10. Lucy
Lucy
I make my way across campus, from the faculty wing over the cobbled sandstone paths. There’s a shortcut through the Veilwalker lecture hall and down the main path to the Great Library. The campus is stunning. Even to me, and I’ve lived here my entire life.
There’s a secretive beauty to Finis Academy.
At first glance, it’s all archways and cloisters, creeping ivy crawling over sandy-coloured bricks.
But if you keep looking, the truth lies in your periphery.
An aged wisdom of sorts, buried in crumbling shadows that lurk and move in unnatural ways, a clock that never tells the truth, doors that move and shiver away when they don’t want to be opened.
A cemetery that doesn’t want to let you out and a church that won’t let you in.
The campus is alive in ways it shouldn’t be. Perhaps then, Father is right, and Finis Tower is haunted. Or maybe my students wish the stories were true.
The Great Library is circular, an endless spiral building that houses our oldest tomes and grimoires and doubles as a kind of fortress protecting Finis Tower itself—the magnum opus of the campus.
Maldrip, the library’s goyle, sits on an oak-studded door, the dark stone of his skin matching the black metal studs. He mumbles “Good afternoon,” followed by a line of gravelly spittle sprinkling out of his mouth. It lands in a stone dust pile by my feet.
Delightful.
“It’s very much the morning,” I say.
“Professor Corvine, glad I caught you,” Thalia Morrow calls from behind me.
She’s a professor of Veilwalking, but has a specialism in contracts.
She’s brilliant and was my mentor through my own studies.
She must be in her late sixties now, though her bronzed skin doesn’t seem to have aged enough.
Grey streaks her hair, except for the ends, which are dipped in black.
It’s graceful the way the faintest of lines kiss her eyes, all of them etching in smiles instead of grimaces.
Don’t be fooled though, we all carry an edge, and hers is terrifying.
I never crossed her as her mentee, but the lashings she’ll give the students that do are enough to give even the senior faculty members nightmares.
“Looking forward to term starting?” I ask.
“About that. There’s an urgent staff meeting in Finis Tower. Everyone has been called.”
I follow after her, and we pass through a huge stone archway and onto the bridge perched above the moat that lays between the circular library and the tower.
She tugs my arm and pulls it over hers. “Now tell me, how is the love life, hmm?”
“Demon’s above, Thalia, do we have to talk about this?”
Thalia has known me twenty-five years at least. Since I was a teenager. She saw me grow up with Ignatius and often took, not a motherly role as such, but more of the naughty aunt always encouraging me to rebel-type role.
“Absolutely, you’re not getting any younger, when are you going to meet a nice young woman to keep you warm at night?” She winks her golden eye while her blue one glitters at me in the early light.
“Thalia,” I hiss. “Stop it.”
“If I’m still getting it, why can’t you?”
I open my mouth about to say something and stop.
I guess she’s right. But also, I don’t feel like spilling the fact I fucked a total stranger in a grave last night, not least because if Midnight survives the Severance Rite, she’ll be a student, and there are only two rules here.
One of which is students are forbidden from fraternising with professors and vice versa.
“I don’t have time for frivolities like sex,” I lie.
She tuts at me and leads me to the tower entrance as the autumn breeze whips under my blazer.
It’s not compulsory to wear Finis attire as a professor here. Thalia isn’t. But I find there’s something deeply satisfying about looking the part. It makes me feel more professional, like I belong here, more than rocking up in gym sweats or whatever.
Besides, the neat lines and pinched waist does wonders for my curves. Maybe I should take more leaves out of Thalia’s book. I’m forty, not dead. The way the uniform flatters me, I’m convinced whoever designed it must have been a woman. If nothing else, the black and red fabric matches my hair.
When I reach the tower door, Mordax, our most grumpy of gargoyles, is chewing on his knocking handle. His wing-like ears ruffle as I incline my head at him.
“Good morning, may we gain entry to Finis Tower?” I say.
His stony eyes glide up to meet mine, all the while he chews on his iron ring.
“Don finkth soh,” he mumbles around the handle.
“Much as we’d love to exchange pleasantries, we’ve been summoned for a staff meeting, so open up or I’ll tweak your ring,” Thalia growls.
He chews on the iron a little more aggressively, scowling at the pair of us, but the door swings open. I tickle him under his wing-tip ears, trying to appease the situation. He shivers in delight but continues to chunter insults under his breath at Thalia.
“Thank you,” I say and can’t help but smile in spite of the glare he’s giving us.
The tower is regal as ever. It houses fifteen floors total: seven above and seven below and the ground floor smack in the middle. Each floor down is more demonic than the last, and each floor up more celestial than the previous.
Beneath them all lies a forbidden basement with a door to the underworld, and above them sits an ancient records room holding a door to the celestial realm. That’s the other rule of the Academy: no one goes to the basement without training and permission. My father’s permission.
Connecting each level is a single spiral staircase that carves a coil through the centre of the tower.
Seven floors for seven devils.
Seven floors for seven angels. And one ground level for Ora City, the gateway to everywhere else.
“Bloody goyles thinking they own the place,” Thalia grumbles as she leads me into the largest of the lecture theatres on the ground floor.
We make our way through the foyer, our feet dancing over the chequered tiles.
The building hums, thick and sticky with magic.
Candles flicker in sconces, dim streaks of light paint the floor.
Every wall is covered in shelves and books, jars, specimens and scrolls.
The sweet musty smell of decaying paper fills the air.
I inhale, wishing I could breathe in new magic, maybe a clause that would supersede my father’s contract.
I’ve tried; gods, have I tried. I’ve spent months searching the demonic library for my contract, to no avail.
I must have glimpsed every other agreement we have stored but mine.
Years I’ve spent studying and hunting for anything I can find about underage contracts. Contracts that save lives.
The air ruffles, and I glance over my shoulder but no one’s there.
Thalia tugs at me, urging me towards the theatre. “You know it’s not really haunted.”
I squint into the gloom, but we’re definitely alone. “So they say.”
“Oh, come on, you’re really superstitious?”
I give her a stern glance. “Is it really so hard to imagine the tower is haunted? It’s literally our job to work with the dead.”
She nods. “Then if it were haunted, don’t you think a campus full of professors who all work with the dead would have heard about it?”
Once again, she has a point. Though it doesn’t stop my skin from itching like the bite of nettles on flesh.
Thalia opens the lecture hall door, and we take seats near the front. I spot Father lurking in the stage alcoves. He nods at me, his face severe.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I whisper to Thalia as she waves and greets various faculty members.
“No. But were you here last week when we had that tremor?” she whispers out the side of her mouth.
I shake my head.
“It was awful.”
“I think—” she starts, but Chancellor Lucan Arcadius strides on stage, my father, the dean and second-in-command, two steps behind.
He’ll hate that. Arcadius has an ego the size of the underworld.
I mean, why wouldn’t you as the archdevil.
He is the highest ranking of all devils and has been around for longer than anyone can remember.
He’s completely unbeatable. Which is exactly why my father hates him.
He’d cut off a limb if it meant he could rule the underworld, or be Chancellor, for that matter.
Thalia licks her lips as Lucan strides up to the lectern. I cock my head at her.
“What? A girl can appreciate a strapping man.”
Strapping is right, his thigh muscles bulge through his trousers.
“I thought your ex was a woman,” I say.
She shrugs. “I like who I like.”
I glance back at Arcadius. His shoulders are as wide as a carriage.
Two silvery-white horns slice through his hair, curving in a sinister twist above his head.
Not all demons are horned, but some, especially the most powerful, tend to be.
My father isn’t, and he takes this as some emasculation of his demonhood.
Arcadius’s eyes harbour the same swirls of black as Father’s, with one difference.
Where Father’s hold darkness, Lucan’s hold a cold kind of cruelty that screams sadistic bastard.
Not in the spank-me-harder-daddy kind of sadism, either.
His teeth are sharp, his nose patrician and regal and his dark brown skin curves and bulges with ounces and ounces of muscle.
He taps the mic on the lectern. “Finis Academy.”
There’s a rumbling in the audience as the professors who are less inclined to perform the arbitrary student response of G ood morning, Professor Arcadius mumble responses.
“Those of you who have been here for more than the last academic year will have experienced the infrequent tremors and quakes that have been happening for the last couple of decades. However…”
Arcadius glances at my father, who produces a thin sheet of parchment and hands it over.