more likely her body was simply dropped there, and that she died somewhere else.”
I hadn’t thought of that as a possibility. I’d just assumed she was attacked and died on the grounds. Showed how much I knew about this sort of thing.
“Well, what do you think could’ve done it, then?”
Cal shrugged. “A vampire, maybe, but I don’t know what one would be doing all the way out here.”
“Yeah,” Adrian agreed, falling into the chair opposite me. “An animal, we’d have smelled, but a vampire’s smell is fainter than that. They hardly have any smell at all, except Draven of course. That weird cologne of his, what’s it called? The Devil’s Diaper?”
“The Devil’s Bed, I think,” Cal corrected.
I shrank into myself, wondering how hard that smell was to detect since it was probably all over me from falling all over him just last night.
“Yeah, but in French so it sounds more…”
“Expensive? Classy?”
“Yeah, that.”
Adrian bent forward in his seat, resting his elbows atop his knees, clasping his hands together as he regarded me with slightly glowing ocher eyes. “So, love, want to tell us why that very distinct smell is all over you this morning?”
10
Harper
Suffice it to say Cal and Adrian weren’t exactly thrilled that I trusted Draven enough to let him help in the task of figuring out who was to blame for all those Enduran and Vocari deaths.
Actually, they weren’t uber excited that I was trying to find the person responsible at all. But they knew what it meant to me, to find the people responsible. What I’d felt when I led the pack there, only to see a fraction of them freed before a fellow witch destroyed the place and all the lives inside. They thought I’d risked enough, wanted me to sit on the sidelines while they followed the dangerous leads.
I told them not a fucking chance.
Once that was settled, we agreed to work as one. Me, Draven, and my familiars. I knew we could also count on Bianca and Elias if we needed them, but I made it clear I’d rather keep them out of it—especially Bianca. She had enough to deal with.
So, in the span of two days, I told three people about my father’s journal, and about my suspicions.
Like I expected, all three thought Alistair Hawkins was a crackpot. There is no cure. It isn’t possible, they said.
But what if it was? So many things were once considered impossible. I bet cavemen didn’t think we’d ever fly inside of metal tubes with wings in the sky. And I bet whatshisface who invented the telephone or that other guy who invented electricity were called crackpots, too. Until they did it.
I never knew my father. But I had to believe he wasn’t just some delusional theorist.
“Your father was a very passionate man,” Diana said. “He had grand aspirations and even grander ideas. But no, I wouldn’t have ever called him delusional.”
We were sitting in her office, drinking some tea that tasted like flowers and dirt. It was Sunday and all the students would be coming back at some point today for when classes resumed tomorrow.
After spending most of Friday and Saturday with Cal and Adrian, and the late-night hours in my room, studying more than sleeping, and avoiding Elias, there was nothing left to do but twiddle my thumbs until Draven came back.
Thankfully, when I’d brought a tea tray up to her office, the headmistress hadn’t been too busy to sit with me a while. It’d become something of a habit on the weekends when Bianca was away. There wasn’t all that much else to do when the halls and classrooms were empty. But, like me, Diana never seemed to leave the grounds either.
“What made you ask such a thing?” she prodded. Her brown eyes were bright as she took another sip of her tea.
I pressed my lips together and shrugged. “Just curious. It was something I heard someone say about him, that’s all.”
“Well, whoever said that obviously didn’t know him,” she said with a little smirk.
Her long dark brown hair seemed lighter today. It looked as though the little bits of bronze and gold threaded through it were also now shot through with silver and gray.
Perhaps the new position was wearing on her. It dawned on me then how old she would have to be if she knew my father. Around 150, maybe? The prospect of living that long made me feel strange, though I didn’t think I had to worry about the added years. From