“I had my first Council test today,” Irene replied softly, swallowing. The mere thought of the dungeons was enough to send a wave of nausea up her throat. The stench of blood seemed to follow her everywhere. The howling cries of agony burned into her memory.
Mateo’s face hardened. “Ah. I had assumed Everly and Samira’s presence this morning had something to do with that.”
A gentle breeze drifted between them.
“Did you know about the dungeons?” Irene asked, though a part of her was afraid to know the answer.
A thin rivulet of shadows momentarily flickered beneath the skin of Mateo’s exposed forearms. He rarely let the shadows slip out of him anymore—it was clear to Irene that he made an effort to hold them back in front of her. To appear asnormalas he could. So Irene did her best not to flinch at the sudden reminder of the darkness inside him.
“I’ve heard of them,” Mateo replied, voice hoarse.
Irene tore her gaze away from him, looking out toward the oak trees lining the path to the Main Yard. She watched the gnarled branches shift and move, the crawling vines shiver in the late-afternoon glow.
“I thought Demiens were supposed to be the cruel ones,” she whispered. “The ones who had lost their emotions—”
“Some of us have,” Mateo interjected. “Mostof us have.”
“Well…” Irene let out a bitter chuckle. “It turns out Blackwood and the Demien Order aren’t so different after all.”
As the words left her lips, Mateo’s expression abruptly darkened. He winced, clutching his head, as if a sudden pain had blossomed in his skull. Irene instinctively reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
When Mateo’s eyes landed on hers, Irene couldn’t stop the gasp that sprang out of her.
Shadows.
His eyes were entirely blotted out by shadows, as if completely submerged in swirling pools of ink. Mateo shut his eyes, grimacing. When his eyelids fluttered back open, the whites of his eyes had returned to normal.
There you are, Irene thought with a sigh of relief. But what she actually managed to say out loud was “What the hell was that?”
“Nothing.” Mateo cleared his throat, awkwardly shifting ontohis feet. “I just…I received a communication from the Order’s base. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
Irene wanted to pry. She wanted to demand answers. But staring up at Mateo, his face haloed by the approaching silver glow of night, she knew that her interrogation would be pointless. That she would remain unfairly tethered to the sidelines until she proved to the Demien Order that she wastrulyone of them.
“Off on another mysterious excursion that you’ll tell me nothing about?” she asked with a teasing lilt.
Mateo’s lips lifted into a rueful smile. “Something like that.”
And then he vanished, disappearing into the night before Irene could get another word out. There was no puff of smoke. No remnant of a relocation spell. It was simply as if he had blinked out of existence—one moment there, and the next…gone.
Irene sat in the Main Yard for a few more minutes, ruminating on her conversation with Mateo. As evening settled upon Blackwood in a shimmering blanket of silver light and feathered clouds of fog, she decided it was time to make her way back to the Ascended Quarters. But as she stood and began walking onto the main path, a sudden noise caused her to stagger to a halt.
A voice.
A deep, familiar voice.
“Apologies for the intrusion.”
A strange whirling sensation clutched her skull, a terrible sense of vertigo.
And then it was as though the ground beneath her had slipped away, the world of Blackwood Academy swallowed by darkness. She was falling, plummeting into nothingness, descending deeper and deeper, until—
Irene’s eyes snapped open with a gurgled gasp. She was standing in a clearing. A sickening trace of nausea curled around herthroat as she gathered her bearings, eyes trailing the dense forest surrounding the perimeter of the clearing.
And standing before her, a coy smile on his face, was Headmaster Silas.
Panic surged through Irene.
