The Chronicles of Kerrigan Prequel Series Books #1-3: Paranormal Fantasy Romance Read online

  “So…what do you think?

  In the mother of all ironies, the happy sounds of the alumni party drifted in through the open window, filling the room with a false sense of cheer.

  “I wish I had never come to this freakin’ school.”

  Chapter 2

  By the time Simon woke the next morning, Jacob was long gone. The curtains around his cot had been pulled back, and the sheets changed and pressed so tightly that Simon was fairly certain they could repel water.

  Hospital corners, he thought as he pulled on his jacket and got slowly to his feet. That must be where that comes from.

  While Dr. Stanton was no Dr. Stein, he had successfully removed all traces of the assassin’s sedative from Simon’s blood. His head was clear, his movements crisp and sharp, and, for the first time, those half-formed questions that had been racing around in his brain since the attack solidified into sudden, sharp focus.

  A man had tried to kill him. On orders from someone else. Apparently by someone higher in the hierarchy. The only reason Simon was still alive was because the assassin had been assassinated first by someone faster.

  Simple inquisitiveness didn’t begin to cover it. And Simon’s list of questions was fast becoming an avalanche—one that threatened to overwhelm and destroy. However, despite all the madness descending upon him, at least one thing was certain. He at least knew where to start.

  It was time he tracked down his Botcher. Jason Archer.

  Sometime soon.

  Maybe just not right this very moment.

  No. Now. The sooner the better.

  * * *

  Compared to the raucous events of the day before, the campus was eerily quiet as Simon walked across the lawns on his way to the Oratory. All of the students were already sitting in morning classes, and, judging by the fact that no one had snuck into the infirmary to confirm the grisly tale for themselves, he was guessing that the story had not yet begun to circulate due to the fact that everyone had been distracted by the alumni party.

  In a way, Simon was happy for the quiet. He wanted to talk to people, of course. But what he really wanted to do was to sit down and analyze every single second of what had happened. Examine it from every possible perspective and angle. Form every opinion he could. On his own, but also with his friends. He hadn’t even been able to talk to Argyle yet. For all he knew his best friend was sitting in class, just as oblivious as the rest of them.

  However, in spite of his need for companionship, Simon was grateful for the time to think. There were simply too many pieces missing from this story to make sense of it. Too many unanswered questions for him to begin to calm down his rapidly unravelling nerves.

  Why did someone want to kill me? What the heck have I done? Nothing! How did they even know where to find me?! I hadn’t been planning on going to the Oratory that night. I ended up there simply because I’d been escorting Jacob. How the hell were they able to get inside?!

  From everything Simon had always heard, Guilder security was no joke. Just a few hours ago, he’d seen the man in charge of the school’s protection shake his head in bewilderment. Even he had no idea how this had been done. How had an assassin waltzed right through their gates?

  A sickly churning in Simon’s stomach stopped him in his tracks.

  What if Jason hadn’t gotten there in time? Screw that—what if Jacob hadn’t walked back in when he did?

  Just a few more seconds…

  The sharp crack of the gun echoed again in Simon’s head and a cold sweat broke out all over his body. For a split second, he thought he was going to be sick.

  He dropped his hands down onto his knees and took a deep breath. And again. Slowly he straightened, cleared his head, and fixed his eyes on the Oratory.

  I need to talk to Jason now. He’ll know what to do. He’ll know how to make this right. He always does, doesn’t he? He’s not like everyone else here. Jason’ll fix this. He always does.

  But the more Simon repeated the calming mantra, the emptier the words sounded in his head. He had seen the look on his mentor’s face. Jason had been just as baffled as the rest of them.

  The sooner he found his mentor, the better he would feel. Right?

  After an overly-contemplative walk to the Oratory took him twice as long as it would have normally, Simon finally reached the heavy gilded doors. He went to automatically tug one of them open, freezing suddenly in place. An eerie thought crossing his mind.

  What if the body of the assassin was still in there? What if no one had cleaned up yet, or if that whole place had been quartered off as a crime scene? Would he get in trouble just for going in?

  Screw it! If this place is a crime scene, then I’m its biggest piece of walking, talking evidence. If anyone has a right to go inside, it’s me. Besides, there isn’t any caution tape. Don’t crime scenes always have caution tape? Or guards?

  Simon sucked in a deep breath to steel his nerves, then pushed open the double doors.

  The overpowering smell of bleach burned his nostrils the second he walked inside. It was enough to make his eyes water, and he took an automatic step back before tentatively venturing forward and looking around.

  He froze just inside the Oratory. He couldn’t believe it.

  It was like the attack had never even happened.

  Any piece of evidence had been removed, every remnant of the battle had been chemically washed away. The shell casings had been swept up, the gunpowder residue scrubbed away. The mats on the floor had been taken out entirely and replaced with others that were clearly meant to be the same color—but were a slightly darker shade. Even in the dimly-lit Oratory, he could tell. It probably had to do with the fact that he knew exactly where to look. No one else would probably notice.

  The only thing that remained was a tiny hole in the wall where the first tranquilizer dart meant for Jacob had buried itself in the plaster. The dart itself was gone, of course, but Simon suspected no one had noticed the little hole.

  He traced it with his finger. The only testament left to the terrifying moment he had almost lost his life. The only physical trace left that it had really happened. It felt surreal.

  One moment he was this kid in high school, and in one devastating moment the entire world had changed. Or maybe he had changed. Everything felt different now. It all looked different, and he felt a million years older.

  Someone had tried to kill him, and had nearly succeeded. And yet Guilder seemed to have erased all of it. Like it had never happened. Like he was nobody. Like it meant nothing. It was then that the crippling nausea started to creep back and he turned away deliberately, moving quickly down the hall to Jason’s office.

  The light was on, and Simon opened the door without even knocking.

  Jason appeared to be only just getting there himself. Or maybe was just leaving. The mountain of paperwork on his desk usually implied that his day of loathsome logistics had just begun, but his keys were already in his hand and he was just getting to his feet, or about to sit down, when Simon walked inside.

  “Simon.” His Botcher froze where he stood, looking uncharacteristically unsure. “I-I was just going to the infirmary to check on you.” There was an awkward pause. “How…how are you?”

  The obligatory ‘I’m fine’ rose automatically in Simon’s throat, but he merely shook his head and looked down at the folders scattered across the desk. “You working?”

  “What?” Jason followed his line of sight. “Oh—yeah. You wouldn’t believe how much paperwork is involved with one lousy assassin.” The room went dead quiet as his eyes flickered up cautiously to Simon’s. “Too soon, maybe?”

  Strangely enough, a wide grin stretched across Simon’s face, relaxing the tension that had settled there. He needed a little normalcy right now. In fact, he needed a lot. He even found himself chuckling as he seated himself in the chair opposite the desk. I was right—Jason always knows what to say. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he joked lightly.

  “That’s alrigh
t.” Jason settled back in his own chair, and the moment was forgotten. “At least it got me out of that horrible alumni dinner.”

  That’s right, Simon remembered with a sudden frown. That must’ve been why Jason wasn’t in his office. Except… hadn’t Jacob said Jason wanted to meet that night?

  “It was a last-minute invitation,” Jason said, as if reading his mind. “And when I say invitation, I don’t mean request. More of a demand. When a summons comes down from the dean of the school, it’s not exactly optional. Unfortunately, not even for me.”

  “But you came back,” Simon said quietly. He might be feeling a little more relaxed now that the two of them were actually talking, but that didn’t mean his questions had gone anywhere.

  Jason nodded briskly, in a way that suggested that, over the course of the last twelve hours, he had been forced to recount this story many times before. “I’d made tentative plans to meet with the new kid, Jacob Decker, that night. I needed to cancel them.” He ran his fingers back through his hair, looking suddenly tired. “Good thing I left my cell back in the office, or I wouldn’t have…” His voice trailed off and the little room fell silent once more.

  ‘…gotten here in time.’ Simon finished the sentence Jason couldn’t, in his head. If it wasn’t for a freaking misplaced cellphone, his body would be lying in a ditch somewhere on the side of the road. “Well, anyway,” Simon steadied his hands and quickly changed the subject, “I’m sorry you got yelled at by the dean.”

  Jason looked up distractedly. “What?”

  “Dean Robbins. He was really letting you have it.” Understatement of the year.

  “Oh, you heard that, did you?”

  Simon flushed guiltily. Oops. Wasn’t he supposed to be knocked out from meds at that point?

  Jason rolled his eyes. “Robbins is an idiot. He and the rest of the board. If they have a problem with the way I do things, they can come down here and kiss my ass.”

  Simon smiled faintly, but his face grew worried and he dropped his eyes to the floor. “Yeah, but…Masters.”

  For the first time, Jason paused. He grew very still for a moment before becoming abruptly thoughtful. “Masters doesn’t think I did anything wrong.” He seemed to be selecting his words very carefully, and without seeming to realize it his eyes flickered to the door. “We went back to his office; he asked me…”

  Simon waited on pins and needles, but Jason was lost in thought. Finally he kicked the side of the desk, startling his teacher back to attention. “He asked you what?”

  Jason’s eyes jerked away from the door, and cleared instantaneously as they landed back on Simon. “He asked me what happened, and I told him. Simple as that. Case closed.”

  Simon’s eyebrows shot up, and he made an incredulous sound of disbelief. “Case closed? Really?”

  Jason sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “I have no idea what you mean!” Simon’s voice jumped several octaves all at once. He found it was suddenly quite past his control. “I have no idea what any of this means! I came in here last night, and a man tried to kill me. I have no idea why! I have no idea who he was, or who he was working for. I don’t even know his name!”

  Jason watched his outburst carefully, letting Simon get it all out.

  “And then Jacob and I woke up in the hospital! And no one was even there! And no one will talk to me about it! And this whole school is just going on like nothing ever happened!”

  Jason nodded slowly and tentatively opened his mouth to speak, but there was one more thing on Simon’s list.

  “And the janitorial staff replaced the mats in the training room—and they’re not even the same color blue, Jason! They think they’re fooling everyone—but they’re not the same color blue!”

  The words echoed in silence as Jason leaned back in his chair, waiting to see if Simon was done. When he was satisfied the rant was finished, he folded his hands on the desk with a very serious look on his face. “Would you like me to lodge a formal complaint?”

  With a sudden sense of whiplash Simon jerked back, thrown by the question and the sudden change in momentum. “Would I like you to…what?”

  “Lodge a complaint with the janitorial staff.”

  Simon blinked, unable to articulate a proper response. Sensing his companion’s temporary helplessness, Jason was more than willing to pick up the slack.

  “Normally, we have an uneasy truce—the janitors and I,” he explained. “I don’t bother them; they don’t bother me. But you’re clearly very upset, and if you’d rather the mats were cobalt than cerulean, I’d be happy to make a call—”

  There was a broken gasp and Simon slid his hands up over his face. His shoulders began shaking with silent but hysterical laughter. The kind of laughter indicative of damage, not joy, but it was laughter nonetheless. Just like his volume, it seemed there was no controlling it. It washed out of him like an ebbing tide, racing back to the sea and leaving him shaking in its wake.

  Then laughter turned to embarrassing tears.

  The crying was even worse because it was in front of someone like Jason, but Simon found he couldn’t control it any more than the laughter. It caught him by surprise, but poured out of him just the same, trembling his hands and bowing his shoulders.

  It was quiet, at least. As quiet as his laughing, but Jason saw it all the same.

  He didn’t want to look at his Botcher, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.

  His mentor’s face tightened as he stared helplessly across the desk. Once or twice he moved as if he was going to reach out to Simon, once or twice he opened his mouth to offer words of comfort, but he came up short every time. In the end, he just graciously looked away and waited for his young apprentice to pull himself together, staring out the window with storm clouds brewing behind his troubled hazel eyes.

  When at last it was quiet, Jason gravely turned forward. “I’m going to find out what happened, Simon.” His voice was quiet but firm, and there was a look of dark promise on his face that raised the hairs on the back of Simon’s neck. “You have my word on that.”

  For a second, Simon almost felt sorry for the assassins. Almost.

  He nodded with a warm flush of embarrassment, and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “Have you heard anything from Jacob?” he asked thickly.

  “No, I haven’t.” Jason’s face tightened once more with concern as his fingers traced absentmindedly on the edge of a folder. A folder that Simon guessed was Jacob’s file. “I’m assuming he wasn’t in the infirmary when you left?”

  Simon shook his head. “Nope—gone. And he…he wasn’t in a good place last night.” He remembered Jacob’s final words to him with a shudder. I wish I had never come to this freakin’ school.

  Jason sighed. “Who can blame him? Poor kid. It was his first day.”

  “Plus, his older brother got kicked out.”

  Simon felt the sudden need to share every bit of information he had. If they were talking about Jacob, that meant they weren’t talking about him…and the little freak-out he’d just had.

  “Yeah, I’d heard that.” Jason picked up his keys again and got to his feet, prompting Simon to do the same. “Do me a favor, alright? See if you can talk to him. I still want to meet with him to discuss our training, but I’m not going to ask him to come here, not after what happened. If you happen to run into him, tell him I’ll meet him wherever he wants to go. We can talk in his dorm room for all I care.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Simon nodded quickly.

  He was rather desperate to talk to Jacob anyway, clear up a few things that happened back in the Oratory. A PC-sanctioned excuse was the perfect way in.

  After flashing Jason a quick smile, he pushed to his feet and headed for the door. He was halfway out when Jason called out to him.

  “Simon?”

  Simon turned around in surprise. There was a timbre to Jason’s voice he had rarely heard there before. A kind of intensity that was matched only by the focused glimmer deep
in his eyes.

  “In the meantime…I’ll handle this.”

  They locked eyes, and for the first time since he’d hit the ground on the Oratory room floor Simon felt a flicker of reassurance.

  “They can change the mats all they want. I’m not going to pretend like it didn’t happen.”

  A rush of gratitude welled up inside Simon, a gratitude so intense it threatened to undo him once more. So instead of saying anything, he simply nodded once then disappeared out the door.

  Like I said…

  He picked up his pace as he headed down the hall.

  …Jason will know what to do.

  * * *

  Rather than trying to sit down and focus his attention on afternoon classes, Simon went back to the dorms. But instead of returning to his own, he made a split-second decision, bypassed his door, and headed down the hall to Jacob’s.

  It wasn’t clear at this point whether the guy was avoiding him or not. He may well have just gotten up that morning and didn’t want to wake Simon before he left. But Simon had a nagging feeling in his stomach that there was a bit more to it than that. That the evasion was a bit more intentional.

  He knocked twice on the door, but with no response.

  Come on, Jacob, open up.

  He was about to knock a third time, when it swung open suddenly and he was faced with the last person in the world he expected to see.

  “Professor!” Simon stepped back in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  Professor Lanford stepped out of the dorm room, looking just as surprised to see Simon as Simon was to see him. His thinning hair wisped back in alarm and a faint flush blotched the skin on the base of his neck, as if he was embarrassed to be seen anywhere as common as Joist Hall.

  “Mr. Kerrigan! You were my next stop.” He took a step back as his face cleared quickly to a look of appropriate concern. “I heard about what happened last night in the Oratory; I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

  Another flush of gratitude welled up in Simon’s chest. How strange it was that, just a few weeks ago, he would have thought the only person at this school who’d even notice if he was gone was Argyle. Now, it seemed he’d had people looking out for him all along.