Twilit Mage

Chapter 47: One Missing

The lockdown went on.

At first they had all still firmly believed that it would be over soon. The first day everyone had been full of confidence, convinced that the lockdown could end at any any moment now, that it was only a matter of time until the unknown threat on campus was caught and they all could walk free. They simply needed to wait. The teachers were doing everything they could, and what could escape their combined powers for long?

The second day, however, conviction started to waver.

No one had expected this lockdown to last longer than a day. The entire school had woken up thinking everything would be back to normal now, like waking up from a bad dream and finding that nothing had been real after all. But when they got down to the doors, it was the same procedure as the day before.

Day two came and ended, and day three began with no changes to the situation at all. The only thing that changed were everyone's moods. The students were starting to complain and get angry or scared. Some were talking about calling their parents to get them out of there, others spoke about threatening to sue. The teachers grew more and more stressed. When they weren't teaching classes they did shifts of guarding the hallways and passages and the cafeteria, constantly keeping up barriers and enchantments and searching for the mystery threat in the evenings and even at night. None of them looked like they had been getting more than an hour or two of sleep every night, and Sullivan Blake wore a glove on his left hand that he never took off.

Mercury was getting tense too. Not because she was scared of the ominous thing out there. But she was worried anyway, worried what it might be, worried that she and Raoul had something to do with its appearance. Raoul grew very quiet again. He clung to Mercury the way he always had, but she could tell he was every bit as afraid as she was. No, possibly more. Knowing him, he might be blaming himself because the entire adventure had been his idea. She wished she could tell him it wasn't, but there was no way, not as long as they didn't know what was going on in the first place.

Georgiana, however, seemed to suffer even more than the two of them did. Unable to access either the library or Paige & Turner, she grew uneasy, restless, constantly searching for information on her phone and getting irritable every time she came up with nothing helpful. Online databases knew a lot, but they didn't know what she needed, and it was driving her up the wall. More and more often she quit her attempts and found herself heading to Mercury's room, visiting her simply to try and put a stop to her endlessly circling thoughts.

But the one who took the lockdown the hardest, who panicked at every new minute, every new second, was Riley. They had been anxious from the very beginning. Every time something happened they perked up with hope, and every time nothing changed they only grew more desperate, visibly straining themselves to keep from breaking down in front of everyone. They were anxious the first day. The second day, panicking. By the time the third day rolled around, they looked ready for anything.

It was breakfast when Mercury noticed them, sitting not far from her own group while Raoul and Georgiana exchanged sarcastic quips next to her. They were surrounded by friends, but not even friends seemed able to calm them down today. Their face was so pale it looked gray. Their eyes were wide and swollen and bloodshot and shadowed with dark circles as if they hadn't slept in days, their lips chapped and bruised as if they had chewed on them nonstop. Mercury couldn't tell for sure from this distance, but their hands seemed to be shaking.

"It's okay, Riley," a girl said where she sat across from them. "It can't be long now, and then you can have it back. You can hang in that long, right?"

Riley forced a smile, but everyone within a three-mile radius could see how fake it was.

"Sorry, guys," they said. "I got this. Just a little longer. Right?"