“Are we lost?” Drusilla Blackthorn peered across the darkened field toward the horizon. “Tell me we’re not lost.”
Her roommate Thais frowned at the hand-scrawled map she held in her hand. “I’m not sure. Check your direction rune.”
Dru sighed and looked at the inside of her wrist, where she’d applied a True North rune earlier that evening. In the late afternoon, really. Hours ago.
Neither she nor Thais had expected this particular activity to take as long as it had.
It had sounded simple enough. Usually Dru was delighted when the Shadowhunter Academy students got out of the classroom and did field exercises outside.
She didn’t mind studying, but she wasn’t like her brothers and sisters—every single one of them excelled at memorizing abstract facts: dates, languages, kinds of weapons.
Dru liked to see and touch things, to hear stories about them.
To understand how they worked. That was how she learned.
This year, her third at Shadowhunter Academy, they had Downworlder studies, which was split into quarters: vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and faeries.
They were on faeries now: their history (which Dru liked, as history was always stories) and the various kinds of faerie nobility and traditions, which she liked less.
Faeries had both a lot of traditions and a lot of noble houses and ranks and there was no understanding them; they just had to be memorized.
She and Thais had both been pleasantly surprised to walk into class today and find Luke Garroway, the head of the Academy, there, carrying a stack of maps and instructing them all to get into fighting gear and meet him outside the farmhouse to find out what their assignment was.
Dru always liked getting into gear. There was something about buttoning and zipping herself into the close-fitting black fabric and heavy boots that made her feel a part of all the Shadowhunters who had gone before her.
It helped that she’d brought her mother’s gear jacket to school with her—she and her mom had been shaped the same, curvier and rounder than most Nephilim—and wearing it made her feel closer to Eleanor.
Thais always looked glamorous in her gear.
She was tall and rangy, with long russet-brown hair streaked with gold where the sun had lightened it.
She had brown skin and freckles on her nose, and Dru often thought they looked like exact opposites—Dru kept her pale skin out of the sun, and her choppy hair was dyed black as ink.
Where Thais was slim, she was curved; where Thais was tall, Dru had resigned herself to being 5’3” forever.
In the ways that mattered, though, they matched perfectly.
They both loved horror movies, staying up late, sarcastic humor, inside jokes, and everything about learning to be a Shadowhunter.
Even the brutal parts, like the bruising training: learning to take punches, to fall without breaking bones, to climb ropes with only the strength of their arms until their bodies went nerveless and they slid to the ground only to do it again a second later.
For Dru, it was a way to forget everything that haunted her.
For Thais, it was a way to prove herself.
She hated failing anything, which was probably why she was scowling so hard right now as she glared around at the unchanging view: dark fields bordered by shadowy hedges, trees spreading black branches against the night sky, the faint moon hanging over the distant hills.
Somehow they’d wandered far enough from the farmhouse that it was no longer visible; more worrying, Dru couldn’t see—or hear—any of their classmates, either.
“Faeries tread lightly on the land,” Luke had said when he explained their assignment. “They leave few signs behind, but training can help you spot them. You’ve been learning those signs these past weeks. Now you’re going to go out and spot them.”
“And if we catch a faerie, then what?” It was Mason Hardcastle, generally considered to be the most popular of the third-year boys. He had fine features and always seemed to be wearing a cashmere sweater thrown casually over his shoulders. “Trap it, bring it back?”
“You’re not hunting faeries,” Luke said. “They’ve left clues for you to find. You’re looking for signs of the Fair Folk, not faeries themselves.”
“What kind of signs?” demanded Paige Ashdown, looking as if she found the whole business tiresome.
“Faeries tend to work with things that already exist in the natural world,” piped up Jane Cartwright.
Dru shot her an encouraging smile—she’d always liked Jane, who tended to be shy.
“So we want to look for things that seem like they belong in nature, but are unusually beautiful or interestingly shaped. And we should handle them carefully.”
“That’s right,” Luke said. He gave them all a measured look. “The local faeries are cooperating with this exercise. Don’t make them sorry they agreed to help.”
Mason muttered something under his breath, and Paige snickered.
Dru made a rude gesture at Mason as Luke explained that they were all going to split up into groups of two or three and comb the grounds of the farm—Luke owned more than sixty acres, so it wasn’t a small area—until seven p.m., when they’d have to return.
Any sign of faeries they saw was supposed to be noted down on the map.
Dru and Thais didn’t need to ask each other; they knew already they’d be a team. Thais turned around so Dru could shove the map into her backpack, holding the mass of her wavy hair up and out of the way so it wouldn’t get caught in the zipper.
Mason Hardcastle sauntered up just as Dru finished with the pack and gave Thais’s shoulder a pat to let her know she was all set.
“Maybe you two should change it up a little,” he said. He lowered his voice. “The three of us are the best here. If we team up, we’ll win.”
“What, you don’t think your friends are the best?
” Dru inquired archly, shooting Paige, who was glaring in their direction, a dark look.
She’d known Paige back in Los Angeles—the Ashdowns had been friendly with the Blackthorns, though Paige herself had always been unpleasant.
She’d mocked Dru for her clothes, her weight, and her enthusiasm for horror movies, and been even crueler in her attitude toward Ty.
She’d never apologized for any of it. No, Dru didn’t have a lot of time for Paige Ashdown.
“They’re fine,” Mason drawled. “But you’re better.”
“It’s an exercise, Mason, not a contest,” said Thais, turning around. “There’s no winning.”
“There’s always winning,” Mason said, but he wasn’t looking at Thais. He was looking at Dru. “Come on. Let me help you.”
Dru zipped her gear jacket up. “Go away, Mason.”
He grinned. “Drusilla,” he said. “Don’t pretend you’re impervious to my charms.”
Dru shrugged. “But it’s true. I’m impervious. I cannot be perved.” She looked at Thais, ignoring Mason’s narrow glare. “Should we get going?”
Thais winked. “Vamos.”
Dru hurried to join the crowd of students leaving the farmhouse by the dirt road that curved through the fields. Thais, beside her, was silent until they’d clambered over a fence and were heading away from the others through waist-high grass.
“Mason wants you to be his girlfriend so bad,” Thais said, looking amused.
“No. He doesn’t.” Dru had taken out her stele and was applying runes—True North, Awareness, Clarity, Knowledge. “I made out with him at the end-of-term party last year and the next time I saw him the first thing he said was that it hadn’t meant anything.”
“I know,” Thais said, because of course she did. “But just because he said that doesn’t mean—”
“Yes, it does.” Dru snorted. “Guys like that—they want to make out with a girl who looks like me, but they’d never admit to their friends they actually liked her.
So he just lurks around, hoping he can drag me off into a closet somewhere for a furtive groping session.
Lurk, lurk, lurk. He’s like a…a sex crocodile. ”
“A what?” Thais laughed.
Dru couldn’t help her mouth from twitching into a smile. “Crocodiles lurk underwater, waiting until their prey gets close enough for them to strike. Haven’t you seen Rogue Crocodile?”
“No one but you has seen Rogue Crocodile.” Thais did draw the line at some horror movies, especially the bloodier ones. As far as Dru was concerned, there were no lines to draw. Nothing scared her. Nothing in a movie, anyway.
That had all been hours ago, before sunset. Now the moon was a sliver in the sky overhead, and the fields that spread out around them were so dark that even Dru’s Night Vision rune wasn’t totally dispelling the shadows.
The trees overhead whispered eerily in the breeze, making Dru shiver.
Not that she was scared, she reminded herself.
She was—worried. Where was everyone else?
Why couldn’t she hear them? Surely the other students were also blundering around the countryside, searching for signs of the Fair Folk?
Cairns of stones, circular rings of mushrooms, moss growing in unusual patterns, the odd behavior of animals, especially birds…
Luke had said there would be evidence for them to find, but so far they hadn’t seen even a single mushroom growing in a suspect way, or a blown dandelion clock.
In fact, they’d found sweet fuck-all, as Dru’s friend Kit liked to say.
He’d been living in England for the past three years and had developed a whole new set of idioms, which Dru enjoyed teasing him about.
She glanced down. The True North rune stood out stark on her wrist. She turned her body, rotating until the rune emitted a tiny spark that hovered in the air for a moment before vanishing. “That way.” Dru pointed. “That’s north.”