Felicity stood straighter. She got a particularly dark look in her eyes.

  Jane’s eyebrows descended, and her lips parted slowly. “You look like you’re going to go and hit something. I suggest you control that emotion. If you really do try to strike out at Belinda, you will get kicked out. Though maybe that’s the best way to go, you’ll probably get sued. It doesn’t matter that her family is the richest there is – they know precisely how to stay on top, and it’s by bullying and stealing from people like you. So reel your anger in.”

  Felicity managed a nod. It was so tight, she could’ve snapped her neck.

  Jane went to walk away, her warning obviously done.

  Felicity quickly grabbed her arm. “I want more info about that recent murder. Where can I find out the details?”

  Jane frowned. “Why do you want to know about the murder?”

  Felicity snorted. “Because I want to keep myself alive, and it sounds like the only way to do that is to understand precisely what I’m up against.”

  Jane looked at her, then shrugged. “You want to know about the murder, then good luck with that. There aren’t any details.”

  Felicity frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “After the body was found between classes, the teachers put up a magical defense shield to ensure that no one could take photos and couldn’t leak the story to the media until the situation was controlled. That meant that most of the—”

  “Magical evidence would have been contaminated,” Felicity said. There was only one thing she could think of. It pounded through her mind, in fact. It was the memory of the day Damien had been pulled in. She could still hear one of the headteachers snarling at everyone to put up a magical defense field.

  … Could that be a coincidence? Could the teachers have been in on it?

  Maybe Jane was good at reading minds, because she immediately shook her head. “I doubt the faculty are involved. Not directly, anyway. But they always act in a way that protects the school’s reputation, despite the fact that often means they do nothing about the crimes that are committed here. Anyway, I should go. I’ll program the maintenance tunnel so you can exit on the grounds. If I were you, I’d just walk around for a while and come back late at night. The later, the better. Belinda will get bored by about 10 o’clock. I’ll see you in our room. But,” she turned around, “please pretend not to know me. I know that sounds harsh—”

  “But you want to keep your head down,” Felicity said evenly without a hint of bitterness in her tone. “I understand. Thanks for this.” She made enduring eye contact.

  Jane nodded and walked off.

  Felicity waited until Jane had disappeared, then she felt a spell pushing through the room. The maintenance tunnel changed, and right in front of her was a door.

  She spread her fingers close to it, and she concentrated. That was all it took to appreciate that the door led out of the side of the building to one of the sprawling lawns.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Convenient. I’ll have to remember this,” she muttered under her breath.

  She’d already remotely scanned this room to ensure that there were no sound recording spells.

  It wasn’t hard. Lucifer had taught her several powerful enchantments before she’d come here. So she knew perfectly well that whatever was said or done here would not make it back to anyone.

  She planted her hands on her hips. “Thank you, Jane. This is the perfect way in and out of Broadstone.” She leaned to the side and rapped her knuckles on the wall. Then she frowned as she thought about everything she’d learned.

  Jane was related to one of the murder victims.

  That was one hell of a coincidence.

  “But it could be one hell of a benefit,” she muttered. Jane could become a really useful asset. It was clear she knew a lot, and it was just as clear that she had absolutely no compunction about badmouthing the elites.

  Felicity’s mind instantly ticked back to what she’d learned about the recent murder. If they really had used a complete magical field to ensure photos couldn’t be taken, it would be harder to discover the magical spell that had been used to kill Eleanor. But not impossible. Felicity just had to retrace the crime and think in a way the criminal hadn’t.

  When you are arrogant, which was everyone here, you tended to forget just how much evidence you could leave. Felicity wasn’t just talking about spellcasting anymore. She was talking about forensics, believe it or not. Though the magical community often dismissed the technologies of ordinary humans, forensic science had come a long way in the past several years. It wasn’t impossible that Felicity would be able to find a strand of hair or a stray fingerprint. All she would have to do was—

  “Start on the roof.”

  She shoved her hands into her pockets and concentrated on the door. When she discerned that there was no one out there, she slipped out.

  It was time for some real detective work.

  8

  Felicity waited until dark.

  She wasn’t about to waste her time, though. While she waited, she watched.

  She found a relatively secluded position in the grounds, grabbed a book from her magic pocket to look as if she was studying, then set up position as she surveilled everyone who came and went.

  There was a lot more traffic than there should be.

  Technically, when classes were on and it wasn’t holiday time, the students were not allowed to leave Broadstone. You tell that to the 50 or so students she saw disappearing through an unmarked door on the side of the building. All they would have to do was walk up to it and whisper something at it, and the door would open and take them right to a busy main street. They didn’t even have to go through the forest. They just hopped right out into town.

  Nobody saw Felicity watching them.

  From one angle, they would’ve recognized that she was just an ordinary kid studying. But she got to decide what people saw. If they looked dodgy, then they didn’t see anything at all.

  It would ensure that if anyone asked where she’d been, she would be able to generate several witnesses who had legitimately seen her just sitting under a tree. But nobody who could be a potential target had any clue that she was watching them.

  Felicity had a pen in her hand. She tapped it against the book she was apparently reading as she watched the 51st student disappear.

  Broadstone was meant to be the most secure building in all of the country, ha? Things were only secure when you kept all the doors locked.

  Felicity was under no illusion whatsoever that these students had created this door on their own. Broadstone was more than secure enough to have detected the door on multiple occasions and shut it down. But the door remained. Which meant the faculty was completely aware of it and didn’t give a hoot.

  Felicity made a note of everyone’s identity, then, when it was dark enough, she finally rose. She cracked her shoulders. She discarded the book behind her into a spatial pocket. There was a slight crackle of magic, and it was sucked away.

  With the portal still open, without turning around, she reached a hand behind herself, and she pulled something out.

  It was a sword. No, as tempting as it would be, she was not about to go on a rampage and trash the school grounds, though she would love to destroy the magical defense class just to see what the teacher would look like the next day. This sword was… well, she guessed you could call it a wand. A real one.

  Wands technically concentrated magic. It wasn’t the wood they were made out of – it was the complex interconnected lattice network that was inside them. People might pretend that it was cool that they had cherry wood wands, or cedar, or some ancient wood that hadn’t been seen in thousands of years, and that this somehow made a scrap of a difference when it came to casting. What mattered was how sophisticated that internal lattice was. It was an artificial substance grown in a lab. The more magic you introduced to it, the more holes that lattice had, and the easier it was for it to concentrate magical fields. That’s why certain ones were more expensive. Magic was, in and of itself, an expensive commodity. The more you used to generate the wand, the more it cost.

  But what Felicity was holding now was something completely different. Lucifer had given it to her, for one.

  It didn’t concentrate magic – it cut things. Specifically, it cut through existing spells.

  You didn’t need a wand to concentrate your magic. All you required was your mind. If anything, it was a dangerous crutch. But when it came to destroying people’s spells, efficiency was the thing that mattered most. Hence the sword. Rather than having to waste her precious mental resources breaking through other people’s enchantments, all she would have to do was slice this sword through them, and they would shatter as effectively as glass thrown off a cliff.

  “Time to get this done,” she growled to herself.

  She stalked across the grounds, but she did not do so visibly. It sure as hell would be a great exclamation mark for her already crappy day to reveal who she was by striding around with forbidden enchanted weapons.

  One of the other spells that Lucifer had been at pains to teach her before she’d left was a true invisibility cloak.

  To cast it, you had to screw with the space directly around you. But to truly ensure that you were properly invisible, you also had to screw subtly with people’s minds.

  Light was a funny thing. The way it bounced off objects wasn’t always clear. You could cast what you thought was a pretty good invisibility cloak, and it would work on direct observers, but it wouldn’t work on those who were far away.

  To ensure that you were truly visible, you had to create a manipulation spell that was carried on the light that struck your form and rebounded. Anyone that light struck would be controlled by the spell. Now that was hard.

  The kind of hard where Felicity had been forced to concentrate with all her damn mind to learn it.

  Though Lucifer didn’t exactly have a problem with being hands-on, when he was teaching her spells, usually he let her figure things out for herself. Not this time. When he’d taught her true invisibility, he’d wrapped his arms around hers, grabbed her hands up, and held them in a specific position. She could still feel the latent tingle from where his thumbs had spread her fingers.

  “Clear your head, girl,” she said to herself pointedly as she rolled her tongue around her teeth. “And concentrate.”

  She’d already cast her invisibility spell. She could tell it was working fine because she walked past two teachers who were taking a stroll around the grounds and they didn’t even blink her way.

  Though clearly the teachers were searching for any students who were trying to skip school and head out into town, they were clearly doing a pretty shit job, because despite the fact they saw two students heading toward that door, neither of them did anything. The students weren’t wearing cloaks, but they were from very well-known families.

  Felicity just strode past everybody, the sword in her hand, a disgruntled look in her eyes.

  Though it would’ve been easy as hell to slice her sword through the teachers – not that it would’ve killed them – she resisted the urge. The attack would have momentarily crippled their magic and left them as nothing more than magical vegetables for several minutes. Then she could have turned around and smashed up that door. It would be the only effective way of ensuring that students didn’t skip school.

  She had zero intention of being responsible for these assholes’ truancy, though.

  She made a beeline for the roof.

  She didn’t walk through the building. It wasn’t just that the building had a far stronger magical detection net than the grounds. It was that the direct approach was always better. And there was nothing more direct than climbing up the side of the building.

  Here we go, she thought as she ticked her head back and faced the sandstone wall. She cracked her shoulders from side to side. She scratched her ear, then she launched herself at the sandstone. Her sword was still in her hand. She only needed one hand to climb with. With a quick muttered adhesive spell, she ensured her fingers and feet were sticky, and she started to climb. Hell, she practically ran up the wall.

  This was the benefit of having a strong body. She didn’t tire, even as she got halfway up the 10-floor building.

  By the time she reached the roof and flipped onto it, she was ready for a fight, not bed.

  She whipped the sword around in her hand, drummed her fingers against the hilt, and started searching for magical spells.

  She quickly came across several.

  They weren’t the ones she was looking for, though. These were just the standard dross that was spread around the school. Some of them were part of the sensor net. Some of them just seemed to be old magic that had been cast over the years and hadn’t been cleaned. Some of them were for surveillance.

  She arched an eyebrow. So the school surveilled the kids after all, then?

  Though she wanted to believe that the school let the elites get away with anything, she was missing the point, wasn’t she? There was a hierarchy, even when it came to the elites. And that hierarchy was maintained when they exited back into the real world. It wasn’t beyond the realms of imagination that the school surveilled the lower-class elites in order to generate evidence should they ever need to be blackmailed further down the track.

  She arched an eyebrow. “This is such a nice damn place,” she quipped.

  The roof was large. Fortunately, it was flat in most sections. If you thought that would be a nightmare when it came to rain collecting and draining through the sandstone, you’d be wrong. There was a weather field up here that would ensure that even the most battering storm, save for the one that had helped her escape all those years ago, wouldn’t cause any damage to the building.

  She shoved her free hand into her pocket as she walked.

  She kept her tongue against the roof of her mouth. It enabled her to concentrate on the magical fields she encountered. Occasionally, she brought up her sword and sliced through any enchantments that were getting in her way. Mostly, it was old magic. Though you would think that not too many people came up onto the roof, obviously you’d be wrong. There were a whole host of ancient spells, from sunshine spells, to the things students had clearly been practicing, even to a few love spells.

  She pressed her teeth against her lips, came up to one particularly old spell, and rather than cut through it, grabbed it, instead. She secured her fingers around the invisible strands of magic, closed her eyes, and started to tease them apart.

  It was kind of like she was sniffing through it to see what it smelled like. And what it smelled like was blood.

  She opened her eyes.

  Jane had already revealed that the teachers had stupidly used a magical field as soon as they’d discovered Eleanor’s body. That would ensure that no real evidence remained. But there was an assumption there, wasn’t there? A magical field would be able to destroy evidence of recent spells, but it could do nothing for old spells or persisting spells.

  The enchantment that Felicity had her hand on right now seemed old as hell. More importantly than that, it was laden with the scent of blood.

  She brought her fingers close to her nose, and despite the fact it was pretty disgusting, she smelled as deeply as she could. It was like she’d gone into a graveyard, dug up a fresh corpse, cut it, and buried her face in its torso.

  It was this sickening old scent of death. It was so cloying and maddening, Felicity had to stop herself from gagging. She pressed her hand against the back of her mouth.

  She’d encountered spells like this before. Once upon a time, Lucifer had made Felicity go after his competition, because yeah, of course he had competition. He wasn’t the only demon in town, though he was by far the most powerful. Though usually demons just left each other alone, that didn’t always happen. She’d never asked exactly what that rival mob had done, but Lucifer had spared no expense in breaking them apart.

  When Felicity had gone to their main den, she’d encountered a spell like this. Later, Lucifer told her it had presided over the killing of over a thousand people.

  You read that right, a thousand people. It had stunk. And yet, it didn’t stink as badly as this one.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she muttered to herself darkly. “This makes no damn sense. If that other spell killed a thousand people, then this one….”

  She pushed away, locked her hand against the back of her mouth, closed her eyes, and tried to count.

  When she was done, she was well into the thousands.

  Though she couldn’t be sure that she’d pierced the veil of the spell accurately and counted its every victim, a ballpark figure wouldn’t be that off the mark.

  She shuddered. It was a cold, destructive move. It felt like someone grabbed her by the shoulders and kept shaking her as if they wanted her damn head to snap off her neck.

  If Broadstone had killed thousands of students, people would know. You could smooth over a handful of deaths, but not that many.

  Though this spell smelled of blood and reminded her strongly of the spell she’d encountered with that dark mob, maybe it hadn’t actually killed its victims. Judging by the overpowering scent of blood, it might have just bled them.

  That could account for the apparently high body count.

  But it could not explain why this spell was here in the first place.

  “Unless someone needs an inordinate amount of blood?” she stammered.

  She paled.

  Blood was a pretty powerful substance. It didn’t just keep humans alive – there were plenty of magical creatures out there that used it in their spellcasting.

  Blood that was given freely was powerful, sure. But blood that was taken secretly had different properties. When it was taken by force, it had different properties again.

  Felicity could think of a handful of extraordinarily dark spells that required blood that had been taken secretly. All such magic was forbidden.

  She shook her head. “This makes no damn sense. What the hell are students from this school doing collecting blood for forbidden magic?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79