shovel the main walkway to the school gate. Every day after classes and before dinner. No excuses. No magic to do it for you. I want you both shoveling."

I nodded, willing to accept whatever punishment she dished out since I deserved so much more.

She shooed us away. "Please. Go to dinner."

Ramsey and I turned to head back down the hallway, but I outpaced him almost at a run, needing to get away from him as quickly as possible. I had too many thoughts to wade through, each one more confusing than the last.

A rubber knife…if he hadn't changed it, I likely wouldn't be racing back to my dorm. He'd done that…even though I'd tried to kill him.

I could feel his stare probing my back, wondering about me, but now I didn't really know what to do with myself around him, so I was wondering about me too. I couldn't just switch off the rage and hate I felt for him, even if he didn't kill my brother. Did he? The truth was in my pocket, but right now, more than anything, I wanted to find Seph.

Not in the deserted entryway. Not in the nearly empty Gathering Room. I raced upstairs to our room and burst through the door. Empty. Not even Nebbles the Undertaker cat to hiss and spit at me.

Voices drifted across the hall, and I quickly crossed toward them.

"Hey, have you seen—" I started.

The girl from two doors down took one look at me, dove into her room, and slammed the door in my face.

Well. Still guilty in the eyes of the school, then. Lovely.

"Dawn," a sultry, honeyed voice said.

I flicked my gaze down the hall.

There stood Morrissey outside her room, red ribbons decorated with teeth woven through her long black hair that fell to the middle of her black cloak. The same girl who'd never said a single word to me before now, but had been a good friend, nevertheless.

She stared at me with her beetle-black eyes and smiled. "If you got any spare teeth you don't need, I'll read your fortune. It won't hurt."

No. No, I didn't have any spare teeth. But since I was feeling so lost and confused, I said, "Yes. Yes, I do."

"Can we expect Echo and her fists anytime soon?"

Morrissey closed the door of her and Echo's room. "No."

I'd never actually been in their room, and it was a lot tidier than mine and Seph's, and it had a lot more teeth. I could instantly tell which side of the room belonged to Morrissey. A lifelike drawing on her desk caught my eye, framed not with teeth but silver looped into hearts. It showed Morrissey, and a smaller, lookalike version of her missing several teeth, both of them smiling from ear to ear. 

"My sister," she said, coming up behind me.

I nodded as a pang speared my chest. The proud note in her voice reminded me of how Leo used to talk about me, and me about him.

"Have a seat, and I'll get us ready."

I did as she said while she retrieved a rolled black cloth from the trunk by her bed. "Why are you talking to me now and not before?"

"Because I didn't have anything to say before." She took the cloth to her desk, laid it down carefully, and began to unroll it. "Until your teeth began whispering to me."

Oh. Of course. "And I'm guessing teeth whisper to you often?"

"Only when their owner needs help." 

"But you did help me. You helped me in gym class and with the séance."

"Because you asked me, and I could tell that you needed help, but now, your teeth are asking."

I sighed, loud and long, not following. I’d always thought my teeth were just teeth, but what did I know?

She leaned down in front of me and caught my gaze with her midnight eyes. "It's a custom where I’m from not to speak until spoken to by one's teeth. Then and only then. It wasn't personal that I didn't talk to you before, but when your teeth aren’t talking, I don’t talk either. I listen."

"All right." I shrugged. "I'm not mad or anything, but why now, I wonder?"

"You don't think you need help now?"

Ah, good point. Before, I’d had tunnel vision on Ramsey and hadn’t thought I'd needed guidance. Now, doubts tumbled through my head, along with the impossibilities that had come to light about Leo's murder, harder and harder until they'd crushed me to my lowest point. And Morrissey was offering me her hand to help me up—a hand that was currently holding a giant metal torture tool.

"Uh, thought you said this wouldn't hurt?"

She winced. "I meant the fortune part. Not the tooth-pulling part."

My jaw dropped. "You tricked me."

"Sorry? You can heal yourself right after I pull the tooth, right?"

"How about before you pull my tooth. Like preliminary healing?"

Frowning, she shook her head. "That makes the tooth too numb to speak clearly. But the pain will only last about two seconds, and then you can heal it right after."

I started to loosen a breath, about to give in, when my next thought froze my lungs together. "Wait. Which tooth are you taking? Not one of my front ones, right?"

"Of course not," she said with a sultry laugh. Her voice wasn’t what I expected her to sound like. I guess I thought she’d sound the same way she looked—small and unassuming—though I knew she was anything but. "Front teeth only whisper about superficial things anyway.  The ones that whisper the loudest are the ones near the back. They're the ones that know exactly what you should do next because the nerves run deeper."

I nodded. "Makes sense."

"Does it?"

"Not one bit,” I admitted. “So which tooth are you taking?"

"The one that whispers the loudest, and I’ll insert a fake tooth when I’m finished.” She brought the torture tool closer. “Ready?"

I nodded, gripping the bottom of the wooden chair so tightly that my fingers cramped, and opened my mouth wide.

Morrissey's pale face brightened at all the pearly white possibilities in front of her, then slid the long tool inside. Her dark eyes sparkled as they locked onto one, and pressure tightened around it. "On the count of three…one."

She yanked. I sucked in a breath as pain filled my mouth. My eyes watered. Salty blood trickled across my tongue.

“Bind thee in health, Protect mind and soul too, Boost vigor and happiness, Make it all renew,” I murmured, and instantly, a pleasant numbness filled the spot where my tooth had been.

Morrissey held the tooth up in front of her, clasped tightly in her tool's tongs, her mouth opened in awe while she stared at it. "Two. Three."

I flopped back in the chair. "That's not how ‘on three’ works."

She shot me an apologetic smile and then returned her stare to my tooth. "This one is telling me all sorts of things.” She leaned in as if to listen. “You need to find a familiars' cemetery after the dark hour as soon as you can."

A familiars’ cemetery, which would basically be a pet cemetery. "Not for Nebbles, I hope. Does it say why?"

"No. It says that you…" She tilted her head, her brows merging into a line of confusion. "That you were at White Magic Academy recently?"

I sat up straighter, a rush of nerves knotting around my spine.

"With a tooth that looked exactly like this one and that you were…searching for something." She looked at me, her eyes wide. "A tooth that looked like this one…I don't know what that means."

I swallowed hard. I knew what it meant. It had been a skin-walker, one who didn't need magic to transform into someone else. I was at White Magic Academy while I was here…because Morrissey said I was looking for something there. What was it? The only reason I knew all this was my parents went to White Magic Academy and sent me a letter saying how great it was to see me. Then Ramsey had said it wasn’t him who’d killed Leo, but a skin-walker. That was the only explanation I had of me being in two places at once.

I reached into my pocket and grazed my fingers over the crystal ball, not ready to look at it, not ready to admit what might be on it could be true. That Ramsey didn't kill my brother, and that the skin-walker did. 

Don’t trust anyone, he’d said in the dungeon.

I cleared my throat, my voice still sounding rough after so much disuse. "So, I need to find a familiars' cemetery after the dark hour and figure out what a tooth that looks like that one was searching for at White Magic Academy. Got it. Anything else?"

"That's it, but it's more information than what's usually packed inside a tooth. And it was more like a shout than a whisper.” She dragged her excited gaze away from my tooth to look at me. “These things are urgent." 

"Yes. Agreed." Because despite what the Ministry thought, Vickie's death was no accident. I knew that truth in my bones, just as I knew that Seph's sleepwalking was linked to Leo's, and that this was all linked to the onyx stone and Ryze.  Leo had even told me to guard the stone during the séance. Others could die if I didn't figure all of this out, and soon.

“It’s interesting,” Morrissey said, “because your tooth isn’t the first who has whispered about an exact replica while its owner was somewhere else.”

Which meant the skin-walker had been busy…

A knock sounded at the door, and Morrissey rose to answer it. A familiar face appeared on the other side tattooed with red and white swirl designs all over her bald, ebony head, a face that nearly caved my chest in with relief. When she saw me, a wide smile spread across her mouth, and tears immediately sprang to her big dark eyes.

“Hey there, stranger,” she said.

I flew at her, a sob in my throat and a heavy weight suddenly freed from my shoulders. We clung to each other and sniffled and laughed and cried, and it struck me how easily I'd made a friend even while fueled by rage and the need for revenge that had filled me so completely that I didn't feel like I fit inside my own skin anymore.

She started to pull away, but I couldn't let her. 

"No,” I choked out. “I'm not done."

"Dawn.” She gasped while patting my back. “I can't breathe."

"Oh. Sorry." Finally, I let her go. "I was so worried."

"I was so worried," Seph said at the exact same time, and we both laughed. "Are you…Did he…"

I knew the questions she was trying to ask, but I didn’t know the answers. "I'll explain. Well, I'll try anyway."

“Good.” Seph looked to Morrissey, who appeared transfixed as she laid my tooth on her desk. “Have you put her fake tooth in yet?”

Morrissey shook her head.

I sat in the chair again, and she replaced the torture device with another from her black cloth, this one with a brand-new shiny tooth clamped in it.

“You won’t even be able to tell,” Seph said.

Morrissey wedged it into place where it clicked and fit perfectly.

“Thank you, Morrissey.”

Her midnight eyes flicked toward my tooth on her desk, and she smiled wide.

“Bye, Morrissey.” Seph took my hand and led the way to our room.

Something tugged at my memory for an instant as we walked out into the hallway, too fuzzy to take shape, but seeming important somehow.

The charms on Seph’s bracelets and earrings tinkled a happy little song and brought me back to where I most wanted to be—with Seph.

"I can’t believe they locked you away for almost three months when you didn’t do anything,” she said. “But you were finally cleared? You’re staying here?"

I nodded. "More importantly, are you?"

She shut our door behind us, her black cloak swirling around her ankles. Her bald head glinted in the torchlight when she turned. "I haven't sleepwalked once, even when you were gone. I always woke up in my bed where I belonged, with Nebbles lying on my face. Isn’t that great?"

I heaved out a breath that unraveled some of the knot in my stomach. "Absolutely." 

And while I was relieved, I wasn't so naive to think everything was normal. Far from it.

Seph plopped down on her bed, taking me with her by my hand, and despite my doubts and worries, it did feel good to be back here with her. To have someone I could talk to freely.

“So, Ramsey…is innocent?” she asked, squeezing my hand. “Catch me up with that.”

Just then, our door creaked open, and a furry gray body slithered through. At the sight of Nebbles the Undertaker, Seph’s familiar, my heart squished into goo, just like it did every time I saw her.

“Hi, Nebbles,” I squeaked. “Long time, no see. Did you miss me?”

She pierced me with her one orange, glaring eye and went straight to Seph’s boot where she deposited whatever was caught in her mouth. A dead mouse, I realized, picked clean.

“Oh good,” Seph said, grimacing. “Thanks, Nebbles. You really shouldn’t have.”

Careful not to jostle it off, Seph crossed to her desk, dropped a couple of pieces of parchment to the floor, and gently toed the remains onto it. With her mouth twisted in disgust, she picked up the parchment and the remains and put it on her desk. Nebbles sat proudly with her chest puffed out and one fang peeking out of her mouth.

“Good job, Nebbles.” I gave her a thumbs-up, which she ignored, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Cats. I just wanted to kiss and smush all the furry little murder balls, no matter how dark and dire everything else was.

“If there are no more interruptions.” Seph gave Nebbles a stern look and then returned to her bed. “What about Ramsey?”

“He’s…” I couldn’t answer if he was innocent or not, not without looking at the crystal ball, which I still wasn’t ready to do just yet. “He said something to me when I confronted him. Something that didn’t make sense but did at the same time.”

She patted my knee. “You’ve lost me completely but go on.”

“Right before I went to his room, I received a letter from my parents saying how great it was to see me at White Magic Academy.”

“Right before?” Confusion formed deep ridges across Seph’s brow. “What? You were here, with me.”

“It didn’t make any sense to me either until Ramsey mentioned a skin-walker.”

Her mouth popped open. “Then he’s lying. You said—”

“I know. There were no traces of magic anywhere near Leo when he died. But the Ministry told me there was no magic on the doll that looked like Vickie, either, or her body.”

Seph rose from the bed and rubbed at her head while she paced the room. “A skin-walker who doesn’t use magic…How can that be? It requires a twin’s eye and then a spell to walk through skin. There’s no way you can do that kind of dark magic without magic.”

I nodded, forming my next question carefully so it didn’t sound like an accusation. “Does what you do with dolls require magic?”

“Oh yes. It’s the only magic I’m actually good at.” She stopped and stared at me, her eyes wide. “You said the doll didn’t have traces of magic on it, so was it this skin-walker, who doesn’t even need magic, who killed Vickie?”

“Possibly.”

“And your brother?”

I touched the crystal ball again in my pocket. “Maybe.”

“The skin-walker could literally be anyone, and no one would know.” She drummed her fingers on her lips and started pacing again. “But why though? Why kill your brother and Vickie? Why pretend to be you at White Magic—?” She stopped again. “Oh. It’s kind of genius, really. Be you, a student who enrolled but never showed up, so you won’t be recognized while you…do what?”

“Good point. I need to find that out.” I probed my tongue over my fake tooth. “Morrissey told me I need to go to the familiars’ cemetery after the dark hour. Maybe there will be answers there? I don’t know.”

Seph gasped. “Morrissey…”

“What?”

She hooked her finger in her mouth and tapped on one of her teeth in the back. “She took my tooth too. She told me something that didn’t make a lick of sense.”

“Yeah? What was that?”

“She said my tooth saw me in here with you. Both of us were sleeping, but…there were two of me, one sleeping and one…not.”

Unease prickled up my back. Someone had been in here with us? I’d often wondered that, especially when I’d once woken to find the floor frozen over and my boots moved out of reach so I couldn’t chase after Seph. “What were you—it—doing?”

“Watching,” Seph said, wringing her hands together.

My swallow stuck in my throat, and a shudder raced across my shoulders. “Watching what? Watching you?”

“No.” She winced. “Watching you.”