Chapter 34 Atticus
Atticus
We learn from failure, not from success!
—Bram Stoker, Dracula
Everything hurts. Even my eyelids ache. I try to open them, but it’s like they’re glued shut. My mouth is dry; my tongue tastes like iron. I try to swallow, but I can’t.
I don’t know where I am. I’m on my back, lying on something hard and cold.
A chill rakes through me like tiny daggers.
My shoulder throbs, a low, heavy pulse. Ba-dump, ba-dump, faster and faster.
I try to touch it, but I can’t. I manage to open my eyes to see why.
My arms, they’re raised over my head, and when I try to move them, a rattle echoes in the chamber.
Something cold and hard binds my wrists.
I move to wriggle free, but the iron cuts my skin when I struggle to pull my hands from it.
I’m chained up. My legs are bound. The freezing cuffs clutching my ankles are like vises, holding me down.
I don’t know what happened. One minute I was with Professor White; the next…
Everything comes back to me. My eyes snap open.
I know where I am.
I’m in Adelina Ward’s cell. The cage, half-collapsed but still standing, surrounds me.
Thousands of candles illuminate the room in an eerie glow.
The sigils on the stones are just as I remember them.
Rubble and debris from the demolition litter the floor, but the very center has been cleared out, making room for the spot where I’m bound.
The demolition was halted when they found us in this room, and I thought they’d sealed off this place, preventing anyone from entering it.
Someone found their way inside it. I’m bleeding from my shoulder. The gash is shallow, but it aches with each heartbeat. I turn my head to see a smear of something red on the floor. Blood. Someone used it to draw a shape on the stones. A summoning circle.
A shiver runs through me.
Panic is a monster. It’s all-consuming, a gaping mouth with teeth, and venom, and hot, wet breath. It has me, and it won’t let me go. Again, I tug at my chains, but the metal tears at my skin. I cry out. I can’t sit up. I can’t move. I can’t run, no matter how hard I try.
I am helpless. I might as well just lie down and die.
But then the rational, logical, calm part of my brain reminds me: Panicking will not help me get out of here.
I close my eyes and try to breathe. I focus on the Fibonacci sequence, reciting it under my breath. “Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one…” A sob escapes me, making me choke on the words.
“You’re awake,” says a voice.
Professor White peers down at me from above. She holds the journal clutched tightly to her chest. She looks unbothered, even as I pull on the chains. No empathy in her eyes, nothing.
“Why am I chained?” I ask, but she only shakes her head.
“You’re stronger than I thought,” she says blankly, as if observing a weed growing out of the sidewalk. “That’s good.”
“Professor White, please. Let me go.”
She doesn’t answer. She moves away from me, out of the cell and around the room, to a table stolen from Adelina Ward’s lab. It’s covered in candles and books. She arranges the desk reverently, as if preparing an altar for a ritual.
I’ve seen this once before, in the vision with Adelina and Henri. I know what Professor White is planning to do.
“If you try to summon another malum, you may not be able to control it. I saw what happened last time. I know what Adelina Ward did.”
Professor White turns. “Oh, you’re mistaken. I’m not trying to summon a malum.”
“You’re not?”
“No,” she says, grinning slightly, like I’m a stupid child who asked if the moon was really made of cheese.
“You misunderstand me completely. No, malums—while useful creatures—are crude things. Like dogs. Singularly focused and insatiable. Throw a bone at their feet, and they devour it without a second thought, then ask for more. I believe that I can do better than that. I believe, with Adelina’s foundational work, I can use her failure as a launching point for my own discovery. ”
I tense up. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll give you a little lesson, seeing as that’s what you’ve always wanted at this school, isn’t it? Sneaking around lectures and stealing books. Oh, I heard about a book missing from the restricted archives, I did. I know it was you and your friends.”
My stomach plummets.
“I think we have a lot in common. So listen well. There are different fields of goetia. Conjuration, divination, evocation…I could go on. The foundations of this school are literally built on the summoning of spirits from another realm. Elemental spirits built Arches, just as they built the monuments of our school and our government.”
Her eyes are bright, her tone triumphant.
She’s proud of her work and eager to share it with me.
“It’s all well and good, what the founders did back then.
But the one subject that interested me the most was necromancy.
The ability to speak with the dead, to learn their secrets.
It’s truly one of the most powerful forms of magic. ”
My hair stands on end. My body screams, eager to break free, but I can’t. I’m a butterfly, pinned and trapped under glass. All I can do is listen.
“I believe I can combine the two, conjuration and necromancy. Ward focused on evocation as a measure of her practice. I intend to use invocation.”
I struggle to recall how Raven defined these words, the memory hazy in my panic.
Professor White sees my confusion and clarifies what she said. “In evocation, we call a spirit into existence. An invocation is where you call a spirit into you.”
My whole body goes cold, her words echoing in my thoughts. Professor White circles the room, her hands behind her back, like she’s lecturing a class on calculus.
“Adelina Ward brought forth chaos, untethered it from its primordial basin, and called it into our world. Made it real. She was a visionary, but she was also impatient. That’s why the malum is difficult to control.
It needs the magic of others to exist, but in doing so, it kills people.
It’s well behaved, though, when you have the right spells.
It often does whatever you want, though perhaps not in the ways you expect. ”
“I won’t help you,” I say. My wrists are raw with pain.
“Sadly, you don’t have much choice in the matter.”
Then it occurs to me—I haven’t seen the malum. I search the room, but I can’t find it. “Where is it? Where’s the shadow?”
“It’s needed elsewhere,” she says.
I pull on the chains again, willing them to break, but they’re solid iron.
“For now, you are my focus,” says Professor White.
“What do you mean?”
“I tried experimenting on the spirits bound to Arches, but their dead essence made the magic brittle. I was missing a key component. A putlog hole, so to speak. A stabilizer.”
“Tried doing what? You destroyed Arches for some experiment?”
“I was testing out the spirits locked in the tower. Through that process, I learned of the existence of the malum. They told me about the creature bound beneath the building. They taught me how I could control it, how I could free the shadow from its prison if I destroyed the tower.”
“Why?”
“The malum is a tool, one of many that I intend to use today. You are yet another one.”
“Please,” I say. “Don’t. You’re not Adelina Ward. You don’t have to do this.”
Professor White moves to the desk. She sets down the journal on a stack of books, undoes a bundle of herbs, and lights a fire under a small cauldron.
A skull sits on the table. The skull from the cell. Adelina’s skull.
“Adelina’s spirit is bound to the skull. And with the right spell, I can call her back. I can invoke her, learn from her. I have many questions, and I can’t wait to ask them.”
“You can’t mean…” I’m horrified at what she’s implying.
Her eyes are fire bright. “I do. You’re going to be perfect.”