Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) (36 page)

“Kay is quite safe,” Sergeant Bane said. There was more than a little absolute conviction in his voice. “And...”

Something
changed
. Emily sensed it, although she was unable to tell
what
it was she was sensing. The magical field surrounding Whitehall had changed since the Warden’s death—it was no longer so focused or precise—but this was different. She caught herself glancing around nervously, unsure of what she was looking for. Something was very definitely wrong.

“What do you think you’re doing, girl?” Sergeant Bane demanded. “Come with me!”

Emily hesitated. The sense of
wrongness
was growing stronger, as if something was beating on the walls of reality itself. She couldn’t move; instead, she glanced around, convinced that something was trying to sneak up on her. The glowing lights on the walls seemed to be fading, leaving the sunlight streaming in through the open windows as the only source of illumination. Sergeant Bane seemed, for a long chilling moment, suddenly lost in the shadow.

“Girl,” the Sergeant thundered. His fury seemed to be growing worse. “Come! Now!”

But Emily couldn’t move at all.

The sergeant stepped forward, one hand raised as if he intended to strike her...and then he stopped. Something was wrong with his face, Emily realized slowly, although her mind had difficulty in even realizing that something
was
wrong. It was almost as if she weren’t quite able to comprehend what she was seeing. Her head hurt and she wanted to twist away, but something kept her feet firmly pressed to the floor...

...And then the sergeant dissolved into an eerie haze of multicolored light.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

M
IMIC!

Emily stared, rooted to the spot, as the entity slowly glided towards her, pulsing with utter malevolence. There was no discernible face, nothing to suggest an expression...and yet she was sure that it
hated
her. She lifted a trembling hand, trying to send for help and cast a protective ward, but nothing happened. The mimic was interfering with the magic...or maybe she was too scared to cast the spell properly.

It had been
months
since she’d seen a Mimic. One of them had been kept in Whitehall’s zoo, trapped behind extremely powerful wards...and had vanished, after Shadye had attacked Whitehall. Everyone had assumed that it had killed, eaten and replaced one of the orcs or goblins that had fled into the countryside after Shadye had been killed; no one, as far as she knew, had seemed particularly concerned. Besides, even
finding
a Mimic was supposed to be almost impossible. Had it been hiding in Whitehall ever since the attack on the school?

The Mimic seemed to be expanding...or perhaps it was simply growing closer. Glowing tendrils of mist reached towards her, the world seeming to fade as they neared. It was draining her, she realized numbly, copying everything that made her what she was in preparation to assume her form. And then it would kill her and take her place...or would it? The pattern didn’t seem quite right...

Sheer panic blasted through her and she stumbled backwards, regaining some strength as she staggered away from the Mimic. It didn’t seem to care; it merely glided after her, pushing her down the corridor. If it had killed and replaced Sergeant Bane—she’d never heard of a Mimic simply being a shapeshifter, although she didn’t know
much
about them—it wouldn’t have any trouble doing the same to her. Desperately, she lifted her hand again and threw a hex at the Mimic. The spell passed right through the entity, as if it were made of fog...or if it weren’t really there. An illusion?

She’d used an illusion of a Mimic before, but she hadn’t managed to duplicate the sense of being drained. How could she?

Emily forced herself to concentrate and threw another spell, one of the handful of completely lethal spells she’d been taught—and warned never to even
think
about using, unless it was a matter of life or death. There was a brilliant flash of red light, but when it faded the Mimic was still there, advancing on her. Emily panicked and cast the first spell that came into her head, the magic detection spell. The Mimic lit up with bright light.

For a moment, it seemed to hesitate—as if the spell, unlike something far more lethal, had done real damage. And then it resumed its path towards her, billowing out to block her line of retreat. Emily gasped, then swore as she bumped into the wall and started to press her way towards the window. She hadn’t even realized that she was being herded until it was too late.

Do something
, her mind yammered at her.
Get out.
..

The Mimic’s pulsing was almost hypnotic as it reached out towards her. Emily could feel its magic humming as it prepared to dine, to absorb everything she was...it was clear, now, why it had claimed the Warden as its first victim. Without his constant monitoring of Whitehall’s interior, the Mimic could pick off the students and staff one by one—and remain completely undetectable. No one had come to investigate the lethal spell she’d used, any more than they’d realized when she’d freed herself from Melissa’s hexes. Master Tor hadn’t realized that his order was largely unenforceable...

Her life started to flash in front of her eyes as the Mimic touched her mind. Her first memories, the few moments of happiness she’d had, her abduction from Earth...somehow, the thought of Void and Shadye gave her strength. She was not going to allow the Mimic to get the better of her, even though everyone knew them to be almost indestructible. There
had
to be a way out. She looked over at the window, then pulled herself forward. It felt as if she had been walking for miles—the Mimic was already draining her life from her—but somehow she made it to the window and stared out over the forest. Behind her, she felt the Mimic closing in for the kill.

There was no time to be careful. She climbed onto the ledge and lost her footing, falling out of the window. She caught a brief glimpse of the Mimic, filling the corridor like fog, then she plummeted down towards the ground. Her mind cleared the moment she was away from the Mimic, but it was hard to cast spells—any spell. The creature had drained her magical reserves, even if it hadn’t managed to kill her. She tried to grab hold of the wall, only to be repulsed by a burst of magical power. Whitehall was designed not to let someone climb up the walls.

Transfigure yourself
, she thought, desperately. If she could turn herself into a bird, or something tough enough to survive the fall...but she barely had enough magic left in her to light a candle. The ground came up with terrifying speed and she knew, with absolute certainty, she was dead...

And then something caught her and slowed her fall at the last possible moment. She still hit the ground hard enough to hurt, badly. The world spun around her and faded from view...

“Emily,” a voice snapped, out of the darkness. It sounded familiar, although the haze of pain made it hard to recognize it. “Can you hear me?”

Emily nodded, weakly. Her entire body felt as if it had been smashed into jelly; there was a faint haze in her mind that made it hard to think. It took her several seconds to remember what she’d seen...and what she’d done, in order to escape. Jumping out of a window nine levels above the ground...if she hadn’t been desperate, it would have been near-suicide.

“You’ve been quite badly hurt,” the voice said, “but we’ve fixed most of the damage. Can you open your eyes?”

Emily hadn’t even realized that they were closed. There was a flash of blinding light as soon as she opened them, forcing her to screw them tightly closed again. A hand touched her shoulder lightly, then tapped her forehead. Emily opened her eyes again, squinting against the glare, and saw Lady Barb leaning over her. The combat sorceress looked badly worried.

“You took an insane dive out of a window,” Lady Barb said, tartly. “If one of the Mediators hadn’t managed to catch you, you would have smashed yourself to a pulp. As it was, you broke about a dozen bones when you hit the ground. I’ve fixed the damage, but you really should stay in bed for the next few days. What were you
thinking
?”

Emily hesitated, unsure. She was in the infirmary, but what had happened to get her there?

And then she remembered the Mimic.

She caught Lady Barb’s arm. “Mimic,” she said, as clearly as she could. Her voice sounded mushy to her ears, as if her jaw had smashed by the impact. “There’s a Mimic in the school.”

Lady Barb paled. “Are you
sure
?”

“I saw it,” Emily insisted, through the haze threatening to cloud her thoughts. “It killed Sergeant Bane, took his place...”

She remembered the pattern she saw and swore, inwardly. They’d deduced that the killer was targeting the people who discovered the bodies, but the killer had
already
killed them and taken their place. Danielle had to have
been
the Mimic when she reported finding her boyfriend’s body; Kay had to have been the Mimic when she’d been right next to Sergeant Bane. And a Mimic wouldn’t have had any trouble posing as the person it had killed until it encountered its next target.

Somehow, she forced herself to keep speaking. “Didn’t anyone
see
it?”

“You dived out of the wrong window for that,” Lady Barb said, grimly. “I have to speak to the Grandmaster.”

“It was up by the barracks,” Emily said. How long had she been in bed, unconscious? Had the Mimic found someone else to consume after Emily had escaped? “You have to find it!”

“Finding a Mimic isn’t easy,” Lady Barb said. She reached out and touched Emily’s forehead, very lightly. “This hasn’t been an easy term for you, has it?”

Emily shook her head, mutely.

“I’m going to put you back to sleep,” Lady Barb added, briskly. “You really need time to rest and mend.”

“No,” Emily said, frantically. Panic bubbled up in her mind, again. “It could come for me...”

“I think it won’t risk coming after you when there are so many people nearby,” Lady Barb said, shortly. She pointed a finger at Emily’s chest. “And you really need to heal.”

The next thing Emily knew was that she was surrounded by the Grandmaster, Sergeant Miles, Master Tor and Lady Barb. There was no longer any sunlight streaming through the windows, she saw, as she looked towards them. Instead, there was an inky darkness that seemed somehow too dark to be real. She’d always admired the night sky from Whitehall—there were no lamps or anything else to cause light pollution—but she couldn’t see the stars. There was nothing outside at all.

“We found Kay’s body,” Sergeant Miles said, curtly. He sounded exhausted. “But we haven’t managed to locate Sergeant Bane at all.”

“The Mimic took his place,” Emily said. Her thoughts still weren’t very clear, but she could remember his form dissolving into the pulsing mist. “I don’t know
what
happened to it.”

“We checked the barracks carefully, finding nothing,” Sergeant Miles said. “You were the only one who
saw
the Mimic.”

Emily stared at him. Didn’t they
believe
her?

“Finding a Mimic isn’t exactly
easy
,” the Grandmaster said. “I don’t believe that it has
ever
been done successfully.”

“But this one is behaving oddly, even for Mimics,” Lady Barb added. “They don’t normally leave bodies behind, let alone bodies with knives in them. I don’t understand why it would even
bother
leaving the bodies as anything more than dust.”

“Everything else fits, though,” the Grandmaster said. “The bodies were completely drained of energy. Even a necromancer wouldn’t produce such an effect.”

“But I have never heard of a Mimic trying to frame someone else,” Sergeant Miles argued. “We assumed there was a necromancer because the bodies appeared to have been killed by a necromantic rite. But why would a Mimic try to
hide
?”

Emily remembered—dimly—the handful of classes she’d taken last year on Magical Creatures. Mimics couldn’t be killed, if she recalled correctly—or at least no one had ever tried to do it and come back to report. They killed someone and copied their body so precisely that they could take their place for weeks, perhaps months or years. And, as they copied their victim’s memories and personality too, the change was almost impossible to detect until the Mimic resumed its natural form. They were the stuff of nightmares.

“I wish I knew,” she said, out loud. “Can we track it down?”

“Maybe,” Lady Barb said. “No one knows much about them, but there’s a general consensus that they can go quite some time without having to change their form. This one, however, seems determined to kill every few days.”

“Maybe it’s injured,” Emily mused. If it had attacked the Warden...it suggested a certain level of intelligence. “Are Mimics intelligent?”

Lady Barb gave her a sharp look. “No one knows,” she admitted. “They certainly seem capable of posing as their victims...”

The Grandmaster held up his hand. “For the moment, I have altered the wards and sealed us within the school,” he said. “We will be unable to leave until we find and contain the Mimic.”

Emily stared at him. “You’re locking us all inside with that...
thing
?”

“Watch your tone,” Sergeant Miles growled.

Emily flinched. Sergeant Miles had lost his best friend when Shadye had forced Emily to stab him—and now he might have lost Sergeant Bane too. He might well blame Emily for Sergeant Bane’s death, even if he knew it wasn’t her fault.

“There’s no choice,” the Grandmaster said. “The Mimic could be any one of us.”

“And none of the students will be welcome in the Allied Lands until they are proved to be
human
,” Lady Barb added, tartly. “Or us, too.”

“You can’t be serious,” Emily said, in disbelief. “We can’t
all
be the Mimic...”

“Emily, people are
terrified
of Mimics,” Lady Barb said, softly. “And with very good reason.”