The Bronze Key (Magisterium #3)(28)

His dislike of the room got way worse when Tamara turned up a photograph, wedged under one corner of her bed. It was a picture of Drew, grinning at the person taking the picture, one arm slung around Master Joseph’s shoulders. Drew was young in the picture — maybe ten years old — and he didn’t look like the kind of person who could have tortured Aaron just for fun. And Master Joseph, in the photograph, looked like one of those older, professory dads who wanted their kids to read picture books in the original French. He didn’t look like a psycho who’d trained an even bigger psycho. He didn’t look like a guy who wanted to take over the world.

Call couldn’t stop looking at the photograph. It was ripped along one side, but an arm and part of a blue T-shirt showed there’d been another person with them. The shirt had black stripes on it. For a terrible moment, Call thought he might be looking at the arm of the Enemy of Death, before he remembered that Constantine Madden had to have died around the time Drew was born.

But it wasn’t just the newness of the room and the loss of Miri and the photograph that made Call uncomfortable. He didn’t like the way Master Rufus was looking at him nowadays either. He didn’t like the way that Tamara glanced nervously over her shoulder all the time. He didn’t like the new, worried frown line between Aaron’s eyebrows. And he especially didn’t like the way that none of his friends would let him out of their sight.

“Eight eyes are better than one,” Aaron said when Call told him that he wanted to go alone to walk Havoc.

“I have two eyes,” Call reminded him.

“Well, sure,” Aaron agreed. “It’s just a saying.”

“You’re just hoping to run into Celia, aren’t you?” Tamara asked, prompting Aaron to give Call another stern look.

Celia’s date with Jasper was that Friday and Aaron thought it would be the perfect opportunity to discover whether she was the spy. Tamara had managed to wheedle most of the details of the date out of Celia. It was going to be in the Gallery, and they were going to meet there at eight o’clock, after dinner, and watch a movie.

“Seems innocent,” Tamara said with a shrug as they sat at lunch, forking up lichen pasta.

“Well, of course it seems innocent,” said Aaron. “You wouldn’t expect her to make her evil intentions known this early.” He cast a glance toward Celia, who was giggling cheerfully with Rafe and Gwenda. Jasper was sitting with Kai and looked as if he was in the middle of an animated story.

“If it’s Celia, how did she manage to get hold of a giant elemental?” Call demanded. “Without it, you know, killing and eating her?”

“Elementals don’t eat people,” said Tamara. “They absorb their energy.”

Call paused for a moment. He was remembering Drew, who had been killed by a chaos elemental while Call had looked on in horror during Call’s first year. He remembered how Drew’s skin had turned blue and then gray, his eyes going empty.

“… seems weird,” Call heard Aaron say as he snapped out of his reverie.

“What’s weird?” Call asked.

“The way everyone’s looking at us,” Tamara answered in a low voice. “Have you noticed?”

Call hadn’t. But now that Tamara mentioned it, he realized that people were staring at them — at Aaron, specifically. And not the way they usually stared at Aaron, with admiration, or with a sort of Look, there’s the Makar expression.

This was different. Eyes were narrowed, voices lowered. People were glancing at him suspiciously, whispering and pointing. It gave Call a queasy feeling in his stomach.

“What’s going on?” Aaron asked, bewildered. “Do I have something on my face?”

“Do you really want to know?” said a voice above their heads.

Call looked up. It was Jasper. “Everyone’s talking about the elemental that almost ate Call —”

“Elementals don’t eat people,” Tamara insisted, cutting him off.

Jasper shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. Anyway, people are saying Aaron was the one who summoned it. Somebody told somebody that they overheard you two fighting and everyone saw Aaron summon all those chaos creatures last summer …”

Call gaped. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

Aaron looked around the room. When he met other apprentices’ gazes, they looked away. Some of the Iron Years started giggling. One began to cry.

“Who’s saying that?” Aaron demanded, turning back to Jasper. His ears were pink and his expression was that of someone who wanted to be anywhere but where he was.

“Everyone,” Jasper said. “It’s a rumor. I guess because Makars are supposed to be unstable and everything, they figure you tried to kill Callum. I mean, some people think it’s understandable because Call is so annoying, but other people figure that there’s some kind of love triangle situation going on here with you two and Tamara.”

“Jasper,” Tamara said in her firmest voice. “Tell people that’s not true.”

“Which part?” Jasper asked.

“None of it is true!” Tamara said, her voice rising dramatically.

Jasper held up both his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. But you know how gossip is. No one is going to listen to me.” With that, he wheeled away from the table, back toward the food.