Chapter 5 #2
I put it on. The stone is warmer than the morning air, and once it settles against my sternum there's a faint sense of something clicking into place, like a lock engaging. Not comfortable, exactly. Solid.
"Thank Malik for me," I say.
"Thank him yourself. He'll be at dinner."
We sit for a moment in the quiet. The dormant hedges are very still. Somewhere on the other side of the building, a bell begins to ring for the next class period.
"He really said you weren't worth his effort," Sage says.
"Verbatim."
"While standing close enough to smell you."
"I'd like to stop discussing that part."
"I'm just noting," she says, "that those two things are not the behavior of someone who actually finds you unworthy of effort."
"They're the behavior of someone who wants me to think about him," I say. "Which is functionally the same outcome and significantly more annoying."
Sage stands, brushing stone dust from her coat. "Welcome to Nocturne Academy."
I stand too. We head toward the main building, and I'm watching where I'm stepping on the uneven courtyard path, which is why I almost miss the figure standing at the far end of the grounds near the iron gate that separates the academy gardens from the outer wall.
Ryder Ashford. Coat, no scarf, the kind of stillness that belongs to someone who arrived a while ago and hasn't moved since.
He's watching the Vampire House entrance, not us, and his expression from this distance is exactly what his expressions always are, which is to say unreadable in a way that suggests the opposite of nothing is happening behind it.
Then his gaze moves, tracking from the Vampire House entrance across the courtyard, and it lands on me.
He doesn't look away immediately. Neither do I. There's a beat of something between us, across thirty feet of cold courtyard, and then he turns and walks through the iron gate without changing his pace or giving any indication that the moment happened at all.
Sage has seen it. She doesn't say anything, which means she's filing it the same way I am.
"He was watching the Vampire House entrance," I say.
"Yes."
"Before he saw us. He was watching it before we came out."
"Yes," Sage says again, carefully.
I think about his expression when he turned and saw me. The way his gaze moved from the building to my face and stayed there for a second longer than it needed to. The fact that he was standing at a gate he had no administrative reason to be standing at, at this hour, in this particular direction.
"He knew I was in there," I say. "With Caspian."
"Probably." Sage pulls open the main building door and holds it for me. "The Vampire House summons you for a private interrogation, your detention supervisor last night would reasonably know about it. He files reports. He reads reports. He probably knew before you did."
"And he came to stand outside."
"He came to stand outside," she confirms, her voice carrying exactly zero inflection, which is how I know she has an opinion she's decided not to share.
"He didn't come in," I say. "He stood outside and watched the door."
"Ryder Ashford," Sage says, "does not do anything without a specific reason.
Whether the reason makes sense to anyone else is a different question.
" She lets the door swing shut behind us.
"He also files dormitory complaints within twelve hours of receiving them and doesn't typically supervise student detentions personally. But sure. Unrelated."
I put my hand over the amulet through my jacket, feeling the faint warmth of it against my palm.
"You have a theory," I say.
"I have several theories," Sage says. "I'm keeping them to myself until I have more data."
"That's what Malik said about his theories."
"Malik and I are very compatible people." She steers us toward the stairwell leading up to the morning lecture. "Come on. If we're late to Healing Arts, Instructor Penwick will make us demonstrate basic wound closure on each other and she always pairs people who clearly shouldn't be paired."
I follow her up the stairs. My hand drops from the amulet. The warmth of the stone stays with me even when I stop touching it, and I carry it through the rest of the morning the way you carry something you weren't sure you needed until you had it and then couldn't imagine putting down.
Caspian Thorne said I wasn't worth his effort, and he knew where the ring was before he summoned me, and he told me that at the end, after the circling and the commentary on what he could smell, and I'm aware that this is a specific kind of game I don't know the rules of yet.
Ryder Ashford stood at a gate in the cold and watched a door I was behind, and then looked at me across a courtyard and walked away without acknowledging any of it.
I file both. Date, method, what was said and what wasn't. The same way I always file things. The record exists even when I don't look at it, sitting in the part of me that keeps track so the rest of me can keep moving.
The amulet sits warm against my sternum, Malik's careful work, and I decide that counts as one thing going right today. The math still holds.