104. Seb
SEB
It was a night.
It was a night not unlike the night he and Adriana had promised each other the bout of a lifetime.
It had the same charge, the same current running through it.
It was a night dense with promise and possibility.
The banquet had come and gone, and their party at the pub grew messier—deliciously so—by the second.
The spotlight on the Cantrèa finalists had faded after Adriana had done an acceptable number of victory shots.
Seb had matched her, albeit with much more grimacing.
Everyone was following the threads of the night’s separate possibilities.
Across the pub, Daphne and Asher were wrapped up in each other, and they were far from the only ones.
Tori, Liesl, and Raf had disappeared a while ago, with a bottle of wine and wicked smiles, only reappearing briefly after the storm started to procure another bottle before heading upstairs to “dry off.” This was Seb’s favorite kind of debauchery, and he’d missed it all year, but he breathed it in now.
Seb and Adriana were half-hidden in the velvet-covered window seat.
They’d let the drapes out of their brass hooks for privacy as they talked, but as the evening progressed their conversation required fewer and fewer words.
The electrical charge that had pinged between them for years had finally tipped into overload. The circuit was going to blow.
It was practically mind-boggling that they had never kissed, but that first year, Raf had beaten her to the punch, and since then, fate had kept throwing other partners in the way.
Other partners.
Seb placed his hand against the window. Instantly, its clamminess drew him back, at least a little way, into his senses. Where was Lily? He tried to recall the last time he’d seen her and couldn’t. He stuck his head around the drapes, scanning the pub, but she wasn’t there.
“Lily?” Adriana said.
He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about Lily for even five minutes, much less fifty, but she’d been strangely flighty, hanging around the edges all night, and he’d been too much in demand to get her alone and find out what was going on, and then too many shots in to care.
She didn’t answer the first call or the third. So, he texted, and then texted again, tapping his phone against the window seat as he waited. Steadily, a nagging anxiety replaced the ache. He pushed his way across the party to discern her whereabouts.
“You’re worried.” Adriana appeared at his elbow as he stared from the doorway into the lobby of the inn.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just this feeling.”
The more he thought about it, the more he realized the feeling was Magic, spreading out in tendrils through his mind, twisting itself into the shape of her name. His stomach dropped.
He gasped, feeling suddenly sober. “I have to go to campus. I have to find her.”
“I’ll help.”
“Fine.” He was already moving, throwing on his jacket as he crossed the slate-tiled lobby.
Adriana kept pace as he skidded down the steep hill that was an epically good-bad idea for sledding in the winter and jogged across the street.
Thunder crashed directly overhead, even though the storm had already started.
They were soaked by the time their feet touched campus.
On the residential quad, the remains of a bonfire smoldered, but the revelry hadn’t died, morphing instead to a muddy bacchanalia.
He slid his student ID out of his wallet and pointed down the quad at Millay Tower.
“Go check the suite.”
She nodded and loped away.
Seb headed for the library.