103. Lily
LILY
She hadn’t really thought about what to do if he lost. As his Orb fell, as it smashed into shards of light on the black sand, so did her heart.
But something was wrong. He was smiling.
He was lifting Adriana off the ground and whirling her around with manic glee.
He had wanted so badly, though, to win. She didn’t understand.
Part of her, the part that wanted progress and moving history slightly in the right direction, was glad for Adriana, the first woman of color to win the championships, only the fourth woman ever, in almost two hundred years.
But the bigger part of her was devastated.
And the smaller part of her, leftover in the darkness from last night, was angry.
She was angry that Seb wasn’t upset. Angry that this seemed to matter so much less to him than he’d implied.
Angry that he could just move on because he could move on.
Already he looked different from the person he’d been before his bout with Danielson. He looked like he knew who he was. Already he was leaving her behind.
She could see it clearly now. In a year, he’d be ready to go on a date.
In five, he’d be able to talk about her without a lump in his throat.
In ten, his children might not even know she’d existed.
By that time, their nine months together would seem so small compared to everything else, compared to the history he’d make after her.
“You okay?” Tori squeezed her arm.
“Yeah.” Lily plastered a terrible approximation of a smile on her face.
She pasted it on during the closing ceremony, the banquet, the impromptu party in the pub at the Alumnae House, where Seb held court alongside the Méridas, all of them getting plastered and messily affectionate.
Lily sat in a corner, drinking a cocktail she didn’t really want, watching life happen around her.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Van Bergen’s letters.
There hadn’t been as much in them as she’d hoped, and they hadn’t tipped the scales for her one way or the other about Selene’s death.
Van Bergen’s letters hadn’t described his wife as depressed.
But she was distracted, confused, sometimes anxious.
Sometimes she thought her skin was on fire.
All of it was almost familiar to Lily, in the back of her mind.
Selene, she thought, Selene, who are you?
Before she knew it, she was getting up, draining her cocktail.
When she slipped out of the room, no one noticed.
Night was rolling in and bringing with it a storm.
The hazy sky turned gray, and then black, as she walked toward campus.
The towering clouds rushing toward her gave her a strange sense of vertigo.
All of the streets surrounding Windermere, the ones with off-campus housing or bars, were chaotically alive, the gold from their open doors and windows spilling into the petrichor-heavy air.
The weather had turned with the storm, and her jacket felt claustrophobic.
The streets were already shimmering wet from the mist settling as the pressure dropped.
Campus itself was a riot of noise and cantrips.
They went off like fireworks, some of them actually fireworks, without the danger of blowing your hand off.
Someone had started a magical bonfire on the quad, and no one seemed to be stopping it.
In the mass of bodies and kegs, she saw Hawleyhurst and was too slow looking away.
He caught her eye, and in it was a malicious promise.
He followed her with his gaze. A great gust of wind hissed across the quad, sending a mass of sparks up from the fire and Lily’s hair lashing against her face.
Not very far away, thunder boomed, following a crack of lightning that lit the malevolent spires of clouds in the night sky.
The very air around her felt dense and charged.
Checking behind her with an illuminating cantrip to make sure no one—visible or otherwise—was following her, she broke easily into the library.
She paused in the atrium, breathing in the quiet and absence of chaos.
Briefly, she went up to the tower room to get the flashlight and supply pack, the disc.
Outside, the clouds that had hung low and close over the day opened, spitting rain against the diamond-paned windows, melting the last, stubborn snow in a stream toward street gutters.
A call, then a text, came in from Seb. She silenced her phone and pressed the hidden button behind the unicorn tapestry.
She gritted her teeth against the cacophony of the stone iris opening, ignored the throbbing in her heart, and descended into the endless darkness.