Brittany's quiet for a minute, crunching through chips. Herbert emerges from under her bed, picks his way delicately across the floor, and climbs up onto my mattress. He settles near my knee, eight legs tucked under him, beady eyes fixed on my face.
"He keeps doing that," I say.
"He's concerned."
"About what?"
"Your currently fragile mental state." She takes a swig from the bottle and holds it out to me. "The fraternities do this to everyone who doesn't fit in, you know. It's not personal."
"It feels pretty fucking personal."
"That's the point. They push until you break or leave. Either way, problem solved." She shrugs. "You're more of a problem than most, so they're pushing harder. That's all."
I take the bottle from her, put my lips to its mouth, and cautiously drink. It burns going down and tastes like bad decisions, but the warmth in my belly is soothing somehow. "How did you survive it?"
Brittany doesn't answer right away. She's looking at the wall, at her band posters, at anything except me.
"Who says that I did?"
The question hangs there. I think about her academic probation. Her failing Sanguis magic. The way she keeps everyone at arm's length, including me, especially me, like getting close to people is a risk she's decided not to take.
"Brittany—"
"Don't." She takes the bottle back. "I'm not doing the heart-to-heart thing. I'm just saying, this place breaks people. Some of us it breaks all at once, like they're trying to do to you. Some of us it breaks slow, over years, until we don't even rememberwhat we were like before." She takes another drink. "The ones who survive are the ones who find something to hold onto. A person, a goal, a grudge. Something that matters more than the breaking."
"What's yours?"
"Wouldn't you like to know." But there's no bite in it. She almost sounds tired. "What's yours going to be?"
I look down at the cracked sphere in my bag, still pulsing with its four impossible colors. At the note in my hand, two words designed to make me disappear.
"Figuring out what I am," I say. "They're scared of me. All of them. I want to know why."
"That's something." Brittany puts on her doom metal—quieter than usual, almost background noise. "Good enough for now."
Later, after the chips are gone and the whiskey has settled into a warm blur behind my eyes, I check my schedule for tomorrow.
Elemental Studies with Parker. The assignment: attend a Mors practical demonstration, observe the sensory experience of death magic, write a two-page reflection on temperature shifts and ambient energy changes.
Great. A room full of necromancers, and me with my cracked sphere and my apparent ability to absorb anything that comes near me.
I pull out my notebook. The sphere. My useless research notes from the library. I don't have answers yet, but I have questions, and questions are somewhere to start.
Go home, the note said.
I smooth out the paper, fold it neatly, and tuck it into my notebook as a bookmark. A reminder.
They want me gone. All of them: the fraternities, the students, maybe even the administration. They look at me and see a problem to be solved, a bomb to be defused, something that doesn't fit and never will.
But I'm still here. Crying into contraband snacks in my dorm room, sure. Failing to make a single friend, absolutely. Running out of leads and out of hope and out of every coping mechanism I've ever relied on.
Still here, though.
That has to count for something.
Chapter 7: Everly
Ossium Hall looks like the kind of place where vampires hold dinner parties and no one leaves alive.
