Chapter 25 · Dropped Into Witch Academy at Midnight - Chapter 25: The Patient in the Tower

The tower door is already open.

I stop at the threshold, lungs burning from the sprint up four flights of stairs. Vivienne's behind me, close enough that I can hear her breathing hard. Cassandra took a different route—east wing, she said, like she knows this place better than she wants to admit.

The door shouldn't be open. Headmistress Morien locks everything.

"Alex." Vivienne's hand finds my elbow. "Wait."

I don't wait. I'm through the door before she finishes the word, and the room inside is wrong.

It's not an office. It's a medical bay—old, Victorian-style, iron bed frames and glass cabinets full of brown bottles. The air smells like antiseptic and something else. Something burnt. In the center of the room, on a table that looks like it was dragged from a morgue, there's a body.

No. Not a body.

A man. Chest rising and falling in shallow, erratic gasps. Wires trail from his temples, his wrists, his sternum. They snake across the floor and feed into a device that's half-magic, half-machine—