Page 35 of House of Ydril

Luckily, despite the injury that’s forcing him to use a walking stick, the old man is quite fast and within fifteen minutes, I’m back in my room. As soon as I’m there, I bolt the door and grab the diary.

“What is it that you wanted to explain?” I ask her with bated breath.

“Not explain per se,” she says hesitantly.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Moswen,” I reply, only half-jokingly. Because it’s my very fraught nerves that she’s toying with.

“I can show you,” she says as she walks up to me, motioning at the diary in my hands.

“Show?”

I barely manage to say it before she places a hand on my forehead and I feel a violent jerk as I get sucked away someplace else.

It takes me a second to open my eyes, which I’ve instinctively shut tight at the first sign of something happening. When I open them, my room has been replaced by one of the common rooms somewhere in the East Wing of the castle. I recognize it by the Oriental interior design that can’t be found anywhere else.

And there’s lots of people there and everything seems okay, but there’s a strange warm glow to everything that I see.

I don’t see her, but I hear Moswen’s voice. “You’re in one of my memories,” she says and somehow makes me look at one of the far corners of the room. “Pay attention or you’ll miss it.”

I listen, focusing all my attention on the two people, a man and a woman, sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers strewn all over it. They’re both tall, beautiful fae-blooded people dressed in ornate robes. And they seem to be deep in discussion. I try to move closer, but as soon as I do, I hear Moswen say, “It doesn’t work that way. You’re in my body now, the echo of it at least.”

And she seems to be right, because when I finally move, it’s not of my own accord. I walk around the pair, in the widest possible circle, and use a free-standing bookshelf right behind their table as my cover. Because I apparently want to get close without getting noticed.

I pull a book out and crack it open, but I don’t look at its contents. Instead, my eyes fix on the couple. Interesting, I think to myself.

And there’s something about those people, but I don’t even dare to think that they are my parents. It’s only when I hear the man say, “I think it’s a Blood Moon ritual,” that Iknow.

“I don’t know,” the woman hesitates, shaking her head as she looks up, her eyes sweeping her surroundings. “That would mean…”

She breaks off, but our eyes have already met. Moswen’s and hers, I mean. And for a second, I think she’ll say something to her, but before I know it, I’m being sucked back into my room.

“And you said you had no memory of my parents,” I say as soon as I find myself in front of Moswen once again. I’m not even trying to hide the suspicion and the anger in my voice.

She avoids my eye. “True,” she mutters, only throwing me a single nervous glance. “I guess I didn’t want you to see me like that. Sneaking around and eavesdropping on people to learn more about dark magic.” She pauses, this time looking me straight in the eye. “Because make no mistake, the Blood Moon ritual is exactly that.”

The way she says it makes the suspicion and the anger brewing inside me dissipate. But now my heart is pounding. Because it’s finally dawned on me that my parents may have been involved in some shady business.

Chapter sixteen

“They’reeverywhere,”Imutterto Nuala as I rip off the flier that someone’s taped to the inside of the Elevator.

“Of course they are,” she says with a tentative smile, her words immediately followed by the opening of the door. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the First Round istomorrow.”

As she follows me out of the Elevator, I turn to give her a smile. I’m so grateful to her for even trying to cheer me up, but the truth is, I’m scared shitless and there’s nothing that can change that.

So I just keep walking, the two of us heading straight for the graveyard. The end of December is nearing and the treetops are bare, no birds singing from their branches. Moswen is insisting we do some training every day, preferably first thing in the morning.

And that’s what we’ll be doing as soon as we get there. But not three seconds go by that I don’t subtly crane my neck to see if Leo is somewhere behind me.

“You do understand,” Nuala starts as she side-eyes me, “that if he really was following you, you wouldn’t know that he was doing it.”

I quirk my eyebrow at her. “Nuala, Moswen told me Leosawher.”

“That was over a month ago and you haven’t seen him at the graveyard since.”

I let out a low groan. “Youmay not remember him putting Cormac under his spell…” I pause to throw her a look. “And just because I said I wouldn’t go to the Ball with him… ButIsure as hell remember.”

“You can’t be positive that that was him,” Nuala insists.

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