Chapter 105: Twelve Midnight

Reed

Aldric listened without interrupting as I laid out everything we’d found. Astrid’s cracked phone. The fake messages. Ivy’s bracelet lying abandoned near the east wing entrance. The complete absence of either girl anywhere on the grounds. His expression shifted somewhere in the middle of my explanation, moving from the careful concern of a headmaster handling a student incident to something far more serious, something closer to a man realizing an abduction had happened inside his own academy.

"We’re sealing the east wing entirely," he said, already reaching for something on his desk. "And the surrounding corridors. I want a full search of the grounds by morning."

The search happened. Guards restricted movement around the area, staff combed every inch they could reach, and by the time the sun came up there was still no trace of Ivy anywhere. That absence made everything worse. It meant this wasn’t Astrid slipping away on her own. Two girls were gone, and neither had left so much as a footprint behind.

Word spread through the academy despite every effort to contain it. By breakfast, students were whispering in tight clusters, and by midday they’d stopped walking anywhere alone. The whole atmosphere of Moonshade had shifted overnight into something uneasy and watchful. I noticed all of it happening around me, but my mind kept circling back to one single moment, that brief flash of Astrid’s fear through the bond before the connection had cut off entirely.

Aldric found us again that afternoon. "I need you both to step back from this," he said.

"No," I said immediately.

"Reed—"

"No," Xander said, louder, before I could even finish disagreeing myself.

"You’re emotionally involved," Aldric said. "If whoever did this is dangerous, and I have every reason to believe they are, the two of you charging in could put yourselves directly in harm’s way. I have people searching."

"She’s not just a missing student to us," I said. "I’m not sitting in a room while she’s out there somewhere."

Aldric studied us both for a long moment, and something in his expression told me he already understood neither of us was going to walk away from this quietly, no matter what he ordered.

Later that day, Eliza, Criston, and Josh found us in the corridor outside the apartment. "We want to help," Eliza said.

"No," I said, my instinct immediately protective. "This is dangerous. I’m not dragging more people into it."

"You’re not dragging us anywhere," Eliza said. "We’re offering. Criston can read traces of thought that might still be lingering where she was taken. I can identify magical residue that your security team might miss entirely. Josh hears things from students that would never reach Aldric’s desk."

I hesitated, and Xander looked at me, waiting. Refusing them out of some need to protect people who weren’t asking for protection would only cost us leads we couldn’t afford to lose.

"Fine," I said.

Camilla and Martha arrived not long after, insisting on the same thing. "Ivy’s our friend," Camilla said. "We know her habits. Where she studies, who she talks to, where she goes when she wants to be alone. That has to count for something."

It did. Finding someone wasn’t only a matter of magic and mental traces. Sometimes it came down to knowing which corner of the library someone preferred, or which bench they sat on between classes.

Roshan joined next, offering his knowledge of academy security and event procedures, the kind of institutional knowledge that came from years of paying closer attention to how the school actually worked than most students ever bothered to. I started to see the group less as a collection of worried friends and more as a set of specific, useful pieces.

Then Damien showed up.

Xander’s jaw tightened the moment he saw him standing in the doorway. "Absolutely not," he said under his breath.

"I have something useful to contribute," Damien said, unbothered by the reception.

"We don’t need you," Xander said.

"Xander," I said quietly.

He looked at me, clearly wanting me to back him up. I didn’t. Whatever I felt about Damien personally, and it wasn’t nothing, we needed every resource available to us right now, and turning away a genuine offer of help out of jealousy would be its own kind of failure.

"He stays," I said.

Xander didn’t look happy about it, but he didn’t argue further either. Finding Astrid mattered more than his feelings about Damien Cross, and he knew it even if he hated admitting it.

We couldn’t organize anything properly in the middle of the academy’s daytime chaos, so I told everyone to meet at the apartment at midnight, away from the noise and the whispering students and Aldric’s watchful staff. Everyone agreed. Before they scattered, I made sure they understood one thing clearly.

"This isn’t about running in blindly," I said. "We need information first. Whoever did this planned carefully. We have to be just as careful."

The apartment felt unbearably quiet once Xander and I were alone again that evening. Astrid’s presence should have filled it, and its absence sat in every corner instead. Xander finally broke somewhere around ten, sitting on the edge of the couch with his head in his hands.

"I should have noticed," he said. "The messages. How distracted she’d been. I joked about it instead of actually asking her what was wrong."

I didn’t tell him it wasn’t his fault, because I didn’t fully believe that myself. "I feel it too," I said. "I should have pushed harder. I told myself she’d talk to us when she was ready, and I let that be enough."

He looked up at me, something raw in his expression that he rarely let show. I understood it, because I felt the same thing clawing at me.

"You can’t carry this alone," I told him.

It wasn’t only about the search. It was the rest of it too, the guilt and the fear neither of us had any business shouldering by ourselves. He didn’t say anything, but something in his shoulders eased slightly, enough that I knew he’d heard it the way I meant it.

Midnight arrived with a knock at the door.

Both of us went still for a second before Xander crossed the room to answer it. Eliza came in first, followed by Criston, then Josh, then Camilla and Martha together, then Roshan, and finally Damien, who nodded once at Xander and got nothing back. The apartment filled slowly with people who had all come for exactly the same reason, and the emptiness where Astrid and Ivy should have been sat heavier with every person who arrived.

I laid out the plan once everyone had settled. "Camilla, Martha, you’re focused on Ivy. Retrace her movements, figure out who she talked to last, where she normally goes." They nodded. "Eliza, Criston, you’re on Astrid. Criston, anything you can pull from where she was last seen. Eliza, any residual traces the security team might have missed." Criston gave a short nod. "Josh, you’re our ears. Find out what students actually saw, not what Aldric’s office is willing to release." "Roshan, look at event logs, security gaps, anything unusual around the east wing recently." He agreed immediately. "Damien, whatever access or information you have, use it." Damien said nothing, just nodded once.

"Xander and I will coordinate everything," I said. "Compare what everyone finds, decide where we move next. And someone needs to keep an eye on Aldric’s official investigation so we’re not working blind against whatever his people uncover."

I looked around the room at all of them, every face carrying the same tight, determined worry.

We still had no idea where Astrid and Ivy actually were. We didn’t know who had taken them, or how they’d vanished from inside Moonshade without leaving a single clear trail behind.

But, we finally had a plan.