Page 24 of The Witch They Fear

I start walking again. Corvin, behind me, hasn't reacted. Didn't hear anything. Because there was nothing to hear—just the inside of my skull and a stranger who's made himself at home there.

The cottage comes into view through the oaks. Small. Quiet. The geraniums on the step. Zeva's silhouette visible through the window on the left side.

I fish out my key. Reach for the lock.

And stop.

There's something on the door. Cut into the wood just below the peephole—new, fresh, the shavings still clinging to the edges. A symbol. Some kind of rune, maybe. I don't know enough about ward notation to identify it, but I can feel it—a faint hum radiating from the carved lines, the same frequency as the wards in the campus walls but sharper. Meaner. This wasn't put here by the academy.

This is something else. Something deliberate. Something left.

I run my finger along it.

A jolt—sharp, stinging, electric—snaps through my fingertip and up my wrist. I yank my hand back. The rune glows faintly for a half-second—a dull, angry red—and then goes dark.

My pulse is everywhere—throat, wrists, the backs of my knees. I look around. The path behind me is empty except for Corvin, who's already stepping through the door on the enforcers' side of the duplex. The garden is still. The oaks are still. Nobody is watching.

But somebody was here. While I was in a basement having my magic ripped out of me, while I was bleeding in a hallway, while I was sitting in a classroom trying to be invisible—somebody walked up to my door and carved a rune into the wood and left.

Somebody who knows where I live. Who knows my schedule. Who has access to the old campus.

And who wanted me to know they were here.

I stare at the rune. The wood around it is scored deep—whoever did this wasn't gentle. Wasn't rushed. Took their time.

I unlock the door. Step inside. Close it behind me.

Lean against it.

Fuck.

This is going to be a long year.

Chapter 5

The morning is thick with fog.

Not the clean, cold fog I imagined from my locked room in the facility—this is southern Louisiana fog, warm and wet, clinging to everything like a second skin. It rolls through the oaks and blurs the edges of the campus into something impressionistic, like a painting someone smudged with their thumb. The apothecary garden is a green haze beyond the cottage window. The clock tower is a ghost.

I'm sitting on a stone bench outside the dining hall with Nellie, a coffee that's too hot and too weak, and a piece of paper I spent twenty minutes making last night.

The rune rubbing.

I found a pencil in the school bag and held the paper flat against the carving on my door, shading over it the way you'd do with a gravestone etching. The symbol came up grey and jagged against the white—angular lines, sharp turns, something that looks almost like a letter from an alphabet I don't know. It hums faintly even on the paper, a residual charge that makes my fingertips tingle when I hold it too long.

I slide it across the bench to Nellie.

"This was on my door yesterday. When I got back from class." I keep my voice low. Zeva is standing ten feet away, pretending to examine the architecture while monitoring my every breath. "Carved into the wood. Fresh."

Nellie picks up the paper. Holds it close to her face, tilting it in the grey morning light. Her eyebrows pull together.

"That's not standard ward notation," she says. "I mean, I'm not an expert—wards are literally my worst subject—but I've been at this school for three years and I've never seen anything like this on campus." She traces the lines with her fingertip, careful, like she's reading braille. "Where exactly was it?"

"Just below the peephole. Eye level."

"So whoever put it there wanted you to find it." She looks at me. The sharp brown eyes are doing their math again, but the equation is different this time. Less how do I help this girl walk to class and more who the hell is carving runes into this girl's door. "Did you touch it?"

"Ran my finger along it. Zapped me. Sharp, stinging—like touching an electric fence. It glowed red for a second and then went dark."