“Are you surprised? He reminds me of Whiskers. Oversized body, undersized brains, lumbering around swinging his horns and balls around like he owns the place. If I can keep a bull in his place, I can keep this guy in his place,” I said back in that same quiet voice he’d used.
Rory grunted, and a quick look revealed he was fighting back a laugh. “Whiskers isn’t hamburger yet?”
I shook my head. “Only bull left on the farm. We need him to keep the calves coming.”
His jaw ticked. “Your dad is okay? He was sick when I left.”
Here it was, the talk we’d not been able to have earlier because the Culling Trials were too intense for catching up.
His question made my throat and heart tighten. I’d left home only a week ago, yet it felt like years. The sickness that held my dad in its grips left him not much better than a cripple even though he wasn’t yet forty. My mom had died when my twin siblings, Sam and Billy, were little, and since then, it had been my job to take care of all of them. Now it was up to my brother and sister to take care of Dad and the farm. At sixteen, or close enough, they should be able to do it.
That I wasn’t there to look out for them struck a hard chord in me, one that pricked at me in ways I didn’t like.
“Yeah, he is,” I said finally. “Still sick, and not getting better.” Which would leave the twins on their own should anything truly disastrous happen to Dad.
Rory seemed to read my mind. “They’re fine. You know they are. Your dad is a tough one, and if Sam’s half as fierce as you, she’ll keep them both in check. You know it.”
I shrugged, not wanting to discuss them further. Talking about my family twisted my guts and made me miss them, which left me vulnerable—a state I couldn’t afford to wallow in.
So I changed the subject.
“You know, your dad is still a dick. I stole his old truck to get to the airport. He took a pretty good swing at me.”
Rory went very still, his body doing that thing Shades could do—practically turning into a statue. His breathing slowed, and if my eyes had been closed, I would have sworn I sat there by myself.
“Did he catch you?” he finally asked.
“Almost. He’s faster than he should be for a mean old drunk.” I wanted Rory to confirm what I had suspected since that moment. That his dad had been in the House of Shade, too, at some point.
“Academy training will do that to a person,” he said with a slight nod. “He didn’t handle his abilities well. He could have been great, but he let himself go down a bad path . . .”
I snorted. “Yeah, I noticed.”
We were quiet for a minute. “My mom was in the House of Shade too, wasn’t she?” I asked.
Rory adjusted in his seat so he was closer to me, just barely touching our sides together, from our hips down to our knees. “Yeah. I think your dad would have been too if he’d possessed any magical abilities. But he didn’t pass the Culling Trials.”
That was what I had been told, that my dad was a null. He had no magical powers.
Rory reached into his pocket and pulled out something that he gripped in his palm. “This was Tommy’s. I found it in his stuff before they burned it all. I wanted to wait until you were through the trials to give it to you.” He offered the item to me, and I took it.
The key was heavy, made of a burnished dark copper with an engraved skull. The mouth of the skull was a hard line with what looked like stitches across it, and the eyes were chips of black stone. I rolled the key in my hand. “Why would you give this to me now?”
Was this the kind of key that opened something, or just a memento someone had given Tommy? Was Rory setting me up for another game? The Culling Trials had given me a healthy dose of wariness whenever something new was offered to me in any way, shape, or form. But there was no trickle of warning down my spine.
Rory shrugged. “He had it on him all the time, always in his pocket. He told me once that your mom gave it to him when he was a kid and told him it would keep him safe when he got to school. I know he’s gone, but . . . I just thought you should have it. Maybe it will do a better job of keeping you safe.”
I rolled the key in my hand again, thinking of Tommy doing the same. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure I’d seen him with it in his hands a time or two before he left for the academy—if I thought hard enough, I could almost see the glimmer of it clutched in his fingers.
But I hadn’t known what it was and hadn’t bothered to ask.
A skeleton key from our mom. I brushed my fingers over the length of the key, the metal warming slightly from the heat of my hand, then tucked it into my pants pocket. “Thanks.”
He nodded and the bus rounded a turn on the highway, which pressed Rory a little more firmly against my side.
I took a deep breath. “When will we get to the pier or wherever?”
As I spoke, the CB radio above the driver’s head squawked, interrupting me, static rolling through before giving way to a voice that was most certainly that of the Sandman—the deadliest in the House of Shade and something of a nemesis of mine. I still wasn’t sure if he was friend or foe. I was leaning toward pain in my ass, to be honest.
“John. Put me on the headset,” he barked through the radio.
The driver grabbed his earpiece and stuffed it in his ear. The other earpiece dangled just out of reach. I gave Rory a quick glance, shot a hand forward and snagged the hanging earbud before he could try to stop me. Scooting forward on my seat, I pulled it as close as I could without alerting the driver. John was too focused on his job and listening to notice me.
Rory mimicked my movements, leaning in toward the earbud.
The noise behind us died out as I focused on what the Sandman was saying.
“. . . attacks on all the Houses, with the exception of the House of Wonder. We haven’t found all the bodies yet.” I shot a look at Rory, whose face was a mask of nothing. He had to know some of the kids involved. There was some static, a click, and then the Sandman went on. “We’re rerouting all the buses. You need to turn the bus around, get those kids out to the House of Wonder now.”
John dropped the earbud, and I did the same thing.
I looked at Rory, suspicion rolling through me. “Is this part of the Culling Trials? Like some last-minute game to see if we’re worthy?”
Rory shook his head. “No. This is bad, Wild. This is very bad.”
Awesome. What a way to start my first day at a new school.
2
The reroute to the House of Wonder didn’t so much as put a blip on the radar of the other kids on the bus. Which made me think maybe none of them should be going to the House of Shade. Why didn’t the U-turn rouse their suspicion? Why didn’t they wonder if we were about to be driven off a bridge and made to fight our way out of a sinking bus?
Yeah, okay, so that sounds horrific, but if the Culling Trials had taught me anything, it was to expect the unexpected. Hell, I’d heard the announcement directly from the Sandman, via the earbud, and I still didn’t trust what was going on. But the others clearly hadn’t learned the same lessons, since they had zero wariness going on.
“We’re swinging by the House of Wonder first.” Rory stood and turned back to the other kids, balancing without even holding the back of the seat. “The new director wants to speak to us there.”