Beta (14 page)

Deirdre could hear the edge of compulsion in his voice. She couldn’t hesitate to obey him—not unless she wanted him to discover that she was immune to his powers.

She turned on her heel and followed Blythe out the door.

Despite her outward compliance, her mind was whirling.

Release the children into town? It wasn’t big enough to have many services for gaeans, who tended to cluster in major cities on either coast. There would be virtually no OPA presence at all.

Probably why Stark had chosen to release kids from that school in particular. They didn’t have as much government help to fall back on.

But there
would
be an eventual response. Someone would arrive to corral the children, returning them to St. Griffith’s or relocating them to other facilities. It would be a fleeting victory.

Releasing them couldn’t be his real goal.

This was about the files. Those sisters he was trying to find.

Deirdre pitied anyone that Stark might be trying to hunt down.

To reach the stairs leading to the bedrooms, Blythe and Deirdre had to go down a long hallway that passed a formal dining room. The door was cracked open. The shine of moonlight on metal caught Deirdre’s attention.

She stopped in the doorway to look inside. Her heart sank at the sight of the other recent additions to the house, which matched the bars over the windows in many ways.

There was a pair of shackles bolted to the wall.

“This way,” Blythe whispered.

Deirdre ignored her and stepped into the dining room.

The walls were decorated with heavy velvet drapes, giving the dining room the air of a place that fancy state dinners might be held. It was easy to imagine Rylie entertaining the OPA’s secretary over at the buffet table, laughing politely while twirling a pearl necklace around her forefinger.

But one of the curtains had been pulled aside to reveal the shackles, as though carelessly brushed aside. Those belonged at no state dinner.

Deirdre kneeled to run a finger along the edge of the shackle. It burned her skin.

Silver.

From her position nearer the floor, she could see underneath the bottom of the curtain. There was another pair of shackles underneath it.

Deirdre pulled aside the next curtain, and the next. They were concealing restraints all around the room. Dozens of shackles forged from an alloy that could easily restrain shifter children.

It looked much like Stark’s basement.

She turned on Blythe, who stood nervously in the doorway.

“What have you people been doing here?” Deirdre asked.

“They beat the girls,” Blythe whispered. “I’m not talking about a few switchings when they get into trouble. I mean that they are whipped with silver and chained to these walls. They’re given ‘time outs’ when they’re especially bad.”

The solitary confinement that Vidya had suffered in flashed through Deirdre’s mind. “Time outs?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“There are closets,” Blythe said. She left it at that. She didn’t need to say anything else. Deirdre knew exactly what she was talking about.

Corporal punishment hadn’t been unheard of when Deirdre was in the system. Many foster parents believed it to be the best way to handle unruly shifter children. After all, shifters were naturally violent with each other; kids established social hierarchy with near-constant scuffles.

But there was a difference between two nine-year-old shifters facing off to see who was at the top of the dog pile and an adult witch hexing children.

They hadn’t used silver-tipped whips on Deirdre, but she’d been struck with belts, crops—that kind of thing. The foster homes didn’t have quite as much government oversight as the boarding schools.

That wasn’t to say that life had been good outside the foster homes. It hadn’t been. But most of the abuse Deirdre had sustained came from other kids, not from the adults in the house.

Obviously, the “tough love” philosophies of the foster homes had been gaining popularity since Deirdre had become an adult.

Hot fury flooded her veins. “Are they here? The teachers who do this?”

“It’s mostly the dean conducting punishments,” Blythe said.

“Where does she sleep?”

The groundskeeper caught onto what Deirdre was saying. Her eyes widened. “But Stark told us to wake up the kids.”

“Where?” Deirdre asked, drawing her Sig Sauer.

Blythe handed her a key. “
He
sleeps on the third floor, down at the end. He likes the corner windows.”

Stark was right. The children needed to be released from St. Griffith’s.

Deirdre clutched the key in her fist. Its teeth dug into her palm. “Wake the kids up. I’ll see you in the foyer soon.”

She broke away from Blythe, jogging up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She didn’t try to be quiet. She hoped someone would find her so that she could deal with them. Liquid anger flowed through her body. She stung with the memory of corporal punishments she’d endured, and she wanted to share the pain.

But Deirdre didn’t run into any adults patrolling the second floor, nor the third.

The number on the room key was 315. Deirdre found it at the end of the hallway and around the corner, where the view of the gardens was surely the best. Just as Blythe had told her.

She unlocked the door and slipped quietly inside.

The dean slept with the curtains open, allowing the moonlight to spill into the room. The furnishings were nice. Mostly antiques. A four-poster bed, a big mahogany wardrobe, a lovely vanity. Filmy white gauze hung from the posts of the bed, fluttering in the cool wind that blew through the cracked window.

Deirdre stepped between the cloth. It swayed around her as she studied the man sleeping in bed.

He was slender, gray-haired, and wearing silk pajamas. His hearing aid rested in a shallow plastic tray on the side of the bed—a contraption of plastic and metal that would cover him from temple to jaw when he wore it, sparkling with magical enchantments.

She would have remembered that hearing aid anywhere.

The memory of the man who’d worn that hearing aid made Deirdre feel sick.

“Dr. Landsmore,” Deirdre whispered under her breath. “You changed careers.”

No wonder Stark had asked Deirdre about Dr. Landsmore earlier that night. And no wonder he had told Deirdre she would like going to the school. He had known Herb Landsmore was at St. Griffith’s, and he had brought Deirdre there like he was giving her a present.

Deirdre hadn’t known she had a revenge fantasy about Dr. Landsmore until she stood over his prone body.

The man stirred in bed, as though he could feel Deirdre’s hatred radiating from beyond the fluttering gauze. His eyes opened slowly. Once Dr. Landsmore saw Deirdre, his eyes shot open the rest of the way and he sat up with a gasp.

Deirdre pointed the Sig at his forehead. “Quiet.”

Dr. Landsmore was quiet.

He didn’t need to speak to fight back.

The witch flung his hand toward Deirdre, mouth opening silently in a word of power.

An invisible fist of magic punched her in the gut.

Deirdre’s feet left the floor. Her body rushed through the air. Her back smashed into the dresser, and she fell to the floor in a shower of books and writing implements.

Dr. Landsmore was out of bed in seconds, cramming the hearing aid into place and plunging a hand into the drawer on his bedside table. He yanked out a notebook and ripped a page free.

It was a spellpage—a piece of paper with a rune that had been infused with magic.

Reuben Wheatley had used a spellpage on Andrew at the detention center and nearly burned him to a crisp.

Deirdre wasn’t familiar with enough runes to have a clue what it’d do to her. But if Dr. Landsmore could throw Deirdre across the room with a word, then a whole page would surely do something deadly.

There wasn’t time to restrain him nicely. Deirdre lifted the gun in both hands and shot Dr. Landsmore in the wrist. Blood splattered onto the gauze dangling beside him.

The witch screamed as his fingers went limp. The spellpage fluttered to the floor without being activated.

Deirdre scrambled to her feet as Dr. Landsmore opened his mouth again, surely to unleash another word of power. But before the man could speak, Deirdre shoved the muzzle of the gun into his mouth, letting him taste gun oil.

“Shut up,” Deirdre said through gritted teeth.

Recognition flashed through Dr. Landsmore’s eyes. He tried to speak around the gun. It didn’t come out clearly, but she understood what he was saying. “Deirdre Tombs?”

“Good to know I’m memorable,” Deirdre said. “I know I’ll never forget you. What are you supposed to do against an adult who can fight back? Don’t try to answer that. I’ll make you swallow a bullet.”

Dr. Landsmore wasn’t the type to cry when his life was threatened. It only made him angrier, cheeks reddening and eyebrows lowering.

Deirdre slid the gun out of his mouth and grabbed a fistful of Dr. Landsmore’s thinning gray hair.

“We’re going for a walk.” Deirdre pushed the Sig into Dr. Landsmore’s temple and used it to propel him out of the room.

There was a woman in the hallway—a teacher patrolling the floor. She stopped dead at the sight of Dr. Landsmore coming out of his bedroom at gunpoint.

Deirdre moved the Sig and fired.

She was kind enough to go for the teacher’s thigh rather than somewhere more critical. Her aim seemed to have improved in her fury, too. She hit right in the meat of the teacher’s leg.

The teacher staggered, clutching her hands to the wound as blood flowed down her thigh to her calf.

Dr. Landsmore gave a little cry of shock, clapping a hand to his hearing aid. He twisted, as though trying to escape the loudness of the gun, but Deirdre tightened her grip on his hair. “You’ll pay for this!” Dr. Landsmore said. His tone was a little flat. He’d always spoken funny, since the hearing aid made it difficult to hear himself.

“I’m pretty sure I told you not to talk.” Deirdre marched her hostage past the woman that she’d shot.

But Dr. Landsmore didn’t shut up. “I still have friends among the OPA.
Many
friends, and many of them in very high places! They’ll see to it that you’re executed for this!”

Unfortunately, if the OPA caught Deirdre, the punishment would surely be much worse than a mere execution. They didn’t seem to kill their prisoners, after all. They locked them up in little boxes and experimented on them, just like Dr. Landsmore used to.

Vidya was proof of that. Poor, broken Vidya, covered in her own effluence. And all the children who had been chained in the dining room of St. Griffith’s, fragile little wrists burning, feet kicking helplessly against the antique hardwood floors.

No, death wasn’t the cruelest punishment that the OPA could exact on shifters.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised that your behavior over the years has resulted in payback,” Deirdre hissed into his ear. “Did you think you’d get away with all the shitty things you’ve done?”

“Medicine isn’t advanced by people handling their patients with kid gloves,” Dr. Landsmore said. “It’s good for society to experiment. I helped people by what I did with you.”

Deirdre yanked hard on his hair. “Is that why you’re a dean now instead of a doctor?”

“Every genius makes enemies,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s how you know you’re doing something right.”

No regret. Not even an acknowledgment he might have done anything wrong.

When they got to the first floor, they came up behind Blythe’s herd of students, all dressed in their pajamas and looking very confused. Deirdre shifted the gun to the small of Dr. Landsmore’s back so that the kids wouldn’t see it. No need to scare them more than necessary.

Stark was waiting at the front of the foyer, arms folded, papers tucked under his arm. His usual neutral expression had been replaced with one of frustration as Blythe brought the children down.

Whatever he’d hoped to find in Blythe’s files, it hadn’t been there.

Deirdre shoved Dr. Landsmore to his knees in front of Stark’s feet. She planted the Sig against the back of his head. “You knew,” she said. “You knew that this man was here.”

“Yes, I knew,” Stark said. There was actual compassion in his voice. It made her waver on her feet as her heart gave a little hiccup in her chest. Her gun didn’t waver, though.

“You did this for me?” She couldn’t manage to speak above a whisper.

“You’ve given me everything you have, Tombs,” Stark said. “You’ve been loyal.” His fingers brushed against her arm, just above the intake bracelet on her wrist. Goosebumps shivered up her shoulder. “Are you happy?”

Deirdre shut her eyes, drawing in a long breath.

With Dr. Landsmore at the end of her gun, she felt something much more powerful than happiness.

Happiness was what the lethe gave her. It was uncomplicated and illusory.

Now she felt vindication.

Deirdre steadied herself before opening her eyes to meet Stark’s harsh yellow gaze. “This man beats the students here. He locks them in closets and whips them with silver. He’s probably been performing medical experiments on them, too.”

“I’m aware of that,” Stark said.

“So what are we going to do to him?” Deirdre asked.

The corner of Stark’s mouth twitched. “Anything you want. This is for you, Tombs.” Dr. Landsmore made a strangled sound, as though he was choking on a bite of food.

“All the students have come down,” Blythe said, standing on her toes to look over their heads. “Or most of them, anyway—there are always some stragglers.”

There weren’t nearly as many as Deirdre had expected. It looked to be more in the range of a hundred students rather than five hundred. Still, it was a lot of little bodies in the room, all of them wide eyed and baffled by the experience.

They were probably only used to waking up at night to get whipped, after all. This was something completely different.

Deirdre expected Stark to give some kind of speech to turn the children’s attitudes in his favor. There were a hundred malleable minds waiting to be told their anger was justified.

He wouldn’t even need to wait for the kids to grow up to recruit them into his army. Preteen gaeans could be just as deadly as their adult counterparts, if not even more so, with the wildness of hormones in their bodies.