The Hidden Court Read online

  Over the course of a week, I answered about a thousand questions related to the event at the museum. After my chat with Riordan and Simon in the infirmary, I didn’t hear another peep from the administration.

  The students were another matter. After retelling the tale a few times, I finally gave Ben permission to become my honorary spokesman. It was like he got street cred for being pals with me, because the other mages paid him more attention after he began to relay the story. He loved every minute, I could tell, because he started exaggerating parts of the battle and acted some of it out with magic, putting on illusional spectacles that the other students enjoyed.

  When I asked my friends if they’d ever heard of the Hidden Court, none of them had anything to offer. Not even know-it-all Pilar or studious Benjamin. I hesitated to ask any of the professors, expecting they’d only repeat Simon’s words.

  “What do your parents think about it?” Liadan asked as we made our way from Magical Artifacts.

  “Dad tried to make it sound like it was just part of life, but I think he was fibbing. He does this thing when he’s not being completely truthful, you know? Sort of hesitates like he has to think about what to say, and he starts mixing up his English and Italian. He’s an awful liar.”

  Liadan chuckled. “And your ma?”

  “Mom said to be strong and fed me some stuff about knowing how to handle myself. I mean, she’s right, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I think she was holding back something.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Hell if I know. Maybe there’s some faerie-eating bogeyman they never told us about. Or it’s another test like that stupid surprise exam.”

  My roomie rolled her eyes and bumped her shoulder into mine. “I doubt that one, but I agree it does sound suspicious. What did Gabriel think of it all?”

  I shrugged. “Haven’t had a chance to talk to him except to hand him his jacket back. His girlfriend was over at his place, and I’m steering clear of that train wreck.”

  Liadan wrinkled her nose. “I’ve seen her around, and I can’t utter a kind word in her favor. From what I’ve heard on campus, she’s a spoiled drama queen. Her father is the personal bodyguard for the governor of Texas.”

  “So lots of money in that family.”

  “Lots.”

  I reached the double doors leading out onto the campus then frowned. “Crap. I’ll meet you at the Jamba Juice in five. Forgot to ask Gaspar a question.”

  “I’ll hold you a seat then.”

  We split ways, and after I confirmed my essay subject met the assignment’s requirements, I hurried back outside to catch up to Liadan, the kitten heels on my new autumn boots clicking against the marble floor. After the splurge I made while out with Pilar, I couldn’t afford any more new stuff with my tiny savings, but my parents made me keep wish lists at my favorite online retailers.

  The boots had arrived yesterday, feeling more like a bribe to keep upbeat about PNRU than a random gift. But I trusted them. My parents wouldn’t send me off like a calf for slaughter, right? Not that they had a choice. The laws governing our society had been around for centuries, and if you didn’t want your powers stripped, you attended school.

  When I swung the glass door open, the breeze carried the aroma of fragrant flowers from the courtyard. Further down the way, some of my fellow fae ran a baked good stand to make money for some random charity in the city.

  The wind kicked my hair up around my face, recently straightened and tamed into sleek waves thanks to Pilar’s Cosmetic glamours. She could turn a T-shirt into an evening gown. Meanwhile, I struggled to expand a face cloth into a bath towel.

  Ice cold fingers caressed my nape. “Hey, fresh meat, look out.”

  Midstep during my descent to the sidewalk, I jerked toward the whisper in my right ear. My foot never reached the next stair, and I flailed in the air before losing balance and tumbling down to the bottom.

  Somehow, fortune landed me on my hands and knees, though I abraded my palms on the cold concrete and snapped a nail deep enough to bleed from the nail bed where the ragged edge broke the skin. A hiss of pain escaped from between my teeth.

  The small gathering of college girls at the fountain snickered, all their faces turned toward me. Miss Pink Booty Shorts sat among them with a smug smile on her flawless face.

  Refusing to cry, I stood and brushed off my jeans with the uninjured hand. “Real mature, guys. So nice to see you putting your talents to use.”

  Some ravens had a knack for illusions, possessing a natural grasp of them most mages studied their entire lives to achieve. Ben put countless hours into it since it was his subject of focus, while idiots like Jada used the skill for spite and mischief. Throwing her voice had been a cheap trick.

  Scowling, I eyed the mean girls and decided to exude enough class for their entire group.

  “See any big bad statues lately?” one girl asked.

  “Be careful. She’ll be saying the campus gargoyles are after her next.”

  Of the five, one frowned. “Knock it off,” Amalia said. “Did you forget Gabriel was attacked too?”

  Jada pursed her lips. “No, he single-handedly fought off two spirits gone berserk, because Fresh Meat over there was clumsy and busted something.”

  Without giving her the satisfaction of a response, I darted down the walking path. The scrape of claws against cement alerted me to incoming trouble before I made it beyond the corner of the building. One of them had followed me.

  I glanced over a shoulder to see an enormous she-wolf with caramel fur falling into stride beside me. In a blink, Amalia shrugged out of her furry shape and rose on both legs to trot to my left.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?” I snapped. Too furious and embarrassed to make the distinction between her and Jada, I stalked ahead without slowing down, hoping to leave her behind. A pounding headache on the verge of becoming a migraine throbbed behind my left eye, and my racing pulse pushed me along, even though the mood for the library and a smoothie was long gone.

  “I’m sorry about that. I tried to tell her not to do it.”

  I grunted.

  “Jada’s my friend, but she can be a bitch sometimes,” Amalia continued. “But she’s really a nice person when you get to know her.”

  “Right, so nice she doesn’t even care that her boyfriend is hurt. You should have heard her in the car.”

  Amalia fell silent. She’d also picked up speed, too thick to take the hint or that desperate to convince me Jada wasn’t a terrible person. “I’m sorry.”

  “You aren’t the one who owes me an apology.

  “So what really did happen?”

  “Does it matter? She seems to have her version of the events firmly in her head, and you all seemed happy enough to go along with her.”

  “Oh, c’mon, don’t be like that. Rodrigo and I were stuck downstairs thanks to the guards.”

  “I don’t know, okay? The cursed soldiers decided to start moving around and attacked us. Gabriel and I had to fight them off.

  “Jada thinks you’re trying to pull something. I told her that’s ridiculous. I mean, it isn’t like you need Gabriel’s popularity when you come from that family.”

  My scowl deepened. “Look, I don’t give a damn about being some popular girl, and I don’t hang out with Gabriel because of his influence. He’s a good guy and a great sentinel. So tell her to take a chill-the-fuck-out pill and leave me alone.”

  Amalia studied me. “All right. Well, later then.” She turned and jogged away, her steady pace transforming to a four-legged lope midstride. The light brown wolf disappeared around the corner, leaving me to enter the student center alone.

  The food court was located on the upper level, a short staircase dividing the lower lobby from the university grocery store and campus bookstore on the ground level. I found Liadan at a small table with a smoothie waiting on my side.

  Lia rubbed her index finger and frowned, s
ensing my pain before she noticed my arrival. As I stepped up to the table, her gaze dropped to my bleeding finger. “Oh no. What happened? Let me see that.”

  “It’s nothing, Lia.” Not that she listened to my protests. She took my hand and gave it a good lookover.

  “Lying is beneath you,” she chided.

  Lia removed her crystal wand from the Neverspace, a pocket dimension where we fae stored things we didn’t want to carry in the physical realm. After she tapped it to the back of my hand and mended my bleeding nail bed, I told her about what happened. Her eyes darkened and the good nature vanished from her features within seconds. “You should tell the provost.”

  I glanced down at her progress with the Mending glamour. It wasn’t good for much more than minor scrapes, cuts, and bruises, which meant I’d have to get a new manicure from Pilar. “Tell her what? That a big bad upperclassman was mean to me?”

  “Isn’t this the very thing she claimed the school would not be tolerating between all of us?”

  After shrugging, I glanced away and considered the past five weeks of training alongside Gabriel. “It has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with her man being alone with me at night. It’s petty, vindictive jealousy. He told her that he’s been training me, and she didn’t like it.”

  “I’m guessing she didn’t like you riding home with him either.”

  I scoffed. “Yeah. She went postal when she heard I was in the car. He, uh, hung up on her. Well, technically I did, but because he told me to.”

  “You should still say something.”

  “I’m not tattling because she’s jealous. If it becomes something more than that, I will, okay?” Friendships between students of the day and night school didn’t occur often, and if anything, it’d paint a bull’s-eye on my back if I reported Jada for picking on me. No one but her and my closest friends knew he trained me.

  If I told on her, I’d have to reveal why she loathed me. And if I revealed the truth to PNRU’s administration, I’d risk causing trouble for Gabriel and losing my lessons. That couldn’t happen.

  “Fine,” she agreed.

  “Good afternoon, ladies. Am I interrupting?” asked a student in the most sensual French accent I’d ever heard. My ovaries popped like kettle corn, preparing a thousand eggs all at once before I even looked up to see our faerie class mentor standing over us with his lunch tray.

  “Uh…” My brain and my mouth refused to connect, and it seemed like I wasn’t the only one affected. Lia looked equally as dazzled. Somehow, I recovered my wits enough to snap my mouth shut. “Hey. Julien, right?”

  “That I am. And you’d be Skylar.” Julien’s gaze turned to Lia. “And Liadan.”

  He knew my name. I could die on the spot.

  “May I join you?”

  I would feed him every grape on his tray with my fingers if he’d let me.

  “Uhhh,” came out of my mouth with a strangled noise before Liadan kicked me under the table.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Merci,” Julien replied, sitting to my left in the chair on my side of our table. My shirt felt too tight, and my nipples were as hard as marbles, and I still had this dopey smile on my face that wouldn’t go away.

  Something was definitely wrong, and the longer I stared at Julien, the more apparent it became to me that it was something to do with his faerie nature.

  “I wanted to ask if you were all right after your ordeal at the museum. I would have checked in earlier, but you are such a busy woman.” When he grinned, his cheek dimpled. Just one. My heart did a somersault in my chest, and sweat beaded on my brow, not because it was hot in the damned food court, but because I was fighting all my instinct to avoid asking Julien out on a date.

  A few steady breaths helped, even though he smelled divine too. “I’m fine now.”

  “But you were injured, no?”

  “Just a small one.”

  Wondering if anyone else shared our distress, I stole a look at the nearby tables. A couple girls had glanced at us, three freshmen ladies were staring, but no one else seemed to care that the hottest guy on the campus had graced us with his glorious presence.

  It had to be glamour.

  “Well, I’m glad to see you came out of it mostly unscathed. Gabriel is a good sentinel, and it surprises me very little that he protected you so well. Though…” He leaned forward, blue-green eyes twinkling like ocean water beneath a noon sun as he whispered, “Perhaps some of that luck and skill is your own. You and Liadan should join the rest of us when next we have a party. We have all taken your freshmen classes already, after all. We will help you study.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “In fact, I still have my freshmen notes. Would you like them?”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? It’s not like I can go back in time and do the classes again.”

  “Believe me, the offer is tempting, but I do better when I have to work at it.”

  Julien’s gaze swept over our neglected lunches before raising to study our faces. I hadn’t touched my smoothie since he arrived. “Well, anytime you change your mind. But I still hope to see you both at one of our soirees. You will have fun, I promise.” He winked at me and rose. “Au revoir.”

  The moment he left earshot, Liadan leaned in and whispered, “He’s so… so pretty. Like the prettiest man I have ever seen pretty.”

  “He’s gotta be a selkie, right? I swear I could barely think when he was around.”

  “It’s supposed to be easier to resist the more you’re around them until eventually you don’t notice it at all,” Liadan said.

  “No wonder Gabriel said it would be more fun for me to find out on my own.” I sighed and stared off in the direction he’d gone. “I’m half tempted to go to one of their stupid parties.”

  My phone chirped with an incoming message. I glanced at the screen to see a text from Monica, and just like that, my euphoric mood popped. “Looks like my mentor is visiting her charge tomorrow evening and I get to tag along.”

  “How is she? Your goddaughter, I mean.”

  “She seems nice, but really timid. I think she just needs a confidence boost, but Monica doesn’t exactly inspire that sort of thing.”

  Afterward, we met up with Radha, Anji, and Holly to quiz each other in the library over over our respective classes until it was time to break for my final course of the day.

  Before I could make it down the library steps, Anji jogged up to my side.

  “Hey, Sky?”

  “Hmm?”

  With one hand on my arm, Anji took me down the steps and off the path, away into the privacy beneath a few trees. She sniffed the air in a feral gesture like she was scenting for something. “Good. There aren’t any ravens around now,” she muttered.

  “Ravens around?”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t going to say anything, but… Okay, I overheard something. My older sister Suzie is a junior, and I was visiting her apartment yesterday.”

  “Does this have something to do with Jada?”

  Anji nodded. “Jada rents the place beside my sister, and a couple of her friends were coming down the hall and they were talking like you’re out to steal her man. So she’s got a couple raven friends watching you, dude.”

  “Ugh.” As if my day couldn’t get any worse. Now I had a nemesis.

  “Anyway, I had to let you know. Keep your blinds and curtains shut at all times. Watch what you say in public. She’s vindictive, and she’s mean to everyone.”

  “Thanks, Anji. I don’t have anything to hide, but I appreciate the heads-up.

  “No problem. You’d do it for me. Anyway, I better go. I need a nap before class.”

  It sucked having a friend on the opposite schedule. Waving to her as we parted ways, I moved onto the sidewalk and considered her warning.

  Maybe a better person would have cut ties and ended their friendship with Gabriel, but I wasn’t responsible for Jada’s insecurity. If anythi
ng was getting between their relationship, it was her shitty behavior, and I wouldn’t be chased off because she didn’t know how to treat her man like a human being.

  9

  Scavenger Hunts are Grand

  Upon awakening Halloween morning to the buzz of campus-wide excitement, I crawled out of bed to find Liadan decorating our living space with ghoul-themed glamour and cosmetic spells.

  Pilar would lose her shit, but maybe it was the kind of reminder—that the entire dormitory wasn’t her designer haven—she needed. To my surprise, she didn’t complain when she stepped out of her room, and she didn’t turn her nose up at the gaudy, over-the-top decor in the halls. She joined us and loaned a few of her designer, 1500 thread-count sheets to the decoration effort by glamouring them into floating specters.

  The quad hummed with anticipation, filled with an infectious mood permeating every corner of the school like a plague, demanding phony spiderwebs and arachnids in every corner.

  A cheerful substitute with a friendly face and waist-length green hair replaced Professor Tristal. Mrs. Robinson spent the entire ninety minutes teaching us harmless glamours related to creating Halloween decorations and hilarious pranks we could pull on our pals.

  We turned each other’s hair funny colors, animated bowls of miniature marshmallows into fluffy spiders, and laughed when no one wanted to leave once the bell released us from class.

  “Oh my God, she was awesome,” I gushed as Liadan and I traveled the hall toward our next class. We stepped outside to cross to the next building with Pilar alongside us for once instead of ditching to hang with her other friends.

  Liadan frowned. “She was fun, but I hope Professor Tristal is okay. She never misses a class.”

  Had Tristal ever missed a class? The other professors occasionally took a personal day for some reason or another, but our glamours professor was ever present, always at the head of the class staring down her long nose at us.

  “Everyone needs a day off sometime,” I muttered.

  Professor Gaspar’s classroom resembled a crypt, setting the perfect spooky vibe for the day. Fat spiders even crawled through genuine webs hanging in the corners. Our desks had been replaced with huge stone tables, one against each side wall, and there wasn’t a single chair in sight.