“It is a weighty name for someone so small.” Yu Fong smiled a nice easy smile. He would smile like that while he watched a cute puppy play with a butterfly or while his flunkies were torturing his enemy. Take your pick. “The Beast Lord commands fifteen hundred shapeshifters.”
“More or less.” It was more, but he didn’t need to know that.
His dark eyes fixed on me. “One day my kingdom will be greater.”
Ha-ha! Yeah, right. “I’m here with Master Gendun’s knowledge and at his request.”
He didn’t say anything. The metal table under my fingers felt warm. I rested more of my hand on it. Definitely warm. The cafeteria was air-conditioned and even now, with magic up, the air stayed pretty cool, which meant the metal table should’ve been cold.
“A girl disappeared. She was a small girl. Shy. Her name is Ashlyn.”
No reaction. The table was definitely getting warmer.
“She was scared of you.”
“I don’t kill little girls.”
“What makes you think she was killed? I didn’t say anything about her being killed.”
He leaned forward slightly. “If I take notice of something that offends me, I choose to ignore it or kill it. I ignored her.”
Boy, this dude was conceited. “Why did she offend you?”
“I’ve never threatened her. She had no reason to cringe in my presence. I don’t expect you to understand.”
I thought hard on why he would find an obvious display of fear offensive.
“When she cringed, you felt insulted. You had no intention of hurting her, so by showing fear, she implied that your control over your power was imperfect.”
Yu’s eyes widened slightly.
“I’m the ward of the Beast Lord,” I told him. “I spend a lot of time with arrogant control freaks.”
The table under my hand was almost too hot to keep touching it. I held on. “Ashlyn annoyed you. You said you ignored her. You didn’t say anything about your bodyguards. Did they do something to Ashlyn to make her disappear?”
His face was the picture of disdain, which was just a polite way of saying that he would’ve liked to sneer at me but it was beneath him. I’ve seen this precise look on the Beast Lord’s face. If he and Curran ever got into the same room, Kate’s head would explode.
I waited but he didn’t say anything. Apparently Yu decided to not dignify it with an answer.
Thin tendrils of smoke escaped from his book. The table near him must have been much hotter than on my end. That had to be something because the metal was now hurting my fingers.
“If I find out that you hurt Ashlyn, I’ll hurt you back,” I said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Do. Your book is smoking.”
He picked it up. I slowly raised my hand, blew on my skin, and got up to leave.
“Why do you care?” he asked.
“Because none of you do. Look around you—a girl is missing. A girl you saw in class every day got so scared by something, she had to hide from it. Nobody is looking for her. All of you are just going on with your business as usual. You have all this power and you didn’t lift a finger to help her. You just sit there, reading your book, comfy behind your bodyguards, and demonstrate how awesome your magic is by heating up your table. Somebody has to find her. I decided to be that somebody.”
I couldn’t tell if any of this was sinking in.
“True strength isn’t in killing—or ignoring—your opponent, it’s in having the will to shield those who need your protection.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Who said that?”
“I did.” I walked away.
Brook was staring at me.
“Come on,” I told her, loud enough for him to hear the derision in my voice. “We’re done here.”
—
In the hallway I walked to the window and exhaled. The nerve. All that power, all that magic boiling in him, and he just sat there. Didn’t do a thing to help Ashlyn. He didn’t care.
Brook cleared her throat behind me.
“I just need a minute.”
I looked outside at the courtyard, enclosed by the square building of the school. It was a really large courtyard. No place to hide, though: benches, flowers, twisted stone paths. A single tree rose toward the northern end of it, surrounded by a maze of concentric flower beds, spreading from it like one of those little handheld puzzle games where you have to roll the ball into a hole through a plastic labyrinth.
“You’re wrong,” Brook said behind me. “You know what, we all got problems. Just because I didn’t look for Ashlyn doesn’t make me a bad person. Do you have any idea how competitive the Mage Academy exams are? Getting the right credit is taking up all my time. And I don’t even know you! Why do I have to justify myself to you?”
The flowers were in full bloom. Blue asters, delicate bearded irises, cream and yellow, purplish spiderwort—I had a lot of herbology in my old school. Normal for early June. The tree had tiny little buds just beginning to unfurl into gauzy white and pink petals.
“It’s not like I even knew her that well. I don’t see why I should be held accountable for whatever problem made her hide. If she’d come to me and said, ‘Brook, I’m in trouble,’ I would’ve helped her.”
“What is that tree?”
“What?”
“The tree down in the yard.” I pointed to it. “What kind of tree is it?”
Brook blinked. “I don’t know. It’s the dead tree. You can’t get to it now anyway, not with the magic up, because the flower garden is warded. Listen, I’m not proud that I didn’t look for Ashlyn. All I am saying is that maybe I didn’t look for her and I probably should have, but I was busy.”
I bet it was an apple tree. Some apple trees bloomed late, but most of them flowered in April and May. It was June now.
“How long has that tree been dead?”
“As long as I can remember. I’ve been in this school for three years and it was always dead. I don’t know why they don’t cut it down. Are you listening to me?”
“It’s flowering.”
Brook blinked. “What?”
“The tree is blooming. Look.”
Brook looked at the window. “Huh.”
Perfect hundred in botany. Apples in the drawer. Wolf print on the desk. Terrified of a boy who creates heat, because where there is smoke, there is fire. Blooming apple tree that has been dead for years.
It all lined up in my head into a perfect arrow pointing to the tree.
“Can we get down there?”
Brook was staring at the tree. “Yes.”
Two minutes later I marched out of the side door into the inner yard and down the curved stone path. I was fifty feet from the tree when I sensed magic in front of me. I stopped and snapped into the sensate vision. A wall of magic rose in front of me, glowing lightly with pale silver. A ward, a defensive spell designed to keep out intruders. Currents of power coursed through it.
Some wards glowed with translucent color, both a barrier and a warning that the barrier existed, and walking into it would hurt. This one was invisible to someone without my vision. And judging by the intensity of the magic, touching it would hurt you bad enough to leave you writhing in pain for a few minutes or knock you out completely.
I turned and walked along the ward, with Brook following me. The spell followed the curved flower bed.
“What’s the point of the ward?”
“Nobody knows,” Brook said.
“Did you ever ask Gendun?”
“I have, actually. He just smiled.”
Great.
Ahead, a two-foot-wide gap severed the circle of the ward. I stopped by it, looked through, and saw another ward. This was a magic maze, with rings inside rings of wards and in the center of it all was the apple tree.
“She’s watching us,” Brook hissed.
“What?”
“Second-floor window, on the left.”
I looked up and saw Lisa looking at us. Our stares connected. Lisa’s face had this strange mix of emotions, part realization, part fear. She had figured me out. She understood that I saw the ward somehow and I knew about the apple tree, and she was afraid now. It couldn’t be me she was scared of. I wasn’t that scary. Was she scared that I would find Ashlyn?
A bright green glow burst from Lisa’s back. It snapped into the silhouette of an eight-foot-tall wolf. The beast stared at me with eyes of fire.
My heart fluttered in my chest like a scared little bird. Something ancient looked at me through that fire. Something unimaginably old and selfish.
The wolf jerked and vanished. If I had blinked, I would’ve missed it.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?” Brook asked.
So I had seen it with my sensate vision.
Lisa turned away and walked off. My forehead felt iced over. I swiped the cold sheen off my forehead and saw sweat on my hand. Ew.
Things were making more and more sense. I turned to Brook. “Do you have a library?”
She gave me a look like I was stupid. “Really? Do you really need to ask that question?”
“Lead the way!”
Brook headed to the door. Just as she reached for it, the door swung open and Barka blocked the way. “Hey!”
Brook pushed past him and marched down the hall, clenching her teeth, looking like she would mow down whoever got into her way. I followed her.
Barka caught up with me. “Where are we all going so fast?”