Page 72 of Fractured Fates

No, someone took him.

Someone took him to mess with me.

But I have no fucking clue who.

Scrap that. I have several ideas who it could be.

That’s the problem. It could be any number of people. I’ve been here two weeks and I already seem to have built up an entire army of people who hate my guts.

I don’t understand why. I didn’t do anything to provoke their dislike, other than being myself. Maybe that was enough.

Winnie tries to calm me down, grabbing me by both hands and pulling me to sit on her bunk when I return to our room to search the cupboard yet again.

“He’s probably just wandered off. He was probably bored of hanging out in our room, wanted an adventure. I’m sure he’ll be back for dinner.”

I shake my head, telling Winnie the same thing I told Stone. “Pip wouldn’t do that. He never wanders off. He’s too fucking stupid.”

“Exactly,” Winnie says, ignoring my scowl. I am allowed to criticize my pet, nobody else is. “Perhaps he got lost. Let’s get to class and if he’s not back by lunchtime, we’ll go out looking for him again. He probably wandered into the forest or–”

“Someone took him!”

“Why would someone take him?”

I give my friend a hard look.

“To fuck with me.”

“Oh,” Winnie says, realization dawning over her face.

“I need to get him back before they do something horrible to him.”

Winnie turns slightly green. “It was probably Summer,” she says.

“Or Tristan. I tried the Venus common room – it was empty. And so were the locker rooms.”

I wish I could track him like I can track magicals. I wish I’d thought of placing a tracking spell on him. Fuck it, I wish I’d put an actual chip in him. But it never, in one hundred thousand years, occurred to me that someone would steal my pig.

After all, the students here spend their entire time making snide comments about how filthy and smelly he is.

“You could go to Professor York?” Winnie offers, although she doesn’t sound convinced.

We both know Professor York isn’t going to give a shit about my pig.

“I already went to ask Professor Stone for help,” I mumble.

“You did?”

“I was desperate! And I thought, seeing as he’s so damn good at reading minds–”

“He’d be able to identify the culprit.”

I nod.

“And?”

“He basically slammed the door in my face.” I neglect to mention the part where he threatened to kiss me and how that had set my heart racing like a freight train. I can’t think about that now. When I find Pip, then I’ll think about why the idea of kissing that asshole had been, in that moment, so appealing.

Winnie squeezes my hand. “Let’s split up and be methodical about searching this place.”