"Wait!" Hort yelped, chasing Aric and his men through the serrated tunnel shaped like a crocodile snout. "Shouldn't we search the shore?"
He scrambled to keep up as the tunnel grew narrower and narrower.
"Mogrif shield wouldn't activate for nothing! Spiricks must have caught somethi—"
But Aric and the boys had already vanished into the foyer. Hort peered back down the dark tunnel, tempted to go searching himself, but his hair was itchy with lice and his stomach rumbly. "Bet the girls have decent meals," he moped, turning for the castle—
A green blast of light sizzled his skull and he crashed to the floor, head slamming on stone.
When Hort's eyes fluttered open, he found himself splayed in his underpants and nothing else. Given he tended to lose his clothes quite often, Hort didn't think much of this until he looked up. "What in the . . ."
His black-and-red uniform magically floated away from him, towards the swarthy torchlight of the boys' castle, before it swallowed into thin air and disappeared.
***
As I entered the boys' rotted foyer, I made sure the invisible cape covered every sliver of Hort's suffocatingly snug uniform. Under the cape, I'd stay undetected.
Besides an extra coat of grime and a few more leaks, the Evil foyer looked much the same. Through the sunken anteroom, I saw the three black, crooked staircases twist up to the three towers, carved MALICE, MISCHIEF, and VICE. Demonic gargoyles glared down from the rafters, torches flaring in their mouths. But as I stepped into the light, she saw the boys had left their mark.
Crumbly columns decorated with swinging trolls and imps that once spelled N-E-V-E-R now spelled B-O-Y-S. At the rear of the stair room, the door to the Theater of Tales had been sealed with a neurotic number of bars and locks, preventing any access to the Tunnel of Trees behind the theater. My eyes drifted up the scorched walls, where thousands of crammed alumni portraits flaunted only boys' faces, both Evers and Nevers.
Pulling my vanishing cape tight, I followed the echoes up the Malice staircase.
***
A castle full of boys can end one of two ways. Either its inhabitants channel aggression into order, discipline, and productivity. Or they degenerate into hormonal apes. As I stepped onto the fifth floor of Malice Hall, I saw Tedros'school had gone the latter.
Hooting, half-naked boys in black breeches hung from the rafters and crammed into every inch of the sweltering hall, as if spending time in each other's sweat was preferable to being in their rooms. The scorched stone floor was smeared with rotted banana, breadcrumbs, egg yolks, ham bones, chicken feathers, and milky stains, while the gray brick walls were graffitied with infantile warmongering against girls—WHO NEEDS GIRLS, I HATE GIRLS, and caricatures of Evergirls and Nevergirls being eaten by wolves, pitched from towers, and cast off a ship plank. Hidden against the wall, I inched closer, expecting nothing less from smelly, villainous Neverboys . . . until I saw it wasn't the Neverboys at all.
Hairy, burly Chaddick swung from the ceiling, whooping and kicking open rooms, while handsome, dark-skinned Nicholas fired stun spells at a cornered mouse. Regal-nosed Tarquin and muscled Oliver took turns punching each other's flat stomachs; baby-faced Hiro led a burping contest; and quiet Bastian beat bongos, all pausing to join Chaddick's fist-raising chant of "We Are Men, Mighty and Free."
I blinked, aghast. What happened to the chivalrous Everboys I'd once known? What happened to princes-to-be?
"Bonded by strength and fraternity," the boys bellowed, "Gods beyond authority—"
YOU ARE READING
Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)
FanfictionBOOK 1 OF SGE x READER SERIES *** "Is there a reason you're talking to me right now?" he asked. "Or are you just trying to get me out of the way?" I scowled, all nervousness falling away. "If I wanted to do that, you would have been long gone by now...
