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My sense of unease doesn’t lessen at breakfast, even when I try to assure myself it’s just post-ritual nerves. We used old magic to change the future, after all. That’s a pretty big deal — if it’s true. Naturally, Luke is the first person I search for at the table, to make sure my dream is but a dream. He isn’t there, but the rest of the chiefs are, and they look worried.
“What’s happened?” I ask urgently as I swing myself onto the bench.
“Luke got a phone call early this morning,” Rory says, his bowl of porridge lying untouched in front of him. “We haven’t seen him since.”
In Lochkelvin, which has no cell reception due to the school’s remoteness, only the main landline can be used for phone calls. And even then, the reception is supposedly patchy at best, so it’s only ever used in the most extreme cases. Most correspondence is entered into through letters. I have no personal experience with either of these methods, as my mother seems pathologically uninterested in her only child.
We establish that no vehicles arrived to take Luke away from Lochkelvin, so Luke is most likely still inside the castle, which means he’s received the kind of news that makes someone wish to remain unlocated. No one addresses the question that hovers over the table:is this the result of the ritual?
Even in class, there’s no sign of Luke. It’s not unusual for a student to be absent — God knows I’ve done it many times before — but in recent months Luke has made a point of being as present and pleasant as possible, trying to make himself seem human and real instead of a power-grabbing fraudster. But the vanishing act isn’t confined to just Luke: during our last lesson of the day, politics, Dr. Moncrieff also disappears for large portions of time, each time returning with a chalkier and chalkier face, to the point that the knot in the pit of my stomach swells.
Something’s happened.
Working under the same assumption as me, Finlay tosses a crumpled ball of paper across the classroom at Arabella’s pigtailed head. She turns around, indignant.
“Whit does he know?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yer lover, Pervert Man. Whit’s he daein’, where’s he aff tae?”
Arabella flushes. “How should I know? I don’t know everything about his life!”
Whatever it is, Dr. Moncrieff remains tight-lipped even when the three of us approach him after class, though his eyes linger on me for a long time when he thinks I’m not looking. A sick feeling washes over me and all at once, I hear dream-Luke snarl:You did this to me.
What the fuck has happened?
We scan the newspapers after class for signs of something major, but of course they’re all a day out of date at Lochkelvin. Worse still, reading them myself for the first time in so long, it’s all pro-Antiro propaganda and extraordinarily useless.
My thoughts are whirling. The rumor mill is in overdrive by the time classes finish, with far too many students excited by the possibility that Luke’s been kidnapped by Antiro and a final showdown is about to commence between him and King James. There are also variations on the ritual theme, which shows just how powerful its legend is at Lochkelvin, one of the most prominent theories being that a siren had lured him back to the loch and karmically drowned him for his sins. That outside right now, a team of divers is dredging the loch for his body.
I don’t listen to them. They’re deliberately lurid and awful in a way that only teenage boys can be. But to shut out the chiefs? To disappear completely? This is so unlike Luke that by the time dinner rolls around and there’s still no sign of him, in our desperation we end up approaching Baxter at the head table.
I note that Dr. Moncrieff has vanished from there, too.
Silence falls in the hall as we approach.
“Where is Luke?” Rory asks, clipped and cool.
“I have no idea where Mr. Milton is,” Baxter says, looking vexed that dinner has been interrupted like this. In all my time here, it’s definitely unprecedented. “Return to your table at once.”
“Is it true he’s been kidnapped?” a gremlin shouts out, and the floodgates open for a hundred other questions along similar lines.
“Silence!” Baxter orders, rising from her seat. With the height advantage of the platform on which the staff table is positioned, Baxter capably towers over us. “No, Mr. Milton hasnotbeen kidnapped.”
“So then ye know where he is,” Finlay points out triumphantly, his face fierce with determination.
“Once again, Mr. Fraser, basic logic evades you. Back to your seats.”
Reluctantly, the other chiefs do as instructed, knowing it’d be easier to get blood from a stone, but having already drawn magic from a stone, I end up hanging back. “Don’t you care that one of your students is missing?”
For a long moment, Baxter doesn’t respond. Her bead-black eyes bore into me until I think she’s actually about to offer up some nugget of information in pity. It’s a fleeting, desperate thought. Instead, her face shutters and in a cold voice, she repeats, “Get back to your seat.”
That night, we comb the castle. Every room is checked and double-checked, from the ground floor to the girls’ tower. We split up, Rory and I starting from the bottom, Danny and Finlay going from the top.
“He wouldn’t do this,” Rory says, getting increasingly antsy as we reach the third floor. “Not unless shit had hit the fan, and even then…” He grimaces, scanning yet another empty room. “It’d have to be a whopper for him to disappear without saying anything to me.”
In the darkness of the castle, I feel brave enough to finally voice what’s been gnawing at my mind all day to the only one here who knows about it more than most: “Is this the ritual?” Speaking it somehow makes it feel more real.
