Page 130 of The Alchemists

“I think so. I just want to talk to her, hang out with her like…all the time. Literally all the time.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at Asher’s bewilderment.

“Yep. That’s it.” He drained his coffee. “You’re screwed.”

LILY

She wasn’t sure if the anxiety pressing her into her bed like a leaden blanket was real or leftover from the nightmare that had woken her up. She stared at the gauzy pinkness of her ceiling for a while, telling herself she was safe. There was something from the nightmare, something she needed to remember, but she couldn’t.

When she finally got out of bed, she flipped open her laptop absently, eyes unfocused on the street below her desk, until her mail app pinged. Mr. Freer, the archivist, had forwarded her facsimiles of Van Bergen’s letters. Suddenly awake, Lily clicked the first attachment, only to be met by a spidery script more incomprehensible than Seb’s chicken scratch at its most frenetic. Deciphering these…she checked the zip file…twenty-eight documents would take a spell, and she didn’t have time for spells, not when Seb’s first match started in ninety minutes.

She ran downstairs and poured herself coffee, drowning it in milk so that she could gulp it down, then hurled herself into the shower. She made it to campus, out of breath and already sweaty, with fifteen minutes before the match. Not enough time to see Seb, but still enough time that he’d still be checking his phone while he paced around the empty locker room.

The stands were packed for the quarterfinals day. She waded toward Asher’s hair, where she found the whole pack, including the Méridas and a glum-looking Liesl. While Liesl was a pretty good player, Lily thought she’d done as well as she possibly could have, given the competition.

“Does he know to go for his right ribs after a melee?” Liesl offered, which Lily found generous.

“Yeah. Feint early, feint often.”

Liesl nodded and placed her chin in her hands.

“We can make them move over,” Tori offered, glaring at a pack of freshmen who occupied the seat on her right.

“No, it’s fine, I’ll watch from up there.”

Lily made her way up to her favorite corner and found Chant already there. He raised his eyebrows by way of greeting.

“Too good for the cohort?”

“I need to pay attention.”

“Will it make a difference?” Chant offered her some of his kettle corn.

“No,” Lily admitted, leaning forward, elbows on her knees as Dean Meade entered the stands, flanked by a silver-haired man. The way in which he was familiar was on the tip of her tongue, and then, as he glanced up with iced-over eyes, her elbow slipped off her knee as she gasped.

Chant frowned down at the scene as a hush swept through the stands.

“Is that Hawthorn Bellarius?” Chant glanced at her in a specific sort of way, gauging.

Lily’s tongue was stuck rigid with panic, but in his glance she knew. Chant knew her bloodline, but she didn’t know how. Had Seb told him? Dean Meade? But why? Her insides crunched. Her grandfather sat down fastidiously with Dean Meade in the first row.

From the tunnel below the eastern stands, the Giant emerged, blindingly orange in M&M’s California poppy colors. It rendered his skin pink against the lavender trim. Lily could have dwelt for a while on that sartorial misfortune, but as the Giant took his place in the center of the ring, the stands stilled. Lily’s heart quickened in her chest, and then it stopped entirely for one, two beats as Sebastian emerged from the western tunnel.

She’d seen him walk into the ring countless times now, but he took her breath away if she was careless with her gaze. His spine was perfectly straight, his jaw threaded with steel, his gait lean and wary. This was Sebastian Allsaires in his purest form. If she were to put him into the alembic and distill him down to his transmutive substance, this was what would remain. His eyes, flashing gold even from this distance, flicked upward and found hers for a bare second. With one hand, he palmed on his helmet and raised his foil, flourishing his Orb over his opposite shoulder. The match began.

It wasn’t much of a match, as far as excitement went. The things that made the Giant a difficult opponent for Liesl made him an easy one for Seb. He was all power, no imagination, crashing through spells and attacks like they were a wall he needed to kick down. Seb dodged most of them easily—he was playing as economically as possible, saving his energy for his second bout—but one of the Giant’s thunderous swipes with his foil caught Seb in the ribs with an audible thump. Seb turned his doubling over into a roll at the last second, taking him out of the physical zone for a momentary respite. After that, he ended it quickly, using his environmental spell to ice the ground under the Giant, slide in on his knees, and hit his Orb with Fateful Lightning. Fired at point-blank range, the spell exploded with a deafening clap of thunder.

There was a grimace in his winning smile and an undeniable limp as he retreated down the western tunnel.

Lily waited fifteen minutes before sneaking into the locker room. He looked up as she entered, knowing the pattern of her footfalls, and exhaled in relief. He hadn’t showered yet and was stuck trying to get his arm out of his left sleeve. He flapped it limply in her direction. She slid it as carefully as she could off his shoulder, and he winced. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead.

“That looked like a rough hit.”

“Feels rough,” he wheezed, wincing.

Kneeling, she peeled up his soaked technical undershirt and failed to hide the hiss of her breath. A massive, purple-red welt, already bruising, cut a puffy line across his ribs. The force of it had broken his skin where the tip of the foil had hit, and blood seeped into the white spandex of his shirt.

“How bad is it?” Seb craned to see.