It was not Alison.
Moving slowly, he reached into his pocket for the match he’d been given by Dean Whittaker. He knelt to the ground; the floor was stone in this room.
He struck the match.
There was the sound of muffled laughter. Male, young. From its warmth, possibly a dwarf.
A prank, Keir realized. One of the young freshers with an overactive imagination. Keir was accustomed to pranks. Charlotte had enjoyed them almost from the time she could walk: leaving sticky pudding in Keir’s chair, replacing sugar with salt, even locking him into one of the many rooms of Weldan House from time to time.
“Very funny,” he said as he lit the candle.
He jumped. There was movement behind him.
No, it was only his shadow. It moved with him as he turned, the candlelight flickering.
He was in a small room. An office, it seemed like. There were a pair of armed chairs facing a mahogany desk, a large shelf full of books, and a globe in the corner. The painting he had felt before hung near the doorway.
He tried the handle, but it was locked, of course.
“Alison? Can you hear me? I’m trapped in an office.”
He heard movement from the hallway beyond. Probably the prankster. “It’s a very funny joke, but you’ve had your fun. Let me out of here.”
At least there were no windows in the room. As far as places to be during a storm went, it wasn’t a bad option.
The issue was Alison.
She was out in the hall alone in the dark. He hoped she’d managed to light her candle; she had less experience with them, having been raised in the city. Of course, Alison could probably light it with her magic if she needed to.
He could have as well, he realized.
Keir had known the truth of his magic long before the fairy had told Alison. He could feel it in him since the vine, looking for an escape.
He had denied it. Why would it offer itself to him now and not when he needed it? Why had it denied him the chance to save an innocent child?
If the magic—the old magic, funny how quickly they’d stopped calling it “old,” how quickly they had embraced it as part of the now—had a will of its own, Keir certainly couldn’t understand it.
A part of him wanted nothing to do with it at all.
But then there was Alison. She was his light in the darkness. She seemed to have some intuitive sense about things that Keir couldn’t comprehend. There was a way that the world just responded to her, a way it seemed to move and bend around her, that Keir greatly envied. But more than envy, he was grateful to be part of it. And he’d do anything,anythingto protect it. To protect her.
No matter what it cost him.
Though it pained him to do so, Keir reached out into the world with the sense he knew was there, the sense that had been revealed to him in all its terrible glory by the fairies.
At first, he felt nothing, not even Alison’s familiar presence on the other side of the wall.
Then he felt it.
There was something holding him here, and it was full of malice.
Keir did not scare easily, but even he was disturbed by the sudden, certain knowledge of something there in the darkness that wanted him—what, tortured? Dead? It was impossible to say, but he could feel that it wanted him, him specifically, for reasons he could not fathom.
However, and perhaps the presence couldn’t understand this, this knowledge was also a comfort to him. Though the presence had no love for anyone, it seemed Alison was safe, at least from this particular threat.
The presence was in the room with him, and it was for him alone to face.
Keir turned his sense to the door: not locked, held closed by magic. Twisted, dark magic: the kind that had been bent in the way Keir had tried to bend it. Magic that endured, that had corrupted.
