Page 83 of Such a Feral Little Lamb
“What?”
“I was waiting to tell you…” He reaches out and runs his thumb along my jaw. It takes everything in me not to hit him. “But they knew. They’ve always known.”
“About what?”
“The necromancer. The magic. They knew it wasn’t a virus, Isaac. It was pretty fucking obvious if you just looked.”
“Youknew.”
“They told me. They want the necromancer. And they already had a little witch another team had stolen, so I had a leg up on all the teams they sent before.” He tugs up the hem of his T-shirt, revealing a familiar swirling symbol on his hip. It’s red, not blue, and I feel sick looking at it.
I close my eyes, thinking of the weapons in Nia’s office. The gun feels heavy in my pocket.
“They were protecting themselves.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t—I don’t understand. The necromancer is gone.”
Dane leans in, breath hot against my ear. “No, he isn’t.” He steps back and waits for me to look at him. “Come on. Let’s go see them.”
Numbly, I follow him into the school. We enter one of the classrooms—the one Mason and I searched the other day, where I thought I heard a noise—and Dane shoves the teacher’s desk aside, revealing a trap door I definitely didn’t see before. He grins at the frown on my face.
“Once they realised the teams were just getting fucking slaughtered, they sent them up here with specific instructions,” Dane says. “One had to set this all up. Then he hid here for five days until the train came. They killed the rest of them.”
“Why not destroy the train?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Dane asks. He grunts as he drags the door open and I frown at what I see on the underside—the same kind of swirling shapes I’ve seen all over this town, except these aren’t blue either.
They’re dark.
They look like they were painted with blood.
“Even they don’t want the full might of the Citadel rained upon them, I suppose.”
The space beneath the trap door is dark and empty. I wrinkle my nose at the smell of damp earth. Someone must have dug that out, too. A lot of work for a few hours, but Dane managed to hide from all that magic, so maybe whoever created this did, too.
“Out you get,” Dane says.
Autumn emerges first, blinking up at us. She’s gagged, hands tightly bound behind her back. Dane helps her up, but he’s not gentle about it. She groans when he shoves her to the floor, tears welling in her eyes. One is swollen shut, bruised around the edges.
“Fucking hell, Dane,” I snap, but when I move toward her, he points his knife at me.
“You’ll want the rest of the story, Isaac,” he says. “Come on, now. Out you get.”
Mason is gagged and tied the same way as Autumn, but fury blazes in his eyes and his posture is entirely defiant. He doesn’t flinch when Dane drags him out and then holds Mason before him, knife at his throat.
I’ve never felt anger the way I do right now. I’m going to kill him. I know it, can already picture it in my mind.
“Where’s Otto?”
“Dead, I told you.”
“Hisbody, you fuck.”
Dane shrugs, and the knife moves against Mason’s pale skin but doesn’t cut through. “Down there.”
I grimace. He left them down there, tied up, with Otto’s body? After he—I eye Dane warily for another moment, then crouch next to the trapdoor.
