The Secret of Spellshadow Manor (Spellshadow Manor #1)

“It’s true,” agreed Aamir. “You may want to refer to your rulebook before running off on your own. The punishments here are severe.” He gestured to the nightstand by Alex’s bed. “You’ll find it in the drawer there.”


Alex eyed the nightstand warily. He didn’t want to read any kind of rulebook for this absurd place—what was the point, when he was going to escape anyway? Reading their rules would feel like one step closer to submitting to them.

The punishments, though. He felt he’d already gotten something of a taste of how ‘severe’ they could be.

He let out a breath. Well, Natalie would have to leave her dorm at some point. He would just have to find her as soon as he could.

“So,” said Jari, “when did you realize you were a wizard?”

Aamir groaned. “Please, call us ‘arcanologists’,” he said. “‘Wizard’ sounds so…fantastical.”

“And arcanologist sounds like someone with his head in a book,” Jari retorted.

Alex frowned. “I am not a wizard, or an arcanologist.”

Jari stared at him. “Huh?”

“You heard me,” Alex replied.

“You’re saying you didn’t cause any magical events? No buildings catching fire, or luck turning miraculously in your favor?”

“Nothing like that whatsoever,” Alex declared. “Unless you count seeing strange figures nobody else can see, I guess,” he added.

Jari’s eyes widened. Aamir’s head tilted ever so slightly as he leaned in.

“Seeing strange figures?” he said in his rich voice. “That’s a new one.”

“Aptitude for summoning, maybe?” Jari said speculatively.

“That or necromancy,” Aamir replied.

Jari looked horrified.

“Regardless,” Alex interjected, as this conversation was flying over his head, “I think I would have noticed if I were a wizard or an arcanologist. I’m just a senior at Middledale High. Nothing fantastical.”

Jari bounced to his feet with a bright smile. “Well, not anymore, you’re not. Come on, you should get washed and then we’ll show you around before class.”

Aamir nodded. “That would be a good idea.”

Damn it. Of course, Alex would be expected to go to class. He could try to skip it, but that would be more than a little suspicious for a student on his first day. He’d have to figure out a way to explore later, without attracting blatant attention.

Noticing Alex’s hesitance, Aamir reached out and patted his shoulder lightly. “Don’t worry. You’ve got a few hours, and you won’t be asked to perform magic for the first few weeks.” Aamir ducked down beneath his own bed and pulled out a plain dark outfit—cotton pants, a shirt, and a sweater. “You’ll get your own set of clothes made to measure soon,” he added, “but for now you can borrow one of mine.”

“Perform magic,” Alex repeated slowly as he accepted the clothes, his brain still coming to terms with the fact that magic even existed.

Jari chuckled. Grabbing Alex by the wrist, he dragged him out the door and into a hallway hung with gray ivy. “You’ll be fine!” he said. “The basics are easier than breathing. If you were chosen and brought here, you can do it.”

But Alex hadn’t been brought here.

What would that mean for him?





Chapter 9





Jari and Aamir showed Alex to a bare communal bathroom lined with individual cubicles down the hallway, where he took a shower. He couldn’t stop shivering as he stepped beneath the water, even though it was warm, and he didn’t feel any better when he was dry and in his new change of clothes. The sweater felt fairly thick to the touch, but his bones still ached from the cold. What is it with this place?

Once he reunited with the boys, who’d waited in the hallway for him, the first room Jari showed Alex was a small study chamber, complete with bookshelves and a fireplace. Several other students sat in chairs around the mostly empty tables, some reading books, others just staring into space. Alex noticed one bored-looking boy spinning a tiny loop of flames around his finger.

“This is the study hall,” explained Jari. “It’s where you come to read books and generally be uninteresting.”

Aamir made an irritated noise.

They stepped back out into the hallway, and Alex paused. The hallway was different than it had been a minute ago. The lights on the walls had a pinkish glow now, flickering slightly as dawn’s first smear of red light pressed itself against windows overlooking a great lawn below.

“Did we come out a different door?” he asked, feeling disoriented.

Jari cackled in glee. Aamir sighed and put his hand to his brow, looking exasperated.

“The hallways take some getting used to,” he said to Alex. “They shift on you a little.”

Alex stared out at the grass. “Shift? They move?”

“No, no,” replied Aamir hastily. “They don’t move, not in terms of the manor itself. The doors will always be in the same places, and look the same. The hallways themselves, though, they don’t seem to have any sense of where in the building they are located, or, for that matter, where in the world…The manor’s surroundings change, you see—the view from the windows can look as though we were located in any number of places, or countries.”

Like the Head’s hands.

Apparently the whole world was out there, but in here was madness.

So the first step to escaping would be to figure out how to navigate the manor.

Jari looked down at a shining watch affixed to his wrist. He adjusted a few knobs on it, and it whirred, clicking and snapping until it let out a little chime.

“Looks like this hallway is somewhere in Southeast Asia,” he said brightly.

Alex raised an eyebrow, but Aamir just clapped him on the back.

“Jari is much more adept than he may at first seem,” he explained. “I keep him around for a reason, you know.”

Jari tutted.

With a curious eye on Jari’s watch, Alex followed them onward.