Page 51 of Monster's Pet

Professor Dunlop rolled his eyes. “Be safe. Come to me if you need anything. I don’t want to hear anything about this fromanyone.” He stalked away to his office.

I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to my hallway, looking forward to Aiden’s test on Sunday morning.

Aiden hadan audience when he surfaced at the end of his hour under water. It was a relief to have our friends here, supporting him, even though I knew every single one of them would rather be asleep right now. We all stood up from the benches and applauded him.

He smiled a bashful grin before focusing his attention on Professor Akhtar, who had run the test personally.

“I’m glad you were able to work through your issues with the ley lines,” the professor said to him. “I will be double checking every student before we go to Atlantis next week, just to make extra sure that there aren’t any accidents. Go get dressed and bring me your backup plan in my office.”

“Yes, sir,” Aiden said.

“You did well,” Professor Akhtar said reassuringly. “I’m pleased you were able to figure things out.”

“I needed a little more time to adjust to the lack of ley lines,” Aiden said. “And having Siobhan near me helped.”

We had decided to continue the rumor that his soul bond was the reason his magic had gone haywire. The few other beasts at Blackthorn Academy had agreed to encourage it, given that they would also gain more time with their soulmates. I figuredI wasn’t rubbing it in people’s faces, I was getting backup, so Professor Dunlop couldn’t be angry with me. Nobody had connected the manducare with Aiden’s flares of power, and we hoped we could keep it that way.

CHAPTER 14

I settledinto my tiny office connected to Professor Akhtar’s for my office hours on Wednesday, arranging my textbooks on my desk in preparation for any student who might come in.

I hopedsomeonewould come see me.

I’d been the teaching assistant for Professor Akhtar for the entire year so far, and other than the week before midterms and final exams, when I was inundated and couldn’t answer questions fast enough, I never saw a soul.

I rubbed my ring finger on my right hand, where my ring from Grandfather usually sat, irritated at its absence. Professor Reynolds had told us to leave any jewelry behind today, as the spell we were learning in Quantitative Spellcraft reacted badly to worked metal. I had been grateful for the warning when one girl, who hadn’t removed her earrings, nearly tore her earlobes to get the metal out of her skin.

He set an essay on metal and its effect on spells involving poison oak components, due Friday.

I peered out the door and strained to hear any footsteps, but there was nothing. I sighed and pulled my notes toward me, getting a fresh paper to start on the essay. “Some plants fight back against the toxicity of metals,” I muttered, writing theequation for the breakdown of chloroplasts under the effect of iron.

Halfway through my essay, I found my mind wandering up two floors to where Aiden was keeping Moonbeam company.

As a group, we had decided that most of us didn’t have the heart to fake hunting the manducares in the forest. Brom and Bruce had volunteered, if we heard reports of any successes, to join the hunters and try to throw them off track.

Fortunately, nobody in the school had succeeded in finding a manducare.

We’d been approached by a few students for tips on how to find one, and we described our adventure, but it wasn’t like it was helpful to anyone. It had been a fluke, one that hopefully wouldn’t happen again.

“I wonder if there’s anything about manducares in my grimoire,” I said out loud, my voice startling me in the silence of my office. “If theyarerelated to the ley line draining, or even rumored to be, then maybe they’d be mentioned in any spells from last time,” I reasoned. “When were the Dark Ages?”

I needed a history book for that, so I put a note on my office door— “Back in five minutes” —and trotted down the stairs to the library. I stood in front of the wall of books on history and flipped through a few of them until I got my answer.

Back upstairs in my office, I pulled my grimoire back toward me with hesitation. I’d never found anything that old in the book before. “Five hundred?” I muttered to myself, flipping pages. “The school didn’t even start until the sixteen hundreds!” Not for the first time, I wished there was some sort of index for the contents of the grimoire. Usually, I wanted a spell index, but today was a first for many things.

I skipped the beginning of the book, because I knew that things weren’t necessarily in the order that they were written. Spells that were the most used generally made their way up tothe front of the book. Ones that I had written were all at the front, despite having used the pages at the back.

“Back, then?” I continued muttering to myself. “Since they’d be rarely mentioned or used.”

I found some interesting spells regarding hygiene and how to keep pests out of the house, and felt optimistic, but continuing to flip forward didn’t seem like it was the answer, because next were a bunch of spells on horticulture.

“Arg,” I exploded, dropping my forehead onto the book.

“I can come back at a better time,” said a timid voice from the doorway.

I shot up in my seat, my head whipping to face the door and a smile plastered onto my face. I hoped it didn’t look too wild. “No, no, please come in! You’re the perfect distraction.”

The girl was a first year student that I had seen in the first semester, Grace. She tentatively edged into the room and perched on the corner of the chair across from my desk, looking like she was going to run any second.

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