I fold the copies. Lock the drawer. Sit in the dark with my hands in my lap, cuffs straight, everything where it should be.
Three months ago, the obedience was easy. It was the shape of me—the structure I was built on, the architecture that held everything up. Follow the instructions. Deliver the report. Trust the family. Don't ask why, because why is irrelevant when the machinery works.
The machinery still works. I'm still sitting in this chair, still locking drawers, still sayingyes, Motherwith a voice she built and a face she designed and a compliance she installed so early I can't find the seams.
But something's grinding. Somewhere in the mechanism, a gear is catching on a tooth that wasn't there before, and the sound it makes when it catches is very quiet and very persistent and I can't make it stop.
I don't let myself think about what changed. Knowing would make it real, and real things can be taken away. She taught me that. It's the one lesson that never stops being true.
Friday. The Proving Grounds. All four of us, channeling everything we have into a nineteen-year-old girl who bakes snickerdoodles and wears pink shoes and has no idea what she's walking into.
I turn off the light.
I don't sleep.
Chapter 18: Everly
The screaming books are louder tonight.
I don't know if it's because of the storm that's been building over campus all day—low pressure, Atlas-flavored, though I haven't seen him—or because I'm pulling texts from a section I haven't touched before. Blood magic theory. The spines are bound in something that looks like leather but feels warm under my fingers, faintly pulsing, and the titles are stamped in dark red ink that catches the library lamplight like a warning.
Sanguine Bonds: A History of Blood-Based Magical Connections.
The Empathic Channel: How Blood Mages Perceive the Living World.
On the Nature of Channeling.
I pull the last one from the shelf and the book next to it shrieks—a high, thin wail like a kettle left on too long, loud enough that I flinch and yank my hand back. The edge of the shelf catches my palm. Not deep, just a scrape across the meat of my thumb, but enough to bleed.
"Shit."
Blood wells up—dark, quick, a line of red tracing the crease of my palm. I press it against my jeans automatically, the way you do, and try to grab the book again with my other hand.
The screaming book is still going. Its neighbor joins in—a lower howl, almost harmonic, like they've rehearsed this. I grit my teeth and pull the volume free and the wailing cuts off abruptly, replaced by a sulky vibration that I feel more than hear.
"You're welcome," I mutter, tucking the book under my arm.
My hand is still bleeding. It's a nothing injury—a scratch, barely worth noticing—but the blood magic behind my ribs has noticed.It's humming, warm and insistent, responding to my own blood the way it responds to Ren's proximity, and the warmth makes the cut sting more than it should.
I carry my stack back to the table I've claimed as mine—end of the restricted section, tucked behind a column, far enough from the main floor that the ancient librarian can't see what I'm reading unless she comes looking. I've been here since nine. It's past midnight now. The library is empty except for me and the books and whatever ghosts Nyxhaven keeps in its walls, and that's fine. I do my best thinking when the building stops pretending to be a school and starts being what it really is: a very old house full of very old secrets that would rather not be found.
I openOn the Nature of Channelingand start reading. The text is dense, old-fashioned, written in the kind of academic prose that treats every sentence like a legal document. But the content is what I need—a theoretical framework for how blood magic interacts with other disciplines. How channeling itself works on a fundamental basis. How a Sanguis mage perceives magical energy in other living things.
How absorption might be reversed.
That's what I'm looking for. Not how to absorb more—I've proven I can do that without trying—but how to give it back. Whether the magic I've pulled into myself can flow the other direction. Whether the shadows and the lightning and the blood magic are permanent residents or temporary guests.
I'm three pages in, bleeding on my jeans, when I feel him.
Not hear. Feel. The blood magic flares behind my ribs like a match being struck—sudden, warm, unmistakable. A heartbeat that isn't mine, steady and close, getting closer. I know who it is before I look up the same way I'd know a song from its first three notes.
Ren Ashford is standing at the end of my aisle.
He's in his Sanguis colors—crimson shirt under a black jacket, dark jeans, the ritual knife nowhere visible but almost certainly on him somewhere. His dark hair is pushed back from his face and he looks tired in a way that's different from Atlas's hollowed-out exhaustion. Ren's tiredness is quieter. Settled in. The tiredness of a person who hasn't been sleeping well for a long time and has stopped expecting that to change.
He doesn't say anything. Just looks at me—at the books spread across my table, at the titles, at the blood smeared on my jeans where I pressed my cut hand—and something shifts in his expression. Not much. Ren doesn't do much. But the careful blankness he usually wears when I'm in the room loosens by a fraction, and what's underneath is something I haven't seen from him before.
He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down.
