The Chain (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #3)

Alex knew the gargantuan doors to the villa rested a short way from where he crouched, and he guessed that must be where the special visitors were headed. Looking ahead, he saw the spire of one of the corner towers and rushed toward it, clambering up through one of the windows into the room beyond. To his relief, it was empty—little more than a storage room, filled to the brim with clutter and broken furniture. However, the window looked out onto the stretching fields below, giving Alex the perfect vantage point from which to watch the arrivals.

As they neared the main entrance, Alex could see the small band of individuals was made up, mainly, of guards. The same ones, he supposed, as the ones he had watched rowing away, from the lighthouse. Two of the guards carried a shrunken figure awkwardly between them, shrouded in a heavy woolen blanket, though the being beneath seemed to be putting up something of a decent fight despite its diminished size. Once or twice, the two Amazonian guards almost lost their grasp on the blanketed figure, though they always managed to regain control of the prisoner.

Much to his displeasure, Alex saw that the Head was with them too. Alex marveled at this yo-yoing of the Head’s, consistently showing up at Stillwater to beg assistance from his sister, but there seemed to be a more relaxed quality to the Head this time as Alex watched the hooded figure embrace Alypia, who had emerged from the doors beneath to greet the arriving party.

“Has it all been dealt with?” she asked insistently, holding her brother at arm’s length.

“Thanks to you, everything is back in order,” replied the Head with a strained smile, the expression looking deeply unnatural on his drawn, skeletal face.

It was then that Alex noticed the additional figure, trailing behind the rest of the group. It was a face and form Alex had not expected to see.

Behind the guards and the prisoner, a graying, spectral figure moved slowly, as if through molasses. He was dressed in threadbare clothes, the edges of his robe frayed and torn, though not quite as ragged as Alex remembered. Catching sight of this awful being, Alex found himself combatting horrifying flashbacks of the last time he had seen Finder, in the tombs at Spellshadow, wondering if Finder had come back from his second death, somehow, and was hell-bent on haunting him. But, on second viewing, Alex realized this figure was not quite the same. He was wearing robes of some sort, but they were more modern than Malachi Grey’s had been, and his face was altogether less ancient, though it bore the same vacant, disturbing stare.

Understanding dawned—the Head had done as his sister had asked and found a replacement for Malachi Grey.

It was Renmark.

Renmark was the new Finder, a mass of floating, ragtag gray, with one sole purpose. The Head had done to him what he had done to Malachi Grey, all those years ago, reducing him from mortal being to phantom helper with a wave of his hybrid hands. As much as he hated Renmark, he couldn’t help feeling a pang of remorse for what the teacher had become, wondering if he would end up feeling the same way about it as Malachi had, in the end, resenting the Head and everything his half-life had become.

Suddenly, Renmark’s gaze lifted toward where Alex was watching from. Instinctively, Alex ducked back behind the wall of the tower, even though Renmark shouldn’t be able to see him, just like Malachi couldn’t. Still, the last thing he wanted to do was run into a phantom Renmark, which was possibly the only thing worse than running into a living Renmark.

His previous pang of remorse turned to a feeling of grim irony.

You finally got the high-powered position you wanted so desperately, Renmark, he thought to himself. After all, being the new Finder technically made Renmark the second Head; a position of authority high enough to satisfy Renmark’s hunger for power, surely? Alex wasn’t certain it was quite what the ex-teacher had had in mind.

Alex didn’t dare peer back out, though he strained to hear what was being said as voices filtered up from below. Annoyed that he couldn’t make out what they were saying, he braved a glance out the window, just in time to see the Headmistress walking toward the prisoner, who struggled vehemently between the strong arms of the guards. Alex willed Alypia to remove the blanket from the prisoner’s face, so that he might see who was beneath it. But she did not, leaving his questions unsatisfied. Instead, Alypia simply turned and walked back toward her brother, apparently unimpressed by the blanketed gift he had brought for her.

As intensely as Alex scrutinized the shrouded prisoner, he couldn’t work out who it could be. There was an androgyny to the shape, and he couldn’t discern any defining features, aside from the size. But then, the guards standing next to the figure were of such a towering height that anyone would’ve looked small beside them.

He ducked back into the tower as he spotted Renmark raising his ghostly gray eyes once more toward where he stood. Unsettled, and frustrated at no longer being able to see what was going on, Alex shuffled as close to the edge of the window frame as he dared, straining to listen.

“And everything is back as it should be?” Alypia asked, her tone tinged with doubt.

Drily, Alex wondered what it must have been like for the Head, growing up with a sister like Alypia, but he found he could not easily picture them in the domestic setting of ordinary siblings. These two were as far from ordinary as it was possible to be, and who knew how many more royal siblings were out there who had been part of this dysfunctional family unit? It made him think back to the portraits on the walls of the ballroom at Spellshadow, pondering how many of those had been siblings and how many had been other relatives.

“The faculty has been restored, though rather more hastily than I would have liked, and I have managed to regain control of the school—all those who proved troublesome have been dealt with,” insisted the Head, though Alex could garner little else from the conversation. Every time they began to speak of something interesting, the wind changed, carrying their voices away from him so he couldn’t make out what it was they were saying anymore.

Still, what he had heard was enough to cause a wave of dread to pass through him, sinking to the pit of his stomach. If the Head had regained control and everyone had been dealt with, what did that mean for the students? He felt slightly more optimistic at the sight of only one prisoner, but it wasn’t much of a consolation; he hadn’t expected the guards to bring anyone back at all.

He listened as the group moved through the doors and into the villa itself. Only when he was sure they had moved far enough inside did he dare to look back out of the window. Glancing at the field below, he froze, his blood running cold. Staring straight back at him, meeting his gaze head-on, was the full, blazing stare of the ghostly Renmark.

This time, Alex knew he had been seen.





Chapter 32