Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) (37 page)

Emily nodded, unhappily. If a Mimic could replace a person so exactly that there was no easy way to spot the substitution, the first real sign might come when it dissolved into mist and searched for its next victim. She could imagine a wife sleeping next to a husband...and then waking up to see her husband resuming his natural form. It made her wonder if the Mimic kept the memories of those it had killed, or if it forgot what it had been when it returned to its natural form.

“It must forget,” she mused out loud. “Or why would it play at being human?”

Lady Barb quirked an eyebrow. “Emily?”

“The Mimic,” Emily said. “While it isn’t in its natural form, does it remember what it really is?”

Travis
had been interrogated, Emily recalled, and nothing had surfaced to suggest that he was anything more than the jerk he’d seemed. But if she assumed that the Mimic had killed Travis and taken his place during the Battle of Whitehall, when the wards were down, it suggested that the Mimic had been able to pass for a student...simply because it had forgotten it was anything else. Master Tor’s lectures on truth spells and their limitations suggested that a liar couldn’t be detected if he didn’t
know
that he was lying.

“No one knows,” Lady Barb said, softly. She looked down at Emily, thoughtfully. “Can you cast a spell for me?”

Emily blinked. “Which one?”

“Any,” Lady Barb said.

Something
clicked
in Emily’s mind. “You think I’m the Mimic?”

“It’s a possibility,” the Grandmaster admitted. “Danielle would have been replaced; it was the Mimic who reported finding Travis’s body, not his former girlfriend.”

Emily stared at him in absolute horror. If
she
were the Mimic, would she even know that she was? Might she have been replaced
before
she hurled herself out of the window? She hesitated, then cast a simple light spell. The ball of light shimmered into existence and hovered over her bed.

“But that may not prove anything,” Sergeant Miles said, grimly. “If Travis was replaced when the Mimic escaped, he still would have had to perform magic in classes. I know he was studying and using spells in Martial Magic and I really don’t see how he could have faked them.”

Lady Barb nodded in agreement. “So that proves nothing,” she said. “The Mimic could be
anywhere
. Or anyone.”

“I am not the Mimic,” Emily said, sharply.

The Grandmaster gave her a sympathetic look. “Would you know if you were?”

“We’ve had to seal the school,” Lady Barb said, changing the subject. “Could that have been the objective all along? Did someone introduce the Mimic into the school?”

“There is no known way to control a Mimic,” the Grandmaster said, flatly. “It is much more likely that we’re hunting the Mimic that escaped the zoo during Shadye’s attack on Whitehall. And we have to find it before it wipes out everyone in Whitehall.”

He turned and made his way towards the door, then stopped. “Lady Emily,” he said, “thank you for alerting us to the threat. Stay here, get better...then see if you can think of any way to trap the creature.”

Sergeant Miles followed him, leaving Emily alone with Lady Barb.

“You can’t think that I’m the Mimic,” Emily protested. The very thought was terrifying. “I told you about it...”

Lady Barb shrugged. “There’s no way to know just what it might be thinking,” she said, “assuming that it is thinking at all. We know so little about them. No one even knows where they come from. Gorgons and orcs and other such creatures are warped humans, but a Mimic is something else entirely.”

“A monster,” Emily said. From what she could recall of the lectures, even the
suggestion
that someone might be a Mimic had led to that person being lynched—or worse. It was stupid, given what a Mimic could do, but it happened. Maybe she should be glad she was in the infirmary. What would her fellow students do if they thought
she
was the Mimic?

“Quite,” Lady Barb agreed. “The Grandmaster is currently working on ways to trap it. There are wards that can be used to confine it, then we can seal it in a trunk like you did with the Cockatrice.”

She smiled. “I need you to go over everything that happened since Sergeant Bane revealed his true nature to you.”

“That he’d been replaced,” Emily corrected. Sergeant Bane had an alibi for the Warden’s death, she was sure. Even if he didn’t...it didn’t prove that he’d been the Mimic all along. “It could be anyone now.”

“Yes,” Lady Barb agreed. Her voice was very flat. “It could.”

Emily shook her head in disbelief. A Mimic. Why couldn’t it have been a bloody basilisk? A giant snake with a weakness for rooster cries would have been easy to find and kill. A Mimic, on the other hand...

No one even knew if they
could
be killed.

Chapter Thirty

E
MILY LOOKS DOWN AT HER HANDS.
They seem normal, yet she knows there is something badly wrong. A thought is nagging at the corner of her mind. It is...what? She cannot focus; the thought isn’t really there. And yet...her hands are shimmering with light. As she watches, they dissolve completely into glowing mist. A terrible hunger fills her and she turns, searching for her former classmates. Now, they are nothing more than sources of food...

Emily snapped awake, staring around her desperately. A nightmare. It had just been a nightmare...and yet there had been something about it that had reached down inside her and touched the very core of her being. Her entire body was soaked with sweat, even though she was wearing nothing more than a light hospital gown. The nightmare had left its mark on her soul.

She looked around. The infirmary appeared to be deserted, apart from a couple of first-years who were both fast asleep. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the ward. Emily swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood upright, despite feeling shivers running through her entire body. She clung onto the bed until the shakes faded away, then staggered towards the large mirror and peered into it. Her own reflection looked back at her.

Emily had never been particularly vain—any tendency she might have had towards vanity had been drummed out of her by exposure to Alassa, who never managed to have so much as a hair out of place—but she was still shocked by her own appearance. Her face was pale, while her hair was stringy and unwashed and there were bruises all over her body, barely visible through the gown. She touched one lightly and felt a brief ache, before realizing that the healer had fed her numbing potion. If she hadn’t, her entire body would be hurting.

“You’ve looked better,” a blunt voice said from behind her.

Emily spun around to see Kyla, the healer, scowling at her.

“I’ve looked worse too,” Emily said, tartly. “When can I leave the ward?”

“You really need to eat and then lie down for another hour or two,” Kyla said. “After that, I think you could probably leave if you wanted to. But it isn’t very pleasant out there.”

Emily looked over at the window and shuddered. The darkness was still there. Her internal clock had improved radically since she’d come to Whitehall, even though she’d been given a clockwork watch, but it was hard to tell just what time it was. A glance at the clock hanging over the door told her that it was early morning. It felt like the middle of the night.

“Sit,” the healer said, pointing to a chair. “I’ll have food brought up to you in a jiffy.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, sitting down. “What’s happening out there?”

“Absolute panic,” Kyla stated. She peered down at Emily, casting a series of medical charms. “The Mimic could be
anyone
.”

“And we’re trapped,” Emily finished, glancing back at the window. “How many hexes have been thrown in the last few hours alone?”

“Too many,” Kyla said, darkly. “I’ve spent too much time fixing idiots who have been hexed by their classmates.”

She walked over to a cabinet and reached inside, removing a tray of food. “Eat this,” she ordered, passing it to Emily. “And make sure you eat until you’re bursting.”

Emily nodded. The food didn’t
look
very appetizing, but it smelled remarkably good. Lady Barb had talked about Healer’s Mush, a porridge-like substance that helped the body to heal quickly; Emily realized, as she dug into the food, that Lady Barb hadn’t exaggerated the effects. Every bite made her want to eat more, until she had definitely eaten as much as she could. And yet she still wanted more.

“Most of it will help fuel your recovery,” Kyla informed her, as she ran a series of checks on Emily’s body. “I’d advise you to try to take it easy for the next couple of days. Your body was badly depleted of magical reserves even before you jumped out a window.”

“Take it easy,” Emily repeated, rolling her eyes. “How am I meant to do
that
?”

A thought struck her as she looked down at the bruises and she felt a stab of guilt. “How is Melissa?”

Kyla didn’t seem surprised by the question. “I fixed the remaining damage and sent her to bed,” she said, flatly. “I believe that she was...rather unhappy with you.”

“Sergeant Bane healed her,” Emily said, and then scowled. That wouldn’t have been the
real
Sergeant, but the Mimic. It
could
perform magic, then. Did it copy the magical skills of the person it replaced, or did its powers grow as it moved from victim to victim? “I’ll talk to Lady Barb about it later.”

“Indeed you will,” Kyla said. She passed Emily a new set of robes. “I suggest you go back to your bedroom, take a shower and then get some more sleep. And watch your back out there.”

“Thank you,” Emily said. She pulled on the robes and inspected herself in the mirror. They didn’t fit her perfectly, but it was hard for someone to notice unless they looked very closely. “I will.”

She stepped out of the infirmary and headed down the corridor, unable to escape the sense that something was terribly wrong. There was hardly anyone, apart from the Mediators, in the corridors. The handful of fellow students she saw gave her a wide berth, as if they thought she were contagious. It wasn’t any better being thought a Mimic than a murderess and apprentice necromancer. By the time she reached the dorms, she felt thoroughly depressed.

Madame Razz glanced at her as she entered the corridor, then nodded towards the common room. Emily peeked inside and saw a handful of students who were reading a list of instructions from the Grandmaster. Students, he said, were to take an emergency charm and trigger it if they saw the Mimic. There was a dire warning added to the bottom stating that anyone who triggered the charm as a practical joke would be expelled. Under the circumstances, Emily couldn’t help wondering what they intended to do to get someone out of the building. The wards were almost completely impregnable.

The students gave her fearful looks as she scanned the list of instructions, depressing her still further. She knew that she had never been entirely popular—even before she became a baroness, she’d beaten a necromancer—but this was different. At least they weren’t aiming hexes at her back, she told herself, as she took one of the charms and headed out of the room. Maybe, after she’d had a rest, she could go to the library and look up whatever they had on Mimics. There had to be a clue there, something they could use to find and trap the creature before it killed them all.

Or before we run out of food
, she thought. Whitehall’s students consumed a vast amount of food every day, far more than anywhere in Zangaria. How long would it be before the kitchens ran out of food supplies? They’d have to go on rations as soon as possible.

She pushed the door open and stepped into the room. The Gorgon was seated at her desk, working her way through a set of papers, while Lin was lying in her bed, reading a book. Neither of them paid much attention to Emily, for which she was grateful. The last thing she wanted was more attention—and suspicion. She sat down on her bed and started to pull off the borrowed robe. It would have to be returned to Kyla before the end of the day.

“I heard you jumped out of a window,” the Gorgon said, turning to face her. She looked utterly inhuman, the light catching her snakes in a manner that chilled Emily’s blood. “What
really
happened?”

“I jumped out of a window,” Emily said, tightly. “It was the only way out.”

The Gorgon lifted an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you run down the corridor instead?”

“It had me trapped,” Emily said defensively. There had been something about the whole experience, she decided as she considered everything that had happened in retrospect, that suggested that the Mimic had effectively hypnotized her. She’d read, somewhere, there were predator animals that could mesmerize their prey, but she’d never heard of it happening to humans. “I couldn’t think of another way out.”

She finished undressing and walked into the bathroom. Some of the Healer’s Mush had already worked, she realized as she glanced into the mirror. Most of the bruises had disappeared, although the remainder looked as though they would take much longer to fade away. She hadn’t been so black and blue since her first session of hand-to-hand combat with Lady Barb. Shaking her head, she stepped into the shower and allowed the water to wash the sweat from her body, then washed her hair. By the time she stepped out, she was feeling almost human again.

“Walking around naked isn’t a good idea,” the Gorgon said, dryly. “They’ve been searching our rooms at unpredictable intervals.”

Emily snorted, wondering if they thought that would do any good. A Mimic was impossible to distinguish from its victim until it was too late; random searches might trap a necromancer or someone experimenting with forbidden magic—or drugs—but she doubted they would actually help solve their problem. She hadn’t even realized that male tutors were allowed into female bedrooms until Master Tor had come charging into her room...although she did have to admit that he’d had a very good reason.

She pulled on her underpants and the bra—made in Zangaria, a threaded note proclaimed—and then pulled a basic robe over her head. Somehow, she didn’t feel like dressing up when there was a Mimic on the loose. Besides, she wasn’t going to go back to the barracks, at least not for a few days. If they were going to be trapped with a murderous Mimic, the detention seemed to have become more than a little pointless as well as cruel.