The Nightmare Affair (6 page)

He wore his usual tough-guy expression, but I detected shock and a little fear in the rigid way he stood there. I sympathized. The students had reacted with the same judgmental silence when I made my first appearance. I was sure it didn’t help that Eli was so new to the whole concept of magickind. The faces staring back at him weren’t all
that
weird, not with Arkwell’s ninety percent Humanoid Resemblance Requirement for admission, but plenty were weird enough.

That remaining ten percent could be a doozy if the kids weren’t wearing their glamour charms that day: some had pointed ears or oddly colored skin, even horns and tails. Selene and the other sirens had wings. Not that I’d ever seen them. Sirens were like birds in that way; their wings were visible only when they were using them. But The Will prevented people from flying, which meant sirens rarely had a reason to unfurl them.

Still, Eli was the true weirdo here. He was one hundred percent ordinary. Talk about being a disadvantaged student.

Eli gazed at me, his eyes narrowing into something like a glare. A spark of fear went through me, and my nerve endings tingled. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Silly as it sounded, we were connected now. For better or for worse.

It was definitely going to be worse.

For one terrible, nauseating moment I thought he was going to come over to me right then and give me a telling-off for getting him involved in this mess, but he marched down the main aisle through the row of tables until he reached the one farthest from the cafeteria monitor’s station. Not just any table, of course, but
the
table. The popular kids’ table. Mr. Popularity himself, Lance Rathbone, immediately started introducing him to the other cool kids. Lance was a wizard whose father was a big-shot senator.

Eli’s easy acceptance surprised me. The amount of magic a person could wield—at least in theory—mattered a lot when it came to the social ladder around here, and Eli had none. Katarina bestowed one of her dazzling smiles on Eli and gestured for him to sit beside her. Eli’s eyes widened, and he practically fell into the chair. Apparently, I’d underestimated the importance of good looks even among magickind.

“Geez,” I said, looking back at Selene. “Is being at the top of the social food chain like a universal birthright or something?”

She grimaced. “I think there’s a national registry. It’s online at eat-crap-dot-com.”

I forced another smile.

“So I guess he was popular at your old school?”

“Um, yeah, you could say that.” Back at Chickery High, I’d been fairly popular, too. I didn’t inhabit the inner circles Eli did, but I had plenty of friends, most of them my teammates from soccer.

“Well, he
is
pretty cute,” Selene said, looking him up and down. “Not that
I
care one bit about that. Looks shouldn’t matter when it comes to judging a person.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She grinned. “So you think he’s hot, too.”

I shrugged, feeling suddenly warmer than before.

“He must be Lance’s new roommate.”

“Looks like it.” I glanced over my shoulder. It was weird to see Eli looking nervous. He was usually so cool, almost to the point of being aloof, but right now he appeared on the verge of bolting for the door. No wonder he’d glared at me. Two days ago he’d been a normal high school boy in a normal human world. Now he wasn’t.

And it was my fault.

I turned back to my breakfast, contemplated another bite, then stood and approached the nearest trash deposit area. I sorted out the recyclables into the appropriate bins and dumped the rest into a large rectangular trash can nearby. At once the plastic lining the bin started to rustle, but I paid it no mind. That was just the trash troll, a small, ugly creature that lived inside the bin and fed on the waste. Nearly all the trash cans at Arkwell contained trash trolls. They were mostly harmless, unlike their giant-sized kin that lived in the more remote areas of the world. Even still, it was a bad idea to try and fetch something out of a trash can once you tossed it in. At least one student in my year had lost a finger that way.

“Geez, Dusty,” said Selene as I returned to the table. “Why do you look like someone just broke your favorite spell?”

“Well, I’m not exactly excited about Lance and his cronies getting a firsthand account every time I screw up dream-walking.” Lance was the school jokester, the king of pranks and rumors. I could hear it now—jokes about how much I weighed, jokes about my lack of sex appeal, because let’s face it, even though there was nothing sexual about dream-feeding, the mechanics of it
were
a little kinky.

Selene shook her head. “You don’t know that’ll happen. Eli might not tell those guys anything.”

“Sure, and Lance is going to ask me to homecoming.”

“What’s homecoming?”

I sighed, hating it when I mixed up magickind traditions with ordinary ones. “It’s like the Samhain dance.”

“Oh, that’s right. I knew that.” Selene wrinkled her nose. “Well, who cares what he says one way or another? You shouldn’t worry so much about what people think. If you want my advice you should sit back and enjoy the ride.”

This painted far too vivid—and accurate—an image in my mind. “Ugh, I think I’m going to be sick.” I gathered up my things, ignoring Selene’s bemused stare. There was nothing I could say that would make her understand. I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t just bat my eyes and pout my lips and make Eli adore me. She hadn’t heard the way he’d called me a freak. She couldn’t understand how much he intimidated me on a purely physical level.

Selene patted my arm. “If it bothers you that much, why don’t you try really hard to get good at this dream-seer stuff. Maybe once you catch the killer, the senate will let up and you can go back to normal.”

“Yeah, sure. Because my life used to be so
normal
.”

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and hurried for the door, doing my best not to glance at Eli. I felt better once I was out of the cafeteria. I shouldn’t have to worry about seeing Eli again anytime soon. Arkwell was big enough that chances were good he wouldn’t be in any of my classes.

Except three minutes before the homeroom bell rang, Eli walked in. I froze in my chair, braced for another glare from him, but he didn’t even look at me as he walked past and took an empty seat in the far corner. Knowing he was there made my skin prickle. For a second I contemplated moving to the other side of the room, but I didn’t want to look like a coward. Plus, I was too chicken to move.

When the class started a few minutes later, I decided to pretend he didn’t exist. It was just homeroom, after all. I could handle twenty minutes. I lingered after the bell, making sure he left the classroom before I did. As soon as he was gone, I took a deep breath. No more Eli.

But when I walked into Miss Norton’s classroom, there he was sitting next to Katarina. I told myself this wasn’t a pattern, just coincidence. No matter my principal belief that there was no such thing as coincidence in the magical world.

Sometimes I really hate being right.

Eli followed me to spell casting and then to history afterward. I would’ve seen him at lunch, too, except I decided to skip it and head to the library to do some research on Keepers. The place was practically deserted at this time of day, giving me my pick of computer terminals. I sat down at one in the corner and woke up the screen with a push of the mouse. A pop-up box with a smiley face and the words “Hello, student!” immediately displayed on the screen. The animation phenomenon was particularly prevalent in the library.

I gritted my teeth and contemplated switching to another terminal in the hopes that it would be less lively than this one, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. None of the computers in here were new.

In the text box below the greeting I typed “hi thanks” and pressed enter.

The pop-up disappeared, giving me access to the library’s custom search engine. I typed “keeper” and “ring” in the box and pressed the search button.

Another pop-up appeared on the screen: “Are you sure you want to search for that?”

“Yes,” I typed.

“Lots of people aren’t, you know, sure.” The smile on the smiley face widened.

“I’m sure.”

“Sure, sure?”

“YES!!!” I pounded on the keys, trying to get the point across.

The smiley face frowned. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

At last, the stupid thing displayed the results, and I sighed in relief. There were three sets, one from the library archives, one from the ordinary Internet, and one from the e-net, which was magickind’s version of the Internet. The “e” stood for enchantment, naturally.

I scanned the library results and selected one that looked like an encyclopedia entry:

A Keeper is a generic term reserved for a living being whose life force or force of will has been used as a key component in a magical spell. The binding of such a force makes the spell unbreakable for as long as the being in question remains alive, or in the case of the latter, remains committed to holding the spell. Death is usually the only effective means of breaking a Keeper spell.

Oftentimes, magical objects such as a ring, necklace, bracelet, or in rare cases, tattoos were used as the primary lynchpin of the spell. Generally, the lynchpins would seal themselves to the Keeper’s body, requiring force to be removed. These lynchpins were virtually undetectable and impervious to many spells and charms, including those to locate, vanish, break, etc. Widely considered to be a form of black magic, the practice of using Keepers was banned by the Black Magic Purge Act of 1349.

A chill went through me as I finished reading. So Rosemary had been the Keeper of some kind of spell that the killer wanted to break. Well, that explained Lady Elaine’s comment about Rosemary’s age. Eighteen seemed awfully young to commit to a spell where the only way out of it was dying.

I skimmed through the rest of the library results, hoping for something more detailed, but found nothing. Next I tried the e-net results, but they contained only more simple definitions. Not that this was a big surprise, considering the practice of Keeper spells was illegal. The magickind government blocked any questionable material on the e-net.

With zero expectations, I clicked on the Internet results. The first few were advertisements for rings designed to keep other rings in place. One was for a romance novel for sale on Amazon. A couple more had to do with World of Warcraft.

The title of the last entry on the page stopped me cold:

Death at Coleville, First Seal Broken

What was something like that doing on the Internet? I clicked the Web link, taking in the name of the website as I did. Reckthaworlde.com didn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy.

Another pop-up message from the computer appeared on the screen, the smiley face frowning again. “Sorry, Charlie. No can do.”

“Why?” I typed.

“That site is restricted. No social media access in the library.”

I frowned. Was Reckthaworlde.com some kind of antisocial Facebook? Seemed a little contradictory.

I closed the search engine on the library terminal, then pulled the eTab out of my bag. Social networking sites were perfectly allowable on personal devices. I performed the same search and clicked on the link again, appreciating how fast and normal the eTab responded. I wondered if it would ever show symptoms of animation. If it did, I bet it would have a cool personality. That would be nice. My desktop computer back in my dorm had already been two years past warranty when I moved in last spring, which meant it now had the personality of a crotchety old man, constantly complaining about how tired and overworked it was and always going to sleep on me the second I stopped using it.

This time the screen popped up with a log-in box asking me to either enter my username and password or register as a new user. I clicked the latter and typed in my throwaway e-mail address. Another message appeared on the screen:

Welcome, [email protected]. In order to complete your registration, please enter the name of your initiator.

Say what? I’d never heard of such a thing. Was this some kind of online secret society?

Frustrated, I set the eTab down on the table harder than I meant to, almost dropping it.

“You might want to be more careful with that,” someone said from behind me. “Those things can be pretty fragile.”

Both startled and annoyed at the interruption, I said, “Really? And here I thought it was made out of rubber.”

“Yeah, people make that mistake all the time.”

I looked over my shoulder and did a mental stutter. The speaker was a seriously good-looking guy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, a senior probably. He was standing in front of a cart loaded down with library books ready to be shelved. He was tall and on the thin side, but still muscled. He wore his blond hair in a short ponytail at the base of his neck, but some of the strands had worked loose and now hung in his eyes.
Cute
. I realized I was staring and blushed.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Did you just get it? The eTab, I mean.”

“Yeah.”
Okay, Dusty. You’ve got to do better than the one-word sentence
.

“Mind if I take a look? I’ve been thinking of getting one.”

“Sure.” I picked up the eTab, pressed the home button, and handed it to him.

He took it, an eager expression on his face. I watched as his adept fingers moved across the touch screen, opening apps, closing them again. He clearly knew his way around electronic devices. He handed it back to me a moment later. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” A two-word response. Fifty percent improvement, but still a long way from where I wanted to be. I tried to think of what Selene would say and decided to go for honesty. “I’m surprised you know so much about using it.”

“Sure. I guess I’m a geek that way.”

I smiled. “
You
are definitely not a geek.”

He grinned. “Hel-lo,” he said, pointing at himself. “Student
library
aide.”