37. Lily
LILY
Lily stared aimlessly out the window of the Metaphysics library, watching the wind push the black branches of the tree outside back and forth against the dark sky.
She’d planned to distract herself with the Elumnara, but her mind proved determined to fix on one train of thought.
All she could think about was Sebastian piloting a sexily attired Gemma around the dance floor; the last thing she wanted to think about was Sebastian piloting a sexily attired Gemma around the dance floor.
Daphne had texted her the other day, asking if she wanted to go to the dance with a few of her dorm friends, but Lily had texted back, “no costume.” It wasn’t a lie.
It was a truth, but the truth was that watching Sebastian dance with Gemma might destroy her.
She’d been touched, anyway, that Daphne had offered.
Maybe Daphne was as sick of Gemma and Sebastian as Lily was.
It seemed like there was a zero percent chance that Gemma ever shut up about him.
Their phone call had shifted something in her, irreparably.
She couldn’t pretend anymore, not after listening to his voice right there in the privacy of darkness and the dead of night; not after her entire body, and all her skin, had felt itchy and needful and wrong under her comforter.
After hanging up, she’d crept down the back stairs and out the kitchen door, stood shivering in the yard, restless and nearly naked.
She’d stared up at the waxing Reaper’s Moon, waiting for answers that never came, and crawled back into bed with frozen-numb feet.
“Lily?”
She turned around. Professor Chant stood in the library entrance wearing glasses and a charcoal quarter-zip. His hair looked like it needed a wash.
“Professor Chant? What are you doing here?”
He looked bemused beneath his thick-framed glasses. “My office is here. I teach more than the one class, you know.”
If Lily got to choose her death come June, she thought she might choose drowning in Chant’s accent.
“Right.” She sounded idiotic.
He studied her. She studied back.
“No dance?”
“Not exactly in demand.”
He made a small sound that betrayed neither agreement nor dissent and stepped over the threshold. “Then what exactly are you working on this Saturday night?”
“Oh.” It hit her suddenly, her stupidity. Chant. They were working on a problem about alchemy, and instead of bringing it to him, they’d been faffing about like morons. “Actually, it’s alchemical. Could you—” She turned to him just as he pushed his glasses up his nose.
“Pursuing extracurricular learning? Be still my heart.” He leaned in as she nudged the paper with the symbols from the ring toward him. They’d decided to group the symbols by floor and had come up with something of an equation.
“I think this is Sol? But it’s got this extra bit that looks like cinnabar. And this is arsenic, I think, but—”
“Ah.” Chant sighed in satisfaction. “You’ve nearly got it.
You’ve got the elements, but these ‘extra bits’—radicals—are instructions, if you will.
This star, the way it’s placed on top there, shows that the Sol and cinnabar have been sublimated, and this tells you that the arsenic is mixed with silver undergone calcination. ”
“Silver?”
Chant nodded. Of course. Argent Lune. Sol and Luna. She looked at the ring. The two symbols represented the moon and the sun. It was so obvious, now that she had all the information.
She trembled with excitement. “So, if you mixed these, as they’re prepared here—”
Chant grimaced. “You’d have an incredibly toxic compound.”
The thrill of progress faded as Lily considered the truth of it.
“But don’t forget to think about it symbolically.” Chant tapped the paper in a way that Lily wished she could imitate. “This is Sol, and cinnabar—which are…” He looked to her, as if she were in class.
She pondered for a moment. Cinnabar, equally deadly and famous for its vivid carmine hue. “Gold. And Red.”
“And this isn’t just arsenic, it’s—”
“White arsenic!” She nearly fell out of her seat. Red and white were two of the alchemical phases, but more than that, the combination of those two colors was deeply symbolic of the Conjunctio. With the Chalice standing between them on the ring, she could barely breathe. Everything slid into focus.
When she pulled her eyes from the table, Chant was grinning at her. “Looks like I’ve made myself superfluous. I suppose that is the eventual aim of instruction.”
“Thank you so much.” Lily wanted to hug him, dance naked around the library, but she did neither. She stilled as the front door of the building clicked open, echoing down the hall.
Chant’s eyes narrowed.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said stiffly as two sets of footfalls revealed Conrad Hawleyhurst and Tripp Braithwhite. They were dressed like fancy vampires, each of them in ruffled shirts with gaudy baubles hanging from their necks. “How can I help you this fine evening?”
Typical, Lily scoffed. It was something of a Windermere tradition to dress ironically as supernatural creatures for the Halloween dance. Pointy hats never went out of style in October.
Hawleyhurst and Braithwhite stopped and considered Chant. Braithwhite looked stricken. Hawleyhurst smiled.
“Professor Chant!” he beamed. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”
The room went momentarily silent as both Chant and Lily did the math on that.
“And what were you expecting to find here?” His voice could have iced the floor, no spell required.
Lily’s heart slammed against her ribs. They knew I was here.
“We were looking for Lily.” Her heart stopped. “Seemed like a shame to miss the dance.”
Chant turned, incrementally, to meet her eyes. She kept her face carefully neutral. Beneath the mask she was screaming.
“I heard Miss Perkins isn’t in a dancing mood tonight, alas.”
“Lils, really?” Hawleyhurst looked crestfallen. The most terrifying part was that even to her, who knew better, he seemed perfectly sincere.
“Really,” she choked out.
“Well, in case you change your mind, your BFF Allsaires is out there. He’s cutting quite the rug.” His smile was like honey smeared on a pit viper.
At his shoulder, Braithwhite chortled. Lily couldn’t control the flush that spread across her chest, then up her neck. Hawleyhurst saw it and grinned deeper. He knows. Did everyone know? Had she been the last to find out?
“Was there anything else you needed?” Chant cut in.
“We’re all set. Just…think about it, Lily.”
Her stomach curdled. She stared ahead at the branches, now whipping the windows, as their footsteps faded. Chant was quiet for a long time, watching them walk away beneath the lamplight in the academic quad. He turned to Lily, but she remained frozen.
“Have you told anyone?” His voice returned her to her body. She craned her neck to look at him, feeling like one of those rabbits who thought freezing was a form of invisibility. “About the harassment.”
She said nothing, staring past him.
Chant sighed. “He’s not playing, is he?”
Swallowing, she found her voice. “No. He’s not.”
“You should go home,” he said. “Or, I can stay here, in case they return.”
“I can handle myself.”
Normally she believed herself when she said it. Chant’s eyes said he didn’t believe her either.
“I don’t want to keep you—I’ll just finish up here, then I’ll go home.”
“You’ll go home,” he agreed, but it was mostly a command.
She nodded vigorously.
Chant rapped the desk. “I’ll see you in class then. You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” Her voice was firm.
She meant to go home, but when she looked back at the symbols, she remembered that rush of discovery and forgot about Hawleyhurst. One note became two, then four, then ten. Nearly an hour slipped by before she finally found a stopping point, buzzing with energy, about to text Seb.
Lily paused, hand in pocket, first because she thought she shouldn’t bother Sebastian during the dance, then because of the noise. It was soft enough that she thought she’d imagined it. She froze, ears straining.
Just when she’d convinced herself it was nothing, she heard it again. The lights went out. The lights in the Metaphysics Library never went out. They blazed through the night, lighting empty secrets and theorems, for anyone with a key card. She heard the noise again.
Her body thrilled with primal fear, even as it remained motionless. In the almost-blackness, broken only by the sidewalk lights outside, she couldn’t see anything. The gloom was thick and penetrating, but she felt it—a wrongness in the air.
“Boo.” The voice whispered in her ear, its lips stirring the invisible hairs on her earlobe.
Lily screamed.
She jolted at the same time that vicelike arms clamped around her chest, lifting her and dragging her backward. One of her flailing legs caught something, someone, and from the swear she identified Braithwhite.
Hawleyhurst’s knuckles slammed into her lip as he clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her toward the hallway.
She bit it. He tripped backward up the stairs, falling hard, releasing her as he tried to break his fall.
Lily’s elbow hit the floor, showering white sparks in her vision, and she leapt to her feet, trying to avoid the invisible hands that scrabbled for her, accompanied by grunts and vicious profanities.
She tore down the hallway, blindly headed for the exit at the far end of the building.
One of them collided with her, taking her down from behind, and a vivid spike of pain traveled up her shoulder from her wrist as she slammed into the ground.
Hands clawed at her legs and she sobbed, choking hoarsely, as fear pressed down speech.
He flipped her onto her back, and she kicked and bucked, even as she knew, intrinsically, that she was completely fucked.
Her mind was a blank sheet, so whited out that she couldn’t even imagine what they wanted with her.
All she knew was that only one of them was in the hallway with her, on top of her, and she would do anything to get free.
“I’ve got it!” Braithwhite’s voice sounded very far away.
Suddenly, Hawleyhurst stilled. The fact that she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t attempt to read the intention behind his own mask, made it so much worse.
“Well then.” His voice was closer than she’d expected, and she flinched. He laughed. “That’s all then. Thanks, Lils.”
He swung his knee over her hips and she didn’t wait—she ran.
Hawleyhurst’s laughter echoed down the hallway after her and followed her into the night.