The Culling Trials 3 (Shadowspell Academy #3)(24)

“He’s a bodyguard, not a detective. It’s like giving a garbage man a chemistry set and saying, ‘here, make…’” His example tapered off.

“Do you know how dumb you sound right now?” I asked.

He scowled.

I started forward, not really knowing where I was going, just feeling things out. I wasn’t a detective, either, but when the fox got into the henhouse, you found the threat, or you went hungry. I’d spent my whole life rooting out threats, large and small. That wasn’t about to change now.

Windows lined this side of the mansion, all four floors of it.

“Screaming would draw people to the windows.” I pointed up at them, imagining the darkness pressing in from all sides as the guys jogged the kicking and yelling Gregory through the lane of grass. Sound would bounce off those glass panes, and it hadn’t been quite late enough for the attack to go unnoticed.

But then, I’d only heard the two shouts. Was that because Rory had knocked me down and dragged me into the trees? Or maybe they’d knocked Gregory out?

I scanned the tree line across the expanse of small clearing.

Or could it be because they were nearly at their destination?

“Come on,” I said, jogging left.

Trees welcomed us into their shade, the air cooling immediately and the sun’s potency reducing down to a warm glow.

“Why not have a place near campus?” I said to myself, feeling excitement unfurl in my gut. I was close, I could tell. My intuition was practically vibrating through me. “You can take kids at your leisure. Draw them out to chat, then snatch them when everyone else is headed back to their dorms. If all went to plan, no one would be the wiser.”

“Do you need me here for this conversation?” Ethan asked, trailing behind me with his wand out. I was thankful he was still taking this seriously.

“No. You’re no detective, either. Not without your cheat sheets, at any rate.” I scanned the shaded ground, rocks pounded into the soft earth. I held up a finger and backtracked, hitting the tree line again and hooking my arm into his.

“It’s back on, then?” Ethan asked, but I knew he didn’t really mean it. His grip was too tight on his wand. His body too tense. He might ignore it, but he had intuition, too, and it was telling him exactly what mine was telling me.

Here. Somewhere here!

“Lovers’ stroll,” I murmured, scanning the ground as we walked, trying not to make it obvious. Three guys running through, struggling, carrying a load of any kind, would leave prints, and since there was no rain, those prints weren’t getting naturally erased. Would they think to erase them themselves? Or were they too cocky for that? “Bingo.”

Boot prints, their tread obvious. Deep marks scored the soft dirt on the side of one print, indicating the person who’d left it had held something heavy. Then on the other side, the same thing, the weight shifting. Four times they would have brought someone here. Heath. Gregory. Lisa. Mason.

I let Ethan go and followed, pointing at a disturbance in the leaves, a small drag mark, and then the continuing tracks. “They dropped him, picked him up, and kept running. Slower, though. See how the tracks change?”

“You sure you don’t change into an animal?”

“Only a she-devil in the throes of passion.” I frowned at myself. “Stop putting dirty thoughts in my head.”

Broken twigs littered the ground in one place and the tracks lightened before disappearing totally.

So someone did care enough to try and conceal where they’d gone.

“They turned through here. Through these…” A broken branch led the way. Then another. At a dead end, I looked around, momentarily lost. It was Ethan who spotted it.

“Is that stone?” He pointed through a narrow gap between two huge trunks, each fighting for space in the crowded forest.

A surge of adrenaline flooded me. My breathing sped up.

“Yup.” I jogged around the tree, feeling no warning and therefore not being as careful as I should have been.

My breath left me as I fell. Blackness enveloped me. Ethan’s fingers curled around my wrist, halting my descent with a jerk, popping my back. His strong hand pinched the skin of my wrist, and my feet dangled in the empty air.

“Help.” It was barely more than a whisper. Blackness pulsed all around me.





Chapter 10





“This is a glamour, you idiot,” he said through the strain of holding me. A second hand joined the first. All that working out served a purpose after all—he hauled me up out of the black nothingness I’d fallen into.

I clutched at the forest floor as soon as I could reach it, breathing heavily, my toes tingling. I hadn’t gotten one flare of warning. Not a twinge of uncertainty. Was it only living things that alerted my internal warning system?

“There are stairs.” Ethan, out of breath, grabbed me by the waistband of my sweats and yanked me the rest of the way up.

I slid onto my stomach and face, reaching back to shove his hand away from my half-exposed butt cheeks, but he’d already let go, stood, and flicked his wand. A few words and the ground cover cleared away, revealing a large hole in a solid mass of black stone. On the side, stairs descended into the cavern of unnatural darkness below.

“That’s dangerous,” I said, out of breath. “Someone could just fall down that.”