"Probability narrows the field. There were three reasons you'd visit tonight. Two involved asking me something. The third was that you'd finally snapped and come to kill me, which I had at four percent. It's been climbing, actually—it was two percent last month." He grins. The grin is the worst thing about Felix Ferrix—warm, genuine, the kind of smile that makes you like him before you remember that he's running calculations behind it. "This is more fun than assassination."
"Your participation—"
"Obviously." The cards fan out, snap shut. His green eyes are doing the thing where they go sharp and still while the rest of him stays loose. "You know what I find interesting? Nobody knows what happens at full absorption. Every historical record either stops right before the moment or has been razored out of the archive. Someone went through those books with a blade, Callum. I've seen the cut marks. The pages don't just end—they've beenremoved."
I know. I've seen the same thing in the restricted section.
"Friday," I say. "Details to follow."
"Sure." Shuffle, cut, shuffle. Then, as I'm turning: "Whatever your mother showed you today—the stuff on her desk—the probability that this ends clean is lower than you're telling yourself. Just so you know."
He says it lightly. The way you'd mention that it might rain. And his cards keep moving, and his smile stays warm, and I walk out knowing that Felix Ferrix has read me like a page in one of his probability spreads and found the answer wanting.
* * *
The greenhouse is a different kind of hell—warm, thick, the cloying sweetness of blood-fed roses pressing against my sinuses. The thornbushes along the walkway are blooming crimson, petals so dark at the edges they look bruised. Everything in the Sanguis greenhouse is alive in a way that feels aggressive, like the plants know you're there and have opinions about it.
Ren is at his bench. Dark hair, quiet hands, a plant with red veins that pulse with their own light sitting under his fingers. His ritual knife lies beside it, the gem in the hilt glowing like an ember somebody forgot to put out.
He doesn't look up. He doesn't need to. I'd bet my inheritance he knew I was coming before I left Long Shot Mansion. Blood mages read the world through a frequency the rest of us can't access—heartbeat, breath, the electrical chatter of a living nervous system. Ren Ashford has been listening to every person on this campus for years, and he has never once told anyone what he's heard.
"Demonstration," I say. "All four. Simultaneous. Grey. Friday."
He prunes something from the plant. A thorn catches his thumb and blood wells up—dark, almost black in the greenhouse light—and the plant shivers toward it. The leaves flush deeper red. Hungry.
Silence. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.
"I'll be there."
No questions. No resistance. No reaction at all—just three words in a voice so flat it could be a recording. And that's what's wrong with Ren, has always been wrong with Ren. Atlas is a bonfire—dangerous but readable. Felix is a card trick—complicated but patterned. Ren is a closed door. Locked, soundproofed, and behind it is a person who can feel every heartbeat in a hundred-yard radius and has chosen to say nothing about any of them.
He knows what Grey feels. He's felt it through her blood, through the Sanguis magic she absorbed from the spider, through the connection that exists between every blood mage and every living thing in their proximity. He knows things about her that the rest of us never will.
And he's sitting in this greenhouse with his bleeding plants and his quiet knife and he is going to walk into the Proving Grounds on Friday and channel his magic into a girl he's been deliberately not touching for weeks, and he hasn't asked a single question about what happens next.
That should be reassuring. Compliance without resistance. A president who follows orders.
It's the most frightening thing I've encountered today, and I spent an hour in a room with my mother.
* * *
My room. Lights off. The shadows pool around me like water filling a basin—familiar, easy, the one thing that never requires a performance.
I copied the diagrams while Mother was looking out her window. Shadows are good for that—they slide into drawers, flatten under pages, carry impressions back like photographs made of darkness. She probably knows I copied them. She probably doesn't care. The confidence of a woman who has correctly predicted every move her son has made for twenty years and sees no reason to stop now.
I spread them on my desk. Study them in the dark, because my eyes work better in shadow and the diagrams feel like they were meant to be read this way—in the absence of light, by someone who trades in death.
The five-pointed star. The figure at the center. The concentric circles.
The words at each point that my magic won't touch.
Five generations of Bolingbrokes. Five generations ofmanaginggrimoire situations. And the documentation lives on pages that make my shadows recoil, in ink mixed with something that tastes like old death and older purpose.
I should tell the others.
I should show Atlas the star and let him see the human figure at its center and ask him if it reminds him of anything. I should hand Felix the data and let his probability magic do what mine can't—calculate the odds, find the outcomes, map the branches of a future I'm too close to see clearly. I should sit in Ren's greenhouse and ask him point-blank what he hears in Grey's blood, whether it sounds like something building or something ending.
I should warn Grey.
