“I wasn’t,” Kai interrupted. His ebony eyes glinted in the dim light, and his features were completely impassive. “Vampires heal quick. Anyway, all we could see when we walked in was him moving stuff around on the shelves. Little statues, I think.”
“They looked more like raw gemstones to me,” Kingston said, shaking his head. “Dragons have an eye for treasure, you know.”
“Then you wouldn’t have cared whether they were carved or not,” Kai argued. “You wouldn’t remember.”
“I think some of them were carved and some weren’t,” Jayce put in thoughtfully. He wrinkled his nose. “But I don’t think they were gemstones. And he wasn’t really moving them, just sort of picking them up and putting them back down.”
“Which is the literal definition of ‘moving’.” Kai arched a brow.
“Enough.” Toland lifted a hand, interrupting any stupid argument before it could really get started.. “What happened when the three of you arrived?”
“We saw that he had Piper tied up, and we attacked him. Sneak attack. He had cotton in his ears.”
“Why would he do that?” Toland asked.
“Because I almost convinced him to let me go.” I sighed, glancing at the spot where Owen had deposited me on the floor. “I was trying to figure out what he was doing, but he just kept ranting about how he was a better match for me than my guys, blah blah blah, so I tried to persuade him to release me.” I looked up again, meeting Toland’s gaze. “It didn’t work.”
“So we fought him off,” Jayce said quietly. “We didn’t want to kill him—”
Kai snorted.
“I didn’t want to kill him anyway,” the blond man amended. “But he didn’t leave us much of a choice.”
Toland’s heavy gray brows furrowed. “Huh.”
With that vague pronouncement, he led us back out into the hallway where Owen’s stony remains lay like a heap of coal bricks. Toland nodded at the empath, who touched what had once been a forehead. She closed her eyes and hummed tunelessly under her breath for several minutes. After a while she sighed and stood up, her aged knees creaking beneath her.
“It’s been too long,” she said. “If I’d gotten to him yesterday, maybe there would have been something left to glean. He’s nothing but stone now. Memories degrade quickly after death.”
Toland nodded and sighed before turning to me and my guys.
“Well, I hate to do this to you again.” He actually sounded like he meant it. “But this is a serious business. A student is dead. Not to mention that we’re trapped in the underworld. I’m afraid we are going to have to interrogate each of you individually.”
“Interrogate? Why? We told you everything that happened,” Kingston said with an indignant shake of his dark hair.
Toland gave him a flat look. “Because you can’t even agree on what objects used to be on those shelves. We need to have the whole picture before we can hope to piece together exactly how Owen managed this.”
“So you believe we’re innocent?” Kingston pressed. He’d been heir to a business empire back on earth, before he’d been turned into a dragon, and I supposed his old negotiating skills died hard.
Toland pressed his lips together. “I do believe that Owen is behind our sudden relocation. But I would not be worthy of my post as headmaster if I didn’t investigate every aspect of this incident as thoroughly as possible. Follow me. The interrogation room is two levels up.”
We followed him up two flights of stairs and into the basement, where the labyrinthine corridors took us in dizzying spirals until we arrived at the steel door guarded by magic.
“You will be questioned individually,” Toland repeated, turning to us. “Piper, we’ll start with you.”
Super.
Chapter Three
The interrogation room was less intimidating than it had been the first time. That time, they had been trying to scare a student into confessing to what they’d thought was a harmless prank, and they’d set the stage accordingly. The lights had been dimmed, giving the entire room a creepy, eerie atmosphere. This time, all of the lights were on and the crescent-shaped table looked more like the centerpiece in a serious boardroom than the last stop before a guillotine.
I sat where I had before, in the inner curve of the crescent. Cassandra and Vesper sat on one side, Devra and Charles sat on the other. Toland sat directly in front of me.
“You’re going to take us through it all step by step,” he intoned. “Begin with the very first time you ever suspected Owen of foul play.”
The siren began her song. Toland’s request wove through her music like a backbeat, an interrogation remix. I was going to tell them that I never suspected him at all until I saw him going downstairs instead of toward a classroom, but I stopped. That didn’t sound right.
The siren’s song intensified, her sweet, addictive musical embrace softening and opening my mind until I could follow the hesitation back to the source.