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.”“But I have never heard of a Mimic trying to frame someone else,” Sergeant Miles argued.“We assumed there was a necromancer because the bodies appeared to have been killed by a necromantic rite.But why would a Mimic try to hide?”Emily remembered—dimly—the handful of classes she’d taken last year on Magical Creatures.Mimics couldn’t be killed, if she recalled correctly—or at least no one had ever tried to do it and come back to report.They killed someone and copied their body so precisely that they could take their place for weeks, perhaps months or years.And, as they copied their victim’s memories and personality too, the change was almost impossible to detect until the Mimic resumed its natural form.They were the stuff of nightmares.“I wish I knew,” she said, out loud.“Can we track it down?”“Maybe,” Lady Barb said.“No one knows much about them, but there’s a general consensus that they can go quite some time without having to change their form.This one, however, seems determined to kill every few days.”“Maybe it’s injured,” Emily mused.If it had attacked the Warden.it suggested a certain level of intelligence.“Are Mimics intelligent?”Lady Barb gave her a sharp look.“No one knows,” she admitted.“They certainly seem capable of posing as their victims.”The Grandmaster held up his hand.“For the moment, I have altered the wards and sealed us within the school,” he said.“We will be unable to leave until we find and contain the Mimic.”Emily stared at him.“You’re locking us all inside with that.thing?”“Watch your tone,” Sergeant Miles growled.Emily flinched.Sergeant Miles had lost his best friend when Shadye had forced Emily to stab him—and now he might have lost Sergeant Bane too.He might well blame Emily for Sergeant Bane’s death, even if he knew it wasn’t her fault.“There’s no choice,” the Grandmaster said.“The Mimic could be any one of us.”“And none of the students will be welcome in the Allied Lands until they are proved to be human,” Lady Barb added, tartly.“Or us, too.”“You can’t be serious,” Emily said, in disbelief.“We can’t all be the Mimic.”“Emily, people are terrified of Mimics,” Lady Barb said, softly.“And with very good reason.”Emily nodded, unhappily.If a Mimic could replace a person so exactly that there was no easy way to spot the substitution, the first real sign might come when it dissolved into mist and searched for its next victim.She could imagine a wife sleeping next to a husband.and then waking up to see her husband resuming his natural form.It made her wonder if the Mimic kept the memories of those it had killed, or if it forgot what it had been when it returned to its natural form.“It must forget,” she mused out loud.“Or why would it play at being human?”Lady Barb quirked an eyebrow.“Emily?”“The Mimic,” Emily said.“While it isn’t in its natural form, does it remember what it really is?”Travis had been interrogated, Emily recalled, and nothing had surfaced to suggest that he was anything more than the jerk he’d seemed.But if she assumed that the Mimic had killed Travis and taken his place during the Battle of Whitehall, when the wards were down, it suggested that the Mimic had been able to pass for a student.simply because it had forgotten it was anything else.Master Tor’s lectures on truth spells and their limitations suggested that a liar couldn’t be detected if he didn’t know that he was lying.“No one knows,” Lady Barb said, softly.She looked down at Emily, thoughtfully.“Can you cast a spell for me?”Emily blinked.“Which one?”“Any,” Lady Barb said.Something clicked in Emily’s mind.“You think I’m the Mimic?”“It’s a possibility,” the Grandmaster admitted.“Danielle would have been replaced; it was the Mimic who reported finding Travis’s body, not his former girlfriend.”Emily stared at him in absolute horror.If she were the Mimic, would she even know that she was? Might she have been replaced before she hurled herself out of the window? She hesitated, then cast a simple light spell.The ball of light shimmered into existence and hovered over her bed.“But that may not prove anything,” Sergeant Miles said, grimly.“If Travis was replaced when the Mimic escaped, he still would have had to perform magic in classes.I know he was studying and using spells in Martial Magic and I really don’t see how he could have faked them.”Lady Barb nodded in agreement.“So that proves nothing,” she said.“The Mimic could be anywhere.Or anyone.”“I am not the Mimic,” Emily said, sharply.The Grandmaster gave her a sympathetic look.“Would you know if you were?”“We’ve had to seal the school,” Lady Barb said, changing the subject.“Could that have been the objective all along? Did someone introduce the Mimic into the school?”“There is no known way to control a Mimic,” the Grandmaster said, flatly.“It is much more likely that we’re hunting the Mimic that escaped the zoo during Shadye’s attack on Whitehall.And we have to find it before it wipes out everyone in Whitehall.”He turned and made his way towards the door, then stopped.“Lady Emily,” he said, “thank you for alerting us to the threat.Stay here, get better.then see if you can think of any way to trap the creature.”Sergeant Miles followed him, leaving Emily alone with Lady Barb [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]