Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Colson
My footfalls ring out into the stillness of the senior cafeteria. Each tap of my Oxfords reverberates through my nerves.
It’s too early for any food service yet. Only the wan security lights are glowing overhead, but the ghostly illumination they cast over the vast room feels appropriate.
After all, I’m hunting an aspiring murderer.
The lucent law enforcement officials kept the cafeteria cordoned off for the first two days after Elodie’s poisoning while they carried out their own investigations. No stone should be left unturned for the daughter of one of the community’s most esteemed families.
As far as I heard, they haven’t turned up anything definitive. The poisoner hid his or her tracks well.
None of the detectives know the students and staff, though. I doubt any of them have my skill at divination. The lucent police force attempted to recruit me while I was working out the details of my contract with the academy, gushing about what a champion I’d be to the greater good.
As if I give a shit about the community that turned a blind eye while I dragged myself up by my bootstraps and sheltered Asher along the way. I wasn’t worthy of their consideration until they saw they could use me.
I have my own priorities. Like determining who is roaming around my workplace alongside me and my brother with murderous intent.
I doubt Asher would be a target. Then again, if the poisoner realizes that my brother has picked up on some trouble around Elodie…
“I think she’s dealing with something serious right now.”
Guilt pangs with my next footsteps. I dismissed his suggestion, told him she’d be just fine, and days later she was getting carted out on a stretcher.
Who the fuck messed with her, and how soon can I eviscerate them?
I drag in a breath that sounds irritatingly shaky in the quiet and stalk toward the buffet counters.
The poison got into her food somehow. No one else fell ill, so clearly it was added sometime between her individual bowl being doled out and her collapse.
The impressions that quiver out of the ephemera saturating the cafeteria are even more fragmented and jumbled than in most places.
Hundreds of students pass through here in a day, with different things on their minds and different interactions each time, and that’s been going on for over a hundred years since Luminary was founded.
I narrow my attention, seeking the bits and pieces with the sharpest clarity. Someone about to commit murder would have been experiencing some pretty intense thoughts and feelings, one would assume.
I dredge up a sniffle with a tang of heartbreak here, an image of a sneering face and a curdle of embarrassment there. A little pop of joy prompted by a mouthful of sour-sweet cherry tart. A spike of panic—"What’s going on over there?”
Genuine worry and confusion. Not someone who was prepared for the crime, if Elodie’s illness even was the reason for that particular fragment.
The general thrum of all the muddled layers of past impressions starts to condense into an ache at the front of my skull. Grimacing, I prowl on through the cafeteria.
All I need is a spurt of triumph or a jitter of guilty nerves, some indication of a figure with malicious motives. Once I have one thread to latch on to, I should be able to unravel more.
This is the strongest talent I have, the one I put the full force of my determination into honing like a master craftsman’s blade. The one that awed my teachers at Beacon Prep and brought a greedy gleam into the Luminary headmaster’s eyes, bright enough to overlook my background.
It has to work for me now.
But nothing unsettling reaches me as I weave between the tables. I catch scraps of reactions to Elodie’s sudden illness, all of them reasonable shock and distress at seeing a classmate suddenly afflicted.
Was the culprit someone she was sitting with? One of those equally snooty girls she considers her friends?
I finally draw up next to the table where they were sitting. The floor has been swabbed clean of Elodie’s vomit, but that won’t have erased the ephemera of the moment.
Circling the table, I trail my fingers over its smooth surface. Laughter, consternation, a disdainful curl of a lip. A gasp. Frantic voices.
I can taste rivalry in the lingering energies, but nothing that feels outright vicious. No satisfaction in the outcome.
This is the chair where Elodie herself was sitting. I rest my hand on its back, frustration already setting in.
If she had any idea what happened to her, she’d have spoken up as soon as she regained consciousness, wouldn’t she? Her impressions aren’t likely to reveal anything new.
I can’t stop myself from pausing and reaching out, though, just like I couldn’t seem to find my common sense the other day in my office when she bent over my lap.
My fingers clench around the chair. My mind delves through the layers of ephemera.
I wasn’t in the cafeteria when the poisoning happened, but I’ve heard it described enough times. I summon a picture of her in my mind to guide my focus.
Her violet-dyed hair tumbling against this seat back. The deceptively coy smile that would have crossed her lips while she talked with her friends. The way those lips would have parted to admit her spoon…
A flicker of an impression brushes against my senses, with an edge of terror that grips me in the instant before I lose it.
Pulse stuttering, I stretch my awareness after the fragment again. If I aim all my intent at recovering that moment—
There, again. A burst of fear and horror, a sour taste, a jab of a finger against tender flesh—
The glimpse flees again, but I remain where I am, my spine gone rigid.
The poison didn’t make Elodie vomit. She forced herself to, with a finger jammed down her throat.
No one’s mentioned that factor. Maybe no one saw the furtive motion of her hand—her hair would have fallen around her face, they could have thought she was trying to wipe at her mouth if they noticed the position of her arm.
She was afraid first, and then she forced up what she’d just eaten.
She knew she’d been poisoned? Before the toxin even took effect?
Why would the princess of lucent society be anticipating her own murder? How would she have recognized what was happening so quickly?
I’m more familiar with lethal chemicals than anyone else in this school should be, and I don’t know if I’d have realized their effects on me before they really took hold.
Her reaction means something. Something I don’t understand, so it’s going to niggle at me that much more persistently.
Only Elodie can give me answers.
Ten hours later, I’m standing outside Julien Devine’s residence, clutching the handle of my briefcase and wondering if I’m making a vast miscalculation.
Three stories of aged but painstakingly maintained brick loom over me, every artful detail from the sculpted railing to the window-frame flourishes screaming how much the place must have cost. The goddamned garage off to the side of the building is probably worth more than the entire house I rent half of.
Any one of the cars parked in it would cost my annual salary.
The very air, laced with a refreshingly cool breeze and the spruce scent of the manicured tree next to the front walk, says I don’t belong here. The faintly lilting hum of the place’s cultivated ephemera feels far too elegant for a Beacon Prep upstart.
Even in my designer-label suit with my own careful tailoring, I’m a shabby fraud in the face of this graceful refinement.
Who am I to ask anything at all of a Devine?
I’m not sure which is going to be more of a problem: my insecurity or the fury it stirs inside me.
I grit my teeth for a few seconds, and then I relax through sheer force of will and stalk up to the front door.
My welcome doesn’t boost my confidence. Some member of household staff ushers me into a grand hallway before a gleaming hardwood staircase. The scents of the finest wood polish and something elegantly floral fill my lungs.
Why the fuck should I care what’s happening to Elodie when she’s got the whole world at her fingertips? When would any of these people ever stoop to lending me or my brother a hand?
Then Julien Devine steps into the hallway, and I shove all my resentment down as far as it’ll go.
I believe the man’s got nearly two decades on my twenty-eight years, but I have to admit he wears them well. Even with worry etched across his face and his eyes slightly bloodshot, it’s not surprising most of the female staff at the academy giggle and gossip when he makes an appearance.
He rakes a hand through his unusually mussed hair and blinks at me as if it’s taking a moment for him to sort through his thoughts. It doesn’t take any divination for me to guess that he hasn’t slept much the past few days.
His roughened voice adds to that suspicion. “You’re from Luminary Academy… Professor Raith?”
I nod. “I’ve collected the past few days’ notes and classwork from all of Miss Devine’s instructors. She can review them over the weekend if she’s up to it—or they can wait for whenever she is.”
Something in the man’s expression hardens. A spear of ice stabs through my gut, as if there’s any chance he could know how I’ve handled his daughter in the past just by looking at me.
His next words make it clear his animosity is spread much broader than that. “They say they’re the best school of magic in the world, and they couldn’t even ensure…”
He trails off with a shake of his head. “Fine. You can give the notes to me.”
I adjust my briefcase in front of me, weighing my response carefully.
“If she’s well enough now, it would be better if I could go over them with her myself so I can add context based on talking with my colleagues.
I’ll keep our conversation succinct, of course.
It may be easier for her to hear the explanations directly rather than sorting through the notes on her own? ”