"That's Caspian Thorne," she says. "He does both of those things. Sometimes in the same sentence." She glances at me sideways. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You look like someone who's pretending to be fine."
"Those are the same thing until proven otherwise." I stop walking. We're near the small garden at the east side of the grounds, stone benches and dormant hedges and nobody else around at this hour. "He said I wasn't worth his effort. He said it like he was closing a door."
"He was." Sage sits on one of the stone benches, pulling her coat tighter against the morning cold. "That's what makes him dangerous. Not the circling. The dismissal. The circling is theater. The dismissal is the actual weapon."
I sit beside her. The stone is cold through my repaired jacket, which the dormitory seamstress fixed yesterday with a needle and a look of profound, professional disapproval.
"I know what it's like to be dismissed," I say. "This felt different."
"Because he dismissed you after making sure you knew he'd noticed you." Sage pulls something from her coat pocket. "Which is specifically designed to make you feel both seen and discarded simultaneously." She holds out her hand. Two small amulets rest in her palm, flat discs of dark stone carved with overlapping lines. "Malik made these last night. He wants us both to wear them."
I pick one up. The carved lines are precise, the kind of work that takes time. "Protective?"
"Warding charms. They won't stop someone actively trying to hurt us, but they'll disrupt passive compulsion attempts and low-level tracking." She closes her fingers around the second one. "He said the Seraphina situation is escalating in ways that suggest someone is directing her. Not just encouraging her."
"Directing her toward me specifically."
"Directing her toward us." Sage puts her amulet on, tucking it under her collar. "Malik has his theories. He hasn't sharedthem yet, which means either he doesn't want to worry us or the theories are worrying enough that he's still checking them."
"Neither of those is reassuring."
"No." She watches me turn the amulet over in my fingers. "Put it on, Angelic."
I put it on. The stone is warmer than the morning air, and once it settles against my sternum there's a faint sense of something clicking into place, like a lock engaging. Not comfortable, exactly. Solid.
"Thank Malik for me," I say.
"Thank him yourself. He'll be at dinner."
We sit for a moment in the quiet. The dormant hedges are very still. Somewhere on the other side of the building, a bell begins to ring for the next class period.
"He really said you weren't worth his effort," Sage says.
"Verbatim."
"While standing close enough to smell you."
"I'd like to stop discussing that part."
"I'm just noting," she says, "that those two things are not the behavior of someone who actually finds you unworthy of effort."
"They're the behavior of someone who wants me to think about him," I say. "Which is functionally the same outcome and significantly more annoying."
Sage stands, brushing stone dust from her coat. "Welcome to Nocturne Academy."
I stand too. We head toward the main building, and I'm watching where I'm stepping on the uneven courtyard path, which is why I almost miss the figure standing at the far end of the grounds near the iron gate that separates the academy gardens from the outer wall.
Ryder Ashford. Coat, no scarf, the kind of stillness that belongs to someone who arrived a while ago and hasn't moved since. He's watching the Vampire House entrance, not us, andhis expression from this distance is exactly what his expressions always are, which is to say unreadable in a way that suggests the opposite of nothing is happening behind it.
Then his gaze moves, tracking from the Vampire House entrance across the courtyard, and it lands on me.
He doesn't look away immediately. Neither do I. There's a beat of something between us, across thirty feet of cold courtyard, and then he turns and walks through the iron gate without changing his pace or giving any indication that the moment happened at all.
Sage has seen it. She doesn't say anything, which means she's filing it the same way I am.
