Desdemona ''Des'' Winchester wants nothing to do with Melliford Academy. In fact, she's pretty sure her parents shipped her off to boarding school just to get her out of their hair. It's a move they'll come to regret if she has any say in the matter...
A/N: Hello, friends! I know I'm behind on comment replies again, but I see you reading weekly, and I want you to know that it makes my day 😊
This is a smol heads up that I've just completed another editing pass on this book, and cleaned up some minor details that I wrote in while pantsing but later found just complicated things. Nothing substantive, but if you notice any inconsistencies with what you've read before (especially around the sixty-year historical mark), just go with the newer version. It's already been fixed throughout the book!
That's all for me. Cheers, and happy reading ✨
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Detail on the map is scant; this wasn't an engineer's construction. But there's something else on it that catches my eye. In the middle of the grounds around the backside of the building is a faint dotted line. It outlines a shape—"circle" is generous, so I'd call it a blob—in the middle of grass that Exie and I have trampled before. From it to the building runs a line. More than one—the rest branch off it like bureaucratic tangents—but their motherline runs from the blob straight up the ass end of Melliford Academy, where the chapel lies. There it ends.
"It's the water," I say.
"What is?"
"This." I trace the blob with one finger. "Look, that's the same distance from the wall as the last willows. You ran to this one"—I tap an empty space on the blob's bottom right corner—"and these ones were still standing. This one was gone."
"What are the lines?"
"No idea."
There's no logic to them. Only their main trunk seems to run to the school, and the wall eats it for breakfast. There's no doorway back there; I've checked. Besides the front doors and the school's many first-floor windows, there's no alternative exit at all. The other branching lines interlock with one another and end in random parts of the yard, though one has adopted a nomadic life and taken off into the neverworld somewhere off the map's left spread. I pull up my mental image of the region again, but there's no town in that direction. There is a wall, also doorless. The line runs past it like a teenager ignoring their parents' call for dinnertime. It can't be a road.
"Anything on the others?" I whisper.
Exie shakes her head, handing the papers back. "It's just student records."
Records of people this school has brainwashed into demon servants. I also take a look over the pages, but they're straightforward, with no suspicious marks or annotations. I'd love to take them all with us, but we can't risk that theft being discovered. I cast a final eye over the building map, paying particular attention to the blob and the intersecting nest of lines making roots for it. There's nothing but grass along them, to my memory, but a second, more targeted search of the school grounds might reveal something. I slip all the papers back into the hidden drawer and slide it shut until it clicks. I test the finger-hold on its underside. Back to how we left it.
