Page 5 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
The frantic thought scrabbled at the edges of my brain as my vision went cloudy: my Wild Whispering magic wasn’t enough to save me if I didn’t have the breath left to use it. Why had I parted with my mother’s knife, even for just a silly little swim?
“I do hope you find him,” the octopus said dreamily. “True love is such a rare thing to observe from these depths.”
A rush of water around my ears, and I was suddenly slamming back down onto the slick edge of rock, gasping and retching as a sucker-lined tentacle wiggled goodbye and slipped itself back under the surface.
“You found him?” Gileon rushed over to me, thumping me on the back. “Oh, Wren is going to be so mad.”
Before I could respond, Wren herself broke the surface of the water, spluttering and treading over to the slab of rock where I still kneeled. She swept aside wet strands of feather-black hair as she climbed up next to us, a scowl scrunching her face.
“I passed him on my way up. I guess Penny Ickers was telling the truth for the first time in her life. Maybe Rodhi won’t—”
But Rodhi popped up next second, already cackling with victory.
“Did youseethe eyes on that thing? I swear, each of them was bigger than my face.Someoneowes me thirty coppers, ten jokes I can claim as my own, and an apology in the form of a foot massage.”
Wren crossed her arms. “I’ll give you thirty coppers, fine, and the God of the Cosmos knows you need help with your jokes. But I’ll convince a rhino to eat my hands off before I ever touch your feet.”
Rodhi pressed a hand against his chest, pretending to pull an offended expression over his face as he clambered up next to us.
Gileon, however, furrowed his eyebrows at the lake. “Do you think Melle and Lander are okay? They’ve been under for a while.”
“Lander’s literally a shark right now,” Wren replied with half an eye roll. I suspected her tone had taken an even sharper edge than usual in the face of her loss against Rodhi. “They’re probably just making out among the angelfish.”
No sooner had she said it than both Emelle and Lander popped up, spluttering out laughs as Lander melted back into his human self. My own wetsuit sprung back into normal clothing, and I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to calm the rattling race of my heart.
You took a midnight swim with that lover of yours.
Where is your lover now, hmmm?
True love is such a rare thing to observe from these depths.
No, no, no. I couldnothave been in love with a monster like Coen Steeler. I’dseenthe memories the top Mind Manipulator on the Good Council, Kitterfol Lexington, had transferred to my own brain. Steeler had used me and abused me and then ripped himself from my head, leaving this throbbing pain behind. Even now, I could hardly concentrate on what Emelle was saying to me as that pain reached a new pulsing crescendo.
“What?” I asked, trying to refocus my vision.
Emelle squinted at me, the smallest of a concerned expression tightening the smile on her face. “I asked if you’d seen the octopus, too. Lander and I must have missed him, but Rodhi and Wren—”
She didn’t get to finish her thought. The next second, a piercing scream ripped through the air in the distance.
“By the feather and the fang,” Lander breathed, using his own sector’s motto on instinct as we all swiveled toward that sound. It was coming from the direction of campus in echoing waves.
“That isnota scream of pleasure,” Rodhi said, squinting.
Emelle glanced at me, and in that moment, it didn’t matter that I had a wall of ice surrounding me. She saw right through it, saw the fear that must have been in my eyes, that dread reflected in hers.
The next moment, we were both running.
Back across the bridge, through the Element Wielder sector, toward the courtyard that connected all of campus, where that scream was still spearing the humid air. The others followed, our combined footsteps slapping cobblestone until the five of us nearly slammed into a crowd forming around the fountain at the center of it all.
It was Wren who dragged Gileon through the condensed barrier of bodies to carve a way for the rest of us. And when I saw where that screaming was coming from, my heart flipped over backward.
A young woman was on her hands and knees on the cobblestone by that fountain, which was tinkling merrily as if nothing was happening. As if the young womanwasn’tblaring her throat out, bile dripping from her open lips. Her hair had grown back in rough patches, and her eyes were no longer bandaged, but open and unseeing.
Jenia Leake. A fellow Wild Whisperer.
Nobody knew what had happened to her at the end of our first year, but rumor had it that she’d gotten into an altercation with her boyfriend, Fergus, out in the jungle where no one could hear them. While Jenia had come out of it with her head andface mutilated, Fergus himself hadn’t come out of it at all. He’d simply disappeared, despite the Good Council’s attempts to find him.
I’d never liked Jenia—not after that first introduction with Quinn, when she had surveyed me like I was a rotten piece of meat—but I couldn’t remember talking to her much after that. And Jenia had been living in the sick bay ever since Fergus had disappeared. I’d rarely seen her out in public, even in the dining hall of our own house.
