“This is bad,” was all I could manage to say.
“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that too.”
“No, I mean really bad. Like, to a level I didn’t know badness could reach.”
Archer crouched down near the lip of the crater, the flickering blue light playing in his eyes. “It gets worse.”
“What, does this pit also eat kittens? How much worse can it be?” I stared at the flat rock, blinking at the power radiating off the markings.
“Ever since I left Hex Hall, I’ve been looking into the history of the place. In the past eighteen years, six students have disappeared from the school.”
I finally tore my gaze away from the depression and turned back to Archer. My knees were weak, and my stomach churned with dread, but I made myself play devil’s advocate. “That’s not that many. Have you ever been to a big human school, Cross? Some of those places lose six kids in, like, a week.”
“Sophie, two of those kids were Anna and Chaston.”
I knew he was serious because he hardly ever used my first name, and then I just went ahead and let my knees do their thing and give out. I thumped onto the ground.
“After the attacks, they both vanished,” Archer said.
“No,” I said, thinking of Daisy that night at Shelley’s. How she’d kept insisting that The Eye couldn’t be there. “No, their parents came to get them.”
Archer stood up and moved closer to me. “Did you ever see them?” he asked quietly. “Did any of us?”
I racked my brain. Mrs. Casnoff had told us that their parents had come for them, and they were taking the year off. They were supposed to come back after the summer.
But no. I’d never seen either of them—or their parents—after Alice fed on them.
“I visited their parents,” Archer continued. “All four of them were under some heavy spells, Mercer. They were convinced their daughters were spending the summer at Hecate. Said they talk to them once a week. But none of our guys have been able to locate either Chaston or Anna anywhere.”
My brain was spinning. Demons, missing students…
Why had my life suddenly become a Nancy Drew mystery from hell?
“Okay, but that would mean…” I could hardly say the next words. They seemed unbelievable to me. “That would mean Mrs. Casnoff is in on it, and if that is the case, my dad would know something about it.”
“Not necessarily,” Archer said. “Hecate Hall and Graymalkin Island are completely Mrs. Casnoff’s domain. Your dad signs off on all the kids who’re sentenced here, but past that, he leaves it all to her.”
Way to be screwed over by delegating, Dad.
I stood up and paced a few feet around the basin. “So you think Chaston and Anna were taken so they could be made into demons?”
“It seems to fit. Daisy and Nick are both teenagers; so was Alice back in the day. Maybe Mrs. Casnoff figured they’d be easier to turn because they’d already been up close and personal with the dark side.”
“Why, though? Why would Mrs. Casnoff, of all people, be raising demons?”
“It might not be just her,” Archer suggested. “After all, her sister works for the Council. Their father used to be the head. I think this goes way deeper than we can even guess.”
I kicked a clump of dirt, and it tumbled down the sides of the crater, landing on the slab. For a second, I thought I saw something move, but it was probably just a trick of the light. “Cross, my dad thinks if he can catch the people who changed Nick and Daisy, he can get them to reverse it, and stop a war between The Eye and Prodigium. But if it’s the Casnoffs who are doing this?”
Archer stood up, dusting his hands on his pants. “Yeah. As we’ve established, it’s bad.”
“So…why did you want to show me this? You guys could handle this on your own. Why risk getting kicked out of your He-Man Monster-Haters Club?”
“Because we can’t handle this on our own. At least I don’t think we can.”
“You said yourself you already have some Prodigium working with you. Why not go to them?”
“We have a handful,” he said, frustration creeping into his voice. “And most of them suck. Look, just consider it a peace offering, okay? My way of saying I’m sorry for lying to you. And pulling a knife in your presence, even if it was just to open a damn window to get out before you vaporized me.”
Most girls got flowers. I got a dirt pit used for demon raising. Nice.
“Thanks,” I replied. “But don’t you want in on this?”
He looked at me, and not for the first time, I wished his eyes weren’t so dark. It would have been nice to have some idea of what was going on in his head. “That’s up to you,” he said.
Mom always liked to say that we hardly ever know the decisions we make that change our lives, mostly because they’re little ones. You take this bus instead of that one and end up meeting your soul mate, that kind of thing. But there was no doubt in my mind that this was one of those life-changing moments. Tell Archer no, and I’d never see him again. And Dad and Jenna wouldn’t be mad at me, and Cal…Tell Archer yes, and everything suddenly got twistier and more complicated than Mrs. Casnoff’s hairdo.
And even though I’m a twisty and complicated girl, I knew what my answer had to be.
“It’s too much of a risk, Cross. Maybe one day when I’m head of the Council and you’re…well, whatever you’re going to be for L’Occhio di Dio, we could work on some kind of collaboration.” That brought up depressing images of me and Archer sitting across a boardroom table, sketching out battle plans on a whiteboard, so my voice was a little shaky when I continued. “But for now, it’s too dangerous.” And not just because basically everyone in our lives would want to kill us if they found out, I thought. But because I was pretty sure I was still in love with him, and I thought he might feel something similar for me, and there was no way we could work together preventing the Monster Apocalypse/World War III without that becoming an issue.
Not that I could say any of that.
Archer’s face was blank as he said, “Cool. Got it.”
“Cross,” I started to say, but then his eyes slid past me and went wide with horror. At the same time, I became aware of a slithering noise behind me. That just could not be good; in my experience, nothing pleasant slithers.
Still, I was not prepared for the nightmares climbing out of the crater.