Thane is already moving, the sparring pad dropped, tension radiating from him that wasn't there thirty seconds ago. "Stay here," he says.
"No."
"Angelic." He stops, turns. The gold in his eyes is brighter and the air around him has gone several degrees warmer. "This isn't a training exercise. Stay in this room."
"There are people in the lower levels," I say. "Students. Faculty. And whoever is down there has been using those passages to set traps." I pick up the short practice blade from the rack because it's better than nothing, and I know that because Ryder told me to always have something in my hand. "I'm not staying in a room while something hunts through the floors below me."
He stares at me for two seconds. Then he crosses the room, takes the practice blade out of my hand, and replaces it with an actual weapon from the locked case on the south wall that he opens with a touch of heat from his palm.
"Stay behind me," he says. "Two steps. Don't close that gap for any reason."
"Understood."
We move.
The stairwell to the lower levels is at the end of the corridor, and the alarm is louder here, cycling in waves that make my back teeth ache. The bond with Ryder fires hot the moment we hit the stairs, a sharp spike that tells me he's already down there or moving toward it, and I push the awareness aside because splitting my focus on the stairs is how I die.
The lower passages are older than the rest of the academy, stone that predates the current construction by several centuries, corridors that are narrow and low-ceilinged and smell of cold water and metal. The torches down here run on a different system, oil rather than magical feed, and several of them have gone out.
Thane slows at the first junction. He's reading through the air with senses that aren't mine to access. Then he turns left, and I stay two steps behind him exactly like he said, because this is not the moment to be contrary.
We find the source of the alarm in what the academy's layout calls the lower archive corridor, a passage running beneath the east wing where old administrative records are stored in warded cases. There are four other people already in the corridor when we arrive: two students I recognize from the reaper house, a maintenance worker pressed flat against the far wall, and Professor Aldric.
I've had Professor Aldric for ward theory on Thursdays. He's methodical, dry-humored, the kind of man who teaches through repetition until the material becomes structural. He's standing in the center of the corridor with his back to us, and he's standing wrong. Too still. The specific stillness of a body being operated rather than inhabited.
"Professor Aldric," Thane says. His voice is level but the warmth in the air around us has intensified. "Step away from the archive access panel."
The professor doesn't turn around. His hand is pressed flat against a panel in the wall, and the wards on it are active, pulsing with a sickly green light that isn't the original color of the academy's warding system.
"Aldric." One of the reaper students, a girl named Fenn who I know by reputation rather than conversation, takes a careful step forward. "Sir, you need to step away from—"
The professor turns around.
His eyes are wrong. The pupils have gone vertical, and the irises are filmed with dark fluid that moves in patterns that don't follow any human structure. His mouth is open slightly, and when he exhales, the breath comes out too cold for the room's temperature, visible even in a corridor that isn't cold enough for breath to show.
Possessed. The word lands in my chest with the weight of recognition.
The maintenance worker makes a sound against the far wall. Thane steps in front of me, and I don't argue with it because the thing wearing Professor Aldric's face has just looked directly at me and tilted its head at an angle that human necks don't comfortably reach.
"Conduit," it says, using Aldric's voice but not Aldric's cadence. The word comes out in layers, like being spoken through water. "There you are."
"It knows what you are," Thane says, not to it, to me, his voice flat and quiet. "Get behind the reaper students. Now."
"It's blocking the exit," Fenn says. "There's a secondary passage through the archive, but the wards are active."
"I can break the wards," I say. "I've been studying the seal signatures. Give me thirty seconds."
"You don't have thirty seconds," Thane says, and then the possessed professor moves.
It's fast in the way wraith-driven things are fast, bypassing the physics of a human body because it doesn't care about what human bodies can do. It crosses the corridor in less time than it should take and Thane meets it head-on, a wall of heat and impact, his hands closing around the professor's wrists, fire running along his forearms in controlled lines.
The wraith doesn't care about fire. That's the problem with possessions. The host body flinches, but the thing inside doesn't feel the heat the same way.
"Archive door," Thane grits out, holding it back by sheer force, his feet sliding on the stone floor. "Break the wards. Go."
I go.
The archive door is six feet from where Thane is holding the professor off the floor by main strength, which means I'm working in proximity to a wraith-possessed faculty member while my hands are occupied with ward-breaking, which is a sentence I never expected to be applicable to my life.
