Page 49 of House of Lilith

An image of her pops into my head. The future princess whose role in life will be to perpetuate injustice like this, perched atop her high horse.

What snaps me out of my ruminations is the series of sharp knocks on the office door behind my back. It seems my fifteen minutes have run out.

Feeling myself starting to fume again, I jump to my feet and I tell my friend, “I don’t know how exactly we’ll get out of this. I just know there’s no one here we can count on.”

And even before I see fear flash through his eyes, I make myself say, in a much more determined, upbeat voice, “But don’t worry, I’ll take care of it, Ricky.”

I pause to look around the room, gritting my teeth. “And my first order of business is getting you out of this sick fucking joke they put you in.”

Chapter 11 - Nyx

Riddledwithguilt,Itoss and I turn in my bed. They keeps echoing through my mind, all the things I heard when we got summoned to the Dining Hall, right after the party.

Professor Onas getting stabbed to death in his office.

Someone at the Academy looking for information on how to piss off the mermaids.

Eryndor, a Fiain without a last name and Dahrian Howe’s right hand, waiting for the Authority to come hurl him into jail.

But what troubles me most is something I’ve seen with my own two eyes. Once the Pied Piper finished divulging all this information and we started filing out of the Dining Hall, I spotted one of the Authority Officers march up to Uncle and give him something. A book.

Then they said bye and that was that.

But right now, there’s a student sitting in a cell, thinking he’ll be thrown in jail, when there’s a chance he did nothing at all.

It’s only when the first rays of cold morning light enter my room that I decide I’ve had enough of trying to fall asleep.

It’s time to take action.

I spring from my bed and start getting dressed. As I look at myself in the mirror, my mind rushes back to Max. How unnecessarily rude he was when he came to the party. How embarrassed it made me, him ordering me around like that.

I tried to talk to him about it, but he just stayed silent, ignoring my protests. So I went to the Dining Hall to hear what they had to say and then straight to bed.

But now he’s texting me, all sweet, asking to see me. And I’ll have to do it at some point today, but I’m not ready to confront him yet. I’m not sure how I feel. He was the asshole, so why do I feel guilty? In any case, I have more pressing things to do.

So I finish getting dressed and I rush down into the Common Room, stopping on the lowest step.

There are small groups of students here and there, but they’re unusually quiet, huddled around their tables, whispering, showing each other stuff on their phones.

It’s when I hear a quiet sniffle that my head snaps to my left and I see an older fae-blooded woman approach me, carrying a bunch of papers with her eyes fixed on the staircase pillar right next to me.

*

Without giving me so much as a glance, the woman takes one paper and starts taping it to the pillar.

Frowning, I walk around her to see what it is.

“Missing,” the flier says, in large block letters, “a green journal embossed with initials RO. Reward: 1,000 aureons.

And then the contact number.

My eye gets drawn to the woman again. She must be Professor Onas’ wife or something. A pang of sympathy shoots through me.

Once she’s finished taping it, the woman turns on her heel and finds herself face to face with me. “The Authority are saying it’s not important,” she tells me, in a distant, mournful voice of someone who’s just been through a shock, “but it’s missing. How can it not be important?”

And she’s not really asking. I don’t think she even sees me, not really. She staggers off, sniffling, disappearing through the archway and down the stairs, leaving me standing there in dumbfounded silence.

I force myself to snap out of it. I turn on my heel and start walking to my usual table.

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