Chapter 138: Line Forty-Three

By the time the sun went down, Blair had taken four practice exams.

She had scored a hundred on all four. Killian had stopped scrolling through her answers after the second one. After the third, he had simply stared at the results page for a long time without saying anything at all.

After the fourth, he closed the laptop and announced that they were done for the day.

Blair nearly cried with relief.

Killian packed his bag at the front door with slow movements while Daemus stood beside it with his arms crossed, like a bouncer waiting to throw someone out of a club.

"Bye," Daemus said.

"Oh, you’re not driving all the way back tonight, are you?" Clarice swept out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. "It’s so late. And you’ll only have to come all the way back in the morning."

Daemus’s head whipped around. "Mom."

"You can have my room," Clarice went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. "I’ll sleep on the couch. Kael’s aunt is bringing him back from her place tonight, he can sleep with you, Daemus."

"That is unnecessary," Killian said. "I have a driver."

"Yeah, he’s got a driver," Daemus agreed quickly. "Great driver. Probably the best driver. Go home, Kill."

Killian paused with his hand on the doorknob.

He looked at Daemus. Daemus looked back at him, very hopefully.

Killian let go of the doorknob.

"On second thought," he said, "I will stay."

Daemus made a sound like a kettle about to boil over.

"Wonderful!" Clarice beamed. "I’ll go change the sheets."

Killian set his bag down, looked at Daemus once more, and smirked.

Blair quietly backed into her room and locked the door.

She waited until the house went quiet.

She listened to Clarice go upstairs to change the sheets and come back down. Then Daemus’s heavy ones, stomping, followed by a door slamming a little harder than necessary. Then, finally, a third set, so light she almost missed them, climbing the stairs to Clarice’s room.

Then nothing.

Blair opened her desk drawer and took out the sheet of combinations. Her eyes went straight to line forty-three.

LXRK309

She opened the laptop. The password box sat there, waiting, just like it had every night.

It’s probably not it, she told herself. It’s one line out of hundreds. It’s just a coincidence.

She typed it in anyway. L. X. R. K. Three. Zero. Nine.

She pressed Enter.

The password box vanished.

The folder opened.

Blair forgot how to breathe.

Files spilled across the screen. Scanned documents. Photographs. A spreadsheet titled Hookup Forest. A map of the woods behind the academy, covered in small red dots.

She opened the spreadsheet first.

It was a list of dates, going back almost a year. Next to each date was a short note.

Human female. Approx. 18. Found near the creek. Claw marks.

Human male. Approx. 20. Partially buried. Claw marks.

Human female. Unidentified. Remains only.

There were dozens of them.

Blair’s hand shook on the trackpad. She closed the spreadsheet and opened the next file.

It was a stack of scanned forms. Medical Transfer Authorization, each one stamped with the academy’s blue crest. Every form listed a student’s name, a dormitory, a time. And at the bottom of every single one, in the box marked Authorized By, was the same ID.

LXRK309.

Blair scrolled. And scrolled.

Then she stopped.

Name: Greene, Heather. Dormitory G, Room 204. Transferred: 3:12 AM. Authorized By: LXRK309.

The date was the night of the party.

The night Heather never came home.

Blair pressed her hand over her mouth. She read the line again. And again. Her eyes burned.

Killian.

Heather had left the party with a male royal. Everyone had said so. And here was his ID, on the form that had taken her away.

There was one more file. A single photograph. She clicked on it without thinking.

Candles. Stone walls. A small, dim chapel she had never seen before.

Then rows of women in black habits, kneeling on the floor with their foreheads pressed to the stone. At the very front, gray hair pinned neatly beneath her veil, knelt Sister Margaret.

They were all bowing to a painting.

It hung above the altar, enormous and gilded, lit by what must have been a hundred candles. A woman gazed down from the canvas, her hair spilling over her shoulders in shades of pink, purple, silver and blue.

Her eyes were pink.

Blair had never seen that painting in her life.

But she knew that face. She saw it every morning in the mirror.

It was hers.

The room tilted.

And suddenly, Blair wasn’t in her room anymore.

She was small. The walls were white. The floor was white. The light was so bright it should have hurt, but it didn’t, and someone behind the glass was writing that down. Cold water was rising around her ankles. Her knees. Her chest.

Again, said a voice through a speaker. Calm. Bored. Subject Supreme. Again.

The water closed over her head.

Blair gasped and slammed the laptop shut.

She was sitting on her bed. Her pajamas were soaked with sweat. Her lungs were heaving as if she had been holding her breath for a very long time.

Her throat was so dry it hurt.

Water. She needed water. She needed to stand up and walk and do something normal with her hands before she came apart completely.

Blair unlocked her door and crept out into the dark hallway. The house was silent. The kitchen was just a few steps away, lit only by the thin blue glow of moonlight through the window.

She took a glass from the cupboard. Filled it at the sink. Her hands were shaking so badly that water sloshed over the rim and ran down her wrist.

She lifted it to her lips.

"Can’t sleep, human?"

The glass slipped out of her fingers.

It hit the sink with a sharp crack. Blair spun around, pressing her back against the counter so hard the edge bit into her spine.