Chapter 33 Bechora
Getting into Dean Femirea’s office was suspiciously easy.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find acting as security to keep people out, but it definitely wasn’t the mechanical lock that Vallynn’s shadows broke through in the blink of an eye.
I’d been so certain we’d run into some sort of magical security that I had counterspells, Miles had found, tucked inside the messenger bag slung over my shoulder.
“I feel like there should be boobytraps or something,” I muttered under my breath as I followed him and Dante into the dark office.
“People would expect that,” Vallynn said, moving toward the cabinets along the far wall. “Even with the amount of human tech we’ve coopted, we rely primarily on magic, which means something like a human door lock makes the best security.”
I rolled my eyes and didn’t respond before looking around the space for a place to start searching.
Without light, I could just make out the large desk centered near the back of the room, cabinets slightly off to the right that Vallynn had moved toward, a bookshelf to the left, and a couple of chairs facing the desk.
Dante murmured something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, but the soft glow of light emanating from his palm told me he’d cast the same light spell I’d learned last term.
It wasn’t bright enough to draw attention from the windows, but it cast enough illumination to bring the room into focus.
Unease settled in as my eyes adjusted. Everything was…
too clean, too orderly. The desk was devoid of personal touches, and the bookshelf held textbooks organized in orderly rows.
It felt like walking into a room that had been carefully staged, rather than a well-used office.
I moved toward the desk, my shoes quiet against the floor as I reached out and ran my fingers lightly over the surface as I moved around it.
My gaze moved to the drawers. Slowly, carefully, I pulled the top one open.
Inside were neatly organized files. Grabbing the first one, I skimmed over it, realizing I was looking at some sort of faculty report.
Nothing related to the reason we were here.
Putting it back where I found it, I reached for the next.
Minutes ticked by as I worked my way through the remaining files, finding class schedules, disciplinary write-ups, staff schedules. Normal things.
“Anything?” Dante asked from where he’d posted up by the door.
“Nothing useful,” I replied, quietly shutting the drawer.
“Nothing here either,” Vallynn sighed heavily, closing the cabinet he’d been searching before moving to the bookshelf, hoping maybe he’d find something hidden among the textbooks.
Squatting down, I shifted my bag behind me and pulled open the bottom of the two drawers in the desk.
At first glance, it was empty, seemingly untouched, but as I looked closer, I could see faint outlines where files had once been stacked.
The slight discoloration where something had sat long enough to leave a mark.
My brows dipped, and I frowned, starting to shut the drawer when something odd caught my attention.
Moving it slowly back and forth, I realized the front was twice the depth as the inside bottom appeared to be.
“There’s a false bottom,” I said, keeping my voice low.
Dante pushed off the wall near the door, immediately, and crossed the room in silent steps. “Show me.”
Vallynn abandoned the bookshelf just as quickly and came to stand on my other side.
I ran my fingers along the inside edge of the drawer, feeling for any sort of catch. There wasn’t anything obvious. No latch, no visible seam.
“Maybe the Dean used magic after all,” Dante whispered.
“Maybe,” I murmured, though I couldn’t tell either way.
I pressed my palm flat against the bottom and applied pressure, hoping it would reveal something .
My lips pursed as nothing happened. Shifting forward to put my knees on the floor, I reached toward the back of the drawer and dragged my fingers along the back edge.
My nails caught slightly on a near-invisible ridge this time.
Hooking a nail into it, I pulled. The panel lifted with a soft, almost inaudible click, and I lifted the false bottom free.
Vallynn took it from my hands and set it on the desk as I studied the hidden contents.
There was a stack of papers, maybe a dozen sheets at most. They were all worn at the edges and covered in an elegant scrawl that I recognized from History of Magical Warfare as the Dean’s.
My pulse kicked up as I reached for the top page.
Names. A list of them, written in her familiar looping script.
Ones I recognized from the lists we’d compiled of suspected missing students.
“Tell me that’s not—” Dante started.
“It is,” I said, my voice barely more than a breath.
I flipped through the remaining pages, finding what appeared to be dates and detailed notes for each named student’s abilities. There was something more, noted near several of the names, that I couldn’t quite make sense of.
“We need to make copies of these so we can figure out what all of this”—I gestured to the notations I didn’t understand—“means. If we take the originals, the Dean will know someone is on to her.”
Vallynn held out a hand for me to hand him the pages. “Let’s split them so we can get them copied faster and get out of here.”
Rising to my feet, I handed him the small stack and shifted my bag around to pull out three notebooks and pens.
Vallynn had already handed Dante some of the pages when he took a notebook and pen from me, in exchange for another part of the stack.
We worked as quickly as we could, copying down everything exactly as it was written into the notebooks.
My pulse pounded faster and faster like it was racing against the clock.
As if someone would stumble upon us at any moment.
I could have sworn I didn’t even breathe until we’d finished and put everything back into place, notebooks and pens tucked safely away in my bag.
The drawer slid shut with a soft click, and for a second, none of us moved. The quiet in the office seemed to press in thick and suffocating for a brief moment before Dante moved toward the door. Vallynn and I followed close behind him, and I nearly collided with his back when he stopped short.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, tilting his head slightly.
I leaned forward, pressing my hands against his back to maintain my balance, and strained to listen for whatever he’d heard. A heartbeat passed, and then footsteps. My heart slammed against my ribs.
“Someone’s coming,” I whispered, hands turning to fists as I clutched the back of Dante’s shirt like it would hide us from whoever was drawing near.
The room plunged into darkness as the light Dante had summoned snuffed out, and I felt something shift under my fingers curled into his shirt.
The dense muscles gave way to something harder, the scent of stone filling my nostrils.
He turned, breaking my hold, and pulled me flush against his chest, stone wings shifting to cocoon me against him as Vallynn’s shadows seemed to explode outward.
“Wha—”
“Shh,” Vallynn hissed, silencing me. “My shadows will keep us hidden, but we have to be quiet if we don’t want to be heard.”
It seemed to click then, the reason Dante had shifted to his stone form and used his wings to shield me.
The vague recollection of the time I’d copied Vallynn’s shadows last term, and Shadrie had informed me only gargoyles were immune, came to mind, to make sense of why the gargoyle seemed to hold me so close.
Tension thrummed through my body, warring with the urge to melt into Dante’s hold as the footsteps drew closer.
I held my breath as the sound came from right outside the door, letting it out in a quiet rush when they kept moving.
None of us relaxed until they’d faded away completely.
Dante’s wings dropped, and his stone form melted away. Releasing his hold on me, he turned toward the door and eased it open.
He poked his head into the hall before pulling the door open wider. “Go,” he whispered.
Vallynn didn’t hesitate, moving past him to step out of the Dean’s office. My feet felt frozen to the floor, heart still thundering in my chest from nearly being caught.
“Come on, Red,” Dante whispered, tugging at the strap of my messenger bag. “We gotta move.”
This time, my feet obeyed. I slipped by him into the hallway, and he followed, closing the door behind me. I heard him murmur a few words under his breath, turning my head in time to see his hands moving as if he were casting a spell.
“He’s fixing the lock,” Vallynn said, gently grabbing my arm to pull me down the corridor. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before we run into someone.”
By some miracle, we reached Magus House without incident.
The familiar warmth of the dorms wrapped around me the second I stepped inside, but it didn’t chase the unease coiling in my gut.
We’d found something . Even if I wasn’t sure what it was yet.
We made our way up the stairs quickly, my mind whirring with theories, and headed straight to my room, where Shadrie and Miles waited.
Shadrie was on her feet the moment we stepped inside. “Thank-fucking-Selir,” she breathed.
“Worried about us?” Dante teased.
Shadrie’s face twisted into a scowl as she turned her attention to them. “No,” she replied flatly. “If you and Vallynn turned up dead in a ditch, I wouldn’t bat an eye.”
“Harsh,” Dante said, clutching his chest as if she’d wounded him.
“Have the others made it back?” I asked, moving to our sofa and dropping my bag on the coffee table, before they could devolve into full-blown bickering.
“Not yet,” Miles answered, reaching for my bag.
Disappointment and worry twisted sharply in my gut, but I shoved it down.
“We found something, at least,” I spoke, forcing my voice to remain steady. “A list of names that’s almost exactly the same as what we made, but there’s notes and dates. Not all of it makes sense to me.”
Miles nodded, removing one of the notebooks from my bag and flipping it open. His eyes skimmed the carefully made copies as the rest of us waited for him to speak. Finally, he lifted his head, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked at us.
“This looks like names, possibly dates they went missing, their abilities, obviously, and partial star chart details,” he said,
“Like general star charts or specifically tied to the students?” Dante asked.
“These look… specific,” Miles said slowly.
“Why would their charts matter?” Vallynn asked. “Astrology can tell us a lot, but it’s not always accurate in predicting someone’s future.”
“Unless the goal isn’t to predict the future and she’s looking for something in the past,” Shadrie suggested. “Birth alignments don’t change. She could be searching for a specific one.”
Ice rushed through my veins, and my stomach roiled. Thoughts of the prophecy and its mention of my birth alignment roared in my head. “I… What if she’s looking for me?”