I glanced at her, not trusting her farther than I could throw her. “You too. I saw you lead the guys into the first trial and then use them as bait.”
She grinned. “Boys are dumb.”
That got a laugh from me. “And they kind of stink.”
She grinned wider. “I think we could work together. The other girls . . . they’re not really thinking about this school. They’re too busy eyeing up the boys and trying to get in good with them. A different set of skills than what I want to hone.”
Alliances already? I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, so I just nodded. Not really committing but not shutting her down either. Her abilities might complement mine, and that would not be a bad thing. “Are you going to let me copy your notes?” I asked.
She laughed. “Only if you teach me some of your badass moves with that knife of yours.”
Again, I just nodded. Just in case I needed to back out later. I didn’t get a bad feeling from her, but trust was not easily given in my world.
Rory led us through the fence gate. The smell of garbage intensified for a moment, but the minute my feet crossed the threshold, the dazzling building blinked back into view, to a series of gasps from the kids around me. I blinked a couple times, realizing the other first years hadn’t been able to see through the illusion masking the building.
The other kids, who’d already been training, had known it was there.
“Yeah, never see it coming,” Shaw grumbled. “House of Wonder is always showing off what they got. Money, magic, and power. Think they’re so damn fancy cause they got them boom sticks.”
While the other kids stared and whispered to one another, my guts twisted at the thought of the wand stuffed into my bag. My affinity for every single damn house was something only I and two other people knew about. It made me what this world called a Chameleon.
That other person who knew?
The Sandman. And he was watching me, making sure I didn’t go bad like the last two Chameleons. Frost, the director I’d helped take down, was one of them.
The other . . . the other was apparently a relative of mine, if Frost could be believed. I wasn’t sure she’d told me the truth, not by a long shot. My mom would have told us if we had a psycho family member, right?
Except there were plenty of other things I hadn’t been told.
Snatches of conversation flashed through my mind. Pieces of half-heard exchanges between my parents, whispered late at night when they thought us kids were all asleep.
What do we do if he finds us?
We run again. We run and run.
I’m going to draw him away. Tell them I love them. Every day.
That last . . . I hadn’t thought of it in years, and chills swept up and down my body. That had happened not long before my mom died.
Had . . . she gone to stop that other Chameleon and failed?
I shook my head, pushing away the distant memories that climbed closer to the surface of my mind the deeper into this new world I went. The past was catching up to me in ways I kept trying to understand but couldn’t quite grasp. Like chasing butterflies in the fields back home—everything was just out of reach.
“Do not touch anything, and do not lift anything,” Rory said. “I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for the other houses to show up. We were closest, they shouldn’t be far behind us.”
“Why we gotta wait for the other houses? What is going on? We’re going to miss lunch,” Shaw grumbled, and while I didn’t like him much, he was asking the questions everyone else was thinking.
Rory took a stance in front of the group that reminded me of the Sandman, legs wide and hands tucked behind his back. “Get your asses in here, or Director Rufus will be forced to come out and escort you in.”
Director Rufus?
I had to work to keep my jaw closed.
Hands stuffed into pockets, the students all shuffled forward, no one else seeming to make the connection.
Frost had been the director of all the houses. She’d been taken down thanks to yours truly.
Director Rufus, aka the Sandman, was the most dangerous member of the House of Shade with the highest kill count of anyone on record. Was he now the director of our house? Or the director of all of them?
I’d rather roll around in the pig pen, go to prom, and have to sing on stage than answer to the Sandman for anything.
I followed the other kids, stuffing my own hands into my pockets and wishing my knife was on me instead of tucked into my bag with the wand. I needed to find a way to keep them both on me at all times, hidden but accessible. Color me cautious, but I doubted we were done with the whole try-to-kill-Wild business.
And if I was just being paranoid, well, no harm, no foul for being prepared.
My fingers brushed against the key. Not exactly a weapon, but it brought me a small comfort because Tommy had valued it. I lifted my eyes. The building glistening in front of us drew my attention again. A jewel hidden in the middle of New York City, made of massive white stone blocks that were easily five feet high each. The sparkle inside the rocks refracted rainbow reflections across the ground, our clothes, and even the faces of some of the kids.
The double doors at the entrance were made of wood, if the knots and grooves were any indication, but it was an unusual color—a pale, creamy white—with golden knobs and filigree winding out from the hinges.
Pretty impressive even for a bunch of people who had magic wands and probably added the glitter with a spell of some sort.
Rory didn’t knock on the doors inscribed with words that almost made sense to me even though they were obviously not English.
Magia. Virtus. Regium.
I swallowed hard as those words rippled through my mind. Magic. Power. Royalty. That was what the House of Wonder was all about. I didn’t need to look any further than Ethan and his family to see that.
Again, my gut twisted with the slightest tingle of warning. Something about this place did not bode well for me.
One last deep breath, and I followed Rory into the House of Wonder. My jaw dropped open so wide it was all I could do to keep it attached to my face.
If I’d thought the outside was stunning, the inside was out of this world in extravagance, expense, and strange beauty.
Like walking into a fairy tale—that was the only thing my brain could give me when trying to absorb the room.
From the floor to the walls to the ceiling, not one detail had been ignored when it came to flashing off the wealth and power of this house. The floors were polished quartz shot through with shimmering veins of soft colors and bright sparkles of glitter.
The walls were of the same quartz, smooth and stunning with only the lightest etchings here and there. It took me a minute to realize the faint designs symbolized each of the houses.
The House of Wonder was a trio of triangles, the lines interlocked.
House of Night was represented by a pair of back-to-back ravens holding a bone between them in their claws.
The House of Claw was a giant multi-branched tree, each limb covered with animals.
The House of Unmentionables had a simple sign, the unfinished figure eight with the ends curling in on themselves.
And then there was the House of Shade. Our sign was the Web of Wyrd, a series of vertical and horizontal lines interconnecting over and over in a rectangular form.
While the designs could be seen, they weren’t obvious. You had to be at the right angle to spot them within the stone.