Page 87 of Shadow Caster
Her smile was forced. “Oh, he left early for the end-of-term vacation, I believe.”
Why was she lying? “He sent me a note to meet him here. He said he had answers about the evidence we found.”
She waved a hand. “Oh, that. We studied that residue. It was nothing. Just a secretion from a harmless fungus that grows in the vents. It thrives on humid temperatures.”
“Wait, what? This place is fucking freezing. There is no humidity.”
She looked over her shoulder, and when she turned back to face me, there was a deep weariness etched onto her face.
She gnawed on her bottom lip. “Dammit, child.” She raised a hand, and green power jettisoned toward me.
Unconsciousness claimed me.
Twenty-Eight
“Indigo? Indigo, wake up.”
My eyes snapped open to Payne leaning over me. His blond hair had flopped onto his forehead, and two lines of concern sat between his brows.
The lab, the amulet. Madam Mariana. “Shit.” I sat up quick, and my head spun.
“Easy.” Payne steadied me. “The residue of Mariana’s enchantment will take a moment to wear off completely.”
I scanned the room through the bars of the cell we were in. The shelves and counters housed strange-shaped glass vessels with tubing running between them. A long counter with stuff on it. A lab. Alchemy? There was a counter with feytech armor balled up on it--feytech skin to be precise. The ceiling was rock face, the ground rough stone.
“Where are we?”
“Mariana’s secret lab,” Payne said. “It sounds like a bad joke, but I doubt whatever she has planned for us is funny.”
“You found something, and she’s involved?”
He nodded, his expression grim. “When we were examining the residue, she was dismissive. She kept saying it was nothing, but there was something too defensive about it all, so I did some more research. Florina showed me to the books on endangered supernaturals, and there was a book missing. She checked the catalog, and the missing book was on the history of morphs.”
“Morphs? As in the creatures that can mimic organic matter?”
“Yes.”
I was confused. “What has a morph got to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure,” Payne said. But Florina helped me find another text with a page on morphs, and it mentioned a bright yellow secretion that morphs leave behind after they’ve adopted a form.”
“What are you saying? That Minnie is dead? That the Minnie at the Academy is a morph?”
“No.” Payne shook his head. “We did her bloodwork. She is definitely a nightblood.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that there was a morph in that library and that it somehow took Minnie’s memories.”
“Leaving her intact … but that isn’t how morphs work, is it?”
“Not from what we understand about them, no.”
“So, then … we could be wrong?”
“Yes.”
The door to the room opened, and a figure staggered in carrying something. No, not something, someone. Madam Mariana to be precise. She hung limp and lifeless in Redmond’s arms. He laid her carefully on one of the countertops then stroked her hair back from her face.
