Chapter 18
"Three students gone," Sage says, dropping onto the bench beside me with her breakfast tray and the particular urgency she reserves for information she's been sitting on all morning. "Three. Since Tuesday."
"Gone how?" I ask, though I already have a guess and I don't like it.
"Gone like Mira Solis gone. Like there one minute and then just not." She cuts around a cluster of second-years clogging the main corridor, and I follow. "Two reapers and a witch. All three had been near the east wing breach points."
The east wing. Where the Veil runs thinnest. Where the wraith attacks have been clustering for the past two weeks like something is herding them toward a specific spot.
"The faculty is calling it voluntary withdrawal," Sage continues. "Three students choosing to leave mid-semester, separately, without telling anyone." She gives me a flat look. "Voluntarily."
"Right. Very voluntary." I shift my bag higher on my shoulder. "Has Malik heard anything from the reaper division?"
"Malik hears everything and tells me roughly forty percent of it, which is still more than most people have.
" She lowers her voice as we pass a professor moving in the opposite direction.
"What he did say is that Thane's father sent a formal declaration to the headmaster's office yesterday.
Full diplomatic language. Very polite. Essentially amounting to: send my son home or I make the academy's political situation considerably worse. "
I think about Thane. His gold-flecked eyes and the way he moves through rooms like they owe him something. His mother was a null. Executed in a purge before he was old enough to understand what that meant. He has spent every year since making sure no one looks at him and thinks weakness.
"Is he leaving?" I ask.
"He hasn't yet." Sage slows at the junction where our paths split toward different afternoon classes. "But the dragon house is on edge. Like they're waiting for something to break."
She peels off toward the west stair, and I take the long corridor toward the library annex, and the academy wraps around me with its usual weight of cold stone and old magic and the particular brand of tension that has been building here for weeks.
It's not background noise anymore. It lives in the walls.
I'm two turns from the annex door when Caspian steps out of a side passage and falls into pace beside me as if he'd been waiting, which he absolutely was.
"Fairmont," he says.
"Thorne," I say back, not slowing. "If this is about the east wing study sessions, I already told you I'm not stopping them."
"It's about me leaving tonight." He keeps pace easily, which is irritating given that his legs are longer and he's not even trying. "Family emergency."
That stops me. I turn to look at him. His red hair is slightly disordered, which for Caspian counts as visible distress. His dark green eyes watch me too carefully, cataloguing.
"My father sent word this morning. I don't have details yet." He pauses. "I need you to stay away from the breach points while I'm gone."
"And you're telling me this because?"
He's quiet for a beat. Around us, the corridor is emptying as students filter toward afternoon commitments. The stone arches cast long shadows across the floor.
"Because I need you to stay away from the breach points while I'm gone." His voice has lost its usual smooth armor. "The east wing. The lower passages near the crypt. All of it."
"Caspian." I cross my arms. "Three students have disappeared. The wraith activity is doubling every week. And your response is to leave and tell me to stay away from the places where the answers are?"
"My response is to leave because I have no choice, and to tell you that because someone needs to.
" He takes a step closer. His face has gone serious in a way I rarely see.
"The breach points are being used as lures, Angelic.
The attacks aren't random. Someone is directing them toward specific locations, and those locations happen to be the places students like you go to look for answers. "
Students like me. I file that phrase away for later examination.
"Who's directing them?" I ask.
"I'm working on that." His mouth tightens. "Which is also why I need you to not get yourself pulled through a breach while I'm gone and unavailable to do anything about it."
"You're not usually this concerned about my continued existence."
"I'm always concerned about your continued existence." He says it quietly, almost flat, like a fact he's tired of carrying. "I've just been consistently terrible at showing it in ways that look like concern."
I study him. Caspian Thorne, who has been a cold shadow at the edges of my worst moments here. Who I've caught watching me across rooms with an expression I couldn't translate. Who stopped an attack on me once in a way that looked accidental and wasn't.
"Why do you care?" I ask. "Genuinely. Because you've made it very clear you think I'm a complication. A liability."
His throat works. Pain flickers across his face before he can catch it.
"Because I know what's coming for you," he says. "I've known since before you arrived. And I've been trying to find a way to keep you out of it that doesn't require you to understand exactly how bad it is." A pause. "I've been failing at that too."
"So tell me how bad it is."
"When I get back."
"That's a very convenient timeline."
"I know." He doesn't apologize for it. Just looks at me, direct and tired and raw underneath those two things. "Stay away from the east wing. Please."
The please lands differently than the rest of it. I've never heard that word from him without some layer of performance coating it.
"Why should I?" I ask.
He exhales through his nose. Takes another step, and now there's less than a foot of corridor between us, and his voice drops to something that doesn't carry past my ears.
"Because if something happens to you while I'm gone, I will have spent months making your life harder in the name of protecting you, and it will have been for nothing." His green eyes fix on mine. "And because I can't stop caring what happens to you, even though I've tried. Believe me, I've tried."
"Caspian—"
He kisses me.
His hand comes up to the side of my face and his mouth finds mine with the specific desperation of someone who has been deciding not to do this for a very long time and has finally run out of reasons.
I go still for one second out of sheer surprise, and then heat floods through me, because his mouth is warm and real and he's kissing me like I matter to him in a way that has nothing to do with prophecies or politics or the carefully maintained cruelty he wraps himself in like a coat.
Then I pull back. Just enough to breathe, enough to look at him.
His hand is still against my cheek. His eyes are open, watching me, and whatever composure he normally maintains is entirely absent from his face.
"I can't stop myself," he says. Rough. Like the admission costs him something structural. "I've been trying for months. I can't."
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't read too much into it." But his hand drops slowly, like he's making himself let go rather than wanting to. "Stay away from the breach points."
"I'll think about it."
A smile almost pulls at his mouth, gone before it fully forms. Then he's stepping back, and the corridor air fills the space he was occupying, and he turns and walks the other direction without another word.
I stand there for a moment.
Then the bond hits me.
The connection snaps tight in my chest, sudden and sharp, originating in my sternum and radiating outward.
It's Ryder. The bond that has been running open and steady since the ritual is now running hot, and what comes through it isn't ambient emotional noise.
It's specific. Focused. And cold in the particular way that cold things get when they've been applied to something burning.
He felt it. The kiss, or the emotion underneath it, or both, transmitted through the connection that has been sitting wide open between us since I tried to sever it and made everything worse instead.
I close my eyes for two seconds. Then I start walking.
He's not in his classroom when I get there. The door is closed but not locked, and I push it open without knocking because if he's going to feel everything that happens to me through an involuntary metaphysical tether, he can deal with me entering without an appointment.
He's standing at the window, his back to me, one hand flat on the stone sill. The afternoon light comes in at an angle and catches the tension in his shoulders, in the line of his neck, in the controlled stillness of someone holding very hard to something that wants to move.
"You felt it," I say, closing the door behind me.
"The bond transmits emotional resonance," he says without turning around. "That's what bonds do when they're fully open. I'm not responsible for the data it sends me."
"That's not what I asked."
He turns around. His face is the controlled version, the one he puts on for council meetings and difficult students. But his eyes are doing something different than his face, and the bond doesn't care about his face.
"Yes," he says. "I felt it."
"I didn't plan it," I say. "For whatever that's worth."
"It's worth exactly what it is." He crosses his arms, a mirror of my own posture, and the resemblance is irritating. "Thorne has been watching you for months. I knew that. I wasn't operating under any illusion about where that was heading."
"Then why does the bond feel like you're about to put a fist through the window?"
A muscle works in his jaw. "Knowing something is coming and experiencing it are not the same thing."
"No," I agree. "They're not."
We look at each other across the classroom. The afternoon light has shifted while we've been standing here, going from gold to something more grey, and the room is colder than it was when I walked in.