Several awkward minutes passed before the others arrived. Paul recounted his story about Titus’s murder for Eli, which burned a little time. Then he demonstrated the usefulness of the shape-change necklace, which helped a little more. But still, it felt like an eternity before Selene and Lance arrived. At least the latter brought his laptop with him.
“This will work perfectly,” Paul said, cracking his knuckles over the laptop’s keyboard. “I just need your username and password for the network access, Dusty.”
“Why hers?” Lance said. “Won’t that mess up mine?”
Paul shook his head. “It’ll be its own unique account, everything separate. And I would prefer to use Dusty’s. No offense, but I know her better.” The “I trust her” was implied but everybody caught it just the same.
“Use mine,” Eli said. He was hovering near the desk, his arms crossed in a way that made the muscles in his chest stand out.
“Why?” Paul said.
Eli’s stare spoke louder than words. Because I don’t trust you, it said.
“Never mind.” Paul lowered his gaze to the computer screen. “What is it?”
While Eli spoke the information aloud, the rest of us pretended not to listen. Selene was the only one who pulled it off, but only because Buster was giving her such a hard time. In its excitement, the chair kept rolling side to side, bucking a little with each change of direction. She threatened multiple times to remove its wheels if it didn’t stop, but so far the chair wasn’t buying it.
“Okay, there we are,” Paul said. “Now, I’ve just got to purchase the software I need and we’re good to go. Um…” He glanced around the room. “Does anybody have a way to pay for this? I would offer, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want it traceable back to me. Not to mention ex-cons are notoriously broke.”
“Crap, I don’t have anything,” I said. “Not unless the place takes CasterCard.”
“Doubtful,” said Paul.
“I don’t have anything either,” Selene called from the far side of the room where Buster had just whisked her to.
Smirking, Lance pulled his wallet out of his pants pocket. “It’s all right. I got it.” He slid out a card, seemingly at random. I spotted a half-dozen or more in there. “But you owe me, Everhart.” He winked.
Are you sure this is a good idea? I wanted to ask him, not knowing how things stood between him and his father, but Selene was bound to wonder at my concern. I snickered instead. “Would you like that as a personal check or money order?”
Lance tilted his head. “What’s a money order?”
“Never mind.”
As Paul set to work, I reached into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around the flash drive. It was possible Paul could salvage some of the data, but I doubted my mom would want me to trust him with the information.
“Okay,” Paul said a few minutes later. “This will take awhile to download. But as soon as it’s done, I’ll start working on the hack. But don’t expect results right away. It might be a few days, easily.”
“Okay,” I said, and then taking a deep breath, I pulled the flash drive out of my pocket and held it out to him. No, Mom wouldn’t want him trusted with it, but I didn’t have anyone else to go to with it. And he was helping us save her. That had to count for something. “Would you mind seeing what you can do with this?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Paul said, accepting the flash drive.
“It got rained on.” Then I explained what it contained.
Paul looked intrigued and a little shocked at the news, but he slowly nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“All right.” Eli put his hands on his hips. “In the meantime we should start identifying what we know and what we need to figure out.” He strode over to the dry-erase board on the far side of the room.
I watched him with hungry eyes. This was how I liked Eli best—in his private detective mode, focused to the point of fervency.
“So,” he said, a black marker in hand. “The most important thing we need to do is determine possible suspects.” Eli began jotting notes down on the board. “We have to determine who else might’ve killed Titus.”
“Oh, that’s not going to be hard at all,” said Selene as she forcibly rolled the chair nearer to the rest of us once more. “Every single person who lost a loved one at Lyonshold has a motive for killing Titus Kirkwood.”
Eli licked his lips. “I know. Which is why instead we need to figure out just who else is capable of committing the crime. Valentine claims only a Nightmare could do it. So either there’s another Nightmare around here we don’t know about, or there’s some other way the killer could’ve gotten onto the magically restricted ward.”
“What about one of the guards?” I turned to Paul. “You said they did regular floor checks, right?”
“Yeah, they did. I mean they do.”
Eli glanced over his shoulder. “Wait. Aren’t there security cameras?”
Paul laughed. “Nope. They used to use them, I think, but they’ve been disconnected. They’re too unreliable with the animation effect.”
“No kidding,” I said, remembering the dancing camera in the interrogation room.
Eli shook his head, bemused. He jotted “no cameras” on the board.
“Well, we know it wasn’t one of the guards,” Selene said. “Not unless one of them is a Nightmare. No magic on the ward.”
“Who says he was killed with magic?” Eli said. “The guards could’ve killed him like an ordinary would have. A knife, box cutter, even a razor blade would do the trick if applied to the right area.”
I shivered, remembering Katarina’ taunt about my mother. Had she chosen that knife just because it was the only traditional weapon on the table? Or did she know something about Titus’s murder? I wondered what her parents did for a living.
“If it was a guard,” I said, turning to Eli, “the killer could’ve slipped into Titus’s cell during the floor check, killed him, and came back out and gave the all clear. Then all he had to do was wait for the next floor check to report the murder. Or let one of the other guards discover the body.”
“Yes, that could work,” Eli said, biting his lip. He wrote the word guards on the board beneath the column suspects. He paused, staring at it, his mind working so hard I could almost hear the gears churning. Then to my surprise, he shook his head. “No, it’s a good theory, but I bet when we get the case files we’re going to find all the guards have been cleared.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked. I noticed a fray on my jeans and started picking at it.
“Because Valentine knows what he’s doing.” Eli exhaled loudly. “The guards would’ve been the first people he investigated and cleared. If the killing couldn’t have been accomplished with magic, then the easiest solution is that it was an inside job. But I bet they all passed the lie detector test or whatever it is magickind do in that situation.”
“The guilt test,” I said, glowering. “Valentine is a guilt demon. A Crimen, I think it’s called.”
“Wow.” Eli snorted. “That sounds really reliable and effective.”
“Tell me about it.” I rolled my eyes. “But wait. Could someone disguised like one of the guards have done it?” I motioned to Paul. “Like with one of those shape-change necklaces? Maybe the killer snuck into the cell pretending to be one of the guards and then snuck out again after it was over without the guard ever knowing he was being impersonated. They would pass the guilt test then, yes?”
Paul ran a hand over his hair. “It’s another nice theory, but that’s exactly the kind of thing the anti-magic protects against. The second you try to walk in there with a glamour on, even one as powerful as a shape-change necklace, the spell will break and set off the alarms.”
“Crap. Why does magic have to make everything more complicated?” Eli rapped his fist on the table. The computer sitting nearby let out a startled beep. Eli pulled his hand away and shoved it into his pocket, making it clear he wouldn’t hit anything again. Violence of any kind was a bad idea in room 013. The animated objects didn’t take it very well.
“You’re right it does,” Paul said. “But if it wasn’t a guard, I just can’t see somebody else pulling off that killing without magic. The whole ward is restricted, not just the cells themselves. I doubt the killer could’ve broken in, snuck past all the security, and committed the murder without using magic somewhere along the way.”
“It might’ve been hard to do,” Eli said, his expression turning stony, “but we can’t rule out the possibility that he was killed by ordinary means. Not until we got a hold of the case files and know for sure. Magickind likes to pretend ordinaries can’t do anything at all because they’re not magical, but that’s not true. Someone clever enough, determined enough, could’ve found a way.”
“Where there’s a will,” I said, clinging to the thought. Never mind that “clever” and “determined” described my mother perfectly.
“Hang on a minute,” Selene said. In her excitement, she stood up, but right away Buster wheeled forward, striking her in the back of the knees. She tumbled onto the chair with a grunt. I waited for the spectacle to ensue, but Selene was so focused she just ignored the misbehaving chair completely. “Paul’s right that his glamour necklace wouldn’t work, but what if the killer is a real shape-changer?”
“That’s impossible, babe,” Lance said, giving a little laugh. “There’s no such thing. Not anymore.”
Selene scowled at him. I wasn’t quite sure if it was because he’d dismissed her idea or that he’d called her “babe.” My vote was on the latter. “You don’t know that for sure. Nobody can prove they ever went extinct. It’s impossible to prove considering they can shift their shape.”
Lance started to argue, but Eli cut him off, raising his hands as well as his voice. “Hold up, you two. What are you talking about?”
Selene tore her gaze off Lance and directed it at Eli. “Shape-changers are, or were, a type of darkkind. They had a reputation for evil—total mayhem and destruction. So much so that their magic was outlawed at the end of the magickind wars. Anyone caught shape-changing was put to death.”
“That’s a familiar tale,” I muttered.
“They did outlaw it,” Paul said, “but telling a shape-changer not to shift their shape is like telling a Nightmare not to feed on dreams.”
“But Nightmares would die without dream-feeding,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Selene tapped her toe against the floor. “That was the whole point. Some legends claim all the shape-changers were executed because they refused to stop shifting. Others claim they simply died from magic deprivation.”
I shuddered, feeling gut-punched by the idea, by the reality of it. It was the kind of awful truth I wished I could dismiss as mere legend or even exaggeration, but I knew better. The severe lack of Nightmares around was proof enough that such prejudice could happen. Even worse, it was still happening. Everywhere, it seemed. And not just among magickind.
“But other legends say they just went into hiding,” Selene continued. “The shape-change isn’t detectable like most magic. It’s more like a Nightmare’s magic. It’s part of who they are. A shape-changer could’ve walked right into that ward without setting off a single magic detector.” She hesitated. “I think so, anyway. If the legends about them are true.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I’m not sure that relying on an ancient legend as a possible explanation is going to get us anywhere with Valentine. He’s more of a facts-and-evidence kind of guy.”
“That’s certainly true,” Eli said, a sigh in his voice. “But still, we don’t have a lot to go on. If we eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
“You know Sherlock Holmes was fictional, right?” Paul said.
“You sure about that?” Eli arched an eyebrow, the sarcastic gesture doing little to disguise the hostility on his face. He might be acting civil with Paul so far, but friendliness would be a long time coming. Like never. “Up until a year ago fairies and sirens and Nightmares were all fictional, too. To me at least.”
“Good point,” I said, my voice a little higher pitched than normal. I sensed a fight brewing, and I wanted to head it off. “It seems like every other day I discover something I thought was myth is actually true—Atlantis, Beowulf, King Arthur.” Excalibur, I silently added. Around my wrist, Bellanax tingled against my skin.
Flashing me a commiserating smile, Eli turned back to the board and wrote down shape-changer.
“Guys,” Lance said, “we don’t have to go searching for improbable explanations. Not yet.”
All three of us turned to look at Lance. Even Buster seemed to shift toward him, in sync with Selene’s gaze.
“What do you mean?” Eli said.
“There’s another Nightmare around, besides Dusty and her mom.”
“If you’re talking about Bethany Grey,” I said, “you can forget it. Valentine told me she’s gone missing, and it wasn’t a jailbreak. Lady Elaine saw a vision that it’s connected to the—” I suddenly couldn’t speak, my lips sealed together as if with magical cement.
Eli grunted. “That damn nondisclosure thing. What Dusty is trying to say is that given the reason Bethany has gone missing it makes her a victim, not a suspect.”
Selene harrumphed. “I really wish you could tell us what this nondisclosure thing is all about.”
Me, too, I thought, unable to say the words aloud.
“Me, too,” Eli said.
Lance waved us off. “I’m not talking about Bethany Grey.”
“Then who?” Selene fixed a fierce stare on him.
Shifting his weight from side to side, Lance said, “It’s Mr. Corvus.”
I tried to laugh, couldn’t quite do it with my mouth closed, and managed a snorting sound instead like I was trying to breathe through water. Mr. Corvus? A Nightmare? No way.
“I don’t know,” Eli said. “It’s hard to picture it.”
“Why?” Selene said, her face alight with comprehension. “Because he’s male? Trust me, there are male Nightmares around. There has to be. You know, a little thing called survival of the species.”
A suggestive grin flashed across Lance’s face. Wisely, he made it vanish before Selene noticed.
“Yeah, okay.” Eli focused on Lance. “But why do you think Corvus is one? He’s never mentioned it in class.”
No kidding, I thought, I would’ve remembered something like that.
“His eyes glow in the dark,” Lance said.
An awkward silence descended at this announcement. It was true that glow-in-the-dark eyes were the surest sign of a Nightmare, our signature as it were, but how on earth would Lance have ever seen it? It wasn’t like Corvus made a habit of turning the lights off to teach. And I knew from experience that Nightmares took measures to keep their glowing eyes hidden.
Lance bared his teeth in a sarcastic smile. “It’s not as weird as it sounds, I promise. I snuck out the other night to put some hot sauce in the trash troll feed bins in the Menagerie—”
Selene gaped. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“Wanted to see what would happen to the little bastards. One of them bit my shoe the other day in bio and nearly escaped with a toe.” He shrugged. “I figured they might stop being so inclined to bite if they got a taste of something hot.”
I snorted. “That has got to be the worst prank you’ve ever come up with.” A half second later, I realized the nondisclosure spell had let go of its hold on my tongue. “Thank goodness,” I said, patting my mouth.
“Welcome back,” Eli said.
Lance grinned in my direction. “I might have better success with my pranks if you got back in the game.”
“Come on, you two,” Selene said. “Don’t get started.”
Lance sniffed. “Fine. The point is, I saw Corvus walking outside the Menagerie. It was really dark, but I’m sure it was him.”
“If it was dark, how could you tell?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” His lips twisted upward in a smirk. “There aren’t a lot of people on campus with only one eye. Try none.”
“Oh.” As soon as he said it, I realized it made perfect sense. It was incontrovertible. Glowing eyes meant Nightmare. Glowing single eye meant Corvus.
“Wow,” said Eli. “I can’t believe we never figured it out before now.”
“Yeah, but do you really think he’s involved?” said Paul. “What motive would he have for killing my uncle?”
“Who can say?” said Eli. “There might be any number of reasons.”
“Especially if he’s connected to Marrow,” I added. I stood up, unable to stay still as thoughts tumbled through my mind. “Valentine and Lady Elaine seem to think that all of this might be related to Marrow. Both Titus’s murder and the thing that Eli and I aren’t allowed to talk about. And with Marrow involved, Corvus might have any number of reasons for killing Titus. Maybe it was a cover-up. Remember how we thought Corvus was involved with the attack on Lyonshold?”
“That’s right,” Eli said. He looked on the verge of pacing. “Me and Dusty were snooping through Corvus’s office when Titus kidnapped us. Titus said he’d bugged our dream-session, but maybe that was a lie. Maybe Corvus knew we’d broken in and tipped him off.”
I nodded, scrambling to recall all the details. It hadn’t been all that long ago, a little over three months, but so much had happened after Titus captured us. “We suspected Corvus because there were ravens in Eli’s dreams,” I said, thinking aloud.
“And he owned the Atlantean Chronicle,” added Eli. “He’s an historian. We never did figure out how Titus learned the spell to sink Lyonshold. Maybe Corvus told him.”
“That’s possible,” Selene said, bobbing her head in agreement. “And he might not have known what Titus was planning when he handed over the information at first. But then after the attack, he could have decided to kill him to save his own neck.”
I frowned. Was Corvus capable of something so cold and calculating as executing Titus Kirkwood to protect himself? The short answer was—maybe. It wasn’t that he was cruel or unkind. He didn’t even strike me as vindictive. No, the word that always seemed to come to my mind to describe him was imperialistic. Authoritarian. He ruled his classroom with absolute power, and that sense of dominancy permeated everything about him. He reminded me of a general in a war movie, the kind of man capable of making decisions that he knew would cost lives, but that he calculated would be worth it in the long run.
What kind of a person can do that? I thought, sacrifice real lives like chess pieces? Only it happened all the time. Wars were fought among ordinaries across the world every day.
Shaking off the shiver sliding down my spine, I glanced at Eli. “And the third reason we suspected him was because of that symbol. The one with the three rings all connected.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.” Eli turned toward the dry-erase board and drew the symbol. When he finished, he stepped back, giving us all a clear view.
I examined the symbol, a peculiar feeling going through me. Mostly, I suspected, it was because of all the bad memories that came with it. I glanced at Eli. “Didn’t you ask Corvus what it meant afterward?”
He ran a hand over his buzzed head, nodding. “He called it the Borromean circle. Said it was an archaic magickind symbol of unity. Each ring represents a kind. One for witchkind, one for naturekind, and one for darkkind.” He pointed to each in turn.
“So something less than diabolical, in other words,” Paul said.
I nodded, but inside I wasn’t so sure.
Only the blood of the twelve can undo the circle.
The odd phrase came sailing at me from out of the blue. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it, but then it came to me. It was the line Corvus had made me translate out of one of his ancient books as part of my detention with him last year. A depiction of the Borromean circles had been in that book, too. And while the symbolism of the Borromean circles might be positive, that sentence certainly wasn’t. It sounded like a way of breaking the circles, shattering that unity—perhaps in the same way Titus Kirkwood had hoped to start a new magickind war by sinking Lyonshold and making the naturekinds look responsible for it.
“Well,” said Selene, “the symbol might not be evil, but that doesn’t mean Corvus wasn’t involved. Does anybody know if he was even at Lyonshold that day? I know I didn’t see him. He should’ve been there though. All the teachers were chaperoning.”
Eli twisted the marker through his fingertips, his mouth hanging slightly open as he contemplated the possibility. “We won’t know anything for certain until we take a closer look at what he’s been up to. But I’ve got to guess that Valentine knows he’s a Nightmare and has gotten his alibi already.”
I clucked my tongue in dismay. “He certainly gave me the impression that there was someone other than me, Bethany, and my mom running around here.”
“Yes, and I would think he’d have to disclose his kind to school officials, at a minimum,” said Lance. We all turned to stare at him, surprised by his sudden contribution. It wasn’t that he was dumb, quite the opposite. Lance was absurdly clever—and devious—but he was also perpetually bored and disinterested. It was strange to hear him talk with such enthusiasm.
“Yeah, they probably do,” Eli said, recovering first. “But I don’t think we should eliminate him as a possible suspect. Not yet. He’s our best lead so far.”
“And he could’ve lied about his alibi,” Paul said.
“What about the guilt test?” asked Selene.
I scoffed. “Valentine suspected my mother from the beginning. I doubt he tried all that hard to read Corvus’s guilt.”
“Or maybe Corvus is pathological and doesn’t have any guilt about committing murder,” Lance said. “He is a Night—” Lance cut himself off before finishing the sentence, but that didn’t stop Selene from standing up and punching him hard in the shoulder. Buster followed it up with a full frontal attack, whacking Lance in the knees with its seat.
Lance winced, and cupped his hand over his arm, as if trying to squeeze the hurt away. “Ouch. But yeah, I deserved that.” He cast a sheepish smile in my direction. “Sorry, Dusty. Old habits and all.” The words were light, but for once he said them straight, no joking or underlying derision.
I clenched my teeth, uncertain how to react, whether to be angry or pleased. On the one hand, it wasn’t the first time I’d been faced with the stereotype that Nightmares were born evil. In truth, it was one I’d worried about from time to time myself. I was often haunted by the possibility that there was something fundamentally evil about my nature, especially whenever I screwed up and did something stupid. But on the other hand, Lance had apologized—sincerely. If he could change, well, that was a big enough miracle for me.
“It’s all right,” I said, and for once I spoke to him straight, too—no snide or sarcasm in sight.
Eli cleared his throat. I had a suspicion he was trying not to grin about the Disney-moment breakthrough Lance and I just had. “Anyway, so it looks like our first order of business is to investigate Corvus.”
I nodded. “But we need to be extra careful this time.”
“No argument there.” Eli wrote Corvus’s name on the board.
I stared at it, a weight sinking through my chest and down into my stomach. Corvus was a Nightmare. Like me. Like my mother. Like Bethany. Four of us, the only four I’d ever met or knew anything about. And of those four, Bethany was a condemned criminal and my mother suspected of murder. As much as I was certain she hadn’t killed Titus, I couldn’t claim that she was entirely innocent either. My mom had skirted the line of the law, the line of rightness, her whole life.
And then there was me. Most times I wanted to believe I was good, always inclined to do the right thing. But I’d attacked Katarina. Was that really just because of Bellanax? Or was it because of something in my nature?
There was no answer, not even from the sword, which seemed to have gone cold and lifeless as it lay in its glamoured form around my wrist.
Please let us be wrong, I thought, looking at Corvus’s name on the dry-erase board. Please let the guilty be anybody else except a Nightmare.