Runebinder (The Runebinder Chronicles #1)(58)

Someone knocks on the door and opens it before Tenn can say anything. He hopes it’s Kevin, but it’s just Mark, their RA.

“Bus leaves in twenty,” Mark says. Then he’s off to the next room.

Tenn thought it was strange that they were evacuating the school. There were gates here. And people who used magic. That had to mean it was safe, right?

“Do you want to get left behind?” Greg asks as he pushes out the door. He looks Tenn up and down. “God. At this rate you’ll be the first to get eaten.”

Then he leaves, before Tenn has a chance to respond or even comprehend. Eaten. That’s a legitimate threat now.

He looks at the photo on his desk of his family. Reaches to take it, then thinks better. It would be safer here. He’ll find them. Soon. He’ll find them, and he’ll bring them back here. Where it’s safe.

Of all places in this world, Silveron has to be safe.

Tenn barely felt Water transition from a memory to a pull. It sloshed around in his gut and his mind, dragging not only his memories back, but his body forward. Safe. Something has to be safe.

But Water knew better. Water resonated with the pain, and embedded deep within the foundations of the school was a burning, nagging shadow of something terrible. Something inhuman. And that sense, that wrongness, twined itself around Tenn’s heart. Water echoed the monster’s hymn, and Tenn’s body had no choice but to march to its cadence. It tugged him forward. It told him to obey.

He left his quarterstaff in the room and slid out the door. A small part of him was dimly aware of how silent the hall was, how loud his footsteps were on the tile. But the twins didn’t stir. He had meant to tell them something. Something about the safety of this place, but Water was louder in his head than his own thoughts. He could only move with the tide, a stick caught in the stream.

He didn’t stop at the lobby. He continued down into the basement, toward the room where the laundry machines and Ping-Pong tables were. The room was more than just a lounge. Doors lined every wall, and behind them was a series of tunnels that linked to every building on campus. He could practically feel the ghosts of his classmates here, but the perception was dim, lost under the crashing of his mutinous Sphere. He slipped through the lounge like a sleepwalker, past sofas and tables littered with magazines, and made his way to a door at the far end. It opened silently under his touch, the hall beyond stagnant with dead air.

The door at the other end of the long hall was locked. Water roared like rapids.

A flick of Earth, and the lock crumbled. When he stepped inside, Water stabbed him with agony, a pierce that coiled through his guts and made his eyes flutter. The walls in here breathed pain. And that pain, that crippling hurt, drew him forward and filled him with a new sort of ecstasy. A different sort of hunger.

In a small corner of his mind, he knew the room should have been like many of the other downstairs lounges, with sofas and tables and bookshelves. But this room looked like a kitchen. Knives dangled from grids on the ceiling and steel bowls piled on every surface. Rows of metal tables were meticulously arranged side by side in the middle of the room, more knives and bowls artfully displayed on top. Stacks of wood or metal were piled along the walls in pyramids. Tenn didn’t need light to know that there was no dust in here. He could sense it—the cleanliness, the almost sterile scent in the otherwise-stale air. And yet, despite the order, he knew the walls should be bleeding. They were screaming curses through his veins. He pitched forward. The door slammed shut behind him.

That’s when he noticed the body.

It was the mouth of the whirlpool, and Water left him no choice but to fall toward it. The slumped corpse against the wall dragged him forward, tugged at Water with a hook he had no desire to escape. It was male. Older. The flesh tight over sharp bones. Tenn dropped at the body’s side, his head spinning, spinning. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t—I need to get out of here, I need—Water drowned the fear. It sang a horrible ecstasy. The body was wearing a suit, a wool suit. Tenn’s fingers brushed the rough fabric. His hand pulled itself toward the body’s face. Fingertips brushed dead skin. Water screamed.

“Dmitri,” she says. “You love me, right?”

He nods, though he doesn’t mean it. Of course he can’t mean it. Not after this.

“And you see the good I’m doing, yes?”

He nods again. It’s all he can do, really; it’s impossible to talk through the gag, and the ropes tying his wrists to the chair are strong. He’d given up struggling hours ago. The walls are thick down here. Even if he could have screamed, no one would have heard him. Even if he managed to escape these bonds, there was nowhere for him to run. The whole faculty has gone insane.

Get the kids out. Get the kids out. Those had been his last words, before Helena pulled him down here. Those had been his last words, and he didn’t know if anyone had heeded him.

Helena pushes herself away from the desk. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears the pencil skirt and white blouse that he’d always joked made her look like a sexy librarian. He isn’t joking now. And neither is she.

She holds a scalpel from one of the art studios. It’s already covered in his blood. His skin burns with cold and pain, his blood dripping in slow rivulets to the sterile tiles below. She hadn’t hesitated the slightest bit when she’d brought the blade to his flesh. Not the first time. And not the second or twentieth.