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Jahrdran murmured that he had some more research to do and left me.
Again.
For the third time.
This time, I forgave him, though.
His entire world view had just been altered and he now had to come to terms with the fact that everything his peopleandmine had suffered had been in vain.
As for me, it was hard to feel empathy for the people who had slaughtered mine, but having witnessed Jahrdran’s ashen response, I could only imagine how much harder it had to have been for the original hunters when they realized they were hunting innocents, but were bound by an oath to execute them anyway.
I spent the rest of our break continuing to read theHistory of Shadowsand perusing the shelves of the shadow-room for more books.
Unfortunately, the readings did nothing to dispel the theory that the Shadow Killer could still be out there. In fact, I ended the book convinced the killer was still wreaking havoc across the known universes.
It was that last weekend, when students were starting to arrive back at the castle, that I foundThe Book of Shadows.
It was on the bottom shelf in the shadow-room, hidden at the very back, as if it had fallen from a higher shelf, sliding down a wall made of shadows.
I opened it and immediately knew the explanation for my existence was probably somewhere inside that weighty tome, for it appeared to be a complete record of shadow-beast lineages for the past five hundred years.
When I arrived back in our room, Mikaela and Jasmine had arrived and were waiting for an update on anything I’d discovered while they were gone.
We spent hours talking, both of them shocked but excited to hear that Jahrdran was starting to come around.
Eventually, Jasmine went off in search of snacks and caffeine while Mikaela and I got back into the research.
Mikaela was stretched out on Jasmine’s bed, reading about shadow-mates, and I was flipping throughThe Book of Shadows, examining family trees and shadow-beast lineages, when it happened.
In our earlier research, we had discovered that the shadow realm could heal shadow-beasts to the extent that they could potentially live forever, but that if they stayed too long in the shadow realm without visiting the physical world, they risked dissolving into nothing but shadows themselves.
In the lineages, there were shadow-beasts who had lived for hundreds of years and others who had no dates of death recorded. I was wondering whether those without a death date had fled into the shadows to avoid persecution, and if so, whether they had dissolved to mist by now, when Jasmine’s side of the room erupted in shadows.
Shadow let out a snarl and lunged across the room, tackling one of the long, smoky-gray tentacles that had surrounded Mikaela.
The tentacles tightened around her, then bucked as if in an attempt to dislodge Shadow, before vanishing in an instant, taking Mikaela and Shadow with them.
I lunged across the room, my shadow-beast exploding from me, but there were no shadows to enter.
They had all disappeared.
I whirled and dove under my bed, sliding into the shadows waiting there.
CHAPTER12
The spaceunder my bed had always seemed larger than it looked, and now that I understood the magic of the shadows and how they all led to the shadow realm for those able to enter it, I no longer considered the underside of my bed to be fully of this world anymore.
Instead, it was a gateway to the shadow realm.
Even so, whenever I went beneath my bed, I pretty much stayed within that small, though larger than it appeared, pocket of space.
Until now, I had never attempted to explore beyond it and I had no real idea of what to expect.
The real world, like always, seemed so close, the bed still above me and our dorm room behind me.
If I retreated, I knew I’d crawl right out from under the bed back into my room.
So I crawled forward, toward the wall that stretched alongside my bed, then past where it should be into a vast open space of shadows.
