Sure, I had my daggers and my bad-ass leather outfit, but honestly there had been no real training I could lean on. Nothing recent. I needed to tap into the training Gran and Officer Jonathan had given me, and it was so long ago, I could only remember bits and pieces.

Eammon seemed inclined to let me just stumble through the tests that the other mentors had been setting up. I’d done plenty of exercising and reading, and not a whole lot else.

Under the shadow of the walkways, I knocked on the boarded-up door.

“Feish, open up,” I said. “I need to talk to Crash.”

There was no response at all. I pushed on the door a little and the wood groaned, opening just a crack. “Hey, I’m coming in, you’d better have clothes on!” I grinned as I pushed a little more and squeezed myself through the opening. Robert slid through behind me, his skeletal fingers clutching at my shirt for just a flash of a second.

The darkness was absolute, and I fished around in my bag, pulling out my flashlight. A single click and it was on. I swept the room with it, took a few steps and paused. “Hello?”

A whisper of cloth turned me to the left. I panned my light in that direction, but no one was there. Chills skittered up my spine, but I shook them off. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I whispered with as much menace as I could. I mean, if they wanted to play the scare-the-poop-out-of-you game, I could do that too.

I kept moving forward, hearing that cloth rustle to my right now. I didn’t bother to pan that way—my eyes were drawn straight ahead to where I’d sat with Crash and had tea. The space was bare, the urns gone, the weapons nowhere to be found. He’d left, apparently.

Which meant I was in this place with a critter of indeterminate breeding.

Well, crap. The chills that I’d pushed away as nothing to be worried about came back full force. “Jinx, that you?”

The rustling came faster now, and with it, the sound of something metallic sliding across the floor. Still to my right.

I turned to my left, away from the noise, and bit back a scream.

Robert stood there, swaying, his head down, his skeletal hand pointing at the exit. “Jaysus,” I breathed out.

“Robert,” Robert said, correcting me. Because, of course, he wasn’t Jesus. He was Robert.

Not a time for laughing, though the urge ran through me in a rather quick, so-scared-I’m-giddy moment. I walked as normally as I could toward the barred-up door. I stuck the flashlight in my mouth and ran my hand over the edge of the door to let myself out. Only the edge was not an edge anymore.

The whisper of cloth and sound of metal being dragged on stone drew closer.