Chapter 38
Unlike Kitty’s disappearance, Lyra’s is schoolwide news.
By the time Reid and I make it to her dorm, it’s like all the paparazzi have been called to the scene of a pop star’s DUI.
A swarm of students attempts to peek into a room blocked off by teachers and Citadel hunters.
The latter are formidable alumni in dark navy uniforms, gear strapped across their chests and arms. It seems the Harker alumni have been called in.
Amid anxious murmurs and wringing hands, I spy Dean Driscoll, arms folded over his chest, conferring quietly with Professors Lisette and Crowley.
I push past onlookers to get my own view of the dorm room.
Inside is the unmistakable wreckage of a struggle: broken glass lampshade, speckles of blood, shattered window.
The sight chills the blood in my veins. Lyra was a second year and a hell of a fighter.
In fact, like Kitty, she struck me as having qualities similar to an aeon’s.
A hunger for the kill, the implication she’d had the abilities to hunt before turning twenty-one…
Whoever took her had to have been worse than formidable.
When I look away from the scene, my eyes lock with Professor Lisette’s.
My stomach dips with unease. If she’s behind this, and now she’s playing concerned teacher at the scene of the crime…
“What’s going on?” Peter asks. I turn to see him and Sophia pushing their way through the murmuring crowd.
“It’s Lyra—”
Sophia gets one look inside the dorm room and blanches.
“Oh god.” She turns to Peter to shield her eyes, and he cradles her head against his chest beneath his chin.
I never noticed Peter was a full head taller than Soph, but he holds her like he was born to do just that.
The longer Peter looks at the bloodstains, the paler he goes too. Only Reid stands stony-faced.
“How did the news travel so fast?” I whisper to them.
Elliot’s found us too, his face a mask of sheer fury. “Her roommate heard screaming on her way back from a class. Lyra was gone by the time she reached the door.”
I look at all three of them. Then to Reid. “We need to talk.”
We make it to Sophia’s and my dorm in record time. Elliot takes a seat on Sophia’s bed while Peter just paces. Sophia studies me and then Reid, who’s leaning against the wall beside my desk. “You two know something. Spill.”
“The first day we met, after orientation, you had a stamp on your wrist from a bar or something. It was antlers, I think. Do you remember where that was from?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Reid tense. Sophia plops down on her bed next to Elliot. “I go to a lot of places. That was months ago…”
“Really try to think.”
“Was it Pomegranate?” Elliot offers. “Or maybe Finale?”
Sophia gets her phone out and begins to scroll. “I’ll see if I took any pictures that night.”
Peter stops pacing. “What does the stamp have to do with Lyra?”
I take a breath. Here comes my crazy conspiracy theory. Chances that my friends don’t fit me with a tinfoil hat and send me right off to Shiloh feel slim, but it’s all I’ve got.
“Kitty had the same stamp on her wrist when I met her. And Lyra too. I think it’s a club here in Astera.
Lyra said during Field Training that she liked to party.
And Reid and I found a bag of poppy with that same club’s logo in the room where the asphodels are kept.
I think whoever took the flowers dropped it without realizing. ”
“You found the hidden garden?” Peter breathes.
Behind me, I hear Reid take a seat on the edge of my desk. I just know his arms are folded, forearm muscles coiled with tension.
“Some of the flowers have been taken,” I tell them.
“I’m not following,” Elliot says. “What do the missing flowers have to do with the club?”
I turn back to Reid, who looks lost in thought. Something is eating at him. All I can do is plow onward. “If the emails that claimed Kitty was fine were fabricated somehow, if someone at Harker really is brewing a syrabraxa…”
Reid’s exhale is nearly a growl. He already knows what this means.
“Let’s just think about their plan so far,” I tell the group.
“They let the wraiths in to cover for Kitty’s kidnapping.
They set up the zombie spell to cover their theft of the Aeon’s Dagger.
All their moves have been hidden by attacks on the school.
But then they take Lyra in the middle of the day with no cover…
I think something changed for them—suddenly they had to get Lyra and the asphodels quickly.
Maybe there’s some kind of time crunch. Maybe they’re panicking, and in their rush, they dropped the bag of poppy from the club.
It’s a clue to who the person behind all this is. ”
Peter’s brows lift slowly with solemn realization. “So Kitty being in Brazil…”
Sophia squeezes his hand. “We don’t know anything for sure yet.”
“We never heard directly from her that she was all right,” I say.
“Why take Kitty and Lyra?” Elliot asks quietly. “What do they have to do with the spell?”
I suck in a ragged breath. I haven’t told Reid what I am yet, and I don’t know how to say They were both prime candidates for being aeons, whose blood is required for the spell without explaining that I only know they were prime candidates because of qualities I have myself.
“I don’t know,” I lie. “But it can’t be a coincidence that Kitty and Lyra frequented the same club as the person who stole the asphodels. ”
“Maybe Lyra and Kitty are working with a turned witch to brew the spell,” Elliot suggests, his face propped in his hands.
“But why make Kitty look like she left school and Lyra like she was attacked? And why—” His fingers rub roughly at his brow.
“Never mind.” He looks tired and miserable.
I survey Peter’s hollowed-out expression and Reid’s and Sophia’s grim ones.
We all look wrecked, but Elliot wears it the worst. He’s too beautiful to be exhausted. He needs a beer with a lime in it.
“I’ve got it.” Sophia stands up to show me a picture on her phone of her and Elliot snorting poppy in the corner of some club. “Fever Dream. In Astera. I’ve been a few times. The stamp is a pair of white deer antlers.”
Fever Dream. Of course. The infamous Half City haunt.
Known as one of the most elite nightclubs in the world, it’s impossible to get into if you aren’t young and hot or richer than god, yet it’s deep below the Chasm—as nasty and debauched as it is renowned.
Stories are always circulating of celebrity scandals, legendary parties, and shady under-the-table deals.
I’ve lived in Astera my whole life and have never stepped foot inside.
“Let’s go tonight,” I tell them. “See what we can find?”
“In,” Sophia says. “I need a fucking drink.”
“You can’t go there.” Reid’s voice behind me is almost too low to hear.
I whirl around. “Why not?”
His eyes are colder than I’ve ever seen them. His jaw is granite. “It’s not safe.”
“Nothing that we do is safe.” When Reid’s lips don’t move from their thin line, I take a meaningful step forward. “What do you mean?”
Silence rends the room.
“What do you know, Reid?”
For a moment, Reid says nothing. I can’t tell if he’s thinking or waiting for me to say more. Eventually he goes with “Just that the owner runs drugs and weapons out of the club. Assassins for hire, money laundering…The pinnacle of Astera crime.”
I glare at him. “A nightclub with an owner who operates in high-level Astera crime and the fact that Harker students who go there end up missing? And the club’s poppy was found in the room where the asphodels—one of several missing ingredients for the deadliest spell in existence—were stolen? And you’re telling me not to go?”
“It’s not up to him.” Sophia’s already pulling her compact crossbow from our utility closet.
“Don’t confuse courage with recklessness, Valentine. I’ve seen the way you fight. You think you’re brave, but…” Reid’s glare is severe. “There’s nothing brave about not giving a shit whether you live or die.”
“Hey—” Peter snaps.
A gasp catches in my throat. “Reid…”
His jaw only tenses. “She’s playing with your life here.”
I bite down on my cheek to quell my fury. “I can take care of my own life.”
Sophia nods to herself, arrows in her hands. “Hey, Reid?”
Reid turns to her, exhausted. “Yeah?”
“Fuck you.”
Elliot chuckles. Reid stands from the desk, fists coiled.
“Okay,” I sigh. “Let’s all just cool our jets here—”
But Reid shakes his head like we’re insubordinate children. “Harker has looked into Fever Dream time and time again. Not a trace of deviant activity. It’s just not somewhere I want you—any of you—spending any time if students who go there end up missing.”
“Fine,” I concede. “Come with us?”
“Absolutely not. I wouldn’t take you there if my own life depended on it.”
“Oh, come on. That’s dramatic.”
He runs an exasperated hand down his face. “You’re not going to save your father by saving these girls, Viv.”
Sophia and Peter suck in twin breaths. Something inside me breaks a little.
Elliot shakes his head. “Everyone’s taking hits today.”
But my heart is racing, and the need to fight is building beneath my skin. “I’m going whether you like it or—”
“Can’t you ever, just once,” Reid snaps, “do what I’m asking you to?”
It lands like a roundhouse. I have enough people in my life telling me all the things I can’t do or don’t do properly. I know who I can and cannot save. I also know that as much as I don’t want to lie to Reid, he’s never going to let me pursue this lead.
I allow my face to shutter. Allow him to think his final words have shut me down completely. Then, quietly, I say, “You have to swear you’ll look into it.”
“Of course. Give me a couple days.”
“Fine.” I’m already moving for my bag. Time to get out of here.
I bolt from the room without another word.