She brought me snickerdoodles on the first day. She named her pillow Frank. She talked to Herbert like he was a person, not a pet, and he responded to her within a week—something that took me three months to achieve and that I've never told her because I refuse to give her the satisfaction.
I didn't sign up for any of this. But here I am.
I watch the taillights until they disappear.
It doesn't take long. The 4Runner's taillights glow red for a moment—bright, functional, because I maintain my car—and then Callum's shadows eat what's left of them, and within thirty seconds the car is just a sound in the dark, and then it's not even that.
Gone.
I stand in the parking lot with my arms crossed and Herbert on my shoulder and I count to sixty because I need something to do with my brain that isn't thinking about what I just did. One. Two. Three. The cold is sharp on my face and my fingers and the tip of my nose, October in New England, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and stays. Twelve. Thirteen. Herbert shifts his weight on my collar. His legs are tense—he knows something's wrong. He always knows.
Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
I gave her my car. I gave her my keys and my security map and my emergency cash and the flashlight with the skull sticker and a note I wrote at two in the morning while everyone pretendedto sleep. I gave her everything I have that's worth anything and I told her to go and she went.
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
The campus is quiet behind me. Callum's storm cover is fading—the clouds thinning, the moon coming back, silver light spilling across the Gothic spires and the stone paths and the oak trees with their reaching shadows. It's beautiful. It's always been beautiful. That's the trick of this place—it looks like a painting, like a dream, like somewhere you'd give anything to belong. You don't notice the teeth until they're in you.
Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.
Sixty.
I turn around.
Nyxhaven University looks the same as it did the day I arrived. Freshman orientation, August, my mother's borrowed sedan pulling up to Bellamy Hall and my mother crying in the driver's seat because her daughter got into a school she'd never heard of, a magical school, a world she couldn't follow me into. I told her I'd be fine. I told her I'd call every Sunday. I told her this was the opportunity of a lifetime, which is what the acceptance letter said, in gold ink on cream paper, and I believed it because I was seventeen and I didn't know yet that opportunities and traps look exactly the same from the outside.
I walk back.
The parking lot to Bellamy Hall is a three-minute walk. I've done it thousands of times—from the car to the dorm, from the dorm to the car, the route I mapped first because it was the fastest way out if things went bad. Things went bad. And I'm walking the wrong direction.
The campus is empty at this hour. Just me and Herbert and the moonlight and the sound of my boots on stone. The securityward at the east gate has reset—I feel the faint hum of it, a vibration in my back teeth, there and gone. They're through. They made it. Whatever happens next, they're outside the wards and heading north and Everly is driving my car with four boys who don't deserve her and the note I wrote is in her bag and she'll read it tomorrow or the next day or whenever she's brave enough, and I hope—
I hope she knows.
I hope the note says what I meant it to say, even though I'm shit with words and worse with feelings and the thing I wrote at two AM with a stolen pen probably sounds more like a maintenance report than a love letter. Not that it's a love letter. It's a—
It's a Brittany letter. She'll know what that means.
The quad is empty. The dining hall is dark. The library windows are black. I pass Ossium Hall, its gargoyles watching me with stone eyes, and Fulmen Hall with its lightning rods catching moonlight, and the rose garden outside Vitae Hall where the thornbushes bloom crimson all year and the air smells like blood and flowers.
I pass the eastern clearing. The one Everly found—the pentagon in the grass, the foundation stones of a building that isn't there anymore. I know about it because she told me, that night, the night before the demonstration. Her voice quiet and wondering, describing the way her four magics went silent when she stepped inside the outline. The way the stones were warm.
I stop. Look at the clearing in the moonlight. The grass is silver. The stones are dark shapes in the earth, half-buried, patient.
I don't feel what Everly feels. I don't have four magics humming in my chest. I don't have a bond, a connection, a door that opened and won't close. I'm just a failing Sanguis student witha spider and a stolen French press and a GPA that's circling the drain.
But standing here, in the outline of a building that was destroyed before I was born, I feel something. A pull. Faint. So faint I could be imagining it—could be the cold, could be the adrenaline, could be the fact that I haven't slept in thirty-six hours and my best friend just drove away in my car and I'm alone on a campus run by a woman who makes people disappear.
My stomach turns over. The nausea—the same nausea I get in Sanguis class, the same nausea that hits me when storms pass or when the Mors students practice in the courtyard. It rolls through me, sharp and quick, and I press my hand to my mouth and breathe through it the way I always do.
Bad dining hall food. Hangovers. The flu that never quite arrives.
I take my hand away. Keep walking.
Bellamy Hall is ahead. Grey stone, choking ivy, the golden plaque by the door that I've read a thousand times and never thought about:Isadora Bellamy, 1659-1682, Who Gave Her Life In Defense Of Magicks Known And Unknown.She was twenty-three. Younger than me. She gave her life in defense of something, and they put her name on a building, and that's the version of sacrifice that gets a plaque.
The version that gets a plaque isn't the version Catalina has in mind.
