“A box of property?” I asked, wrinkling my forehead as I peered around us. “So who owns it?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” Rafe looked up, his gaze sharpening as he took in the smooth brick wall. “My best guess is that it’s the agency. That their off-campus involvement in the Mage Trials is only barely off campus.”
I frowned out at the city street beside us. The agency was one of the controllers of the Mage Trials wizarding competition. They had their fingers knuckle-deep in the Twyst Academy pie. Still, why would they own land surrounding the school? “These streets are public, aren’t they? The city takes care of them.”
“The city takes care of them, but they’re still private. There’s been an agreement in place with the city of Boston covering that anomaly that dates back to the founding of Twyst Academy. I checked. Even more interesting, there are only two buildings that encroach upon the open space surrounding Twyst Academy. This building, and Founders Hall.”
My brows shot up. In addition to housing the board of directors and various administrative staff, Founders Hall was the headquarters of the advisory panel, the group that organized the student competitors as they navigated their way through the Mage Trials. Since we’d started our own foray into the Trials, we’d been called into Founders Hall what seemed like a dozen times already, each visit more stressful than the last as we progressed through the competition.
“So you’re saying the agency has a back room at Founders Hall?” I asked.
“Somebody does,” Rafe said. “The agency makes the most sense.”
“And nobody at Twyst knows about it? That doesn’t seem reasonable.”
“If they knew, they stopped caring a long time ago. No one’s ever shown up to claim ownership rights in either place in the last hundred years, from what I can tell. The assumption is that this mysterious entity deeded the property back to the academy at some point, only no such records exist to support that.”
“Huh. So you’re thinking that the agency—the group that sets up the Mage Trials, creates all the challenges for students, and maintains the game itself—they’re kicking back in the same building where the advisory panel meets to talk about how the students are doing in the Trials? That’s messed up.”
As much as I hated to admit it, I was starting to get intrigued. If what Rafe was saying was true, this agency group could possibly be playing both ends against the middle—setting up the Trials, and then getting the inside scoop on how the students were handling their tests. Were they able to make adjustments mid-Trials, to take out teams that were getting too dominant? Was that allowed?
I reached out to drift my fingers over the rough brick of the archive building. “What did Thelonius say when you told him about this?”
Rafe’s teeth flashed in the darkness. “I haven’t told him anything yet. If he doesn’t already know, that’s on him. I don’t have any interest in letting him slow down my own investigation. He can wait.”
“Fair enough.” I peered more intently at the wall. “So now what?”
“Now we see what key it takes to open any door we truly want opened.”
He withdrew a long slender object from the neckline of his black knit shirt. A key of rose-colored stone, glowing softly with a silver iridescence that played over its marbled surface. A key I remembered well.
My brows lifted. “Does Luke know you have his key?”
Rafe huffed a quiet laugh. “The long answer to your question is that Luke would be the first to say that the key belongs to all of us, and its primary service is in helping us win the Mage Trials. The short answer, though, is yes. Of course he knows. He gave it to me. I have certain skills that will come into play in what we have to do next, but there’s no need for me to use those skills until necessary. In fact, it would be to our advantage that I don’t use any major magic until the last possible moment.”
I squinted at him. That sounded ominous. “Are you being tracked?”
It was a reasonable concern. Rafe was a Twyst after all, and his uncle was a highly placed member of the board of directors. His family was enmeshed up to their ears in Twyst history. He was also a student wizard who was competing in the Mage Trials, the ultimate competition for wizard prowess in all of wizardly wizardom. Enter the Mage Trials and win it outright, you became one of the most powerful mages in the world, complete with a Mage Trials power booster that left you set for life. Enter the Trials and get flushed out, and your future was nowhere near as awesome. With that in mind, there might be quite a few people interested in following the success of the newest and brightest Twyst.
Rafe shrugged. “I’ve worked out the probabilities, and, while I have plenty of wards in place to dispel ordinary surveillance, I can’t rule out a tracker that might be triggered by my own magic. There are too many variables. So, we do this instead.”
He gestured to the bare wall, and I returned my focus to it. This section of the academy archive building was uniform red brick. There were no windows or doors of any kind, and the wall showed absolutely no detail until the heavily carved facade of the roof line. That was easily thirty feet up. I looked from the wall to Rafe.
“Funny thing about keys,” I drawled. “They generally work better when there’s an existing lock.”
“They have up to this point, yes. But there’s nothing that says that an existing lock—or door, for that matter—is required. All that’s necessary is the belief that a door could be there, wouldn’t you say?”
As he spoke, he held up his hand as if he was offering me an egg cradled in the tips of his fingers. Instead of an egg, a swirling orb of light sprang to life, all blues and purples and reds. I didn’t know much about Rafe’s particular magic, but pretty little glowing spheres seemed like a cool trick.
Only one problem with that. “I thought you weren’t supposed to tap into your magic.”
He brought his fingers together, raising the orb higher. “Certain spells are beneath the threshold of any serious mage’s interest. They’re considered child’s play, almost embarrassing. As a result, I’ve found many and varied ways to use illusions like this to my advantage.”
With a flick of his fingers, the magic left his hand and bounced to the brick wall facing us. Instead of scattering into a burst of sparks, however, it raced in a single line about six or seven feet up the wall, then shot to the right, creating a horizontal line that extended about three feet. At that point, the magic sped downward to the ground within the space of a heartbeat, creating the gleaming outline of a door on the side of the building.
“That’s an illusion?”
“That’s an illusion…until you think it’s something more.”
“Me?” I frowned at him. “Why me?”
“Last I checked, you’ve bonded with Luke, our resident manifester. As I understand it, there’s a comingling of your abilities that takes place when you bond…not that I’d personally know. So can you imagine there’s a door here and help a guy out?”
My heart did a weird little shimmy as Rafe shifted toward me, and a tendril of warmth curled through my belly. I was glad of the shadows as my cheeks flared again, and hoped my embarrassment wasn’t as wretchedly obvious to him as I feared it was.