Chapter 4
FOUR
LINDSAY
I don’t remember falling asleep.
I just remember the shift—like the floor dropped out from under me and I kept falling through layers of silence and light.
As though I was Alice falling into Wonderland.
Now, I’m standing barefoot in a hallway that almost looks like the Academy.
The stones are the same. The long arched windows. The flickering sconce lights.
But nothing is right.
The ceiling breathes. The walls ripple when I stare too long. The torches burn upside-down, casting shadows that move in the wrong direction. My reflection doesn’t follow me in the glass of the windows—it lingers behind, slow and flickering, like it’s waiting for me to turn around.
I don’t. I keep walking. My footsteps echo too loudly, as if the sound is trying to escape faster than I can.
A voice drifts from somewhere far off.
“Linds…?”
It’s soft. Familiar. Tamsin.
I turn toward it, but the hallway shifts. The walls stretch, and the floor tilts until the direction is gone, replaced by endless corridors and stairwells that loop back on themselves. I press my hand to one of the walls. It’s warm. Too warm. It pulses beneath my palm like a heartbeat.
“Okay,” I murmur. “Not real. This isn’t real.”
But it feels real.
The air tastes like copper and ash. My skin hums with energy—burned magic still crackling beneath the surface. My chest aches, and somewhere beneath that ache is something else. Someone else. I take another step, and the hallway opens suddenly into the main atrium.
But it’s wrong, like the rest of this place.
It’s flooded with light, as if someone shattered the moon and spilled it all over the stone. Floating up near the ceiling is a mirror. A massive one, reflecting the scene below—but a warped version.
In the mirror, I’m not alone. Three figures stand around me. Kael. Nolan. Raiden. But they’re mirrored versions—slightly wrong. Their faces are shadowed. Their eyes glow with strange light. They don’t speak. They watch.
I take a step forward, and all three tilt their heads in unison.
“Okay,” I breathe, chest tightening. “Definitely not real.”
But the bond between us? I can feel it—even here. A tug from each of them, threads of gold, silver, and shadow trailing off of them like someone strung invisible wire between our ribs.
Kael’s burns cold.
Raiden’s thrums low and steady.
And Nolan’s—faint, flickering, like he’s trying to reach me but can’t quite break through.
When I step toward them, they move back, just out of reach.
“Stop,” I say, shaking my head. Kael’s lips curve up, and he turns away, Nolan and Raiden following. “Wait.”
The mirror above flickers. The three boys vanish like smoke.
“Nolan, Raiden, Kael, Tamsin?” I call out again. “Anyone?”
The only answer is the sound of distant water. Or maybe footsteps. Or maybe both. I turn in a slow circle, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from.
The air shifts again—warps—and then I hear her.
Tamsin.
Her voice cuts through the space.
“Look, if you’re going to keep floating in dreamland, the least you could do is process your mess of a love life while you’re in there.”
I freeze.
“What—?” I whisper.
“I mean, honestly,” her voice continues, clear and undeniably Tamsin, “Kael is missing after brooding next to your bedside for twenty-four hours—what else is new, right? He's a demon, that's what they do… Nolan’s been hovering like a kicked puppy, I can barely keep him resting in his bed, and Raiden nearly ripped the runes apart when your magic flared last night. You’ve officially upgraded from a girl with secrets to a girl with three emotionally compromised disasters tied to her.”
A breath shudders out of me. “Tamsin?”
“Not to mention,” she keeps going, “your bond with Raiden is glowing like a damn lantern that even I can see now. It looks like it needs some healing, and if you don’t wake up and deal with that situation, I will. And I’m not exactly the subtle one in this friendship.”
I glance around, searching for her, but the world shifts again—walls twisting, light bending. She’s not here. Not really.
“Oh, and in case you forgot,” her voice adds, flat, “you nearly blew a hole through half the school when the Veil breach happened, so you might want to stop soul-strolling through the magical subconscious death plane and wake the hell up.”
I almost laugh. It catches in my throat.
Something inside me stirs. A tug. A flicker of sensation I can’t fully name, but it feels like heat against my skin and the pull of breath returning to lungs that haven’t moved in too long.
“I want to,” I whisper. “I’m trying.”
The world ripples around me. But Tamsin doesn’t hear that part. Her voice keeps going like she’s pacing beside me, talking to me even though I haven’t opened my eyes.
“And just so we’re clear? You don’t get to float away from this. Not from me. Not from them. So get it together, Linds. Wake up. Choose a boy. Kiss somebody. Hell, kiss all of them. That’s what I would do. But I’m greedy like that.”
A pause.
“Okay, enough distracting me—open your eyes. I need you to come back to your body now. It’s right here.”
My arm tingles, and I glance down.
It feels like she’s touching me.
“Tamsin,” I whisper.
She squeaks. “Holy void. Yes, Linds! Come to my voice. I’m here. Wake up, bestie.”
Something crackles beneath my skin. Light. Pressure. The shadows around me thin. I feel her fingers on my arm—not just imagined anymore, but real. Warm. Anchoring.
“Tamsin,” I whisper again, louder this time.
Then everything shifts. My vision floods with white. The floor disappears. My body slams upward—like I’m being yanked toward myself.
“She moved! She moved!”
Something cracks. Not loud, but deep inside me. The world shudders. I feel Tamsin’s hand tighten around mine. Warmth rushes up my arm. Magic threading through me as I try to respond to her touch.
And then—everything pulls me back into my body.
Like I’ve been hooked behind the ribs and yanked toward the surface. I don’t see light exactly, but I feel it, blinding and urgent, magic roaring in my ears like a heartbeat too loud.
The bonds that formed flare to life. Their magic slams into mine all at once, not violently, but there. I don’t see them. I don’t hear them. I know they feel it too.
My eyes flutter. A single breath escapes me.
And just like that—it slips away again. The shadows pull me back under, gentle this time. As though they were waiting, and they know I’m not ready yet.
They press in again, smoothing the edges of the light that almost reached me. The moment slips like water through my fingers, and I land gently—quietly—back in the distorted hallway.
But something’s different now.
The Academy is wrong-er than before.
Where there was once just haze and echo, now time fractures around me.
One hallway shows sunlight blazing through the windows—another glows with moonlight so cold it burns.
A clock ticks backward in the corridor beside me.
Students flicker in and out like ghosts.
One version of me stands at the window, staring out.
Another passes by without seeing me at all.
I spin slowly.
Am I dreaming of the past?
Or the future?
Is this all just a really fucked up dream?
A whisper of laughter skates along the corridor, high and familiar and mine—but not how I laugh now.
It’s lighter. Unburdened. It chills me more than the silence did.
I spin, catching sight of me with a tall man I don’t recognize.
His head leans toward mine in a flirty tilt as he props a hand above my head, leaning in like he might kiss me.
It feels like something I shouldn’t be seeing.
I turn away and walk.
I don’t know where I’m going, only that something is pulling me again. Not the bond this time. Not the magic. Something deeper.
I step into the courtyard, but it isn’t the courtyard. It has singed grass and cracked cobblestone.
The sky is fractured into sharp panes, like broken glass held together with shadow. Trees bloom and wither all at once. A fountain runs red instead of water. The stone benches are carved with words and runes in my handwriting—things I’ve never written.
And sitting on one of them—is me. Almost. She looks like me, but paler. Eyes darker. Lips curved into a half-smile that knows too much.
She swings one leg over the other and tilts her head. “Took you long enough to get here. I don't remember it taking this long last time.”
My breath catches. “You’re not real. This is a dream.”
“I’m not lying to myself, if that helps,” she replies easily. “That makes one of us, but I know this is all new, you're just beginning. Sit.” She pats the bench next to her.
I don’t move. “What are you?”
“I’m the part you don’t want to look at. The one screaming at you to stop pretending this isn’t real. That they’re not real. The future won't wait for you to catch up.”
My voice is barely above a whisper. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She rises, dusting off her skirt. “You do. You just don’t want to choose.
Because choosing means giving something up, doesn’t it?
It means facing the fact that you’re something more.
That our Gran lied to us. That all those years of not fitting in…
were because we actually were different.
And maybe the stories we were told about our mom, were just that, stories. ”
“I didn’t ask for any of this. I was content in my life.”
She laughs. “And yet here you are. Bonded. Wanted. Loved, maybe. You think the Veil doesn’t notice?” Her eyes flash gold. “You’re not just a girl anymore, Lindsay. You’re a fault line, and you’re going to crack everything wide open with your head in the sand. So stop lying to yourself.”
“I didn’t—”
She steps closer. “You need to choose before someone else does it for you. Because trust me—if you don’t, you’re going to lose everything.
Because the people that make those decisions for you…
they don't care about us. They don’t care about Nolan or Raiden or Kael or…
” she trails off stopping herself. “Only power. Only what they can take from you.”
My heart pounds.
“Choose what?”
Her smile widens, and the ground cracks beneath our feet.
“That’s the fun part. I would tell you, but you already know.”