I shook my arms out, my feet moving as fast as possible back to the truck. The New Mexico sun rushed in to burn the dank, wrong feeling of the cottage from my skin.
Bear sniffed my legs, investigating the foreign smell for himself.
Dirt and clay kicked up in my eyes as I made my way to the dormitory buildings. Campus was curiously empty. The few stragglers who were around appraised me cautiously.
“Come on, boy,” I nearly whispered. I’d never liked having attention on me, never enjoyed crowds or large groups of people, but now that I was here, my brain screamingdangerdang-erdanger, I had an overwhelming urge to stay out of sight.
CHAPTER TWO
Ireached the girls’ dormitory, House Torlaine, an old, converted ranch house with a cattle skull hung out front, and pushed open its heavy, creaking door.
There were a lot of memories in this building. Few of them good, mostly … not good, but things were different now. I forced down the thoughts of Aaron and his funeral, of my catastrophic meltdown in the second year of my PhD program, of every single thing this place had taken from me. Mentally, I erected a giant metal barrier between myself and Marble County. I could do this. I’d left this place before. I would do it again.
I walked down the empty hall, rotating the bumblebee studs in my ears. The walls were painted a deep rust, and the red tile floors were covered in textiles. The lighting had been added last, dim fluorescents lodged in the low ceilings that cast eerie shadows.
The building was curiously quiet for a college campus, even if House Torlaine was one of the more mild-mannered of the dormitories. An all-girls’ hall, and one of the oldest on campus, it had a lot of rules that the two other coed dormitories didn’t have. No guests after eleven, a strict one a.m. curfew. The only way in was to call the resident assistant, who’d wring you out for waking her. Since off-campus housing was limited in the tiny town of Los Huesos, all years of undergrad students and even some postgrad students lived in the campus dorms or in Greek life housing, if they belonged to one of the fraternities or sororities on campus.
I stopped when I reached room 22. My old room. An old iron key was already lodged in the door; one of the staff must have put it there earlier. I pushed the door open.
A clean white quilt lay on top of the bed. Bear promptly jumped up on it and made himself at home.
I dug the rest of my objects out of my bag. Besides my leather cord, there was the mug my younger brother Aaron had given me for Christmas with holly jolly printed on it, and a small jar of water from a lake where my family used to camp in Colorado. I touched both of them, drawing what comfort I could from their familiarity. Object Theory wasn’t just about comfort, though. Students at Seinford and Brown College practiced the Three Arts, a limited form of Magic channeled through three objects that meant the most to you, in any way you could think to combine them. Casting through objects wasn’t so different from the old fantasy stories of wizards with their staffs or powerful talismans.* Objects were a protective mechanism, a way for excess Magic to be absorbed, rather than going right through the person. It wasn’t the only way of practicing Magic, to be certain—there were still traditionalists and pockets of the community that rebelled against the “new age fad,” people who believed it was simply survival of the fittest if you cast a spell that was too powerful for your abilities and died in the process—but it was the safest. And it was the Magic that I’d practiced, back when I still considered myself a Magician.
I started unpacking, trying to keep my mind occupied, but I couldn’t help the way my mind strayed back to the girl hovering above a bed just like this one. Had Max already seen her? He’d said things were bad—was she what he’d meant?
“Nothing ever changes,” the girl in Maritza’s cottage had said. As I looked around the plain dorm room, the dark walnut armoire in the corner, a single white lamp on the matching bedside table, I couldn’t help but agree. It had been five years now since I’d been in this place, but it looked just the same. I scratched behind Bear’s ears and peeled back the lace curtains to look out the solitary window. House Torlaine was the last in the row of buildings directly behind Ludlow House. My view was of the eastern edge of the ranch, sunbaked fields covered in creosote bushes, cacti, and patchy grasses, and the peaks of the mountains beyond.
There was something else, though. More than what the girl had said, it was how she’d said it. It was her voice, like two rocks grating against each other. An unnatural sound, the kind that stopped you in your tracks.
It reverberated over and over in my head, and a small part of me wondered if I’d heard the voice before. If, deep in my bones, I’d known it all my life.
Ludlow House hadn’t changed a bit.
Fires roared in great dens that had been converted into common rooms and student gathering spaces, expanded with Magic to be so large your voice echoed from one end to the other. Rustic wooden beams ran across the ceilings, above dark walnut furniture and ornate, high-backed chairs in the Spanish style mixed with large, worn leather chairs with students sprawled across them. Towering windows boasted views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the canyon beyond, with the Cimarron River rushing beneath it. Inside, lantern-style lights emitted a warm glow on oak carvings of great beasts and men standing on moonlit mountaintops, of crosses and the hushed utterances of God, though many of the religious carvings had long been covered with concealing spells. This included the crosses over the doors of the twelve bedrooms of the Ludlow children, since converted into classrooms or smaller offices for Admissions or the Dean, though the illusion was slipping. Bits of a crucifix peeked out.
The house had been charmed at one point, worked over by a Magician with a background in architecture, though the architect must have royally screwed up the enchantment because Ludlow House seemed to have a mind of its own. Hallways meandered and corkscrewed like in some old, abandoned castle, turning on themselves while you were going down them, leaving you stranded. There were all kinds of rumors that the house had eaten a student or two in the twenty-odd years it had been a Magic university, but I’d never seen any proof of that.
I walked down one narrow hallway, keeping a stern eye fixed on the walls ahead of me, and stopped at a portrait of the Ludlow family matriarch, Josephine Ludlow. I used to study in her old powder room. The painting showed dark circles beneath a pair of sharp, glittering eyes and chestnut hair piled above a dainty neck. A beautiful woman, but there was something off about the portrait. It betrayed a hint of madness behind her eyes.
“Well, I’ll be,” rumbled a deep voice behind me. “If it isn’t Cella Gibbons, damn near back from the dead.”
I knew who it was without turning around; I didn’t even need to hear his voice. I could tell by the change in atmosphere as he entered it, as if the air itself crackled with wildfire smoke. A part of me always called to a part of him, no matter how much I fought it.
Max Middlemore walked toward me, black cowboy hat slung over his head, jeans hugging his hips, boots thudding against the tiles. He took off his hat, as if to get a better look at me, his face breaking into a wide, boyish grin. Those navy-blue eyes settled on me and didn’t look away.
“Would you stop looking at me like that?” I murmured.
“Sorry. Just can’t believe you’re here, is all. You actually came.”
Max had a way of doing that, of making me forget everything that had happened between us with just a look. He was taller than me, not quite six feet but close, with shadows skittering along his jawline, perpetually in need of a shave. I’d heard little of him since I’d left town, outside of the few times he’d found me when he volunteered to relay messages for Dr. Robetresse. I’d heard reports he’d been getting into trouble, that he’d gotten fired from Philmont Ranch after a nasty fight. His mom had called me, worried about him, scared that, without Magic, he was aimless, one mistake from ending up in a ditch.
Now my eyes narrowed in on an unsightly scar on his finger, flesh curling back from his thumb. Before we found each other, he’d been desperate to access Magic, resorting to some of the wickedest books he could find. Spells that hurt, that split his flesh down the middle. I wondered if he’d gone back to his old habits since I’d been gone.
“I won’t be here long,” I said quietly.
“I figured.”
“How are you?” I asked, fidgeting with the cord in my pocket.
