“Nice.” I force a laugh. “Anyway, the party was okay. Nothing to write home about.”
I watch for a reaction. A raised eyebrow, a twitch, but there’s nothing but fake morning pleasantries in his eyes.
“Kirin,” I say, fighting to keep the irritation from my tone, “Last night… Did you guys go out? After the party, I mean?”
Something finally flashes behind Kirin’s gaze, and his energy shifts. Suddenly it seems like an effort for him to hold that smile in place, and I know right then and there that his next breath is going to be a lie.
“Me? No. Baz and Ani didn’t mention anything either. They’re probably still sleeping—they were pretty wrecked after the party.”
“What about Dr. Devane?”
“I’m not really up on his social calendar, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have one. Why are you asking about this?”
My heart sinks into my stomach.
It’s one thing to tell myself I don’t know them all that well, and I’m misunderstanding things. Or that there are so many people on campus, maybe I’m getting their energies mixed up.
But Kirin is flat-out lying to me, and I don’t know why.
Idoknow that what I saw last night wasn’t a dream. Not because I have so much faith in my visions, or even because of the feather.
But because Kirin, graduate mage and Keeper of the Grave, whatever the hell that means, just made a stupidly human mistake.
Kirin told me he hadn’t heard anything about the party last night—that he’d been sequestered in the library.
Yet now he’s telling me the guys were pretty wrecked after.
How many lies and half-truths is that now? I’m quickly losing count. The spying at Kettle Black. The dodginess when I asked about the Book of Shadow and Mists. The party.
I hate lies. Hate liars. And this Academy is filled with both.
It’s all I can do not to lay it all out right here, demand to know about the Keepers of the Grave bullshit and whatever those dreamcasting visions are all about.
To know what Dr. Devane meant when he said that I’m not just the witch who can translate her mother’s prophecies.
But I can’t figure out how to do it without telling him about my crazy owl trip across the sky, and Idefinitelydon’t want to share that right now.
For now, my best course of action is to stick with the plan. Work on Mom’s research, make the most of classes, try to get a handle on my magick, avoid the hell out of Carly and her merry band of psychotics, and most importantly? Stick to these conniving, secret-society scoundrels like a wart on a witch’s tit, hoping they fuck up and spill their secrets before they figure out all of mine.
Inside the archives, Kirin retrieves the notebooks we started with yesterday, and also hands me a thick manila folder full of computer printouts. News articles, I see when I peek inside.
“I wanted you to take a look at all this, see what you make of it. It’s part of what we’ve been tracking—what we believe are the wrongful arrests of witches and mages since magick first become public knowledge. It doesn’t account for all of them, of course—some locales don’t even bother reporting when a magickal citizen is taken into custody. But it gives you some perspective on why our work here is so important.”
I take a deep breath and page through the printouts, skimming the headlines. Explosions, fires, murders. Dastardly plots to steal, maim, torture. Sensationalist commentary on the dangers of unregulated witchcraft. Calls for more restrictions. More executions.
The articles date back decades, starting right around the time magick was publicly revealed. There seems to be a slowdown in the early 1990s, but then it spikes again—right around the time my parents left the Academy.
The last batch of articles are all about me—the same articles Devane showed me in prison.
I snap the folder shut, not wanting to see one more gruesome headline.
“So in all these so-called crimes and attacks,” I say, the pieces sliding into place in my mind, “the victims themselves are witches and mages—just like the accused parties. Witch-owned businesses are being destroyed. Mage family members killed. The homes of witches torched, supposedly by their own hand. You’d think that if whoever was behind the attacks wanted to freak out the public, get more restrictions put on us, they’d go after non-magickal humans.”
“That’s the crazy part,” Kirin says. “It’s almost ridiculous. Why would witches destroy their own businesses? And hurt their own friends and families? It just seems so… so random.”
“That’s just it,” I tell him. “The attacks are staged tolookrandom.”
“But why? What’s the endgame here? If they wanted to thin out the magickal population, there are probably more effective ways.”
