The Chain (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #3)

“What about it?” pressed Alex.

“Just how important it is to everything they do here,” he murmured. “Don’t worry, I’ve not been drinking the Kool-Aid,” he assured them with a smile, seeing everyone’s worried faces. “I think they just wanted me to understand, so I pretended I did. Then they went over the behaviors and spells from the winners and losers of the last few years—they have it all written out in these huge scrapbook-type things, with lists and lists of spells used and successes and things of that nature. It is very peculiar, but fairly interesting too. After a few hours of that, they took me on a tour through the tunnels beneath the arena. You know, the ones the combatants come out from and get taken back into… if they, you know, lose.” He looked as baffled as the rest of them did, as he relayed the day he had had.

Alex, however, found himself intrigued by what Aamir said, as he remembered the night of the Ascension Ceremony and the strange, hypnotizing horror of it, to have what was essentially ‘graduation’ so openly cheered and celebrated. Even they hadn’t been able to tear their eyes away from the scenes that had played out that night, as wrong as they knew the Ceremony to be. He thought of those poor, tortured mages, forcibly dragged away by guards to have their essences removed—from students to sacrificial prisoners in the space of one evening.

Somehow, his remembrance of those guards turned his thoughts to the prisoner he had seen from the tower, brought in with the guards who had come back from Spellshadow. With Helena there, he figured it was as good a time as any to ask.

“Helena, do you know anything about the prisoner who was brought into Stillwater today?” he asked.

The others looked at him in surprise, clearly not having heard anything about a prisoner or anyone new arriving at Stillwater House that day. Neither had Helena, Alex thought, seeing the blank expression on her face.

She shook her head. “I don’t know of any prisoner. Nobody told me,” she replied, seemingly perplexed.

“When did you see them?” quizzed Ellabell.

“I went for a walk before my first lesson. There was this loud trumpet, and I just followed it and happened to see someone being brought in,” he explained. “I think they came from Spellshadow.”

Aamir frowned. “How do you know?”

“The Head was with them… and so was Professor Renmark, only not the one we knew,” he sighed grimly.

“What do you mean?” Jari chimed in, eyes filled with macabre interest.

“Renmark is the new Finder.”

Natalie gasped. “No—what do you mean, he is the new Finder?”

The faces staring back at him were pale with dread. It had not been an easy thing for him to absorb either, and he had seen it with his own eyes. He felt a pang of remorse for Natalie, whose face showed more horror than the rest; she had known Renmark better than any of them, taking private lessons from him in dark magic, and he knew she had learned a lot from the professor, which had built a certain mutual respect between them, despite the hatred Renmark had incited in the others.

“The Head needed a new Finder, so he chose Professor Renmark,” explained Alex. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, all raggedy and gray—the same state Malachi Grey was in… Only, weirdly, it seemed like he could see me. He looked my way.”

Alex’s friends stared at him in confusion. “I have no idea why,” Alex shrugged.

“So… does this mean Spellshadow is back in the Head’s hands?” asked Jari.

Alex nodded. “I think it must—why would the guards have come back otherwise?”

“Do you think they’re okay?” wondered Ellabell sadly.

It was a question Alex couldn’t answer. He could only hope the students at Spellshadow were doing fine, or were in no worse state than they had been in before, though he imagined the Head must have implemented some new rules to try to prevent an uprising from happening again. What those new rules were, he shuddered to think.

“Whatever happens, we know they aren’t dead, and as long as they’re alive, there’s hope,” Alex stated, trying to give courage to the drained faces of his friends. “One person who isn’t going to be okay, however, is that prisoner. Do you know where they might have taken them?” He turned to Helena, certain she could shed some light on the matter.

“I don’t. I can find out, though.” Helena tilted her head thoughtfully. “Just leave it to me.”

The group looked up sharply as the door creaked, disturbing their hushed conversation. At the far end of the room, a stern-looking wizard had entered, his eyebrow raised as he saw the congregation gathered around Jari’s bed. With slow deliberation, he looked from his watch to them and back again, tutting loudly.

“Isn’t it time you were leaving? Visiting hours are long over,” he declared.

“Just five more minutes,” Jari pleaded, but the dour medical mage could not be swayed.

“Out—now!” he barked. The group said their swift farewells to Jari and scurried from the room with promises to come back tomorrow.

Though the others headed straight for their rooms, Alex waited until they weren’t looking and slipped away from the group at one of the hallway junctions, with other ideas on his mind. Aamir’s words about the tunnels had inspired him, bringing back memories of what the Gifting Ceremony entailed. With those recollections, a decision had come to him: he would use the cover of darkness to investigate the arena.

Alex had a sneaking suspicion that the black bottles, or whatever fancy glasswork the Stillwater folk used, might be stashed away beneath the amphitheater, at the end of the tunnel where the losers were hauled away. It made sense; Helena had told them that the Gifting Ceremony happened beneath the amphitheater, so Alex figured that had to be where they stored the stolen essence, in the same way that the antechamber attached to the room with manacles was where they stored the pulsing black bottles at Spellshadow.

The hallways mostly empty given the hour, he crept uninterrupted through the villa and out across the lakeshore, sticking as closely to the shadows as he could and making his way toward the vacant arena. As he walked along the eerie pearlescent shingle and up over the field toward the amphitheater, he felt a rush of dread. He became aware of the familiar sensation of eyes on him, making his skin feel hot and prickly. Someone was watching him.