She chose to ignore him. I did not. “Excuse me.”
I stood up and slid my tray out. I let it drop loudly on the table opposite Andrei. He didn’t startle. Darn.
“Aren’t you concerned that Captain Nephilim is going to have a problem with you speaking to me?” he asked.
“I’d say that’s more of a problem for you than it is for me.”
His smile was way creepy. The hollows in his cheeks and the bruised patches under his eyes kind of scrunched. He appeared very much like a sack of skin held up by a skeleton.
“So,” I said. “Why the sudden urge to occupy this space?”
“Why not?”
I picked up my fork. “Do you think stalking Astrid is the way to get her attention?”
I caught a glimpse of something behind his eyes. They were unfocused but there was still life in them. Unlike some of the eyes of the demons I’d come across in my time.
“You are a very unpleasant little girl,” he said.
I grinned. “And yet I’m sitting over there with Astrid and you’re not. Guess that makes you worse than unpleasant.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I agreed with him. That was why I decided to take the time out during my free period to figure it out. Over the past year, as I tried to find out more about Lucifer, I realised that Sophie’s Book of Beasts was super sanitised.
The one in the Bloodline library was also censored. Sadly, it was the best version that I had. My only other alternative would be to sneak back into Nightblood.
Colour me surprised when I went to the information desk and Jem informed me there was no need to be all cloak and dagger about it. “The Popescu massacre is well documented.” He scratched a long claw over the bald skin on his head. “You’ll find it in the condemned supernaturals section.”
I sat there all afternoon reading about Andrei’s family. He had two little brothers. Their cherubic faces smiled at me on one page. On the next their gruesome decapitated heads peered out at me. Everything Sasha had told me was in here. The thing that confused me was that nobody could really say why they had given into the bloodlust. The investigation hadn’t been very thorough. I began to understand Andrei’s bitterness. Vampires and bloodlust were a done deal. He obviously refused to believe it.
I realised then why Andrei hated Kai so much. When Kai’s family died, the supernatural community rallied around him. When Andrei’s family died, they were condemned. It wasn’t rational, but I understood. That was the part that scared me the most. Somehow, I had started to feel sympathy for a psychopath. What did that make me?
33
I fell asleep that night with thoughts of headless babies running through my brain. My eyes peeled open to a landscape of pristine blue.
Just to be sure, I slipped in and out of the dimension. Yep. There were no two bones about it. I was magically blind. Stifling the sob that tried to escape, I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My limbs were ice cold. It took a few seconds of rapid flexing for my hands to loosen enough so I could take off my pyjamas. My heart was racing. Taking a few deep breaths, I made myself stuff the panic into a box and lock it away. The boxes were stacking up. Sooner or later they’d topple. Fatigue rolled over me. I pushed back against it. Giving up was not an option. There had to be something I could do. The Ley dimension was too big a deal to just give up on.
The crescent moon hung low outside the window. I slipped silently into my sweats. Taking care not to disturb the wards and circles protecting the room, I stole out into the night.
The first thing to hit me as my feet touched down on the ornamental lawn was a tingle of magic. It fluttered all the way up my spine. I twisted back around and inspected the front face of the Academy. The breath caught in my throat.
All along the brickwork, magic symbols glowed. There was no one denomination. Celtic runes, Talmudic passages, Taoist symbols, and on and on until my vision was swimming in front of me. Everywhere my gaze settled there was another passage of words to astonish. They covered every inch, towering up into the strata above. What the ever-loving hell was this?
Theoretically, I knew the entire school was protected by powerful wards and runes. When my magical sight had still been working, I saw them as two concentric circles that vibrated in tandem. They both protected and contained. A nothing-in, nothing-out mentality. This was on another level.
I hadn’t known I was biting my lip until my teeth broke skin. The lick of blood had me suddenly apprehensive. I never had cause to come into contact with the wards until now. It was even odder that they were visible without the Ley sight.
Without knowing why, I picked up speed. Professor Mortimer lived in a cottage on the outskirts of the official Academy grounds. When I first started, I assumed he just lived in his office because I’d found him asleep at his desk one time too many. The cottage was a step down if you asked me. It was a nondescript single-story building nestled in a small clearing that was surrounded by ash and rowan trees.
There was a light on inside. The way it flickered told me it was candlelight. Something brushed up against the side of my leg. I yelped and jumped a couple of steps. When I glanced down, a pair of hazel night-glow eyes winked at me. The grimalkin made a spitting sound. It was Bebe’s way of laughing. Professor Mortimer had named him Beelzebub but that was too much of a mouthful. Many lifetimes ago, Bebe had been a tomcat. Then he’d made the mistake of ingesting the spirit of some
