The Nightmare Dilemma (Arkwell Academy) (34 page)

My breath caught in my throat. “Really?”

He grimaced. “Yeah. Made a bit of an ass of myself.”

I pressed my lips together, wanting to smile but afraid to at the same time.

Eli exhaled. “So Lady Elaine told me the truth, that our attraction toward each other is connected to our dream-seer powers. We’re literally drawn together in every way. That’s why you and I share all the same classes. We
have
to get close to strengthen our powers. But if we get
too
close that power backfires. She told me all the stories of the dream-seers before us. Most of them died really young, except for Marrow and Nimue, of course, but they spent years battling each other before she finally managed to imprison him in that tomb. Then she condemned herself to the same imprisonment. It’s pretty awful when you think about it.”

I nodded. It wasn’t just awful, it was cruel, like dangling the cure over a sick man, holding it just out of reach while watching him die. I sucked in a breath. “Isn’t there a way to break the curse?”

Eli shook his head. “Not according to Lady Elaine. She said it can’t be broken, only avoided.”

“But how do we know that’s true? We don’t know that will happen to us. There has to be some kind of choice about it.”

“No, Dusty. There’s not.”

I felt like screaming. “How do you
know
?”

“Because I’ve seen it.”

I glared. “What, did you dream about it or something?”

“No, Lady Elaine had a vision of what might happen. She showed it to me with some kind of mind meld like what you’ve been doing with Deverell.” He drew a long, shaky breath. “It was awful, Dusty. And I don’t ever want that to happen to you and me. I care about you too much.”

I inhaled, the gesture painful. It was just what I’d always wanted to hear from him. Just what I’d hoped for, but it was never going to happen. The idea made me feel like I was being wrenched apart from the inside out.

Refusing to cry, I put as much steel in my voice as I could. “Why didn’t Lady Elaine tell me? Why did she only tell you?”

Eli frowned. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that, I’m sure. But I think I have a right to know.”

“She thought, given your tendency to rebel, that if she told you that we couldn’t be together it would just make you seek it out even more.”

A burst of anger went through me, hot and quick like a firecracker only to sizzle out a second later. It hurt to hear it, but I also knew deep down that it was true. Marrow had exposed that truth to me. The more someone told me I couldn’t do something, the more I wanted to do it. Even now I felt that rebellious nature screaming at me to stand up and kiss him again. Forever.

I gave in to it. At first, Eli didn’t seem to know what happened as I rushed over to him, cradled his jaw in my hands, and pulled his mouth down to mine in a kiss hot enough to incinerate us both.

For a few seconds we were nothing more than mouth and tongue, taste and heat. But then Eli wrapped his hands around my wrists. I knew what was coming and I fought against it, kissing him harder, trying to express all my feelings in that one act. For a moment, it almost worked, but then he pulled my hands away from his face, breaking the kiss.

Breaking us.

“We can’t,” he said. “I won’t do this.”

I pulled away from him, a flush washing over my body, my heart wrenching. I turned my back to him as I fought back tears. Eli didn’t try to comfort me, as I knew he wouldn’t. But he gave me time, several long painful minutes as I struggled to regain my composure. I had to regain it. I couldn’t let him see how much I hurt, and I couldn’t be selfish and let this derail us from the task at hand—stopping Titus Kirkwood.

Finally, I wiped the moisture from my lips then turned to face him, making my tone and expression as hard as possible, a difficult task considering how soft and broken I felt on the inside. “So let’s call Culpepper, and see if we can’t get into Corvus’s office.”

“Right…” Eli said, a thousand unspoken things in his voice. But then he accepted the farce I had presented him. He walked over to the table where his wand still lay. He picked it up, reapplied the glamour, and placed the ring on his thumb. Then he went to the desk and slipped on a thick leather bracelet I’d never seen him wear before. Under different circumstances I might’ve asked him where he’d gotten it—a gift from his dad perhaps. But not now.

Finally he turned and faced me. “I’m really sorry, Dusty,” he said, and the longing in his voice, the sadness, made the broken pieces inside me shatter a little more, some of the breakage as fine and thin as dust.

“So am I,” I said. I tried to block out the hurt, to bury the loss deep inside me. I knew if I didn’t, the rest of me would break in ways impossible to repair.

Only, who was I kidding. I already was.

31

The Crow King

The sound of jangling keys greeted us as Eli and I came down the third-floor hallway of Monmouth Tower toward Room 337. Faustus Culpepper stood in front of the door, his hellhound sitting beside him.

“Hey, George,” I said when the hound turned its head at the sound of our approach. Its eyes glowed like flashlights in the dark light of the hallway. George made a whining sound that I decided to take as his friendliest form of greeting.

“Hey, Mr. Culpepper,” Eli said as I bent and gingerly patted George’s head, his black coat more like scales than fur. I was relieved George stood still for the petting, but he made it clear that he was simply allowing the affection rather than enjoying it.

“Hello.” Culpepper didn’t look up from where he was still sorting through keys. A moment later he identified the correct one and slid it into the lock. “You two be quick about this. Don’t disturb anything, and make sure you lock up when you’re through.”

I straightened from my hunched position. “You’re not going to stick around until we’re done?”

“Nope.” Culpepper brushed his knuckles against his head. He wore his hair military short, no doubt a leftover habit from his time in the Marines. Culpepper was a Metus demon, the kind that feeds on fears, but tonight he had his glamour firmly in place, hiding his horns and keeping the green glow out of his eyes.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, one, because I trust you not to do anything too stupid.”

“That’s comforting,” Eli muttered.

Culpepper flashed him a dark look. “And two, I don’t want to risk being involved if you get caught.”

I raised an eyebrow, tempted to point out that his one and two seemed in direct opposition to each other, but really, what would be the point? “All right,” I said. “Thanks for doing this.” Not only had he answered his cell the second I called him, but he’d headed out to meet us right away. We needed to find this proof quick so I could get back to my dorm and write a dream journal about the Telluric Rods.

Culpepper nodded as he twisted the key in the lock and pushed the door open. Then he turned away, giving the hellhound’s leash a soft tug. “Come on, George.”

Eli and I waited as Culpepper and the hellhound disappeared around a corner.

“I’ve got to admit, the guy’s growing on me,” Eli said. “He still weirds me out, but he’s a handy contact.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, following after him.

Eli searched for the light switch and turned it on. I blinked away the spots in my vision and scanned the room. It looked more or less the same as it had the last time with a cluttering of books and papers across the desk. Eli made a beeline for them while I examined the bookshelf and the objects I knew had belonged to Marrow.

I eyed the spyglass and the spinning compass long enough to observe the layer of dust covering them. The dust was a good sign. It seemed they were just there for decoration, inconsequential leftovers.

Finally, I turned toward the desk. I slid open the drawer where Corvus had kept the book before. It was still there, and I pulled it out and set it on the table.

“Is that it?” Eli came around beside me for a closer look at it.

I nodded, trying to ignore the way my pulse reacted whenever he drew near.
Cursed, we’re cursed
. I shut the thought down as tears threatened. “I’ll try to find the page. You keep looking.”

“All right,” Eli said, his voice far too quiet, and I wondered if he’d heard something in
my
voice—the same painful longing made worse by the certainty of knowing it could never be.

I shrugged it off as best I could, focusing on the book. It took next to no time at all to find the page with the three-ringed symbol, because a small notebook had been wedged into the book on the very page.

“Here it is.” I pulled out the notebook then pushed the book toward Eli. While he examined the page, I flipped through the notebook. I recognized Mr. Corvus’s messy scrawl. Most of it seemed like random notes and gibberish, but then one of the clearer sentences caught my eye.

Only the blood of the twelve can undo the circle.

It was the same sentence I’d decoded during detention. I quickly scanned the rest of the page, and in seconds my skin began to crawl. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but there were a lot of references to blood and sacrifice.

“Eli, look at this.” I handed him the notebook. His expression grew more concerned with each sweep his eyes made over the page.

When he finished, he raised his gaze to mine. “This doesn’t tie him to Kirkwood, but it’s worrisome.”

“No kidding.”

Eli set the notebook down. “Let’s keep looking. There has to be proof here somewhere.”

“Right.” Feeling a welcome burst of energy, one strong enough to temporarily ease the ache in my heart, I resumed my search of the desk.

Eli and I both became so focused on the task at hand that neither of us noticed the door opening a few minutes later. One moment we were alone in the room, and the next two men strode in. I barely had time to register shock when a spell struck me in the chest. It hit hard enough to knock the wind out of me, but I was unconscious before I finished falling.

*   *   *

The first thing that registered when I woke was the instinctual knowledge that moving was going to be painful. My limbs had the aching, numb feel of muscles deprived of proper blood flow from lying far too long in an awkward position. I opened my eyes, holding as still as I could, even as panic began to build inside me. All I could see from my current location was a stone floor, dirty and cracked from age. I was lying on my side, my arms tied behind my back.

All at once the memory of being in Mr. Corvus’s office with Eli came back to me. Two men had walked in and attacked us with sleeping spells. But not just any men—Captain Gargrave and one of his Will Guard.

As if thinking his name had conjured him into life, I heard Gargrave say from somewhere above me, “This one’s waking up.”

“Good,” another voice replied. “Just in time.”

Closing my eyes, I shifted sideways onto my back and to the direction of the voices. Pain shot through me from the roots of my hair to my toenails. The worst of it was in my shoulders and neck. How long had I been lying like this? Hours for sure.

I opened my eyes to see a low-hanging stone ceiling above me, easily as dirty and cracked as the floor. Right away it put me in mind of a medieval dungeon, although that might’ve had more to do with the torture currently being inflicted on my body. Bracing one leg against the floor, I tried to roll over onto my other side but couldn’t manage it.

“No need to struggle so hard,” Gargrave said, his voice suddenly much nearer than it had been before. “Ana-acro.”

I screamed as the spell hoisted me into the air by the ropes around my wrists. The magic jerked me to the right then dropped me into a wooden chair. For a moment I couldn’t see or think or do anything until the pain receded.

Then finally I looked around, getting my bearings at last. It seemed my first judgment had been correct. This was a dungeon, or at least it was underground. The air possessed that damp smell like the tunnels at Arkwell. There were no windows, and the only light came from torches hung on the walls. So no electricity either, it seemed.

Captain Gargrave stood a few feet in front of me. He was wearing his usual red and black Will Guard uniform, but he had the sleeves rolled up, exposing his thick forearms. I spotted an intricate black tattoo running up his right arm from wrist to elbow. It took a second for my brain to puzzle out the shape. Those black marks were a flock of crows in flight. Gargrave, not Corvus, must’ve been the crows in Eli’s dream.

The moment I made the realization, my eyes fixed on the man standing a few feet behind Gargrave, his face partly hidden in shadows. Even still, I recognized him. I’d never met Titus Kirkwood in person, but I’d seen his image often enough. Once again I was struck by the strong resemblance he bore to his nephew.

“What are you doing?” I said, struggling in vain to free myself. I couldn’t see the rope binding me, but I knew it was silver and made of magic, simply by the painful tingling in my skin where it touched. “Where’s Eli?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Titus said in a voice that belonged in one of those annoying mud-slinging political commercials. “He’s here, too.”

I jerked my head around, trying to locate Eli in the semi-darkness. Then I saw him lying a few feet away near the wall. Like me, his wrists were bound behind him.

“Ana-acro,” Gargrave said again, and Eli’s body rose into the air. He cried out, coming awake at once. Gargrave deposited him into the chair next to me.

“There now.” Titus rubbed his hands together. He was a tall, broad-chested man with blond hair slowly giving way to gray and a pointed, severe chin. “The dream-seers together as they should be. It really is a shame that it’s come to this. Your talents would’ve proved useful, I’m sure. I tried to keep you out of the way long enough for me to finish my business, but it seems it wasn’t meant to be. You’ve learned too much.”

I glared at him. “How do you know what we’ve learned?”

A cold smile slid across Titus’s face like a snake. “Why, from your own mouth. I knew tonight was your last chance to predict the attack on Lyonshold so I had Captain Gargrave slip a listening device beneath Eli’s door earlier this evening. Bugs, I think ordinaries call them. Such a strange euphemism. But highly effective when brand-new and animation free.”