Chapter 46 Gone
I am out of the archive and running before the word finishes leaving my mouth.
Rhydan is beside me immediately, not behind me, beside me, matching my pace down the corridor and through the main hall junction and up the east wing stairs, and neither of us speaks because there is nothing to say that is more useful than moving fast.
Our room is empty.
Door unlocked. Dara's mug still on the desk, cold now, her textbook open to the page she was reading this morning, her pen sitting in the spine like she put it down meaning to come back.
She did not come back.
I stand in the doorway and look at the room and something cold and focused moves through me, pushing the panic down to somewhere I can access later when it is useful and keeping only what I need right now.
Rhydan steps around me and checks the small bathroom, comes back shaking his head.
"When did you last see her?" he asks.
"East corridor," I say. "Before Corvyn's office. She was outside our room." I look at the mug. "Two hours ago, maybe."
He pulls out his phone and calls Cassian.
I cross to Dara's desk and look at everything on it without touching anything, reading the surface of the space the way my father taught me before I knew why he was teaching me.
Textbook open. Pen in the spine. Mug still here, which means she did not leave intentionally, you take your mug when you leave voluntarily because the café cups are returnable and the deposit matters when you are an Ember House student on a standard scholarship.
Her bag is missing.
Her bag is missing but her jacket is hanging on the back of her chair.
You do not take your bag and leave your jacket in November in upstate New York unless someone else made that decision for you.
"Cassian hasn't seen her," Rhydan says, coming to stand beside me. He looks at the jacket. "Same as you. She didn't leave on her own."
"No," I agree.
"The photograph," he says carefully. "Whoever sent it to my phone knew to send it to me specifically. They knew my number. They knew about you and Dara."
"Sera," I say immediately.
He goes very still.
"She's been inside our trust for four days," I say. "She knows who matters to me. She knows Dara is my roommate. She knows my routines." I look at him steadily. "And she disappeared from the arena gallery last night before the final buzzer."
"If Sera handed Dara's location to my grandfather..." he says.
"Or to the Drevari," I say.
We look at each other and the bond runs tight and urgent between us and both his natures are fully awake, wolf tracking instinct rising sharp and immediate, and I watch his eyes shift toward gold at the edges before he pulls it back.
"I can track her," he says quietly. "Wolf range. If she was taken through the academy grounds rather than out the main entrance, I can follow it."
"How far?" I ask.
"Depends on how long ago and which direction," he says. "But two hours in contained grounds, yes."
"Do it."
He looks at me. "You stay with Bram."
"Absolutely not," I reply.
His jaw tightens. "Veyra..."
"She is my person," I say, and my voice comes out quiet and completely certain. "And my ability responds to supernatural distress. If she is frightened and her ability is spiking, I will feel it through my tamer awareness before you will through wolf tracking."
He stares at me.
"We are faster together and you know it," I say. "You have said it yourself."
A muscle moves in his jaw.
"Stay close," he says finally.
"Always," I reply, and mean it in more directions than the immediate one.
We take the east wing stairs to the ground floor and exit through the maintenance door that lets out onto the academy's north grounds, and Rhydan stops on the threshold and closes his eyes and I watch his wolf nature rise to the surface, not fully, not the gold eyes and the authority wave, just enough, just the tracking edge of it, his head tilting slightly as he reads the air.
He opens his eyes.
Starts walking north.
Fast.
I stay at his shoulder and open my tamer awareness wide and push it outward across the grounds, feeling for Dara's specific supernatural signature, the gold glow from this morning, and it is faint and distant and frightened and coming from the direction of the forest.
"North," I say. "Toward the treeline."
"I know," he replies, already moving faster.
We cross the grounds at something between a walk and a run and the north treeline comes up ahead of us and Rhydan's tracking sharpens, his pace becoming more certain, more directional, and I feel Dara's signal getting stronger and more distressed with every metre.
She is in the forest.
She is awake.
She is terrified.
And her ability is spiking in the completely uncontrolled way of someone whose supernatural nature is responding to extreme fear without any anchor to hold it, the gold glow from this morning magnified into something that in a human would look like a panic attack and in an unclassified supernatural is considerably more dangerous.
We hit the treeline.
The forest closes around us.
And thirty metres in, Rhydan stops walking so abruptly that I nearly run into him, his arm coming out to stop me, and I look at what he is looking at and the cold that moves through me is not supernatural.
Dara is there.
Sitting against a tree trunk, wrists bound in something that glows faintly silver, clearly magical restraints, her head up now, eyes open, and when she sees me her face does something that breaks my chest completely open, relief and tears and fury all at once.
But she is not alone.
Standing between us and her, unhurried and composed and wearing a small warm smile that means absolutely nothing true, is Sera Vance.
And behind Sera, three people I have never seen before.
Not Drevari.
Not Elder Valecrest's people.
Someone else entirely.
"Veyra," Sera says warmly, as though we have run into each other pleasantly in a corridor. "I was wondering how long it would take you."