The car had barely stopped before Ellory was surging out and jogging up to the door. Hudson’s Barracuda wasn’t in the driveway, which didn’t help her shaky nerves. Ellory managed to ring the doorbell only once, but she paced restlessly on the porch until she heard footsteps approaching.
Liam opened the door dressed in a matching slate-gray pajama set. His feet were bare, and his hair was smushed on one side of his head, as if he’d been sleeping on it. He blinked at her in confusion. “What are you doing here, Ellory?”
“I’m looking for Hudson. Do you know where he’s gone?”
Liam’s eyebrows drew together. “Who?”
Ellory wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She stepped forward until Liam backed away to let her inside. “I can just wait in his room,”she said, leaning down to unlace her sneakers. “I don’t want to interrupt whatever you were doing before I got here.”
“In whose room?” Liam asked.
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not kidding. And, not to be rude, but do you know what time it is?”
“Hudson will be—”
“Okay, seriously”—Liam grabbed her shoulder, keeping her from moving deeper into the house—“who’s Hudson? I’m the only person here.”
Ellory’s stomach dropped. She turned slowly, studying Liam’s face. He was serious. She forced herself to sound calm. “Hudson Graves? He’s—you don’t know someone namedHudson Graves?”
“I don’t,” Liam confirmed.
“What about Boone Priestley?”
Liam smiled drowsily. “Are these hot goths?”
Ellory stared at him until he yawned.
“If you’re staying, I’ll put the coffee on,” he said, rubbing his left eye. “In fact, you should stay. You sound—I’m worried about you.”
Ellory allowed him to deposit her on the couch. As soon as he was out of view, she left the house in a daze. Hudson’s phone number was out of service. Liam—his ex, his roommate—had never heard of him or Boone. Part of her hoped that if she waited there long enough, Boone would reopen the door, laugh at her for believing in his and Liam’s practical joke, and tell her that Hudson had gone to the gym or into town or somewhere,anywhere.
The door remained closed. Everything was still.
She walked down the road until she could no longer be seen from the windows. She sent a text to Tai, to Cody, to Stasie, even to theone person she knew from con. law:have you seen hudson today?Each one replied the same way:who?
Each one struck her like a blow.
The journey from the house back to campus flattened to nothing. One minute, Ellory was summoning a taxi. The next minute, she was in Graves Library—which was missing the plaque she sneered at every day—searching ancestry sites and local newspapers, searchingForbesand class records. Hudson Graves, twenty-one, senior at Warren University, didn’t exist, as far as the internet was concerned. His parents had one child—Cairo Graves—who had never attended Warren—or, indeed, any college at all.
The next time she checked her phone, his number was gone.
Ellory blinked, and she was in her dorm room, searching her shelves for the books Hudson had lent her and finding nothing. She sank onto her bed, wishing that she’d taken a picture of him or a picture of the two of them together, something she could hold on to as proof of this tear in reality.
Her surroundings blurred. Tears fell, first one and two and then a steady stream of sobs that tore her throat raw. All the times she’d felt alone before now couldn’t possibly compare to this hollowness. It was like losing a limb that she kept trying to walk on, like breaking a heart that she’d thought was already too broken to work. Ellory wiped angrily at her wet cheeks, but her body continued to shake because nothing made sense, nothing made any fuckingsenseanymore.
Ellory screamed into her pillow until her voice went hoarse and she could finally think.
Boone had warned her that he would protect Hudson at all costs. Had he done this? Had he dropped them both into some liminalspace where she couldn’t reach them, leaving her the sole victim of the Old Masters’ ire?
She rejected the theory as soon as it formed. She’d seen Boone’s magic, and it left copies behind to fill the void left by their absence. Hudson and Boone hadn’t just disappeared; they had been erased from existence, from memory.
Rem?mber.
Someone—Colt, perhaps—was messing with her. She’d gotten too close to the Old Masters and the School for the Unseen Arts, and Hudson had suffered for it. They wanted her isolated and afraid. They wanted her weak and doubtful. She was outside their control, and that made her a problem.
All her life, Ellory had tried her best to be accommodating. She was Black and she was a woman, and that intersection made her determined to be polite, decorous, unproblematic. Never sassy or angry. Never too sexual or too prudish. Never a clown and never a nerd. She welded herself into the mold society left open for her, and she tried not to ask for anything more.
