Chapter 12
TWELVE
GWENNA
The flame on the stove won’t stay lit.
“Come on,” I groan, twisting the knob back and forth under the burner. It’s the damndest thing: it snaps to life instantly, cheerful and orange under the saucepan of milk, and then five, maybe ten seconds later…whoosh. Nothing.
After my third or fourth try, I’m genuinely annoyed.
Then, just as quickly, concerned: is this some kind of gas leak?
Is the Camlann House kitchen about to go up like a grenade?
I squat slightly to peer into the burner, the grate, and even though I’m barely half an inch away, there’s no sense of warmth at all.
When I touch the grate itself, it’s cold iron—like the fire was never there.
Strange. Very strange.
Straightening, I look around me for other options.
Do microwaves kill magic? I wonder. I could text Morgan, but think better of it—it feels like a stupid question to ask, and she’s not exactly someone whose cooking advice I’d take as gospel anyway.
Instead, I elect to nuke just the milk by itself, thirty seconds on high in a red CALIBURN FENCING mug, and then carefully remove it to stir in the honey separately.
The honey is thick, more paste than liquid, and I practically have to chip it out of the jar. But, with a little elbow grease, I manage to get a solid glob on the end of a butter knife, roughly the size of a large blackberry, which I dunk into the milk and stir.
Hm. I half expect the mug to glow or sparkle a little, give some indication that the divination powers or whatever are infusing into the milk. But nothing. If this is magic, it doesn’t feel especially enchanting.
And now the milk is getting cold.
I pick it up and head for Lanz’s room.
Lanz. Lanzelin Dell’Acqua, a ridiculous, ostentatious name for someone so…
neither of those things. The first of these boys I really met—met properly, anyway, since stumbling over Kingston in the chapel my first day hardly counts.
The first one who showed me any sort of kindness.
Certainly the first one I kissed. The one who carried me back to Camlann the night of the formal hall.
The only one to buy me flowers—until Callahan, anyway, and the little pot of winter roses now on my windowsill.
I’ve always liked Lanz. I’ve never not liked Lanz.
And now, maybe, I even…
“Yeah?”
Lanz’s voice is rough when I knock on his door.
I certainly don't want him to be like this, I think.
“It’s me,” I say. “Can I come in?”
A long pause. The soft sounds of bedclothes, then the pad of footsteps. The door opens, but not all the way.
“What do you want?”
He sounds more tired than irritated. And the half of his face I can see is sharply shadowed. Even the bright blue of his eyes looks dull.
“I brought you something,” I say, holding up the mug.
“Oh.” He hesitates. “I’m…I’m good. But thank—”
I stick my foot into the door before he can close it. “Lanz. Wait.”
To his credit, he doesn’t try to slam the thing shut and crush me. Just pauses, and then, at last, opens the door more fully.
When I get a good look at him, I almost gasp.
He’s always been slender, more so than any of the others, but now he looks almost thin, the loose warm-up clothes practically hanging off of him.
His dark hair is in disarray, his lips pale, and I’m hit with the sudden compulsion to drop the mug of milk and fling my arms around him, press his face into my neck, beg him to tell me what’s wrong.
But that won’t work.
“Here.” I hold out the mug. “I made this for you.”
Lanz stares at it. “What is it?”
“Poison, Lanz. I’m trying to kill you.” I roll my eyes. “Look, could I just come in for a second?”
Lanz’s expression goes taut, like he wishes I hadn’t asked. But I don’t like standing in the hall like this, as though I’m begging for a second of his time. Slowly, he presses a hand to his forehead, and when he speaks again, his voice is low.
“Sure.”
He doesn’t exactly welcome me in, just lets the door fall open and steps out of my way.
His room is the same as always—slightly untidy, bedsheets rumpled, the clean, spicy smell of his body heat.
I stand a bit stupidly, mug to my chest, and cast my eyes anywhere but his as Lanz sinks down to half-sit, half-lean, on the foot of the bed.
My gaze settles on his desk, just to his right—to the stacks of books and papers, the lone framed photograph.
“That’s your dad,” I say, nodding. A statement, not a question, because with those blue eyes and that dark hair, who else could it be?
Lanz looks as though I’ve slapped him. “What?” he croaks. He darts a glance back, barely registering what I’m talking about, and swallows. “Yeah.”
Obviously, I’ve stepped in it. “He looks…” The words like you die on my tongue, again too obvious a statement to merit saying aloud. “…happy,” I finish.
“He was,” Lanz says. Pauses. “Then.”
His eyes are fixed on the mug in my hands.
“It’s warm milk and honey,” I explain. “Not poison.” Just in case that needed clarifying.
“Gwenna.” His form sags, his voice rasping. “Come on. First those, now this?” He gestures at his bureau, where a cluster of thin, brown branches flocked with tiny white blossoms stands in a vase. “You really don’t have to—”
“I didn’t,” I interrupt gently. “Not the flowers.”
Lanz looks from my face to the vase. Then back to me. “Oh.”
Neither of us speaks, but I’m sure we’re having the same thought.
Cal.
I tighten my grip on the mug, push it forward slightly. “Would you just drink it?”
Lanz practically scowls at me. “Why?”
“Because it’ll make you feel better,” I say. “And because you haven’t been to a meal in God knows how long.”
“Okay, okay.” Lanz lifts his hands in the air. “Just leave it on my desk.”
I shake my head. “Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust that you’ll actually do it,” I say.
And I won’t be able to look at the empty cup if I do, I add silently.
Lanz pouts, almost glowers, but he takes the mug from me.
Without, I notice, touching my fingers.
He drinks it—chugs it, really. But whatever. Victory, I guess.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, holding out the mug. Not meeting my eyes. “Really.”
I take the cup back. “Thank you.” I glance down at it, at the slight milky-amber streaks clinging to the empty sides, and wonder what to make of it. But I don’t wonder long, just in case Lanz suspects anything. I make a mental note to snap a picture on my phone and look back up at Lanz.
But Lanz isn’t looking at me. He’s staring across the room again, at the bunch of blooming branches standing loyally in their vase, white blossoms lit up in the one patch of sunlight in the whole room.
“God.” Lanz murmurs, shaking his head slowly. “Freaking—he really didn’t have to—”
Thunk.
The windowpanes rattle. Lanz jumps. So do I, the empty mug tumbling from my fingers and—
Crack.
“Shit,” I say softly, and fly to the floor, where shattered pieces of ceramic frame my feet. “Shit.”
“It’s just a mug,” Lanz says—kindly, I notice. The softest his voice has been yet. “We have like a thousand of them.”
“No, I…” I shake my head. “I know.” I can’t explain why this mug matters, his mug matters, not without giving everything away.
Gingerly, I gather the broken chunks into my hand, trying to remember what I’d glimpsed before I dropped it.
Honey and milk, clinging to the inside? A little ring stuck around the bottom and sides?
I don’t even know what I should have been looking for, and that’s about all I can recall. Just that it was there.
Shit, I think again. Standing back up, I look up at the window. “What was that?”
Lanz is peering out through the frost, staring down at the ground below.
“Bird,” he says simply. “Flew into the glass.”
I shiver. “Is it…”
“Dead.” He grimaces. “Looks like, anyway.” Seeing my expression, his face softens. “Hey. It happens. Things…die.”
Not like that, I want to say. Not like that, they shouldn’t.
It isn’t just the stove. Or the bird.
The storm is first. A ripping, violent sort of Nor'Easter a few nights later, with hail the size of fists and lightning scissoring across the purple sky.
“Whoa.” In the Camlann study room, facing the lake, Callahan lifts his head from his textbook. “Look.”
He stands slowly, amazed, and I follow where he points, through the wide frame of the window: a tree, on the other side of the lake, blazing orange flames eating its black limbs.
“Must have—”
Before he can finish, another streak of white sizzles across the sky and slams into the trunk, exploding with sparks.
The next morning, it’s gone.
Then the fish. Bobbing up on the surface of the lake, a few at a time, then dozens—maybe hundreds. Bloated, dead, rotting, pushed ashore by the wind in a wave of slick, liquefying scales and fins.
And then the water.
Kai is first to see it. One minute he’s in the shower, the next he’s slamming out of the bathroom in a towel, his chest and shoulders dripping a thick, viscous red.
“What the fuck?” he mutters, staring down at himself, his hands spread wide. “What the actual, living fuck—”
It’s all across campus, we hear: dorm showers and bathroom taps, drinking fountains and even—
“The pool,” Elena shrieks in Holy Grounds. “The whole swimming pool is blood.”
Not blood, the dean is quick to alert everyone, through whisper networks and paper notices stuffed in everyone’s mail cubby. There’s an explanation, something about iron particulates, continental dust sucked up from pressure changes and all the rainfall dumping them into our watershed.
I don’t know enough about weather patterns to believe or disbelieve it.
But then the darkness falls.