Everly #4
Three stories of stone, the same Victorian gothic bones as Callister House but older, more deliberate, like Callister House is the copy and that's the original handwriting.
Arched windows, all of them dark. A door banded in iron.
Carved stonework over the lintel, geometric and old.
The gap between the buildings is narrow enough that from this sink I'm closer to it than anyone out on the path will ever be.
The kettle clicks off. I make my tea and carry it to the front window, because I don't remember that building being on the map.
The afternoon foot traffic makes me realize something about the building: no one else seems to be able to see it.
Three Mors sophomores pass first, silver-threaded jackets, deep in conversation, and as they come alongside the annex, their eyes focus past it.
Two Tempest students do it next. Then a mixed group of four.
A freshman on her own, earbuds in, drifts to the far edge of the path and around the building without ever once looking at it.
No one walks into the building itself. No one stops at its doors, or is looking out of its windows, which are dark.
And of all the students who walk past it, none of them take the short way past. They all take the path, and as I watch them, I catch the slide of chaos magic at the corner of my eye, changing the odds as they walk past, glimpsed and gone. None of them see it.
I look at the arch above the door banded in iron. I look at the carved pattern at the lintel, at the dark windows set into the stone face, and my heart starts to pick up, something rising in my throat, my thoughts running ahead of me, and then—
The building looks back.
Not the way the raven does. The raven watches me like a camera, mechanical, feeding it all to somebody else. This is something old and enormous noticing that I haven't looked away. Like being heard in a room you were sure was empty.
The back of my throat goes cold, the way it does right before the penny taste arrives. The taste never comes. The cold stays, and my pulse is loud in my ears, and I notice my hands have gone tight around the warm mug.
I don't go in today. I can feel it beckoning to me, wanting me to come in, but I'm not ready.
I don't have a plan, and the difference between brave and reckless is mostly whether you planned first—I've learned that one the hard way, more than once.
But I don't look away either, and both of us know it noticed.
I carry the last of my tea, gone lukewarm in the mug, back up to my room.
The house quiets in stages. The music above me goes off at nine.
The third-floor footsteps walk their route, walk it again, and stop.
A door somewhere eases itself open an inch, slow, like the house adjusting in its sleep.
A voice murmurs on the second floor—one half of a conversation, answering something nobody is saying out loud.
Then nothing.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my hands.
Four lines run out of my chest in four directions, each with its own weight hanging on the end of it.
Callum is locked down tight, this morning's rage still glowing somewhere under all that ice.
Atlas is warm and probably awake. Ren isn't sleeping and isn't troubled by it.
Felix I leave alone tonight—he doesn't seem to want to be felt or seen.
The summer is in me now, bright and alive, like another kind of magic in my chest. What we shared, what we did, who we've become to each other.
Atlas's mouth warm in the rain outside Albuquerque, his hands in my hair.
Ren in the dark, careful and unhurried, like I was the one sure thing.
Felix's thumb tracing the inside of my wrist in a Kansas parking lot at two in the morning, the two of us watching headlights.
None of us have mentioned any of it since.
Each one sits in my chest in a slightly different place than the bond does.
If Felix knows about the others—and Felix knows everything—he hasn't said. I'm not asking.
I change and turn off the lamp. In the dark the room rearranges itself into streetlight and shadow, the old glass throwing its gentle warped light across the opposite wall, and through it, the annex: something old holding very still, the way a held breath holds still.
So. Tallying up. I'm alone in a three-story Victorian that reports my movements to a woman who smiled while she leashed her own son.
I get one supervised hour a day with four men I crossed half a country with.
There's a door on my own floor that wants to walk me somewhere I never asked to go, a grad student who loses the ends of his sentences, and a building next door that nobody else seems to see.
All very ominous this semester at Nyxhaven University, as I enter my sophomore year, with my parents back home still convinced I'm studying communications and spent the summer at an internship. Yeah. They don't even know I almost died (more than once) much less that I have magic.
Still here, though. That has to count for something.
I pull the bed sheets up, slide into bed, and resign myself to knowing that I'm being watched every second of every day, and probably every night too. Through the old glass the annex keeps its own watch, its awareness of me yet another complication in my new and strange life.
Tomorrow, I think at it. Be patient a little while longer. I'll bring snacks.