Chapter 12
The first thingthat I noticed when I stepped outside the academy was the noise. Loud music was pounding out a bass line from somewhere, and the space between the back of the castle and the dark forest was swelling with the sound. That, combined with the shouts and cheers from the students, made for an overwhelming cacophony that made me want to turn around and retreat back to my dorm room.
Aiden stopped me. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” he said, leaning in close to my ear and practically shouting. “Come on, let’s find some alcohol.”
The bar was close to the kitchen door for easy access, and far away from the bonfire for obvious reasons.
The sun was still setting, sending streaks of burnt orange and crimson across the sky to the west, but the east was darkening. The bonfire lit up against the dark sky and darker forest beneath it made a pretty picture.
I found myself wanting to try to paint it, even though I didn’t know a thing about painting.
“Bruce should paint this,” I shouted to Aiden.
He laughed. “Bruce doesn’t paint.”
“But he did your Halloween costume in body paint last year,” I said, confused.
“That isn’t the same thing,” Aiden explained. “Body paint is all about knowing contours and muscle groups. Painting a landscape, you have to understand lighting and depth and countless other things that I don’t know about.”
“So could he paint a portrait?” I asked.
“Ask him yourself.”
I turned to find Bruce behind me, Rhiannon on his arm. “A portrait would be easier,” he admitted when I repeated my question. “But I think it would look more like a Picasso than I want to admit.”
I giggled. “Well, at least that’s a style.”
“I much prefer body art. It’s temporary, a shifting canvas. It’s a challenge that can be wiped clean the next day.” Bruce stared off in the distance into the forest.
“I think I’d rather have something that stuck around,” I said. “All that hard work, only for it to vanish? Not for me.”
“You’re not in the arts at all,” Rhiannon said.
“I don’t have an artistic bone in my body,” I readily admitted. “Una’s been helping me with tailoring, but I think that’s the limit of my creativity.”
“You’ve got plenty of imagination,” Aiden said with a smile.
Bruce chuckled. “That feels like a little too much information.”
I blushed and turned back to the refreshment table, asking the student behind the makeshift bar for a beer.
“I meant you have a good imagination in other ways, too,” Aiden said, catching up to me as I walked away with my beer. He held one as well. “You have really good ideas and make great leaps of logic that can be hard to follow, but you’re always right. I think logic and imagination are linked.”
“If you say so.” I took a sip of beer and wrinkled my nose. “I need to be drunk to stomach this.”
“Just imagine that it tastes better,” Bruce teased, coming up beside me. “Or dump it and get some mead. It’s brewed by the school, you know.”
“I didn’t. Mead sounds much better than beer.” I gave Aiden my bottle and returned to the line to get the new drink.
By the time I returned to the pair, Rhiannon had left, saying she had a headache.
I frowned, disappointed. “I would have walked her back to her room,” I said reproachfully to the two men.
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Aiden said. “Lilia and Brom escorted her. They said something about going to Brom’s room afterward for some quality alone time.”
I nearly choked on my first swallow of mead. “Lilia hasn’t slept in our room at all yet this semester! How much more alone time do they need?”
“Perhaps Brom’s roommates aren’t as accommodating as yours,” Aiden replied with a wink. “And maybe she doesn’t get off on having sex in front of other people while invisible.”
I felt like flames covered my face, but when I glanced at Bruce, he was pointedly looking the other direction.
“Isn’t that the witch who keeps accusing people of murdering Richard?” he asked, indicating a girl walking toward us.
“Paige,” I replied. “And, yes, that is her. We’ve got a potential lead on the missing people.”
“Really?” Bruce replied, suddenly very focused on me. “That’s great. What is it?”
“We’ll tell you together. We came up with it in Herbology, and don’t forget our mini breakthrough when interviewing Valerie.”
Paige sauntered up to us and toasted us with her beer bottle. “What’s that you’ve got, Siobhan?” she asked me.
“Mead. It’s amazing,” I replied. “Apparently, it’s brewed here.”
“It is,” Paige said authoritatively. “The founder loved it so much that he created a unique recipe. It’s still used to this day.”
Bruce choked and Aiden thumped him on the back.
“You must be somewhat related to him,” Paige continued, staring at Bruce. “I hadn’t noticed it before, but the firelight is shading your features and you look very like the portrait of him.”
“I’ve never seen a portrait of him,” Bruce said.
“Oh, well, there isn’t really one. That’s weird, isn’t it? You’d think there’d be a portrait of the founder of the academy. The one I saw was a scan in a history book. I wrote a report on him in my first year here.” She leaned closer. “His true love died tragically only a few years after they started the school. The statue out front was erected in her honor.”
“Oh, that’s so sad,” I said with a frown. I squeezed Aiden’s hand tightly. “Was he a witch or a monster?”
“A witch, I believe. Why?” Paige answered.
I looked up at Aiden, eyes wide. “Is that a secret or something?”
Aiden shook his head. “No, of course not.” To Paige, he explained, “Once we find our soulmate, we don’t survive very long without them, literally.”
“Oh. Right. I knew that. Well, he vanished not long after, so maybe he died. The book didn’t talk about him again. I didn’t find a death date, so maybe he died somewhere else.” Paige shrugged. “He’s dead now, I’m sure.”
Bruce cleared his throat. “Can we hear about this new hunch? Siobhan was very tight-lipped about it.”
Paige explained the theory that the missing memories might be stored in a body of water, like the school’s well.
Bruce looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t the memories be filtered through the school, then? Not sure I want to think about the idea of shitting into someone’s memory.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Descriptive. There might be a reservoir or something for overflow. That would be the ideal place.”
“Or perhaps, it isn’t in a well. Maybe there’s a pond or something in the dark forest. That’s where we think the missing people are,” Paige said.
“Can you re-explain your thought process on that?” Aiden asked.
“For one, there isn’t really anywhere to hide a bunch of people without someone coming across them,” Paige pointed out. “For another, we’ve mathematically linked the rate of decay of the magic at the edge of the forest to the number of people that remain missing.”
“I still haven’t had time to find a spell that will track the flow of magic,” I said with a sigh. “I feel like we should be able to look at something that is actively being drained of magic and see where the magic is going.”
“That would be really helpful,” Bruce agreed with a frown. “Where do you think you might find a spell like that?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” I shrugged. “I’m hoping my grimoire will have it, but if not, I’m going to try to create one in Qualitative Spellcraft. That might take some time, though, because I still don’t really understand how to build a spell, let alone find the time to test it under supervision.”
“So what, a couple hours?” Bruce teased.
“More like a couple weeks,” I countered. “If I’m lucky.”
“You’ll figure it out.” Bruce hip-checked me.
“I was thinking of something,” Aiden said, frowning. “But then I got distracted and the thought’s gone.”
“Oh no,” I said, squeezing his hand. “When did you have it? What were we talking about?”
He shook his head, defeated. “I have no idea. Don’t you hate that?”
“Do you think it was relevant?”
“Maybe?” Aiden rolled his eyes. “But it could also have been something like, ‘ooh, they have a dessert table’.”
“They do?” I asked, whipping my head around.
Aiden laughed and kissed the top of my head. “The other side of the kitchen door.”
“Maybe sweets will help your memory,” I suggested, eyeing the chocolate fountain. “And then we can try to gain access to the well.”
“Sounds good to me,” Bruce said, tipping his mead back, draining the glass, and then smacking his lips together with a satisfied “ah”.
We made our way to the table, which was stacked high with mini tartlets, cake pops, and cookies, not to mention the bowls of fruit ready to be dipped in the chocolate fountain.
“You know...” Paige said, selecting a tart topped with a strawberry. “We should split up. Bruce and I can go check out the well, and you two can go into the forest to see if you can find a pond.”
My eyes widened. “Is that safe? The forest is full of dangerous creatures! What if we get lost?”
Aiden wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “If we lose sight of this bonfire, I think we’ll have bigger problems, like hearing loss or deafness.”
I shook my head, biting back a smile. “You know what I mean. It’s totally different in there. The forest has its own magic.”
“Magic that is demonstrably decaying, especially at the edge,” Aiden pointed out. “We don’t have to go in very far, just try to see if there’s an obvious path that the kidnapper might be taking.”
“Yeah, okay. That makes me feel a little better,” I said. I ate my last bite of cookie. “Okay, let’s get this over with before I lose my nerve.”
We walked past a group of students loudly screaming a sports cheer. They were all dressed in the school colors and hanging off one another as if extremely drunk.
“You know, it’s a good thing that we all know magic,” Paige observed. “Otherwise our team would seriously suck during tomorrow’s game.”
“Why?” Bruce asked.
“Have you ever seen someone play Dragon Polo while drunk?” Paige asked, raising one eyebrow. “I rest my case.”
A little further away from the bonfire, there were less people and the noise level was less oppressive.
“See you two later,” I said in parting. “Don’t fall down the well!”
“You’ll have to send Lassie to rescue us,” Paige said with a chuckle.
“I think Brom is busy right now,” I joked about the wolf shifter. I took Aiden’s arm and we entered the forest when no one was watching us.
“Meet you back here in half an hour!” Bruce called after us.
Not even two steps into the forest, the darkness felt like it was pressing in on me. The pep rally behind us could still be heard, but it was much quieter than I thought it would be.
“What kind of trace would someone leave?” I asked Aiden in a whisper.
“Bent or broken branches, disturbed undergrowth, that sort of thing,” Aiden replied, distracted. He was squinting at the ground. “This is ridiculous. I can barely see a thing!”
He lifted his hand to call a light into existence, but I stopped him with a hand on his wrist. “What’s that?” I hissed, pointing ahead of us, deeper in the forest. “It looks like a lantern!”
There was a yellow-orange light bobbing and weaving between the trees.
“Let’s see what it is!” Aiden whispered back, and we headed toward it.
About ten paces in, I realized I couldn’t hear the noise from the pep rally anymore. I froze, unsure of whether we should keep going or go back.
The light kept moving further away.
“Come on,” Aiden urged, pulling on my hand.
Ignoring my instincts, which were telling me to go back now, while we still knew which way was back, I followed Aiden further into the dark forest.
Branches kept scraping my face and catching on my clothing because I couldn’t see them to avoid them. Nothing a little magic couldn’t fix once we were out, but for right that moment, it was irritating.
Suddenly, the light vanished.
“Where did it go?” I hissed, uncomfortably aware that I had no idea which way to go to return to the academy.
“It went out,” Aiden replied with a growl. “This is frustrating.”
“What do we do?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was about to cry.
Aiden tensed, drawing in a sharp breath through his nose. “Don’t make a sound,” he murmured. “We are not alone.”
I swallowed down a lump of fear, frantically trying to see anything in the pitch darkness that surrounded us. I wobbled, my shoes impractical for walking through a forest, and stepped back on a branch.
Crack!
The twig snapping sounded louder than a gunshot and I clamped my teeth down on a scream that wanted to escape my mouth.
“Down!” Aiden roared, and I dropped to my knees instantly.
I felt something jump over my head, brushing by my hair, but couldn’t register what it was right away. Aiden shifted in a second, the flames on his body lighting up a few feet around us, and caught the creature by the neck, using its momentum to throw it further away from us.
I got the impression of fur, sharp teeth, and a big body.
Wolf.
Wolf. Wolf. Wolf!
The word got stuck in a loop in my mind. I couldn’t see it anymore, Aiden’s flames not lighting far enough into the trees, but he was still standing protectively between me and where he had thrown it.
“Get up and get ready to run,” he said, not looking at me.
“Isn’t running supposed to make their hunting instincts kick in?” I asked breathlessly, getting to my feet. I shed dead leaves and other forest floor detritus from my hands and knees.
“We’ll have to take that risk. We need to get back to the school,” he said. “Go!”
My heart pounding in my ears, I turned and ran blindly, hoping that I was going in the correct direction.
I kept my hands outstretched to prevent running into any trees when I couldn’t see them.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered.
Instead of casting a light spell in front of me, I cast a subtly changed one on my eyes, tricking them into believing that it was daylight. It worked perfectly, and I was able to see broken branches and kicked up leaves on the forest floor.
I heard Aiden panting behind me, and hoped that he’d be able to stop any other wolves that attacked us.
I also hoped that this path was the one we had made on our way in.
All I could hear for the next few minutes were my panicked breathing and the steady thumping of my feet on the leaf-covered forest floor.
Suddenly, it was as if we had broken through a barrier, because the cheering and shouting of our schoolmates reached my ears.
I slowed to a walk and checked to see if Aiden was still with me.
“How did you do that?” he asked, coming to a stop beside me.
“Do what?” I countered, genuinely confused. “You were the one to fight that wolf!”
He brushed that off. “Find your way back. I couldn’t see a thing, and you got us here in no time.”
“It’s a spell I cast on my vision. I wish I’d thought of it on the way in. Sorry,” I apologized, casting it on him after getting permission. “It would’ve helped immensely.”
“Yeah, it would have. It’s fine.” He sighed and looked around us. “No signs of anyone else coming through here.”
“And if there were any, we trampled all over them,” I finished, disappointed in myself.
“Can we talk about what happened back there?” Aiden asked hesitantly, as we returned to the edge of the forest.
“What do you mean? The wolf?”
“I mean the overwhelming wave of fear that you broadcasted during the attack. You’d gotten so good at your shielding that I’d forgotten I could feel your emotions. Nearly took me out at my knees.”
I gasped and pressed my hands over my mouth. “Oh no! I’m so sorry. I lost control.”
“I’m not mad.” Aiden squeezed my hand. “I like knowing how you’re feeling. If you want to lose control during sex, I wouldn’t say no.” He leered down at me.
I chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Nobody paid attention to us leaving the forest, and I performed a quick spell to fix up the scratches and tears that had happened while I had been terrified out of my mind.
“How’d it go?” Paige appeared, asking us almost immediately after we’d finished.
“A light that disappeared and a wolf attack. No bodies of water,” I informed her. “You?”
“A wolf?” she asked, her jaw hanging open.
“You okay?” Bruce asked Aiden. “I assume you fought it off?”
“It didn’t land a single blow on me,” Aiden reassured him. “Did you find anything in the well?”
“Just water,” Paige said with a frown. “It was super disappointing.”
“Sorry your theory didn’t pan out, girls,” Bruce said sympathetically. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”
“Thanks.” I yawned. “I think it’s time for bed. Aiden, you coming?”
“Not yet.” He winked.