Chapter 27

"He said he'd buy five of my blankets if I delivered this to the girl who looks just like him," the vendor was saying, but I could hardly hear him over the rush of blood in my ears as I devoured each scribbled line.

Dearest Rayna,

I received your letter by crow (he gave us quite a fright, squawking outside our window in the dead of night), and I believe I've correctly decoded your message. However, I'm afraid, as I've always been, that you will come to loathe me if I tell you the details of what happened a little more than eighteen years ago. You are my greatest love, my proudest achievement, and I've only ever wanted to keep you safe.

Still, if this is as important as you made it out to be in your letter, if you will try your very best to understand where I was coming from before you decide to never speak with me again—then follow me.

That was it. No salutations, no signature. Just follow me, written in a slightly wobblier hand than every other line, as if Fabian's wrist had been shaking.

"Follow me?" I whispered, then whipped my gaze this way and that, half convinced I'd see my father pop up from behind one of the many carts or tents around us.

I returned my attention to the vendor when nothing happened.

"You said he bought five of your blankets for you to give me this? Did he say anything else?"

The vendor studied me, those beady eyes crawling with curiosity as he took a drag from his cigarette. Too much curiosity for my liking. I leaned closer to Emelle, who was glancing at my letter with an equal mixture of confusion and concern.

"No, kid," the vendor said. "He bought five of my blankets, told me I'd recognize you by the hair—truly the same as his, I might add—and that was it. He left before I could ask any more questions."

"Was there anyone else with him, by chance?" Had Don been there, too? I tried to imagine either of my fathers traveling all the way from Alderwick to Cardina just to buy some blankets and pass along a letter—it would have taken them a few days of travel via regular wagon, and that's assuming they'd had enough Summoning power to propel the wheels forward over the roughest of terrain.

But the vendor scratched his nose with a dirt-packed fingernail. "No, there wasn't nobody else with him. Just him and this paper."

Hmm. I peered back down to study the ink of that last line again.

Follow me.

And suddenly the paper quivered in my hands. Like a pair of invisible hands had suddenly grabbed the corner and tugged.

I let go, watching as the paper fluttered away. But the breeze had died down within the stuffiness of all the commotion, so there was no way it could be flying at all right now unless—

I lurched after it, away from the vendor and his tent of blankets, back to the outer edges of the courtyard, where the monkeys were still springing forward to steal stray bits of food and clothing.

"Wait! Rayna!" It was Emelle, hurrying after me.

"I'll meet you later, Melle," I called over my shoulder. "I've got to—"

"No. I'm coming with you." She caught up and fell into a pounding rhythm beside me. "I'm not letting you run after some enchanted piece of paper alone."

And that's exactly what it was, I realized with a jolt that nearly had me toppling into the nearest stand, where the paper fluttered over a towering rack of shoes. An enchantment. A complicated bit of Summoning magic that Fabian had imbued within the parchment fibers, something he'd never done before at home. At least not in front of me.

I skirted around the shoe stand after it, into the wedge of quaint wooden classrooms reserved for the Summoners. What could I say to Emelle to make her stop chasing me? I couldn't pause long enough to come up with an excuse, or else I might lose the paper, but… what if it led us to something I couldn't properly explain to her? What if she found out about my power and the pills and the pirates?

"Melle," I panted, but she cut me off.

"No. I know you're hiding something, Rayna. I can see it in your eyes sometimes, something distant and—" She huffed out a breath "—foreign."

I glanced sideways to find her jaw set, her fists curled tight as we ran alongside each other: around buildings, up and down sets of creaking wooden stairs, through archways and alleys. The paper maintained an even height from the ground, bobbing along that invisible current toward the back of this side of campus.

"Okay," I told her finally. "But Melle, you can't tell anyone about this, okay?"

My best friend—my beautiful, determined best friend—didn't ask why. Didn't pry any further or demand any more details. She only said, "Deal," and then jerked her chin at the paper ahead of us. "Look. I think it's slowing down."

Sure enough, Fabian's letter jerked back and spiraled, as if caught in a whirlwind, near one of the last buildings in the Summoner section of classrooms: a derelict wooden shack with half its shingles missing like rows of rotting teeth.

Here, the jungle bowed over us, ropes of moss drooping down from the trees and whispering against the ground. The clattering sounds of Cardina had disappeared behind us. There weren't even any monkeys to toss jokes back and forth over our heads. Just the humming of the trees, low and perhaps a little foreboding.

As we watched, the paper swooped through one of the windows bordered with jagged edges of broken glass—and vanished into the gloom.

Follow me, Fabian had said. Apparently, he had meant into this old classroom.

I stepped toward a side door. It wasn't hanging off its hinges yet, but the bruised brown and yellow color of old rot patched its surface.

Emelle sucked in a deep breath behind me and nodded. I turned the rusted green knob, and we crept through together.

Inside, I could just barely make out the paper whipping this way and that in the center of a room haphazardly held together with crisscrossing wooden beams.

"What—?" Emelle started to say.

And Fabian's letter tore itself into shreds.

We watched its pieces fall to the floor like a pile of dead moth wings.

Did he mean for me to find something hidden beneath a loose floorboard? I lurched forward to check when a voice cracked through the staleness of the room.

"Who's disrupting my beauty sleep, hmmm? Let me take a look at you."

The voice scraped against my eardrums like metal against metal. Emelle, too, cringed at the sound of it—just as two pinpricks of skeleton-white broke the dark: a pair of eyes dangling high above us.

When it shifted, more pinpricks shattered the darkness around it, like hundreds of stars blinking awake. A great ripple of rustling and scratching followed, spreading from one end of the ceiling to the other, and it clicked for me then.

"Bats," I whispered to Emelle.

"Oh, not just any bats," the voice screeched. "The last of the tomb bats from the ancient Asmodeus Colony. And I am its highest heir, Lord Arad."

From the feeble stream of light wafting through the broken window, I was starting to make out their vague silhouettes. Clumps of squirming bodies clung to the crisscrossed beams with clawed, humanlike hands, their ears twitching in our direction. The one who had addressed us hung in the center of them all, bigger and more skeletal than the others.

"Now what do you want, human?" Lord Arad continued. "They shut this classroom down nearly thirty years ago, so I know you're not here to learn."

Thirty years ago? So before Fabian's time, then, from what I knew. I felt my shoulders deflate at the thought that perhaps his Summoning enchantment had gone awry, had led us to the wrong place. These bats wouldn't know anything about Fabian if he'd never been a student in here, right? Unless…

"Has anyone else been in here since they shut it down?" I asked, inching closer to Emelle's body heat. "Maybe as a prank or a game? Or a hiding place?"

I was scrabbling at nothing in this darkness, and a sudden, angry taste of bitterness filled my mouth.

Why? Why couldn't Fabian have just told me about my mother before I had left for the Institute? I knew why he couldn't write such sensitive information in a letter, but he'd had plenty of years to tell me before this. And yet the best he'd been able to do was put a mysterious knife in my bag mere hours before my departure.

Emelle must have sensed my despair, because she found my hand and squeezed.

"Why," Lord Arad spit, fumbling to adjust his upside-down grip on the beam, "should I entertain the feeble questions of a human pup such as yourselves?"

I froze at the tone. We'd never talked to bats in Mr. Conine's class, but I vaguely remembered Mr. Fenway mentioning something about them in History. How most of them were as eagerly friendly as domesticated kittens, but one colony…

Emelle remembered seconds before I did. She straightened to her full height, pinned Lord Arad with an exceptional glare, and said, "You should entertain her compelling question because she's friends with Jagaros."

Tomb bats, Mr. Fenway had said, were the last descendants of the ancient vampires and were therefore extremely proud of their lineage. They would only deign to talk to other esteemed members of Esholian society—never a nobody.

The tomb bats halted their rustling at Emelle's declaration.

"Jagaros… Jagaros the king?" Lord Arad asked, a hint of fear in his screech.

I cleared my throat. "The faerie king of old, yes."

I wasn't exactly sure this was accurate, but if you put two and two together…

"How do we know you're not lying through your ugly square teeth?" Lord Arad shifted his grip on the beams. "My ancestors would have sucked you dry and spit their venom on your bones just for claiming such a ludicrous thing."

I gaped upward, but a rougher, colder voice answered in my stead.

"She's not lying, and I ate your wretched ancestors for breakfast."

The tomb bats broke into a frenzy, flapping away to cower in further corners of the room. Emelle pressed closer to me, but I—I beamed as the white tiger padded to a halt beside me, his tail flicking.

"Now," Jagaros growled up at the lead bat, who had scrambled higher up a beam, "answer the girl's question.I would like to hear the answer myself."

With that, he slumped down at my feet, folded his paws, and whipped his tail.

"Of c-course, Your Majesty," Lord Arad screeched, then angled his head back toward me. "You'd like to know what again, dear? If anyone else has been in here to disturb us recently?"

"Not necessarily recently," I said, resisting the urge to reach out and pet Jagaros with my Emelle-free hand; I had a feeling he'd be livid if I treated him like a housecat in front of these assholes. "But anytime in the last, oh, I don't know, twenty-three years?"

For it had been twenty-three years ago when Fabian had first set foot on the Esholian Institute campus, so if anything significant had happened in this putrid space—if his letter had truly meant to lead me here, of all places—it must have occurred during that time frame.

Again, my eyes flicked toward the floor beneath those fallen scraps of paper. Maybe I should just be done with this Lord Arad and check for loose boards…

But another tomb bat, even higher-pitched than Lord Arad, suddenly cheeped, "There was the lady from the sea, Father, remember?She slunk in from the shore and set up camp in here for nearly a year, spying on anyone who walked past."

"Ahh, that does sound familiar, thank you, Velika."

From the forced tone of Lord Arad's screech, I could tell he'd been withholding this information on purpose and would reprimand the younger bat later.

"Yes, there was the lady from the sea, who had hair dark as shadows but skin that glowed like honey."

My blood dropped. It was probably just my imagination running rampant, but that description… it was exactly how I would have painted Dyonisia Reeve.

I shook my head, though. Ridiculous. I was being ridiculous. Dyonisia Reeve had been on this island, watching over Esholian affairs, for hundreds of years. She wouldn't have come from the sea or stationed herself here, of all places. The similarity in appearance had to be a coincidence.

"Uhh…" I glanced at Emelle, who squeezed my hand again and nodded her encouragement. "What was this lady from the sea doing here? Spying, you said?"

Lord Arad rustled his wings. "Spying. Taking notes. Meeting with that boy."

"What boy?" My heart seemed to skip way too many beats.

Lord Arad almost didn't answer, but Jagaros let loose a grumbling growl, and he went on quickly, "There was a boy—maybe a young man, I don't know—who was practicing his Summoning magic right outside the window when he heard her sneeze. He came to investigate and found her standing in here with a knife, poised to kill him. She jolted into action when the boy suddenly said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? Are you okay?' And all his ruddy questions seemed to stun the lady of the sea, who paused long enough to take him in. She saw his wild blonde curls and his much-too-tender, weak little face and dropped her knife right then and there."

"It was love at first sight," the younger bat named Velika sighed.

"It was ludicrous at first sight," Lord Arad snapped. "Utter ludicrous! They didn't even know each other, yet we had to watch them gawk and flirt and keep meeting each other to talk about wretched stars and dreams, and later on—"

"I'm sure we can skip what happened later on, Father," Velika cheeped.

I couldn't take a deep enough breath. Wild blonde curls and a tender face—that had definitely been Fabian. Which meant he'd found my mother, a pirate who'd been immune to the island's shield just like Coen. A pirate who'd snuck through to spy. And they'd… fallen in love here. Not just on this campus, but in this forgotten, festering classroom.

I could practically see it, the tent and sleeping bag and supplies she must have set up in here, stolen food and canteens of spring water piled up in one corner, and clothes and weapons piled up in the other. And all the while, these bats must have dangled and squirmed and watched above her.

But the next part of the story went blank in my mind. How had they separated?

Jagaros, bless him, growled up the question for me.

"Such a sad moment," Velika said quietly.

"Such an expected moment," Lord Arad corrected. "Human love never lasts."

I cringed against Emelle at that, images of Coen flashing before me, but Lord Arad had already plunged on.

"She had the baby, right here on this floor. For a month, they raised the baby together, the boy rushing over to feed and burp and other disgusting things after his classes. And then he took his Final Test and passed it, and she told the boy she had to go back. She'd take the baby, she said, and raise it on the ships, and train it to fight in an upcoming war. The child would grow up to be a spy and assassin and warrior. It would be an honor, the lady said, to provide her people with such a thing.And she invited the boy to come with her,to leave the island and join her."

A deep chill settled to the bottom of my stomach. That child, of course, had been me. My mother had wanted to give me to the pirates… as a baby. She'd wanted to hand me over like a gift. An offering.

"The boy," Lord Arad continued, "begged her to stay. Begged her to leave the sea behind and find a dull little village with him and raise the child in a respectable, unassuming home. She refused. She said the sea was the child's home. She let him kiss the babe one more time and made to leave. But the boy, crying those horrible, ugly human tears, used his magic to send all the blood in the lady's head to the bottom of her feet."

What? I couldn't imagine it, what with Fabian's loathing for violence. Couldn't imagine him holding me in the crook of his arms and sobbing while he knocked my mother out.

"He left with the baby, then?" I asked, and my voice sounded hollow.

It was Velika who cheeped, "Yes, he left with the baby—and her knife."

My blood vibrated within me at that. Her knife. My knife, now.

"The lady of the sea woke up in a rage,"Velika continued, "but by that time, he and the baby were long gone. And she couldn't risk scouring the entire island for them, not when she didn't have one of those strange brands on her shoulder that mark you humans as belonging to that witch on the mountain."

"So she left?" I whispered. "She went back?"

"She went back," Velika confirmed. "She went back cursing the boy's name and vowing to find her child again one day. But we haven't seen her since."

Perhaps the pirates had killed her for fraternizing with an Esholian. Or perhaps she'd simply forgotten about me over all these years. But one thing was clear, as I stood clutching Emelle's hand, listening to the rustling of tomb bats and the grumbling buildup in Jagaros's throat. As my eyes, which had finally fully adjusted to the gloom, saw what lay under the scraps of Fabian's letter: the bloodstains of birth.

No matter how noble or compassionate my father's intent might have been…

He had kidnapped me from my mother eighteen years ago.