The Keep (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #4)(19)

“There was a figure standing in the hallway, in the flashback I had when I picked up Derhin’s bottle—that was you,” Alex said, realization dawning. “You were a professor at Spellshadow, dressed in robes, and you were watching them laughing. It was you, wasn’t it?” he pressed, though he was sure of it. The figure had seemed somehow familiar, even then. It had been the same with the portrait on the wall, in one of the Spellshadow corridors—the only portrait with the plaque torn off. The man in the painting had been so familiar, yet Alex hadn’t been able to put his finger on why. Now, it made sense.

The stars in Elias’s eyes flashed a warning at Alex. “Elias made me, and I am Elias.”

“It was you, wasn’t it? Just tell me it was you.”

“Life comes and life goes. There is no avoiding fate,” he replied cryptically, his voice dripping with bitterness.

“What happened to you?”

Elias was more evasive than ever, glancing around, looking anywhere but at Alex. It was clear he didn’t wish to dwell on what he had been before, but Alex couldn’t drop it. People didn’t just end up as wafting shadows, flitting here and there. There had to be a reason Elias was the way he was, and Alex was desperate to know it.

“I thought I was clever… but never mind that,” the shadow-man sighed. “You seem to be all in a pickle. I can feel it, buzzing off you—most annoying.” He shook out his vaporous body, swatting the air as if ridding himself of a vexatious wasp.

“What do you know of Caius and the Kingstone essence?” Alex asked, knowing he wasn’t going to get the answers to Elias’s existence just yet, but remembering there were other answers he might be able to coax out of the shadow-man.

“I know that you’re barking up the wrong tree, wasting time with the idea of waiting on corners like the sad little vagrants you are. Caius is no fool. He will sense you before you’re even close—he’ll certainly smell you,” taunted Elias, wrinkling up the place where his nose should have been. “What is that? Eau de Pond Scum?”

Alex frowned, realizing he still needed to find something to replace his moat-soaked clothes. He had cleaned them as best he could, but Elias was right—the scent still lingered.

“I fell into the moat,” he muttered.

Elias roared with laughter. “Didn’t get munched by one of the monsters?”

“Evidently not,” Alex retorted, wanting to get back to the topic of Caius. “So how would you do it? How would you smoke him out?”

Elias flashed his starry teeth in a gleeful grin. “I never do the chasing, I always let the admirers chase me. Why wait, when you can have the pleasure of making him come to you? Give him a reason, and he will come.”

Elias’s words suddenly gave Alex an idea, far better than his previous one. In order to smoke out a predator, bait was needed, and the perfect thing was just beginning to take shape in Alex’s mind. He would just need to check the logistics with one of Kingstone Keep’s long-term occupants first.

He had been planning to thank Elias for the seed of a plan, but the shadow-man had descended into a strange sort of reverie, his impossible eyes glancing at the walls around him. Alex held his tongue as the misty creature spoke again.

“They wanted to send me here, to Kingstone, you know, but that skeleton-faced idiot listened to the weasels who were whispering in his ears, telling him all sorts of tales. He tried to keep me to himself instead… He misjudged me,” Elias said. “I would never have allowed my essence to be taken by anyone else, not with the power I had brimming inside me, once upon a time. Now, it is all I can do to keep myself from evaporating back into the ether, but I was a threat to him back then, Alex—I knew things about him and what he could do. I was a force to be reckoned with. I knew things, and he hated me for it. They all hated me for it, and they knew I would have—”

His words were interrupted by the sudden shifting of his unstable face, as it scrunched into an expression of pain, a hiss escaping from between his shadowed lips. Twists of black mist twirled away from him, disappearing into the air with a startling snap.

Alex jerked back in surprise. He had seen Elias make all kinds of dramatic exits, but this was something entirely different; it felt wrong, somehow. Elias simply watched as the strands of himself evaporated into the darkness, his galactic eyes following them with a look of half-hearted regret. Swiftly, his expression changed, as if shaking off a dark thought, and he turned back toward Alex.

“You are in grave danger, Alex. More danger than you know,” he said hurriedly, though Alex wasn’t sure why. This wasn’t exactly new information to him.

He frowned. “I know.”

Elias waved his head from side to side in a slow, wispy shake, the vapor of his form trailing sluggishly after each movement.

“There is more to it than you realize—more to it than you can possibly comprehend. There are so many who have been looking for one like you, for such a long time. The thing is, now they’ve all seen the finish line, they’re squabbling to cross it first… They don’t understand. They don’t get it. It is not their—” He trailed off, his voice snatched sharply from the air. A crackle of bright light burst from within him, shattering the shadows of his being, dispersing them faster than he could put himself back together.

When the blinding light died down, Elias was gone.