Chapter 6
SADIE
Iwas ushered into a room with the blonde maybe-vampire, which wasn’t ideal, but it beat being alone.
I was practically shaking with energy and adrenaline, my head overflowing thoughts, and she hadn’t had to eat and drink to stay in this place, which meant she was from here. Which meant she had answers.
The room was bigger than I expected, pretty generous for kidnappers. Two four-poster beds had been carved from cherry wood, each sitting on a platform and draped with heavy velvet curtains patterned with the same colours and sigils as the banners in the dining hall.
I had no choice but to look at those symbols now, and they didn’t exactly inspire confidence. A fang, a dagger, a sword, a vial, and a sun. I decided I’d be House Sunny Disposition, and hope my roommate didn’t turn out to be House Stab You In The Back.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, leaning against the bed on the left and pleasantly surprised that the mattress wasn’t rock hard. I had no luggage to unpack, no bags of essentials, not even my phone.
Thanks a lot, Gran.
My roommate sunk onto her bed with a sigh and cast her gaze around the room, looking for something.
Whatever it was, she didn’t see it on the narrow, mullioned windows on the far wall, or the second doorway that—fingers crossed—led to a bathroom, but we each had a chest of drawers and that’s where her attention settled.
I slid off the bed and went to my drawers at the same time she searched hers, finding basic cotton underwear, black tops in different sizes, and folded leather pants that gave me hardcore Buffy and Xena vibes.
I might not want to kill wolves, or go through a rigorous training regime, but I could get behind the fashion.
Anything was better than my work uniform at this point.
I grabbed a long-sleeved black shirt and something close to leggings, and turned back to find my roommate had dug a pad of paper and pencil from the bottom drawer. She held it out so I could see it, a tentative smile on her heart-shaped face.
I’m Elix, the paper said. And just beneath it, the letters fainter, as if she’d written them with a lighter hand, unsure, it said: I don’t speak.
“Oh.” I blinked, realising she hadn’t said a word all night. “Don’t worry, I never shut up, so I’ll speak enough for the two of us.”
Her smile grew into something more real, less hesitant.
I mirrored her smile, even if I kinda wanted to run into the bathroom and scream in the shower. Something told me that would scare off my new friend.1 “Can I ask you a question?”
If I can ask you one, she wrote.
“What’s a twin?”
The child of a vampire and a human. Vampires see us as a lesser species. Humans hate us.
“Oh.” I tried to control my expression. “Damn.”
Don’t freak out, don’t freak out, your roommate is a vampire, but don’t freak out.
I don’t have to drink blood unless I choose to, she explained, writing quickly. I won’t bite you, don’t worry.
I blinked. “Who’s worried? Not me. I’m so chill. I’m the most unworried a person has ever been.”
She winced, but held up her pad again, and I laughed. What is Direct Sports Shoes?
“It’s a shoe shop where I work. Awful place. Do not recommend.”
You sell shoes?
“I used to,” I mused, glancing at the richly appointed room, the golden light spilling from sconces on the wall—not fire or electric, I could see from up close.
Instead the light seemed to pool within the metal uplighter of its own accord.
No lightbulb, no flame. I stared for a long, long moment, then realised I’d been in the middle of talking.
“I guess I just quit,” I said with a wry smile, facing Elix again.
It hit me then that the only person who’d care that I was missing was my boss when I didn’t turn up for my shift. That was pretty fucking sad, that the only thing I’d left behind was a job I hated and a Gran who’d washed her hands of me.
That’s better than my last job, Elix wrote, sighing as she sat on the edge of her bed. I mirrored her movement, stretching my legs in front of me and wincing at the throb that shot through each knee.
“Let me guess,” I said, gazing at the room, like something out of Dracula’s castle. “You mucked out the stables of a fire-breathing dragon. Your boss was a controlling minotaur who used to charge at you with his horns whenever you got to work late.”
Elix laughed, bright and musical, and something about it untied a knot in my chest. It didn’t touch the gnarled mass of my anxiety, but I was able to breathe a little easier.
I wish, she wrote, her pencil moving rapidly over the pad. Dragons have been extinct for decades, although my cousin swore she heard a dragon roar from the mountains above Cresemire once.
“Damn.” I leaned back on my elbows. “Dragons are real?”
Elix shrugged. They used to be. What’s a minor tor?
“Oh, minotaur. They’re these massive, buff guys with bull heads and horns. They’re not actually real. I don’t think,” I added. “I didn’t think vampires and werewolves were real, either.”
My head ached, trying to digest my new reality. “So what did you actually do for work?”
Elix’s shoulders hunched inward as she wrote her reply, and I frowned, reading her body language. I worked the silver fields around Silverton.
The way she’d braced for my reaction, I expected something more divisive than that. I was missing something. “So you’re a farmer?”
No, she wrote. Labour.
“Oh,” I murmured. “Shit. I’m guessing not the paid variety.
” She shook her head, her shoulders bowed.
“That’s illegal, at least where I’m from.
Then again, so is trafficking people and forcing them to join a school of wolf killers.
” I really don’t think this was what Aladdin meant when he sang a whole new world.
2 “I’m sorry people suck. But you’re out of that place now, right? ”
Not that Lunatic Academy would be much better.
Elix shrugged, so I added, “Maybe when you’ve trained to be a total badass, you can go back to the silver fields and murder the piece of shit who owns the place.”
A smile flickered at the edge of her mouth, though her eyes remained sad.
And here I’d thought her being non-human made her a threat to me.
I was right with my first assessment of badly mistreated doll.
I didn’t expect her to come from slave labour, though.
Jesus Christ. What kind of world had I been abducted into?
My grandfather, Elix wrote on her pad, and I swore soundly.
“Your own grandfather forced you into slave labour?”
I wouldn’t marry the lord he promised me to.
“Vampire lord?” I asked, an eyebrow raised.
She nodded. An old, traditional vampire who would have made my life hell. Grandfather gave me the choice of marrying him or the fields. He thought I’d choose the lord.
“Damn,” I murmured, admiring the hell out of the woman even as sympathy crowded my chest, elbowing my anxiety aside to make room for itself. “No wonder you’re not phased by this academy shit.”
She laughed. Wrote, I’m petrified.
“That makes two of us.” On reflection, my own family and upbringing were a picnic under a cloudless sky and a bright rainbow. “I’ll watch your back if you watch mine,” I offered.
She was already nodding before I’d finished speaking, pushing a lock of flaxen hair behind her ear.
I meant to ask her a dozen more questions, but she wrote, We should get some sleep. Tomorrow isn’t going to be easy. And I’d have been a fool not to take that advice.
So I took my pyjamas into the adjoined room—a bathroom, thank god—washed the dust from the prison wagon off myself, peed in what was thankfully toilet-adjacent instead of a bucket, and climbed into bed.
My entire body tensed when howls sounded outside.
Not right under the window, but too close for comfort.
Wolves. The shifters I’d been brought here to fight, to kill. I laid there in bed and tried not to think about it, to convince myself I was still at home just so I could fall asleep.
By the time noise began to stir through the hallway outside, I hadn’t slept a single minute.