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G reat. Now it was raining, and that seemed to mean more than just us getting wet. Khalid and Liam both seemed like they were expecting this. I thought Lucian would be annoyed at getting wet, but he seemed to welcome it. I, apparently, underestimated how much he hated not being able to shower.

“How did you both know it was going to rain?”

Liam and Khalid both started talking at once, stopped talking, then started talking over each other again as they told the other to go first.

“Liam, you’re connected with nature. Can you sense the weather?” I asked.

“What? No, I’m in bloody England. It’s shocking we were out here this long without the skies pissing on us. If you’re going to go to school here for four years, you’ll want an umbrella. It doesn’t actually rain that often, but it’s a thing to moan about. I like complaining, too.”

“You knew it was going to rain, too,” I said to Khalid.

“I love the rain,” Lucian said.

“How Prince of Darkness of you,” Liam snorted.

“Fuck off.”

“I was thinking about Mazen. Set was a god of storms, too.”

“This isn’t a proper storm, though,” Liam said. “It’s just nature shaking off after a piss. If Mazen was this big baddy in his previous life and he was awake, he’d probably be dumping more than just a drizzle on our heads.”

This was fucked up. I suspected Lola for absolutely no reason but a feeling in my gut. Khalid was looking at Mazen because he was a history scholar. And I wasn’t sure any of it was fair. There could be a completely logical explanation for why there were conflicting stories about how Lola came to be on her original team.

Mazen seemed just as thrilled to be Set as Lucian was to be Vlad the Impaler. And Headmaster Mykene even said we weren’t our original lives. Which meant someone might not have been evil before, but they were now.

This was complicated and my blood sugar was getting a little low, so it was annoying me more than it should. And don’t ask me how, but Lucian knew.

“Eat some of that fairy bread before it gets bad, please?”

He whispered it privately, so he wasn’t outing me and it was more like he was pleading with me than giving me an order. It was nice. It felt like he gave a shit and my diabetes wasn’t this massive inconvenience like my father did.

“Thanks. Do you need blood?”

“I will soon, but I don’t know how to not make it hurt, so I’m going to bite Liam.”

I liked Liam. Like, I really liked Liam, but I couldn’t help laughing. Liam was off to the side in some intense debate with Khalid. That honestly could have been the merits of Mazen being our big bad or Liam’s obsession with were-corgis.

I ate my fairy bread and looked around. The witches had drawn their line, too. It made a ton of sense Lola’s magic got triggered and was hiding her. I originally went there before Mazen said it out loud.

The witches were giving her filthy looks like they didn’t believe that. And I didn’t feel vindicated at all that I didn’t trust Lola all that much, either. I still felt like shit. Of course, they could literally just be glaring at her because they didn’t like that they couldn’t read her. I could be feeling the way I was, too, for the exact same reason.

“Does everyone have their crystal and is everyone accounted for?” Zephyr asked.

We all did and no one else was missing. All in all, two people had disappeared without a trace. Even one would have been too much. They weren’t dead or Khalid would have known. They were just…gone. And everyone who should have known what was going on either didn’t or they couldn’t talk about it.

I didn’t know if we’d be any safer back at the castle, but I’d feel that way with actual walls between me and whoever was doing all this.