Page 82 of Every Shade of Shadow

She places the teacup down and smiles again. “Oh, please, we’re all adults here, aren’t we? What the Professor does in his own time, what you do in yours…well, that’s entirely your business now, isn’t it? Morals and ethics…” She waves a hand in the air. “We don’t judge, but what I would like to hear about is your progress—magical progress. I’m told you’re showing great aptitude.”

I clear my throat, try to summon some amount of composure. “I’m just doing my best. Putting theory into practice is proving…difficult.”

“Mmm.” She nods, her smile staying put, but I sense there is more lurking there—again something below the surface that shares more with the shadows than this simple presentation of understanding.

“But you aren’t here because things are ‘easy’ now, Ms. Fairchild, are you? Though something tells me little in your life has been, has it?”

“No,” I answer simply, willing my emotions not to spill over. Not here.

“Perhaps it is time,” continues the Headmistress, “I filled you in on your background.”

“My background?”

“Indeed,” she nods, the teacup rising again. I don’t know what she’s drinking. Could be Earl Grey. Could be battery acid. “Your mother and father, for instance, were not killed in a car crash, but you knew that already, didn’t you?”

I’ve always suspected as much. “How did they die?”

“On the job,” she smiles, as if this should explain it all.

I can’t read her. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll speak in plain terms, because I’m not one to beat around the bush—a wonderful inais saying, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

A beat passes where I’m sure she is summing me up, looking for chinks in my metaphorical armor.

“Your parents were magical assassins, and damn good ones at that. Some of the best in the business, actually.”

I laugh. It just nervously bubbles out. “Sorry?”

But the Headmistress remains stony-faced and serious. “Indeed. Because killing, Annabelle, good killing, is an art, and these targets, we shall call them, they deserved good killing. I’m sure Professor Darkwood has told you as much.”

Double shit. So she knows about that as well. I’m starting to wonder what Isadora Lumina doesn’t know.

My mind is starting in twenty different directions, my stomach churning. “I still don’t understand.”

She ignores that. “Did you know they attended this very academy?”

“Lumina?”

She nods and slides across an old yearbook. She places her finger on a single black-and-white photo of who I presume to be my father. “Here,” she shifts her finger to the other page, to a woman with long dark hair, “and here.”

I examine the photos and yes, son of a bitch, there is likeness here, but it could be falsified. AI can make anything look realistic these days. I remember some guy at the café watching a Taylor Swift sex tape that for all intents and purposes showed she was a real good cocksucker—all completely fake, mind. A damn good fake, but fake, nonetheless.

But why? I question. Why the ruse?

No, this seems like the truth.

“Your grandmother also attended Lumina.”

I shake my head, snorting in amusement. “No, that’s not true. Gran—”

“Edna was a model student, believe it or not. We even dallied with some of the boys from time to time.” Her tongue swipes over her lower lip, slug-like. “We were young, my mother, rest her soul, was Headmistress at the time. But Edna ultimately decided a career in the magical arts was not for her. For some, what we teach here can be…confronting. For others, addictive. For some, deadly.”

I don’t miss the way her lips tap together at this word.

This is too much to take in.

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