Page 88 of Shadow Caster
Payne gripped the bars. “Redmond, what the hell is this?”
The Trial Master turned to us as if seeing us for the first time. “Oh, yes. You two.” He looked down at Mariana. “Cora wanted to wipe your memories and let you go. But it isn’t that simple anymore.” He tugged at his hair. “Everything is messed up.”
“Redmond.” Payne’s voice was calm and soothing. “Talk to me, man. Maybe we can work this out together.”
Redmond shook his head vehemently. “There is no other way out. I must get rid of it all. I can’t leave any evidence.” He stroked Madam Mariana’s cheek. “At least she won’t feel a thing. It’s one of her strongest concoctions. She just never expected me to use it on her.”
“What is this place?” Payne asked.
“My lab.” He looked to Mariana again. “Our lab. This was our project, our way out of this fucking place, and now …” His voice cracked. “Now, I’ll have to do it alone.”
“Do what alone?” Payne prodded. “Redmond, come on.”
Redmond fixed his eyes on Payne. “Just six more years, that’s all I have left before I can leave, before they give me what’s owed to me. I’ve worked too hard to let anything come between me and my freedom.” He looked down on Madam Mariana. “Not even you, my love.”
My love … So, Redmond and Mariana were a thing, and not Payne and Mariana. Was it those two I’d overheard in the lab the other day?
“Redmond.” There was a snap to Payne’s voice. “What do you know about the morphs?”
Redmond smiled weakly. “Everything. They were my ticket out of here. Did you know that morphs reproduce asexually when in their natural form? No? Not many people do. They breed once a year. All it took was one to breed an army of hounds, but I didn’t think far enough ahead. I should have kept a couple of morphs aside in their natural forms, as backup, just in case my breeder died. But I was rushing. Wanting to get the trial ready last year. I had Mariana bind all the offspring into hound form. I should have asked her to leave a couple in their natural form,” he chided himself.
“Wait,” Payne said. “Are you saying you created hounds out of morphs?”
“Have you any idea how dangerous it is to catch a fomorian hound? I want to live to reap the rewards of this fucking position, and the damned knights at the fortress are adamant that we use feral hounds in the trials. Otherwise, I would have just taken some of our stabled ones and bred them, but the fucking stable hands keep track of everything. They’ve even named the hounds, and every knight is allocated one, so if any went missing, they’d notice. The bullshit they feed the cadets about the catacombs being a breeding ground is only half right. Like hell they’d allow it to grow out of control. They expect fresh hounds each year and slaughter the ones left alive after the trials.”
“Archer always made it look so easy. Replacing the slaughtered hounds in a matter of days with fresh feral until he had his little …accident.” He cleared his throat.
Why had he said it that way? With that inflection … Wait a minute. “Did you have something to do with it? Did you have something to do with the accident?”
He leaned back against the counter. “I needed that position. It should have gone to me, not a cadet just out of training.”
“What did you do?” Payne’s tone was hard.
He shrugged. “Mariana enraged the hound, which interfered with Archer’s little hound whisperer trick.”
I felt sick. “And then you played the hero and got him back to the barracks.”
“Look, I didn’t mean for him to lose a whole leg. Maybe a hand or just be badly injured. Long enough for me to step in and prove myself.” He winced. “But it worked out more permanently than that, and I can’t say I’m sorry. Mariana and I used the hounds Archer had already caught as templates to create our army. No one noticed. The trials since have gone smoothly, and the morphs have taken well to their new roles, even killed a couple of cadets. It was perfect.”
Oh, God. He was crazy.
“Then what went wrong?” Payne asked.
How could he be so calm, so reasonable when talking to this madman?
Redmond scratched at his head. “The morphs in hound form started to lose it. Not a bad thing if they were going to be taking part in the trial, but then they started shifting in and out of hound form.” He sighed. “The binding was losing its grip. Mariana ran some tests and realized the issue was with the breeder morph. The binding had somehow linked it to its offspring, and it was hungry. You see, morphs feed off the memories of the dead creature whose form they take, but these morphs hadn’t been given that option. We’d manipulated them into existence and bound them using weaver magic, and they were slowly unraveling, so we had to get them memories.”
“You brought the breeder onto Academy grounds,” Payne said. “You let it feed.”
“Yes, but we didn’t kill anyone. Mariana put the student into a deep death like slumber, which allowed the morph to feed on the memories, and because the breeder was bound in its natural form, it couldn’t take on the student’s form.”
“You used the vents to get the breeder into the Academy?” Payne asked.
“It was the easiest way.”
Anger bubbled up my throat. “The easiest way? You think any of this has been easy on anyone? You fucking wanker, you took their lives from them. You took my best friend away from me!” I rattled the bars, wanting nothing more than to grab him by the throat and squeeze.
His lip curled. “You have no idea what it’s like. You’re a child.”
