The Darkness Dwellers by Kirsten Miller

Author:Kirsten Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: The Darkness Dwellers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Since Principal Wickham had named me her protégé, I had really been making an effort to stay awake in class. But let’s be honest, if you’ve been up all night thinking about spies, slaughters, and sabotage, there’s nothing like a physics lecture to send you straight to dreamland.

“Ananka. Ananka!” My physics instructor, Mr. Schiffer, was poking me with a piece of chalk, leaving little white polka dots on the sleeve of my black sweater.

“The second law of thermodynamics!” I blurted out, and my classmates tittered. I twisted around to see a room filled with zombies.

“Nice try, Ananka,” Mr. Schiffer said. “You’re exactly three weeks behind the rest of the class. Now go to the principal’s office.”

“Please,” I begged, wiping the drool from my chin. “I had a rough night. I promise I’ll stay awake.” Principal Wickham may have been my mentor, but she never hesitated to sentence me to after-school detention, and I’d already texted Oona and Iris to meet me at four.

“I’ve given up trying to punish you,” said Mr. Schiffer, waving a note in the air. “But apparently Principal Wickham believes that you might not be hopeless. She’s the one who requested your presence.”

Still groggy, I made a pit stop at the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. Standing at the sink, I could hear the sound of weeping coming from one of the stalls. I squatted down and caught sight of an extra-large pair of ladylike pumps. The stall’s occupant was applying bandages to the backs of her heels, which were raw and bloody from rubbing against the shoes’ stiff leather.

“You okay in there?” I asked. “You want me to get a first-aid kit? Or maybe some morphine? Those wounds look pretty nasty.”

“No, thank you,” came the polite reply. Then the sobbing commenced once more.

“You sure?” I tried again, but the only response I received was the sound of a nose being blown.

Suit yourself, I thought, my sympathy exhausted. That’s what you get for letting traitor-loving Amelia Beauregard turn you into the walking dead.

I pushed through the door and headed toward the dimly lit, reputedly haunted section of the building that housed the principal’s office. When I arrived, her assistant glanced up at me and then returned to her typing. She shook her head as if to say, You’ve done it again. But the only words that left her mouth were, “Go right inside, Ananka. They’re waiting for you.”

Hundreds of eyes always stared back at me whenever I entered the principal’s dusty office. Her walls were covered with five decades of photos—snapshots of Atalanta’s most illustrious graduates. No one knew more senators, brain surgeons, or CEOs than the principal of Manhattan’s most exclusive girls’ school. At one time or another, they’d all been Theodora Wickham’s protégés. If the principal had bothered to call in all the favors she was owed, she could have easily ended up running New York.

But that day, I breezed into the office and found myself greeted by a new set of eyes—a pair that happened to belong to one of the most famous faces in the world.

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