Seven for a Secret Read Free Page B

to the Chancellor? You’re very nearly graduates, ladies. You must acquit yourselves as responsible young adults, and not behave as children. ”
    Carefully, Ruth nodded. From the corner of her eye, she could see the motion of Adele’s cap as Adele mirrored her. „ I am sorry, Herr Professor, ” Ruth said.
    He still frowned at them over the bridge of his nose. „You are lucky seventh daughters don’t grow on trees,” he said, and let his hands fall to his sides, where he slid them into the patch pockets on his dressing gown. „Three demerits to each of you. Extra chores until you have expunged them to the satisfaction of Miss Krupps. And you are both restricted to the household until further notice.”
    Ruth licked her lips and discovered that she’d been correct. They were chapping. „Yes, Herr Professor,” she said, as Adele echoed, „I understand, sir.”
    „Good,” he said. „Now go up to your rooms. I shall inform Miss Krupps to expect you in the kitchens to help prepare breakfast.”Which meant rising before dawn. Short sleep was also a punishment.
    „ Yes, Herr Professor,” Adele said, while Ruth was still considering that. Then Adele took Ruth’s wrist in her chill strong hand and led her past Herr Professor Schroeder—who stepped aside to let them walk up the center of the hall unimpeded—down the long corridor, and up the stairs on tiptoe. They moved as silently as wolves past the open doors of bedrooms so they would not wake the other four girls in their class, who might already be in bed.
    „ That was close,” Adele whispered. Ruth balanced their latchless door open a crack, as the rules demanded.
    Ruth leaned back against the wall beside the armoire in relief and smiled at Adele through the harshness of the electric light. „ Well, what was he going to do to us? Somebody just reminded me, it’s not like sevens grow on trees.”

    When he was in the company of Abby Irene and Phoebe, the wampyr remembered to think of himself as Sebastien. Neither had ever quite surrendered the name they first knew him by, and in a moment of honesty he would admit he found it comforting. Mortals had the luxury of demanding permanence and having some slight chance of getting it. They did not need to acquire the skill of letting names, lovers, places slip through their fingers like hourglass sand. Sebastien knew of—though he did not subscribe to—an Oriental belief ancient by even his standards, which taught the same principals as a means of avoiding suffering. He wondered how many of his court would think it a chilly and nihilistic philosophy.
    So whatever name graced his papers, he was Sebastien, at home. And would remain Sebastien a little while longer, at least to Abby Irene and Phoebe.
    The former of those had indulged his curiosity about what it was that might make a human girl smell of wolf-hide. The library of their deep but narrow townhouse was carpeted, and so Sebastien parked Abby Irene’s chair at one end of it and allowed her to bid him thither and yon, until the turned-leg table before her groaned with aged books.
    After decades spent lightfooted on the continent, Abby Irene’s library had been much reduced. But in returning to occupied London, she had found an unexpected legacy. The Crown Investigators had been disbanded, those sorcerers who had not fled the country detained, and the Enchancery replaced by a skeleton staff of Prussian Zaubererdetektive. Some might consider her a traitor to the crown—she had to admit, she numbered herself one such—but Abby Irene still had a friend or two in London, and a friend or two among those previously employed by the Crown’s Own. Some of the Enchancery’s rarer books had mysteriously disappeared in the early days of the Occupation. And through happenstance or by design, a significant number of those books had come into Abby Irene’s possession over the intervening years.
    Now, Sebastien triggered a latch on the book case that blunted one corner