Even though this whole thing was clearly a bust.
“Yeah, we’re not going to find a single thing in here. She doesn’t seem to believe in secret drawers. Or keeping records. Or even having a place to hide the heads of her untold amount of victims, so she could rub them all over herself when she feels sad,” he whispered back, through the hollow silence.
Much to her horror.
“Jesus. Is that really the sort of thing you thought we might uncover?”
“Maybe. I mean, if she killed you, then purposefully left me to suffer for thirty years, and possibly murdered Jyoti, too, and maybe Will, she has to be capable of a lot. Who knows what other horrifying things she’s done over the years—and to whom.”
“I did wonder if it was worse than just wanting you to suffer. She wrote a paper once about some vampire blood. People using it for weird purposes, doing things with it they shouldn’t. And the tone was so...”
“So what?”
“Stilted. Strained. I don’t even know how to explain. It was like looking into something that had been hollowed out. Completely terrifying,” she said, so far into her thoughts about it that she didn’t see the look on Bram’s face. She didn’t notice that he was looking past her, at the door. Body suddenly so tense, it was trembling, like a plucked wire. One hand slowly reaching for her waist, to surreptitiously urge her behind him. She even carried onspeaking. “Though, of course, not as terrifying as doing something like this.”
Then she looked up and saw.
His still face, the tremor running through him. How almost behind him she was now. And she didn’t hesitate. She was already drawing the line with her hands before she’d finished turning. She threw the glass up between them, without even seeing what was there.
But what was there just batted it away.
One swish of a wand, and there was nothing between them again.
It was just her, and Bram, and then outlined in the doorway.
Professor Hargreaves.
Fully clothed at three in the morning, in one of her pinched, practically Victorian dresses. Every iron-gray hair just so, not a lick of tiredness in her steely eyes. Like she was always just waiting for things like this—and powerful enough that she could definitely rise to the occasion.
Though the latter was a given.
After all, she’d done this. And casually, too.Dear god, Jyoti, she thought and only managed not to lose it entirely because of the thing Jyoti had done before they parted. The light she’d pressed into her skin, just above the wrist.If it goes out, she had said,then I’m in trouble.
But still it glowed.
Most likely it was going to be hers that winked out.
“I should hope it isn’t, Ms. Morrow. When a little meddler and her fool of a boyfriend and her two little friends make a mess like this, being that terrified is the very least they should feel, don’t you think? After all, who knows what is going to happen to themnow,” she said, in the brusque, withering tone of someone talking about an exam her students had failed.
Yet somehow that just made everything worse.
Mina watched the woman tidily step into the room, and shut the door, and felt her insides clench, then try to shrink back. As if they could get away from this horrible threat, even as the rest of her refused to.
Ofcourse, it refused to—Bram was here.
Bram was in front of her, already snarling. “The only thing that’s going to happen here is you being torn apart,” he said, teeth bared. So razor-sharp looking that even she felt a trickle of fear over them.
But Hargreaves didn’t seem fazed at all. She waved one thin hand.
“Goodness me. Do put those fangs away, Mr. St. James. Or should I address you by your given name? Of Ember, is it not? The Areifen sect that hails from the endless stairs? Though of course I knowsectandendless stairsare such clumsy words for the where and who and what of Calabaraia. I try my best, but I am only human,” she said, then spread her hands.
As if to say: It is what it is.
And even stranger, she went to her desk. She passed right by them both and went to the one drawer in it. Took out what looked like a pipe, small and neat as a pin, and clamped it between her teeth, to light. And she did light it, too. She puffed on it and leaned back against the windowsill behind her.
As if they were just here for a friendly chat.
Which was still deeply unsettling to Lili. But now it seemed unsettling in a slightly different way. And she knew Bram was feeling the same thing. He didn’t lunge again, despite how closeHargreaves now was. Just a narrow desk between them, nothing at all really.
