Page 76 of By the Orchid and the Owl
“Wait! Rayna!” It was Emelle, hurrying after me.
“I’ll meet you later, Melle,” I called over my shoulder. “I’ve got to—”
“No. I’m coming with you.” She caught up and fell into a pounding rhythm beside me. “I’m not letting you run after some enchanted piece of paper alone.”
And that’s exactly what it was, I realized with a jolt that nearly had me toppling into the nearest stand, where the paper fluttered over a towering rack of shoes. An enchantment. A complicated bit of Summoning magic that Fabian had imbued within the parchment fibers, something he’d never done before at home. At least not in front of me.
I skirted around the shoe stand after it, into the wedge of quaint wooden classrooms reserved for the Summoners. What could I say to Emelle to make her stop chasing me? I couldn’t pause long enough to come up with an excuse, or else I might lose the paper, but… what if it led us to something I couldn’t properly explain to her? What if she found out about my power and the pills and the pirates?
“Melle,” I panted, but she cut me off.
“No. I know you’re hiding something, Rayna. I can see it in your eyes sometimes, something distant and—” She huffed out a breath “—foreign.”
I glanced sideways to find her jaw set, her fists curled tight as we ran alongside each other: around buildings, up and down sets of creaking wooden stairs, through archways and alleys. The paper maintained an even height from the ground, bobbing along that invisible current toward the back of this side of campus.
“Okay,” I told her finally. “But Melle, you can’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
My best friend—my beautiful, determined best friend—didn’t ask why. Didn’t pry any further or demand any more details. She only said, “Deal,” and then jerked her chin at the paper ahead of us. “Look. I think it’s slowing down.”
Sure enough, Fabian’s letter jerked back and spiraled, as if caught in a whirlwind, near one of the last buildings in the Summoner section of classrooms: a derelict wooden shack with half its shingles missing like rows of rotting teeth.
Here, the jungle bowed over us, ropes of moss drooping down from the trees and whispering against the ground. The clattering sounds of Cardina had disappeared behind us. There weren’t even any monkeys to toss jokes back and forth over our heads. Just the humming of the trees, low and perhaps a little foreboding.
As we watched, the paper swooped through one of the windows bordered with jagged edges of broken glass—and vanished into the gloom.
Follow me, Fabian had said. Apparently, he had meant into this old classroom.
I stepped toward a side door. It wasn’t hanging off its hinges yet, but the bruised brown and yellow color of old rot patched its surface.
Emelle sucked in a deep breath behind me and nodded. I turned the rusted green knob, and we crept through together.
Inside, I could just barely make out the paper whipping this way and that in the center of a room haphazardly held together with crisscrossing wooden beams.
“What—?” Emelle started to say.
And Fabian’s letter tore itself into shreds.
We watched its pieces fall to the floor like a pile of dead moth wings.
Did he mean for me to find something hidden beneath a loose floorboard? I lurched forward to check when a voice cracked through the staleness of the room.
“Who’s disrupting my beauty sleep, hmmm?Let me take a look at you.”
The voice scraped against my eardrums like metal against metal. Emelle, too, cringed at the sound of it—just as two pinpricks of skeleton-white broke the dark: a pair of eyes dangling high above us.
When it shifted, more pinpricks shattered the darkness around it, like hundreds of stars blinking awake. A great ripple of rustling and scratching followed, spreading from one end of the ceiling to the other, and it clicked for me then.
“Bats,” I whispered to Emelle.
“Oh, not just any bats,” the voice screeched. “The last of the tomb bats from the ancient Asmodeus Colony.And I am its highest heir, Lord Arad.”
From the feeble stream of light wafting through the broken window, I was starting to make out their vague silhouettes. Clumps of squirming bodies clung to the crisscrossed beams with clawed, humanlike hands, their ears twitching in our direction. The one who had addressed us hung in the center of them all, bigger and more skeletal than the others.
“Now what do you want, human?”Lord Arad continued. “They shut this classroom down nearly thirty years ago, so I know you’re not here to learn.”
Thirty years ago? So before Fabian’s time, then, from what I knew. I felt my shoulders deflate at the thought that perhaps his Summoning enchantment had gone awry, had led us to the wrong place. These bats wouldn’t know anything about Fabian if he’d never been a student in here, right? Unless…
“Has anyone else been in here since they shut it down?” I asked, inching closer to Emelle’s body heat. “Maybe as a prank or a game? Or a hiding place?”
