Page 36 of Demon of Dreams

“I, um—I’m kind of…” I trailed off, pointing to my waist, and the damp towel still wrapped around it.

“Oh my God, of course.” Ash laughed. “I’m an idiot. Yeah, no, go ahead and change.”

“Thanks.” I looked at Ash and Felix, waiting for them to offer to meet me out in the hall. Neither of them said anything, though, and neither one moved. After a moment, I said, “I guess I’ll just go change in the bathroom, then.”

“Why?” Ash sounded puzzled.

“Well, because I’m…um…naked? Under here?” I gestured to my towel again.

“Yeah, but—oh,Iget it,” Ash said as I grabbed the change of clothes lying on the bed. “You can change in there if you want, but really, we don’t care.”

Felix darted another glance over at me. “You’ll have to forgive Ash. Modesty is a foreign concept to him.”

“But neither of us is interested in him.” Ash frowned at Felix, then looked at me. “I mean, not like,interestedinterested. I promise, I think you’re very interesting in a general sense. One of the more interesting people I’ve met, and I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I moved a lot as a kid, and some of the places we went, I was—”

“People don’t have to be afraid of your intentions to not want to change in front of you,” Felix said. “He barely knows either of us.”

“Fine, fine. I’m just saying, you’re not my type. Or Felix’s. Not that you’re not attractive.” He flicked a finger back and forth between himself and Felix. “But we’re actually—”

“This is ridiculous.” Felix threw me another apologetic look. “We’ll go out to the hall and wait for you there. Take your time.”

He dragged a still protesting Ash out the door, closing it firmly behind them.

The first time I’d entered the academy, it had been dark, and I was nearly unconscious, so I didn’t have much sense of the building other than:big. But as Ash and Felix led me through a spider’s web of twisting corridors, sudden staircases, and rooms within rooms, I began to realize thatbighad been a big understatement.

One symbol kept appearing, carved into wood panels, set in stained glass, and woven into tapestries—a tall tree with many twisted branches, a crescent moon suspended in between them. One door we passed displayed the symbol, but each leaf on the tree was inlaid with emerald, and the crescent moon was worked in diamond. It was beautiful, and just a tiny bit spooky.

“This place is huge,” I said as we climbed what had to be our third set of stairs.

“I know, right?” Ash threw a glance over his shoulder. “It used to be a castle or something—”

“Manor,” Felix corrected.

“—Built by exiled European royalty—”

“Timber magnate,” said Felix.

“—In the sixteen hundreds—”

“Eighteen hundreds. White colonizers were present in the area before that, but thecoureurs des boiswere hardly building mansions.”

“—And he made it super confusing with secret passages and stuff because he was this crazy magician who was paranoid about his rivals stealing his secrets.”

“Or, he was just an old man who didn’t like his inlaws,” Felix said. “There’s no actual evidence that he had any magical abilities at all. What wedoknow is that at the time, his entire extended family, and his wife’s family, lived here with him, and his journals suggest he wasn’t too pleased about that. From what we can tell, he designed Vesperwood so that he wouldn’t have to encounter any relatives he didn’t like. He hoped the structure would be too confusing for them, and he wanted to be able to disappear through hidden doorways if he saw someone coming down the hall who he didn’t want to talk to.”

It was the longest speech I’d heard out of Felix thus far, and he looked vaguely embarrassed to have talked for so long.

“Anyway,” Ash continued, “one of his relatives wasdefinitelya witch, and she’s the one who turned Vesperwood into an academy, to train and organize human spellcasters in their fight to defend the earth from us terrible, horrible, evil monsters.”

I blinked. “Monsters? What do you mean?”

Ash snorted and stopped walking. Morning sunlight slanted in from a casement window, bathing him and Felix in warm amber tones.

“You haven’t figured it out yet?” He pointed to his chest. “I’m an untrustworthy changeling, here to ensnare you in my nefarious plots.” He pointed at Felix. “And he’s no better.”

Felix looked up from the worn navy and cream carpet and raised his free hand in a claw-like motion. “Demon. Rarr.”

“Well, technically, he’s a fallen angel,” Ash said. “One of the nephilim.”

---