Conrad wasn’t at dinner. I kept glancing up at his empty seat at the head table and wondering if he was okay. Not that it was any of my business. I mean, he’s his own man and all that—

Was that why he didn’t like hanging out with me? Was I too naggy?

But I knew he ate a lot, and it wasn’t like he could go out to the local convenience store. What was he going to eat?

I was also worried because I didn’t have a ton of courage, and I had mustered it all to act on my brilliant plan to confront him.

The Plan: I would walk up to Conrad after dinner and stand there until the crushing weight of the awkward silence forced me to say something.

We’ll be real—it would probably be something stupid, but saying something stupid struck me as a marked improvement over not saying anything at all.

But the target of my stupidity wasn’t there, and my courage was waning.

Darius came to me after dinner. He caught me while I was alone by the tray drop-off.

“Emerra, there’s some things we need to discuss back in the room.”

Oh. Right. Like my whole report. I had completely spaced it.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

“How long will you be?”

Let’s see, two minutes to talk to the boys. Five minutes to get to the room. Ten minutes in case I got lost.

“Like, seventeen minutes?” I said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

He left. I went over to where Wes and the others were waiting for me.

“Work stuff?” Wes asked.

“Yeah.”

Scott said, “How long will it take?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been shirking a lot to be around you guys. If I can join you at nine, I will, but don’t wait for me.”

“Will you be okay?” Eric asked.

I sighed. “How much do I have to pay you to forget what happened today?”

Wes, Eric, and Dustin all looked at each other, but Scott cried, “Doritos!”

“Huh?”

“One large bag of Doritos will buy my silence for eternity.”

I looked to Dustin for interpretation.

“Wuller doesn’t allow junk food,” he explained.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but no matter where I went in the school, I’d never seen a vending machine. Conrad was going to starve. I decided it was high time I explored the town beyond the high, stone wall.

“Done,” I said to Scott. I looked at the rest of them. “What about you guys?”

Wes gave me a lopsided smile. “Here’s the problem—we may not say anything, but Eric, he worries about people.”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s all me,” Eric said.

Wes shrugged.

I said to Dustin, “Do you have any embarrassing stories about them?”

He smiled. “Oh, dozens.”

“Whoa! What’s this?” Wes said.

“Bribery or blackmail,” I said, “which ever you prefer, boys, but I would rather not have you reminding me of something I find that embarrassing.”

“All right! Sheez. You could have said please.”

“Please.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

I looked at Eric.

“I’ll take an explanation,” he said.

I’ve always had a hard time sharing stuff about myself, but no matter how I looked at it, the request was a fair one, and if they knew what happened made sense, maybe they wouldn’t worry about it so much.

I squeezed my fingers with my other hand. “About a month ago, I almost drowned. It was, uh…pretty bad. I had some nightmares for a while.”

“Were you in a pool or something?” Wes asked.

“N-not really. Um, someone was trying to kill me.”

The boys fell silent.

Yup. As I had feared, there was no way to say that without sounding dramatic.

“Did the wolfman know about this?” Eric asked.

I glared at him while wishing that my magical eyes had included a laser-beam feature. “That ‘wolfman’ saved my life. He jumped through a window to do it.” I sighed and ran a hand over my scalp. “That’s what you don’t get! Conrad looks big and scary, but he’s the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He’s sweet and shy, and—for flips sake!—he watched My Little Ponies with me because he lost at paper-rock-scissors!”

Wes’s laugh came out as a muted snort. “Did you say ‘for flips sake?’”

“Hey!” Scott smacked Wes’s arm. “A lady doesn’t swear! Dang it!”

Dustin said softly, “Does Conrad know that you like him?”

“A crush on a wolfman,” Scott mused. “Kinky.”

Eric wrapped an arm around the back of Scott’s neck and dragged his head around for a well-earned noogie.

Dustin ignored them. He kept watching me, waiting for an answer that I didn’t have.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I hope he does, but it’s not like people go around saying stuff like that.” I motioned to the four of them. “When was the last time you guys said how much you liked each other?”

Judging by how the four of them went out of their way to avoid meeting each other’s eyes, I figured I had won the argument.

“Maybe you should tell him,” Dustin said. “You could probably get away with it.” He gave my arm a single pat, the way I’d seen him pat Wes and Scott when he advised them against doing something stupid. “Just a thought.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to go.” I waved to them. “Later.”

As they were walking away, I heard Wes say, “You guys know I love you, right?”

Scott hummed. “Sorry, Wes. You’re not my type.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I made it to the room without getting lost, but Darius was already there, sitting at the desk. He glanced up from his laptop as I entered.

“One moment please,” he said.

I gave him a whenever wave and sat on the arm of the sofa to watch him.

“Does email work through the veil?” I asked.

“The barrier only works on things you can see and hear. That’s one of the quirks of magic. We can silence a call and make a microphone deaf, but if you want to stop an email, it’s easier to yank out the modem.”

He closed the laptop and turned to me. It looked like he was about to say something, but then he winced and turned his eyes away.

“I know it’s not a good couch, Emerra, but it isn’t your couch either.”

“Oh, sorry.” I scooted off the arm of the sofa and onto a cushion. I was still hanging over the back so I could see Darius.

“Let’s start with this.” He stood up and walked around the end of the couch to bring me a piece of rumpled paper.

I sat down properly and opened it.

“My notes!”

“Yesterday, were you ever down on the ground floor near the south wing?”

“Um…”

“Near the staff offices?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve only done half of the ground floor, and there weren’t any staff there. Why?”

“I’ll tell you later. For now, would you mind decoding this gibberish? I could only make out half of it.”

I walked him through everything I had learned from Miller.

“Does any of it look promising?” I asked.

“It’ll take some work to parse out the good leads. I’ll have someone start looking into the staff members you mentioned. You said Turner was the only new teacher that’s still here this year?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t like him dwelling too much on my one and only drinking buddy, so I tried to switch subjects. “Reisig’s employment seems a little weird—consulting in September, hired in December.”

“I’m more curious why Miller was so careful to distinguish between the appearance of the first pyrokinetics and the rest of the early claims.”

Huh. Yeah. That was strange.

“Do you want me to ask him about it?” I said.

Darius eyed me for exactly one second too long.

“Can I help you?” I prompted.

He smiled and shook his head. “Never mind. Miller’s explanation for why Reisig was hired in December makes sense. You don’t need a full-time teacher for only one or two boys.”

“Did you ever find out whether Reisig brought the kids into his class before or after they showed their talent?”

“After,” Darius said. “He only works with the students that have already demonstrated a talent.”

“Is that important?”

“I’m not sure, but it means that Reisig isn’t bringing students into his class, then turning them into psychics. What happened after you left me with Reisig and Jolie?”

I told him about my tea with Wuller and about the big, fat nothing I had learned from wandering the school. I admitted I got lost, and, because I knew that honesty and transparency were vital to any investigation, I gave him all the details about my drink with Turner.

Besides, he had a bad habit of pointing out whenever I lied to him.

He listened without saying a word, and he only stopped me when I told him why I had collapsed.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

The sudden question derailed me. And after I had been doing so well too.

“Huh?”

“‘The shadows were in the wrong place’—what does that mean?”

“Um, you know how when you shine a light on an object—”

“I know what a shadow is, Emerra.”

“Try to stay with me, Count.”

I held up my left hand in a fist, and opened my right hand when it was above and to the side of my fist. Tah-dah! A lamp!

I said, “If the light is shining like this on an object, where would the shadow be?”

Darius was sitting on the other end of the small sofa. All he had to do was lean forward to put his finger in the air where the imaginary shadow should have been hanging.

“Right! So would it be unusual if it was here instead?” I pointed with my lamp hand to the other side of my fist.

I smiled, feeling rather pleased with my succinct demonstration, but when I looked at Darius, he was watching me, and his face was somber.

“Emerra, are you sure of what you saw?”

My smile disappeared, and my hands dropped to my lap. “I…yes. Yes, I know what I saw.”

I would have given a thousand bags of Doritos to sound an ounce more confident.

“Is that the truth?” Darius asked.

See what I mean about that bad habit?

I grit my teeth for a moment. “Look, that’s what I saw. The shadows were wrong. There were some that shouldn’t have been there, some were missing, and all of them were in the wrong place! I can’t tell you if…if I was seeing things, or if I’m crazy—”

A lump jumped into my throat. I looked away.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Darius said.

I had to swallow before I could speak. “You had Conrad follow me, didn’t you?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Yes.”

I nodded. That was exactly what I had expected. “Has he talked to you yet?”

“About what?”

That was a no, then.

Reluctance turned my stomach to lead and my tongue into an unwieldy slab of numb meat, but if I valued honesty at all, I knew I had to tell him.

I squeezed my fingers hard enough my knuckles ground together. “I had a panic attack.”

Several seconds passed.

Darius said, “When was this?”

“During the boys’ free period. They were helping me search the school.” I forced myself to look at him. “Still don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Panic attacks don’t mean you’re crazy. It’s a normal stress response to a traumatic experience. Do you know what triggered it?”

I shook my head, then added in a mutter, “I thought I was drowning.”

Darius leaned back. His hand went to his jaw.

“Anyway,” I said, forcing my voice into a poor version of normal, “there it is. I don’t know if I was seeing things when I was in the hall, but I know what I saw. And yes, I did have a panic attack, but that wasn’t what happened last night. They were different. You have to believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“Thank you.”

I cautiously raised my eyes to his face. When I saw the faint worry lines at the edges of his mouth, my heart lurched. It was poised, probably dramatically, at the edge of some cliff, waiting to hear what Darius would say next.

It felt like a long time before the vampire spoke.

“Let’s say, for the sake of this discussion, that what you saw was not the product of your mind. Your eyes perceived the hallway properly, and your brain correctly interpreted the message. What would that mean?”

I relaxed. If Darius was pondering the case, he probably wasn’t going to make a big deal out of the drinking. Or the fainting. Or the panic attack.

Geez. I was working up one heck of a list.

“Is there some kind of magic that could change how a building looks?” I asked.

“A better question is ‘what kind of magic could change how a building looks to you.’ That’s a much harder question to answer, but I’m meeting with Brisbane tomorrow. I can ask him.”

“Brisbane?”

“He’s a member of the Albion Torr. I’ve been buying us more time at the school by offering to help walk Wuller through some of the legal aspects of joining the Torr. I’m borrowing a car to go pick up the papers tomorrow.”

“He couldn’t email them to you?”

“It’ll also give me a chance to dig around for who might have told Wuller about the Torr. Brisbane said a letter showed up at their office one day without any introduction.”

“Huh. That’s…odd.”

The Torrs were basically shadow societies without any of the glamour you’d want from one. It turns out a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy—magic can only dazzle it up so much. But the one thing the Torrs were really good at was keeping secrets. Wuller shouldn’t have been able to google their address.

“How long are you going to be gone?” I asked.

“At least a full day. I should be back either late tomorrow or early Saturday.”

That seemed like a lot of time for picking up some papers and asking a few questions.

Darius must have seen my incredulous expression.

“I’m also going to see what I can dig up on Wuller and Reisig,” he explained.

Oh. That made sense.

“Do you think Reisig is a member of the Psychic Society?” I asked.

“The what?”

We looked at each other, our faces, mirrors of confusion.

“The Psychic Society,” I repeated. “Like, you’d think he’d be a member. That’s probably how Wuller—”

“Is this a real society?”

“Yeah?” My brow creased. “Doesn’t the Torr deal with psychics? I thought you’d have known about it.”

“The Torr deals with psychics when they exist. This?” He dashed his hand to the side. “This isn’t normal. Remember that. You say there’s a society for psychics?”

“Well, for people who are interested in psychics.”

“How did you hear about it?”

“Miller told me.”

“Does that mean that Alex Miller and Wayne Wuller are both members?”

I threw up my hands. “I don’t know when they last paid their dues! I was going to ask Miller more questions about the psychic fan club, but then I got a call from a vampire who really wanted me to meet a ghost!” I paused. “My first life was not this weird.”

My spirits lifted when I saw Darius’s amused smile.

“I’ll look into the society,” Darius said. “You keep talking to people.”

“Hey, Darius, do you already have the car by any chance?”

“Why?”

“I was wondering if you could take me out to grab some snacks.”

“You didn’t get enough to eat?”

“I owe my boys some Doritos,” I added in a mumble, “and Conrad wasn’t at dinner. I thought he might get hungry.” I raised my head. “Did you give him another assignment or something?”

“No. I texted him when he didn’t show up. He said he wanted to go through the dorms when the boys were gone.”

I pressed my lips together. That wasn’t a bad excuse. Knowing Conrad, he probably did it too.

Darius glanced at his watch. “We better leave soon. The gates lock at ten, and I need to pack a few things before I leave.”

“Ready to go when you are, sir.”

While we were walking down the hall, Darius said, “Emerra, I want you to understand, Conrad was only following you because I asked him to.”

“It’s okay. I get it. You were worried I might collapse again—”

He leaned in and said, in a hushed, fast voice, “We were worried you might be attacked again.”

Hold up. Did he say what I think he said?

Darius went on, “We didn’t know what had happened to you. We still don’t know. I would have talked to you about it first, but I didn’t get the chance. I don’t want you to blame Conrad.”

Blame? Forget blame! I was still reeling over the idea that anyone would bother attacking me.

“But there was no one around when I fainted!” I said.

“Emerra, we’re dealing with a school full of aberrant psychics. We don’t know how close they’d have to be to attack you.”

“Um, which ones are the aberrant psychics? Did…did Iset write about them?”

It took Darius a full three seconds before he could wrestle his grin back down to a closed-lip smile.

“Aberrant means abnormal,” he said.

“Where are you getting these words? Do they cost extra?”

“That was worth whatever you think I paid for it.”