An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 37

The schoolhouse was even more worn down this time, like it was crumbling around the tower that marked the Old Masters’ true base. The grass was even thicker, more treacherous to run through. Ellory waded through waist-length strands that clung to her like chains, forcing her to yank her wrists and ankles free of their grasp. Her light hovered by the hummingbird door, indifferent to her slow progress. Wishing she’d brought a knife, Ellory ripped the plants from the ground, tore their vines from her arms, and flicked burrs from her clothes without caring about the scrapes they left behind.

Her tears had dried. Her resolve had calcified. Whatever was inside that building, she was ready to meet it.

She shoved the door open and entered with her Taser lifted. No monster lay in wait. Instead, the ghost light illuminated a trail to the far wall, beyond the shattered blackboard on the opposite side of the room. Ellory kept her eyes and ears open as she inched forward, waiting for the shadows to coalesce into something that was hopefully weak against electricity. But all was still and silent except for the spiders that sprinted across the windowsills and the spectral light that watched her without eyes.

As soon as she made it to the wall, the ball disappeared, submerging her in darkness. Ellory stuffed her phone into her pocket and replaced it with her flashlight. It took two tries for it to click on, but she managed to aim it at the spot where the ghost light had been. There was an inverted hook on the wall, pointing in the wrong direction to hold anything up. Ellory reached for the hook, and it slid downward like a light switch with a low click .

The wall popped outward.

Because it wasn’t a wall, not completely.

It was a hidden door, like the one at the museum.

Before she could touch anything else, something yanked her backward. She hit the filthy floor hard, new aches and pains exploding across her ribs. A clawed foot pressed against her throat, squeezing her windpipe, emptying the air from her chest. It was attached to a corpse-gray leg, thick with muscles and visible veins, and a body that hunched over her to create a shadow larger than any human could. The monster—the assassin—tilted its featureless face down to her, and a seam opened near the bottom of the blankness, widening into a black void of serrated teeth.

Its breath smelled of death.

“No,” Ellory whimpered. Those needlelike talons pressed into her throat, bruising her skin, drawing blood. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t breathe. Black spots danced before her eyes. “No.”

Her heart slowed. The world grew dark.

She had made it this far and would go no further.

This school would be her grave.

“NO!”

She conjured fire, detonating it outward from her chest like a bomb. Red and yellow flames struck the monster through the gut, and it flew backward until it hit the opposite wall. Air. Precious air. Ellory wheezed, her neck stinging with every shaky breath. Her hand stretched out, increasing the temperature of her blaze, searing the beast from the inside out as it writhed above the portrait of Arthur O’Connor. The monster was large enough that part of it extended to the ceiling, but she could see its skin flaking over the light and power tearing through it. There was no screaming, no sound at all but her own breathing.

The beast crumbled. Ash rained to the dusty ground.

Ellory took a moment to collect herself, to wipe her tears and heal the pain of her neck. Her nerves shook for longer than she wanted, but she’d come close to death too many times this year to blame herself for it. Swallowing hard, she pushed herself to her feet.

She continued on.

Behind the hidden door, a set of dark stairs led upward. Ellory replaced her flashlight with her Taser, keeping one hand on the wall to guide her while her eyes adjusted. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own shrieking heartbeat. The scent of mildew and disuse was thick, but a single line of light lay ahead—another false wall, another door, another room she could explore. She realized that she was trembling from something worse than the cold, but even still she couldn’t stop.

They’re coming for you , said a nasty voice in her head. Liam can’t stop them. They’ll come for you. They’ll kill you. You’ll die here with no one to mourn you.

She kept going until the spiral steps turned into a concrete floor. The door swung outward silently, revealing a hallway lit with fluorescent bulbs. There were three closed doors on either side, as well as one opposite her that opened onto another set of stairs. Each door was labeled, and Ellory read the markers as she passed: DEAN, CLASSROOM 1, CLASSROOM 2, LABORATORY 1, STORAGE, and LABORATORY 2. She tried each knob, but they were locked. The brass of them looked newly polished, in contrast to a bottom floor that was doing its best to persuade her that no one had been there in centuries.

“Morgan.”

She turned. Boone Priestley had emerged from Classroom One dressed all in black, his tattoos coiling around his bare arms and the sides of his neck. He looked both terrified and resigned, like he’d been hoping not to find her here and didn’t want to be the one to do something about it.

“You piece of shit,” she accused. “You did erase yourself and Hudson from this world.”

“It wasn’t me, goddamn!” said Boone. And then, quieter: “I get why you think so, though. I mean, I deserve that.”

“What’s down there?” Ellory jabbed her flashlight at the final door. He was lucky he was too far away for her to beat him with it. “Is it Hudson? Is this where they’re keeping him?”

Boone bit his lip and didn’t answer.

“They don’t care about you!” Ellory snapped, frustrated. “They care only about your magic. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they’ll make you disappear, just like Letitia Rose, Manuel Sharp, Angel Mclaughlin—”

“Morgan, come on—”

“—Olivia Holloway, Tasha Butler—”

“You don’t understand, okay? You weren’t born into this shit like we were. Sometimes, you have to take the hits so someone else doesn’t!”

“—Eugene Kang, Kristopher Douglas—”

“I told you these people were dangerous, and you still—”

“Joel Carroll, Malcolm Mayhew. Me.” She stared him down, her jaw set. “Are you going to let me take the hits so you don’t, Boone? Do you think that’s what Hudson wants?”

Surprise flickered across his face. “You remember.”

“We were together. Before. Weren’t we?” When he didn’t answer again, she ranted onward, stepping closer and closer to him. “We were together, and the Old Masters found out, and now I’m here and he’s not. And I know it’s because we fell in love again. I know I did this to him. You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen, and I’m sorry for that. But if you want to protect him, if you actually want to save him, then you’ll stop doing their bidding and help me . If we end this, no one has to suffer again. Not him, not anyone .”

A wrinkle appeared between Boone’s eyebrows. She could see the conflict on his face, could see how badly he wanted to do the right thing. But he still had no idea what the right thing was, and she had grown tired of waiting for him to figure it out. She couldn’t risk him stopping her.

“Morgan,” he began before she smashed him over the head with the hefty flashlight.

Boone crumpled to the floor, and Ellory ran for the next set of stairs.

The next floor was more of the same—locked doors that were once classrooms, dust and blackened grout along the walls—and the floor after that. It wasn’t until she found the stairs that led to the rooftop that Ellory slowed down. There were no footsteps behind her, and there were no more obstacles ahead of her. It felt like a trap, but it was one she had to walk into.

She thought again of Rapunzel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, her hair shorn, her prince blinded, her body banished to the wilderness—all because a sorceress had wanted to keep the princess for her own. There had been a happy ending to that fairy tale, but Rapunzel been blond-haired like Gaia. Ellory wasn’t sure that girls who looked like her, with thick-textured black hair, got that golden ending.

Ellory took a deep breath and pushed on.

As soon as she took the first step, she nearly toppled down the stairs when nausea punched her in the stomach. Her legs felt as weak as a newborn’s. She leaned against the wall to keep herself standing, swallowing again and again to keep bile from rising. Sweat coated her skin, and her breath came in sharp pants. Deep aches bloomed across her skin. She looked down to see bruises circling her ankles and inching up under her jeans. Purple-brown marks sprouted across her arms.

Her legs gave out. She gripped the railing as she slid downward until she was sitting in the center of the staircase, breathing like she’d run a marathon.

What’s happening to me?

The top of the stairs seemed oceans away, but she was seized by the urge to crawl back the way she’d come. Boone might have been unconscious, or he might have been bleeding and pissed, but he wouldn’t hurt her. She knew that now. Not as long as hurting her would hurt Hudson.

Ellory almost turned, but the thought of Hudson cleared her head. Another protective spell, she realized, one trying to keep her from wading deeper into the lodge. She climbed to the next step, dizzy.

By the time she made it to the top, black spots danced in her vision. Her lips were dry, but her fingers were too weak to get the water bottle from her backpack. If she didn’t keep moving forward, if she paused for even a second, she knew she would pass out.

Feet turned into inches, which turned into centimeters. Her shaking hand found the doorknob and turned.

Her breath caught.

The rooftop was lit by bluish glows that came from several globes filling the otherwise-empty space. A cloud-covered sky bore down on them, flashes of stars barely visible between the battlements. Lightning sparked across the surface of the orbs, obscuring the shadowed figure at each center. But the one directly in front of her was close enough for Ellory to see that it was not her kidnapped friends that floated in the middle of this living magic.

It was her own sleeping body.