“What is this place?” I asked.
“A meeting area,” Sanrin replied as he walked through the wall. “Tell me what happened, every detail.”
I spilled my story for the elder and answered a barrage of very specific questions. Where, exactly, had the man been standing when he vanished? What did he smell like? Was he wearing gloves?
Finally, after a solid ten minutes of interrogation, Sanrin crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. His lips moved slightly, like he was having a conversation in his dreams. After a few moments of that, he opened his eyes and nodded.
“Brand and Claude have secured your cottage. They didn’t find any weapons or traps,” he said. “We’ll return there now to search for additional clues as to who attacked you, and why.”
The transition between Hagar’s secret meeting room and my cottage happened between breaths. It was so smooth it took my brain several seconds to catch up with my body. On top of the sensory changes I was dealing with from my core advancement, that was almost enough to make my empty stomach do a dangerous flip-flop.
Hagar put a hand on my shoulder to steady me and looked at me curiously.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Just a little disoriented,” I said. “I’m not used to popping in and out of places without warning.”
“Ah, yes,” Sanrin said. “I often forget most don’t often use that method of travel.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure how Sanrin had moved us. Portals were energy intensive and usually required static gates on either end to work. The fact that he could blink us across the school with seemingly no effort made me wonder who else knew that trick.
“We need to search this place,” Hagar told me. “Go through everything, let us know if you find anything out of the ordinary. We’ll help you.”
Sanrin had already started rifling through my desk. He opened and closed the file drawers with calm efficiency, then started in on my closet. Hagar threw my bedclothes back, flipped my mattress, then shook my pillows out of their cases. From the rattles and banging coming from downstairs, Claude and Brand were doing the same search on the first floor.
I ducked into the restroom off my bedroom and flipped open the top of the dirty clothes hamper. It was Thursday and laundry wouldn’t pick up until Saturday, so the hamper was filled with sweat-stiff exercise clothes, my informal robes for daily classes, and an assortment of underwear and socks. I shook out each article of clothing. I used my new jinsei sight to examine each item, hoping that would help me locate items of interest.
Nothing.
I opened the medicine cabinet over the sink and looked over its contents. It held my toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a stick of deodorant, and some ibuprofen for the muscle aches and pains that came from working out too hard. I checked the bottles, popped the top off the deodorant, and even squeezed a little paste out of the tube. Nothing there, either.
I went through the small cupboard under the sink next. There were some towels, a few cleaning supplies, and something dark shoved all the way in the back of the cupboard, mostly concealed by the plumbing.
I reached back into the shadows and pulled out a matte black jumpsuit.
The same one I’d worn when I’d attacked Albert and fought his bodyguard. I hadn’t wanted the school laundry to find that, so I’d hidden it in the last place I thought they’d look. It had been under there ever since. My eyes roamed over the black material for a second, and a burst of excitement rushed through me when I caught a spark of jinsei where it didn’t belong.
“Found it!” I rushed back into the bedroom, the jumpsuit in my arms. “Right here!”
A thin crystal square, no bigger than my pinky nail, was attached to the back of the suit’s right shoulder. It was surrounded by fitful sparks of sacred energy, and its surface was cracked in two places. An intricate script had been carved into the square’s surface, but was now almost obliterated by scorch marks.
“Well,” Sanrin said. “Someone certainly doesn’t like you very much.”
“Is that an anchor?” Hagar said. “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one in person.”
“That it is,” Sanrin confirmed. “This is definitely how they breached your defenses, Jace. Where did you get this jumpsuit?”
“It’s what I wore when I went after Albert,” I said. “His bodyguard must’ve stuck it to me while we were fighting. I had no idea.”
I felt both stupid and vulnerable. I should’ve checked the suit as soon as I returned to the cottage. Of course, at that time I was still an initiate without the advantages of an adept core’s enhanced senses, so it would have been much harder to spot the crystal anchor. I also had no idea what an anchor was, or how they could have used it to track me, so it would have been easy to assume the square was just part of the suit. My frustration turned slowly to anger.
I’d been kept in the dark about so many things, and now one of those things had bitten me. Enough was enough.
“Maybe if people told me what was going on, I would have caught this,” I said. “If that’s what the assassin used to reach me here, then they could use it to send more of their people.”
“No,” Sanrin said. “The anchor is a onetime-use device. Though your assailant may not need an anchor to return. If he has a strong enough emotional connection to a location, a skilled portal pilot could get him here. From the sound of your fight, his emotional connection will be quite strong.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I mean, really awesome. I’ll have to move out of here. If assassins can pop in and out anytime they want, I need somewhere safer to live.”
Hagar and Sanrin exchanged glances. I didn’t like that look at
