Page 43 of The Stone Secret
Finding the traitor was up to administration. But Derek was my responsibility. “I don’t want you to hurt him. I just need him to be okay. He’s family to me.”
“I won’t intentionally hurt him,” Willowman said. “I swear it.”
I believed him. “There’s something else. Melanie, the ghost in my room, has been acting…odd.”
“Odd? In what way?”
I explained Melanie’s spaced-out behavior. “Ever since she broke into the confidential file room to get Romi’s file and—”
“What?” everyone said at the same time.
Ooops. Okay, they didn’t know about that escapade. “Yeah, I did a thing…”
I filled them in on Melanie’s file room break-in and what she said she found, along with her weird behavior ever since. “And that was the same night that Flora Yarrow was found unconscious on the same floor.”
Willowman chewed on his cheeks. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Surely, Romi’s file would have contained the truth about what happened to him,” Selas said.
“It would have been logged for sure,” Prasan said. “But someone obviously didn’t want Melanie passing on that information.”
“Someone must have messed with her memories,” Willowman said. “Fed her a false one and sent her back to you.”
“Someone who didn’t want the truth about Romi getting out,” Prasan said. “But that’s everyone high up.”
“They couldn’t have known who Melanie was getting the information for,” Serath said. “They were protecting it.”
All this conjecture didn’t help Melanie. “We need to fix her.”
“She’s dead, Cam,” Selas said. “There is no fixing her.”
It was the first time I’d felt irritated with the elite female. “Her body is gone, but her soul is here, and it’s in pain. That matters.”
Selas tucked her chin in. “I didn’t mean to sound callous. But we’re guardians, and our responsibilities lie with protecting the living. It’s where our focus needs to be. Looking into your tulpa’s evolution is enough of a stretch on our resources.”
“By resources, you mean me, I assume,” Willowman said coolly, sitting back in his seat. “And I can speak for myself.” His golden eyes warmed as his gaze settled on me. “I’ll do what I can to help her. I have some contacts in the rim I can speak to. Which reminds me, the blood sample I took from you was ruined. In the hubbub of finding out the orbs had been switched, I must have forgotten to properly store it. We’ll need to take another.”
I’d completely forgotten about my mission to find out how I’d bypassed the ward to the forest on the omega moon. The strange flushes and itchy skin were gone, but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back.
“Can you take a sample later this week when we do herbology?”
“Herbology?” Serath was looking at me again, and it was hard to breathe.
I nodded. “I can’t fly or shift, but I can be useful with tinctures and potions.”
“My little apprentice,” Willowman said with a small smile. “I do have a lot of knowledge to pass on. It’ll be fun.”
I caught movement in the corner of my eye—Selas’s hand on Serath’s arm.
My stomach cramped, and annoyance gnawed at my chest. Did she have to touch himallthe time?
But when I lifted my gaze, his attention was on me, intense and hungry, and damn if I wasn’t suddenly starving for the feel of his thick cock between my thighs and—
“Dessert, anyone?” Selas asked, her tone higher pitched than usual.
“Not for me,” Serath said. “I need some air.”
He pushed back his seat and left, and it took everything I had not to follow him.
