INTEGRATION (Bonfire Academy Book Two) (Bonfire Chronicles) (9 page)

“Were you by yourself?”

“No, Jagger was with me.”

“The faery? He won’t be much use either.” He turned to The Smelt, clearly frustrated. “What about the Trackers? Did you send them up there?”

“I was just about to,” Frau Smelt hurriedly assured him. “I’ll call them in now, if you wish.”

King Sebastian nodded and sat back down on the couch. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

I was desperate to ask him why he thought there was a possible demon presence, but I didn’t dare make a sound, instinctively knowing that King Sebastian was ready to kill. Plus, I was overcome by a horrendous stench. The Trackers had arrived.

I
had never seen the Trackers before, just heard of them. They had attained legendary status at the Academy. They were bloodhound shifters. No one knew how many of them there were, or where they hung out or what they did when they weren’t busy tracking. I had imagined the team to be a pack headed by a fierce bloodhound. I anticipated quite a large group coming into the office, as I had heard Frau Schmelder ask for the
team
to come up.

So I was a bit disappointed to see just two of them walk into the room. I guessed we didn’t really need more than that. One would have been enough. The two who appeared were obviously shifters, but in their human forms, which were kind of
blech
, as Faustine would have said.

Both of them looked like strung out ex-rockers, reminding me a bit of Keith Richards. They were covered in black leather, which accentuated their scraggly, thin bodies. Enormous arched noses with flared nostrils dominated their sunken, gaunt faces. The noses were so overpowering that their small, blackened eyes were almost hidden in their tiny sockets. Both had shaped their hair into black, oily-looking Mohawks. They walked right up to Frau Schmelder’s desk, where they came to a halt and stood at attention.

“Thanks for coming up so promptly. Please take a seat for the moment.”

As they walked over to the chairs beside The Smelt’s conference table, she turned to Faustine’s dad. “I need to make sure that Mason is out of his room before I send the Trackers up there. Although I’m happy to send them, their value will be limited. Whoever was in the room is long since gone, but hopefully, the Trackers will be able to tell you at least what kind of paranormal it was. Chances are that Cordelia is mistaken in thinking that the voice belonged to an old lady. It could have just been Mason in his female form.”

I shook my head vehemently. “No, it definitely wasn’t Mason’s voice. I’d have recognized it. Besides, I could hear Mason; he was in his male form. I could also hear his father. This was a third voice, definitely a woman, and she sounded old.”

“There’s only one way to find out for sure,” King Sebastian said, rising from the couch. “Let’s go and find out.”

The Smelt gaped at him. “We’ll send the Trackers. There’s no need for you to go, Your Majesty.”

“I’d like to smell it for myself,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. There shouldn’t be anyone around in the dorms at this hour, but entering the shifter wing could be unwise.”

“Unwise?”

“If you go up there, Mason may be able to tell that you’ve been in his room. His olfactory senses are very well developed.”

“So?”

“Well, he already has an issue with Faustine, and knowing you’ve been up there may rankle him into further mischief.”

“Perhaps. Although I highly doubt he’ll know it was me. Cordelia and Jagger have already been in his room, correct?”

I nodded.

“That was unwise,” he said as The Smelt threw me a told-you-so look. “He’ll be able to recognize your scents, no doubt. He’s never met me, so that won’t be an issue. He’ll merely smell an unknown demon.”

“What about Mason’s father?” The Smelt asked. “Do you know Monsieur Drasco? Would he recognize your scent?”

“I have met him on a few occasions,” King Sebastian acknowledged.

“It’s very likely that Mason could ask his father to check out any unusual demon scents in his room, after what’s just happened,” The Smelt warned. “I would really prefer it if you remained uninvolved and let us handle it.”

“
My
daughter’s life has been threatened. I’m going.” His tone said his decision was final.

The Smelt’s mouth twitched as though she was about to protest, but the snarl King Sebastian emitted clearly warned her not to, so she simply nodded.

“I’ll walk them over,” I offered, hoping not to be left behind. I’d already been up there once, so Mason would already know that I’d been snooping—no harm in going again. Plus I wanted to know more about the woman who’d been there, and the king definitely seemed to suspect someone. I also wanted to watch while the Trackers did their thing. Who knew what else they might sniff out? The more I found out about Mason, the better I could protect Faustine and myself.

“That’s not neces—” The Smelt started.

“Thank you, Cordelia,” King Sebastian interrupted. “It’ll be very helpful to have you show us where you heard the voice coming from. That’s okay with you, isn’t it, Frau Schmelder?” His tone was hard.

“Yes. That’s fine.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll call Jagger and find out if Mason has gone to class.”

Ten minutes later, King Sebastian and I were following the two Trackers down the empty corridors and up the steps to Mason’s room. So far, the two Trackers hadn’t said a word. They seemed to know what to do without receiving any particular instructions. Frau Smelt hadn’t said anything to them, just nodded at them when it was time for us to leave. I wondered if they could even talk. Perhaps they couldn’t, but I wasn’t much interested in finding out, especially since they seemed totally disengaged. They hadn’t acknowledged or even made eye contact with either Faustine’s father or me. Maybe it was because we were demons and they couldn’t stand being in our midst any more than we could in theirs. But I didn’t trust the Trackers, even though they worked for The Smelt. They were shifters, after all.

Walking side by side with King Sebastian felt familiar in an odd way. For a while, I thought it might be because he was a demon king, like my father, but then it dawned on me that he exuded the same kind of aura as Jagger—dark.

We must have been a strange sight—two demons following two crazy-looking bloodhound shifters. Thankfully, everyone was at class or at their sessions. Once we reached Mason’s floor, I stopped and showed them where I had been standing when I heard the voices.

King Sebastian nodded. “I can’t imagine you mistaking an old woman’s voice for anything else at this short distance. All right, let’s go inside.”

The Trackers slipped the key The Smelt had given them into the lock and then opened the door. Once the door was firmly closed behind us, they walked to the center of the room and stood back to back. I glanced over at King Sebastian, waggling my eyebrows. He shrugged and put his finger to his lips, shushing me.

I looked over at the shifters again. They had closed their eyes. Their noses started twitching, and I could hear their sharp, shallow intakes of air. The nose jerking became more agitated, with them looking even crazier than before. I could barely contain my amusement, and I noticed the king was having the same problem. I wished The Smelt had warned us. I finally succumbed, letting out a muffled snort when their noses actually started elongating and growing wide at the ends, becoming more and more pronounced, until they took on the shapes of funnels. The skin on the outside of their now-hideous noses had gone gray and was mapped with bumpy red capillaries. They looked totally disgusting. I was happy to forgo a good sense of smell if that was what it took. The two shifters twitched their extended noses around in the air, inhaling deeply.

I was so enraptured by the proboscis circus that if I hadn’t peeked over at King Sebastian to see his reaction, I’d have missed his sudden change in demeanor. He’d gone from being an interested, amused audience to looking as if he was about to have a fit.

He had partially transformed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then exhaled loudly, his face bathed in fury. He held up his hand. “Stop!”

The Trackers instantly opened their eyes and glanced over at him, their eyes wide.

“Leave.”

The Trackers looked at each other, clearly unsure of what to do.

“You may leave.” King Sebastian waved them to the door.

Obviously unhappy about the situation, one of the Trackers must have felt compelled to question. His voice was surprisingly effeminate and high. “Sir, I’ve got a scent. Do you—”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here. Go back to Frau Schmelder and tell her that I’ll update her later. And that is
all
you will say. Understood?” King Sebastian said, his voice uncompromising. “Thank you for your time.”

The Trackers glanced at each other, then shrugged and left.

“I’ll take you back to the demon quarters, then I have to go,” King Sebastian said brusquely, ushering me out after the Trackers.

“What happened? Why didn’t you want them to finish doing their sniffing thing and find out who’s been in there?”

“There’s no need,” he said as we took the steps three at a time.

“Does that mean you know? You must! You recognized the smell. Who was it? You have to tell me.”

He stopped and turned to face me. “Cordelia, I will deal with this.”

“What about Faustine? Is she safe from whoever was in the room with Mason?”

King Sebastian answered through clenched teeth, “No, she is not.”

“Will she know who it is?”

“No.”

“Well, you really do have to tell me, then,” I insisted.

“There is nothing you can do with that information, Cordelia. If you want to help, keep doing what you have been doing. This is family business. I’ll take care of it.” Then he turned around and disappeared down the corridor.

Family business?

I
t was almost time to begin Mason’s first session in the dOME lab. I had arrived hours before and been poring over Mason’s file, familiarizing myself with everything. Well, everything that hadn’t been blacked out. Over three quarters of the sheets in the file contained large sections that had been thoroughly disguised by someone using a black permanent marker, making whatever was written underneath indecipherable. I tried every which way to try to get a peek, even holding the sheets over a light box. No luck. Unfortunately, those were the sheets from his Initiate sessions at Boone Academy.

Henri had tasked me with creating a flowchart summary of whatever I could find that would help plan his next sessions. I looked down at my work, my empty chart. Clearly, I sucked at my new job. Or rather, there just wasn’t any information worth noting. I sighed and flicked through the file again, desperately looking for scraps of information I could use so I wouldn’t look like a total moron on my first day as an apprentice.

A cough from behind me indicated that my time was up and that I had officially failed at my first task. I turned to look into Henri’s bespectacled eyes.

“How goes it?” he asked, peering at my empty sheet.

“Not good. There seems to be a lot of blacked out portions in the notes, most of it, in fact,” I said accusingly. He’d have known that before he gave it to me. Way to waste my time. I felt a bit annoyed.

“Yes, that was aggravating, but it was done by Boone to keep Mason’s sessions there confidential. We’d have done the same, which is why even the sessions he had here are redacted. I did that before we sent his file to you. However, I have copies of those on my computer, so I’ll forward those to your iPad. They aren’t that useful, though. We only had a couple of sessions, and not much happened.”

“No disappearances?”

“No, that only manifested at Boone Academy. And those sessions, which would have been interesting to get an insight into, have been omitted from the file.”

“Since those have been blacked out, how do we know for a fact that the disappearances even happened?”

He scratched the back of his neck and sat down opposite me. “Professor Bern brought up that question, too. It could be that it was all made up, just so he could return to Bonfire Academy. That would be a convoluted and costly way to get back here. Anyway, at least as far as the disappearing thing goes, we can look into that here.”