Chapter 10
We spenta little more time discussing the Vulcan culture before Professor Akhtar signaled us to return the way we had come.
Aiden and I trailed behind the others.
“Want to sneak away and make out?” Aiden asked me, grinning rakishly. “We still have about twenty minutes before we have to return to the school.”
“I like the way you think,” I replied.
We glanced around to see if anyone was paying us attention—they weren’t—and ducked behind a grassy knoll featuring a prominent Moai.
Aiden held me close, nuzzling against my neck. “Are you warm enough? Do you need me to add any thickness to your scarf?”
“I’m fine. It isn’t that cold here. It’s just this drizzling rain that’s a bit annoying.” I wiped at my cheeks ineffectually. “No matter how much I brush the droplets away, more gather.”
“Maybe kissing them away will work,” Aiden murmured, peppering kisses across my cheeks and over my nose. “Hmm. Let me try that again.”
I giggled at the light touches. “You’re so silly. I love it.”
“I love you,” Aiden said softly, and kissed me deeply.
My head spun more the longer the kiss lasted, his tongue stroking mine sensually, our breath mingling between us.
“Oh. Sorry,” said a new voice, and we jumped, startled.
“Chuck!” I exclaimed, annoyed at first. But then I looked at him more closely. “Are you okay?”
Aiden remained silent, but somehow managed to tug me closer to his body. Chuck didn’t seem to notice.
His shoulders slumped and he sat down on the grass, running his fingers through the long strands. “It’s been a hell of a year, and today’s only the second day.”
“What happened? Is one of your roommates among the missing students?” I asked.
“Two,” he muttered glumly. “Your friend Hazel was the first, wasn’t she?”
I nodded. “I wish I understood what’s going on. Then we could stop it. When did your roommates disappear?”
“The first was two days ago, the second one today.” He sighed. “I barely got to say hi.”
“Did you arrive with everyone else, or the day before?” I asked.
“I saw Hazel, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Chuck said. “I was... I was actually hoping to talk to Richard that evening, but I saw their fight. He was such an asshole to her that I decided I didn’t want to try to talk to him.” He buried his face on his knees. “And then I didn’t get the chance to try again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I pulled out of Aiden’s embrace and knelt beside Chuck. When I got closer, I realized he was crying quietly. I rubbed his back. “What did you want to talk to him about? I don’t mean to pry, but my friends and I are trying to figure out what happened that night, and why he was killed, but the other students are only being kidnapped.”
“And returned in one piece,” Aiden added.
“Minus their memories,” I corrected.
“Important distinction,” Chuck snarked weakly. “Well, I wanted to talk to him about... About him and me. Not sure if you knew, but we were kinda hooking up around exam time before summer started.”
“No!” I gasped. “Really?”
“Yeah, well, I found out he was using me. Or something. I don’t know.” He blew out a long breath. “It’s not like we’d set boundaries or anything, you know? He can hardly cheat on me if we weren’t a ‘something’ to begin with, right?”
“You’re allowed to feel like he betrayed your trust,” I said softly. “Communication can be difficult.”
“Exactly. Anyway, I broke whatever we had off before we went home for the summer. And then I had months to think about it, and what I wanted. And I wanted to talk to him and find out if he had thought about me at all, and if he maybe wanted to give us another chance.” Chuck stared off in the distance moodily. “I wasn’t in love with him or anything. He was a decent lay. More could have developed if we had given it a chance, you know?”
“And you didn’t get a chance to find out.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, and Chuck seemed to understand that.
“I don’t believe the rumor that Hazel killed him, for what it’s worth,” Chuck said suddenly. He focused on me. “That’s not her style. Maybe tie him up somewhere in his underwear for the teachers to find him or something. But not murder.”
I snorted a laugh. “I don’t think she’d do that either. She’s not very confrontational. I probably wouldn’t have even heard about the fight if everything else afterward hadn’t also happened.”
“I hope she’s found.”
“Thanks. I’m doing my best.”
“We should probably head back,” Aiden said. He glared mildly at Chuck. “Unfortunately, we don’t get any more alone time.”
Chuck winced. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting to find you. I just wanted to get away for a little bit.”
“It’s fine.” To Aiden, I suggested, “You can stay tonight again, if you want?”
“Yeah, all right,” Aiden replied, pretending indifference.
I took his hand and the three of us headed back to the portal.
“Hey, Chuck,” I asked while we waited in line behind the other students. “What was that package about?”
“Package?” he said, suddenly looking shifty. “What package?”
“In the woods the other night, you paid one of the townspeople for delivering a package.”
“It wasn’t me,” he said quickly.
“Oh, come on. I may have been busy, but I recognize you when I see you,” I scoffed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said shortly, and pushed ahead in line, cutting off any further chance of interrogation.
“That was weird,” Aiden remarked.
“Agreed.” I furrowed my brow in thought. “I can’t imagine it being anything nefarious, though. He’s racist, but not evil.”
“You and I have very different definitions of evil,” Aiden muttered.
“You know what I mean.”
We stepped through the portal in the back of the statue, returning to the academy just in time for lunch.
We were all rather subdued at lunch, trying to figure out what avenue to search next. Or at least, that was what I was trying to decide. I wasn’t sure about my friends. Bruce, in particular, seemed troubled.
“I have to run,” I finally said after fifteen minutes of silent eating. “I need to look at the last few books for this Herbology essay. I feel like I’m so close to the truth.”
“Need any help?” Aiden asked.
“You’d just be a distraction.” I booped his nose. “A pleasant one, but a distraction nonetheless.”
“Guilty as charged.” He grinned at me. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” I scooped up a last piece of watermelon with my fingers and popped it in my mouth, giving my friends a wave as I headed out of the cafeteria.
Instead of heading to the main part of the library, I decided to go to my ancestor’s hidden study room. Perhaps the portrait of my multiple times great-grandfather Darragh would have a suggestion.
To get to the hidden room, I needed to go through the restricted area, but with my TA’s pass from Professor Akhtar, I had no problems. The hidden passage in the back wall was right where I expected it to be found, and I passed multiple other hidden doors on the way to my own. I wondered if any of them belonged to students attending school right now, and if they even knew they were there. I hadn’t ever come across another student in the hidden corridor, and I’d only discovered it in my second year. For all I knew, there were multiple hidden corridors all along the walls of the restricted section. There wasn’t any way for me to find out, though. Not without potentially giving away a secret that had been passed down within families for generations.
I sighed with relief when I opened the Doyle study, the familiar odor of old books filling my nostrils.
“Siobhan!” greeted the portrait. “Welcome back!”
“Hello, Darragh,” I replied, happy to see him. I would miss him when I left school. “I’m not here for a pleasant chat, unfortunately. I’ve got class in twenty minutes.”
Darragh leaned forward attentively. “What’s on your mind, child?”
“The dark forest is leaching magic. I was wondering if you’d ever heard of that happening.”
“Interesting.” He stroked his beard. “Leaching to where?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and realized I didn’t know. “I assume further in, since the edge is decaying all along the border. But we’re not allowed in the forest.”
“No?” The portrait’s eyes twinkled. “We weren’t either, but that didn’t stop us. And this seems like a much more urgent reason than drinking spirits until the wee sma’s. What’s stopping you, lass?”
I giggled. “You’re right, as usual. I’ll try to find where the magic is going. Any suggestions on a spell to tell me the direction of the flow of magic?”
Darragh raised his bushy eyebrows. “If there isn’t one in the grimoire, perhaps you can design one. You’re in your third year now. You’re old enough to design your own spells.”
“Thanks. That’s a great idea.” I hoped there was one in the grimoire; I wasn’t sure I’d be able to design and test the spell in time. “Okay, I’ve got to run. Thank you so much for your help!”
“Come back soon. I’ve missed our little chats,” Darragh replied.
I frowned. “I thought you went dormant when nobody was in the room to interact with you?”
“Oh, I do. Some things are a habit to say.” He beamed at me.
“Love you.” I blew him a kiss and left the room. It was so nice to be able to interact with my ancestors. I wondered if Grandfather had plans to make a portrait. I hoped so, even though I didn’t really want to think about the gross way that the portrait had to be made. I shuddered as I walked quickly through the dimly lit restricted section.
Hushed voices made me pause and press myself against one of the stacks.
“Are you willing to help me?” a quiet voice whispered.
“I’m not sure I can leave my studies at this point,” another voice replied, just as quietly. “There’s so much going on at the beginning of the school year.”
“That’s all right, I understand,” the first voice replied. “I would never force anyone to help me out of their free will.”
“I’m glad you understand. I really wish I could help, you know.”
“There’s something else that would help, and wouldn’t take as long. Come with me.”
“I have class...”
“You’ll be back in time.”
“Okay.”
Footsteps met my ears, moving away from me, and I hurried to the end of the stack to peer around it.
There was nobody there.
I frowned, wondering what all that was about. I couldn’t even tell if the voices were male or female, they had been talking so quietly.
Glancing at my watch, I saw that I only had two minutes to make it to my Herbology lab. I ran the rest of the way, grateful that the greenhouse was closer to the stairs than the classroom.
“Ah, now that Miss Doyle has arrived, we can begin,” Professor Calderwood said, his brows twitching. “Oral presentation of your findings. Who would like to begin? No, just stand at your seat, don’t bother coming to the front of the room. If anyone has anything to add, raise your hand and we’ll go from there.”
Most of the students had actually tried to do the research. I was impressed. I guess the professor had managed to get the seriousness of the situation across to them.
When it was my turn, I stood up and cleared my throat. “In my time in the library, I discovered that we need to find out where the magic is disappearing to. We know that it is being sucked out of the border, and perhaps if we can triangulate the direction it is heading, then we can stop what is drawing the magic away.”
Professor Calderwood nodded thoughtfully. “We will work on that problem for the rest of the class. Nothing else that was presented was all that surprising. We’ve got more accurate readings at this point, thanks to an extra day of data. Please split into groups of two and choose a point along the border.”
He cast an image of the border up in the air and flagged points along the edge where samples had been taken.
I looked around the room, trying to find a person to pair up with. Hazel had been my lab partner last year, and I hadn’t really made friends with anyone else.
Unfortunately, Paige met my eye and made her way over to me.
“I didn’t know you took this class,” I greeted her frostily.
“And yet here I am,” she said, slumping into the seat next to me. “Pick a number. We’re the only unpaired students, so we might as well work together.”
I chose a number at random, picking one that was close to the academy.
The math was annoying, even with the equation that the professor had put up at the front of the class. It made no sense.
“I don’t get it. His data from a few days ago gave us equal rates of decay, but then this week, it increased each day, but not at the same rate at all!” I exclaimed, frustrated. “Are we even doing the math right?”
Paige glanced around the room at the other groups. “Everyone else seems to be having similar problems. Keep the numbers. Let’s plot them and see if that helps it make more sense.”
The graph was wonky and didn’t look anything like a normal rate of decay graph.
“Okay, what might have happened in the last few days that would affect the forest like this?” I asked myself, talking out loud. “The students returned right when things started to increase. Could that have an effect?”
“It would have stabilized once we got here,” Paige disagreed. “And some students got here the day before. It should have had a gradual increase at that point if it was related to our arrival.”
“Good point.” My eyes widened and I met Paige’s horrified gaze as we figured it out at the same time. “The kidnapped students!” we said at the same time.
I bent over my numbers again. “How many students went missing and stayed missing that first day? Three?”
“I think it was four,” Paige said. “Don’t forget Hazel on the first day.”
“Right,” I mumbled. “And then six the day after. We won’t have today’s data yet, because presumably there will be students that return in time for dinner, if the kidnapper follows the same MO.” I put up the new data points.
Other than Hazel, they followed the data exactly.
“Remove the outlier,” Paige muttered, changing my graph to exclude Hazel. “She’s not the same as the others, anyway. It’s a perfect match.”
“But... I don’t understand,” I said, my gaze following the two lines. “How can the missing students be related to the forest being drained of magic?”