Page 39 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Good.
I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with any rumors or allegations right now. Not when the pounding in my head kept increasing in tempo as the seconds ticked by.
Lander was just about to shoot his shot when a dry, curt voice cut through the midst of our game.
“Rayna? Your little pest wanted me to tell you she needs you.”
It was Dazmine, right on time, appearing like a ghost on the platform between staircases.
All heads swiveled toward her, where she stood there with crossed arms, as ifwewere the ones who had interruptedher.
I broke the silence with a well-rehearsed, “Oh no! What’s wrong? Is Willa okay?” and a hand pressed against my heart.
God of the Cosmos, I could never be an actress—my voice sounded way too high-pitched to be believable. But only Emelle cocked her eyebrow at me as Dazmine waved a dismissive hand.
“I’m sure she’s fine. Just something about a stomach ulcer and wanting you to grab her some apples instead of cheese tonight. Which sounds to me like you’re some kind of mouse servant, but okay.”
Dazmine, on the other hand,couldbe an actress. Even though we’d planned every word of this conversation, the utter contempt coating her voice almost made me believe Willa reallywassick and in need of my servitude.
“I’ll come with you,” Emelle started, but I raised a hand.
“No, no, you guys keep playing. Here—Dazmine will take my place.”
I was already at the staircases, prodding Dazmine toward the group. When Cilia clapped her hands and squealed, “Ooh, you’re actually going to hang out with us? Yay!” Dazmine threw a death glare over her shoulder at me.
But to her credit, she wafted toward them anyway.
Leaving me to trot down the boys’ staircase, through the dining hall that connected our two houses, and back up my own stairs to my house’s empty parlor.
Nobody saw me sneak out the front door and slip down Bascite Boulevard, undetectable in the thick fog that had settled over campus.
Willa, I knew, didn’t have stomach ulcers, and she wasn’t waiting on my bed for me to deliver apples. But it was a reasonable enough excuse to explain my disappearance… not to our room, as Emelle and the others had believed, but to one of the old Wild Whisperer storage buildings in the back of our sector, where Mr. Conine kept an assortment of animal enclosures he hadn’t touched in years.
I knew what was coming, but I still gasped when I creaked open the storage door and beheld the elaborate trap Dazmine had weaved throughout the spare tanks, hutches, and crates.
Potted sundew lined either side of the doorway, their stalks bowed over the room with twitching bristles. Nepenthes creepers stretched from one wall to the other, their cupped petals already brimming with poison, and flytraps dangled from the arched ceiling.
As soon as I stepped inside, the sundew jerked toward me, like cats ready to pounce—then jolted back just as suddenly. Probably realizing I wasn’t the chosen victim.
“Hello,” I told them nervously, then stepped carefully over the stretch of nepenthes creepers. The flytraps clamped their jaws threateningly, but didn’t attack as I moved beneath them and finally made it to the one empty space in the middle of the room.
Now, whether Steeler came in through the doorway or the opaque window on the other side of the building, he wouldn’t make it anywhere near me withoutsomethingholding him back. All I needed was a couple of seconds to throw my knife, but…
What if his speed was so insane that he still managed to rip through the plants and get away? Or what if he’d already made himself invisible and was watching me from a corner of the room right now?
I slid my knife from its sheath and held it up, my heart pounding nails into my ribcage.
Maybe he wouldn’t show. Or maybe he’d already force-fed me that pill and erased my memory of it. Maybe Dazmine was secretly working with him and this was all a trap forme—
I couldn’t help myself from turning in violent circles, facing the door, then the window, then the door again, until…
The pressure in my head dissolved so suddenly, I knew he’d arrived even before his dark, sculpted figure bloomed into existence in the corner of the room.
Coen Steeler didn’t even get a chance to look me in the eyes before the sundew struck.
Those bristled stalks wrapped around both his arms and yanked tight. He tried to twist, shock flitting over his features, but the string of nepenthes bucked forward and splashed their poison onto him, sending him to his knees in a hiss of pain.
The flytraps lowered themselves until they were snapping just over his head, ensuring he didn’t get up again.
