11. Midnight
Midnight
M orning light dribbles through the curtains as I stare at the dark paper in my hands. Thick ink is scrawled across the page in whorls of red—red that I am convinced is my own blood.
I don’t understand it and I can’t explain it, but I know it to be true. The little sleep I managed, the invitation crept into my dreams and gnawed at me as if it were alive. Sloping and crawling through my nightmares.
Taunting me.
Threatening me.
Whispers of hope. Of possible futures. New beginnings.
The promise of a chance to save myself.
I flip the card over, but it’s blank save for the cracked red wax bearing Finis Academy’s crest. I run my finger over the crumbling seal, the tower of twisted magic that rises as high in the sky as it sinks beneath the earth. So many secrets, so much magic.
My eyes skim the words again, scarcely believing they’re real:
Mercedes Midnight,
You are cordially invited to attend the Severance Rite. Should you successfully complete the entrance trial, you will be given a place at Finis Academy.
Please make your way to the entrance gates at 8 a.m. sharp tomorrow.
The last words are so faint against the dark paper. It looks like whoever sent it attempted to sign their name but the ink—my blood—ran out.
I take a deep breath. Finally.
Nine years. Nine attempts. Nine failures.
This morning everything changes.
I spent half the night packing and repacking. Pulling clothes and books out and putting them back in. Nothing seemed right. Nothing felt like enough.
At 7a.m. I’m pacing and unable to sit still. Nine years I’ve waited for a chance to win the coveted Demonic Favour. A chance to shove Ignatius’s deal back in his smarmy face.
I arrive at the long drive of Finis Academy campus by 7:30. It’s too early, and yet the driveway is crammed with carriages and people carrying bags and trunks.
But it’s also swarming with people holding placards, and a perilous number of balled fists.
Jeers litter the air like the cries of newborn kittens. Screams preach of new worlds, and baritones promise of darkness and unification.
The city’s politics weren’t always so turgid.
I remember my parents: my mother was pro resurrection, my father anti.
They seemed to live together in peace just fine.
Good-natured debates filled the house, and I’d sit on the floor between them smiling and chattering a concoction of big words like I knew what they meant.
This Ora City is not the same.
Something changed during the years of open opinions, almost as if they seeped into the waterways and infected our bellies. Jagged lines now carve faces, making angry eyes and angrier fists.
It’s hard work, but I slalom my way through the carriages and pedestrians, weaving along the endless driveway.
I didn’t realise there would be so many of us with invitations.
Though I suppose half of these are the potential students, and the other half are excited family members wishing their young ones luck.
It must be two miles before I find myself braking and pulling to a stop before the same wrought iron gates where I left Lucy last night.
In the morning light, they seem less imposing and more sinister.
Long iron poles stretch up into the low-hanging mist cloaking the Academy.
Ivy chokes the sandstone brick. And while the trees outside the campus have shed their leaves for autumn, the evergreen vines inside are bushy and plump, as though the ivy fed on the carcasses.
I take my helmet off. The crowd’s screams are shrill, their leers more vicious still. I wince against the roar as pressure builds in my ears. My arms prickle from the restless energy.
“Get the fuck off me,” a girl bellows.
There’s a scuffle, a swarm of bodies pressing in towards the carriages.
“Fucking ashkisser,” someone screams.
“It’s a university, for demon’s sake,” the same girl bellows. “Get off me.”
I find her voice. She’s been grabbed by several protesters. I flick my bike’s kickstand down and dive in, barking at the nearest security guard, who leaps into action after me. A man and a woman hold her as she struggles.
I ram my elbow into the man’s gut and stomp on his foot. He shrieks, and the woman lets go, flapping her arms at what I assume is her husband.
The girl gains her feet and aims a kick right into his crotch, hard enough even I wince. He drops to the floor.
“Ashkissers,” his wife spits at our feet.
“Go fuck yourself,” I say and tug the girl away to head towards the gates.
“Hi,” she says. She’s a Black girl with a set of turquoise braids.
“Midnight.” I hold out my hand, and she shakes it. She’s shorter than me and wears such an array of styles and brightly coloured clothes that I’m pretty sure she’s covered the entire rainbow.
“Lex,” she says. “Well, that’s not my real name of course, but the kids in my school used to call me Lexicon because I’ve always been obsessed with language, and the name just stuck.”
She’s sweet. I like her.
“Pleasure to meet you, Lex. With a name like that, I’m assuming you’re here to study Eytomancy?”
She nods, the beads on the ends of her braids jangling like birdsong. “Absolutely. I’m determined to be fluent in every necromantic language.”
“Fluent… is there someone you want to speak to?”
She shucks her rucksack into place, ignoring my question. “So why are you here?”
“To win the favour,” I say. The fact Lex changed the subject isn’t lost on me.
She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Nothing else? You don’t want to be a Doorstop or Detour? Maybe an Echo or Loose End?”
I frown at her. “A what, what and a what now?”
She hustles me towards the gate, so I grab my bike and trot after her while she babbles away.
“You know, you really need to get with the lingo if you want to be the top student.”
“Apparently so!”
“I’ll help. So, the Echoes are the students who study the memories of the dead.
The Doorstops are the Fabric Weavers working with the integrity of the Veil.
The Loose Ends deal with the dead who have unfinished business, helping the shades to move on etcetera, etcetera.
And then there’s the Subtexts, that’s me.
Though I’ll be minoring in Footnotes—also known as Theoretical Death studies. ”
Gods, my head is already swimming. A wave of warmth rushes up my neck, the confidence I came with draining out of me the more she talks.
We approach the gates. Unlike last night, they willingly open for me. The goyle narrows his grey gaze at me, making me shift position. I hold my bike with one hand and let my fingers skim the cool metal with the other.
There is no hum or vibration this morning. No bite, no blood. Was it all just a dream? A hallucination?
“You okay?” Lex says, staring at my knuckles where I grip the bar tight enough to turn them white.
I didn’t even realise she’d stopped to wait for me.
“I… umm, yeah. Let’s go.”
We’re almost through the gates when I hear my name. It lurks in the wind, all whisper and scream.
I try to locate the source. But it’s nowhere. And everywhere. It crawls along my skin, slithers in my ears, coats my flesh in echoes.
I scan the long line of carriages behind me, all their windows and doors fastened shut. There’s a sea of protesters pressed back by stern security. But no one holds my gaze or waves, no one calls to me.
I glance at the wound on my hand. It’s sealed over, but I rub and knead at the itching scab as if it might scratch away the coiling in my gut.
It must have been the crowd.
We break through into campus and a shroud of heavy fog swallows us whole. It sends tingles stretching from my belly to my toes.
Then the mist clears completely.
I falter, spin around only to be greeted by the towering wall of white.
“What the hell?” I whisper.
“So cool,” Lex says, bouncing on the balls of her platform trainers.
“There are many cool things about the Academy,” a tall lady says. She wears narrow glasses, her hair grey, but she bears the yellowest eyes I’ve ever seen.
“You’re a demon,” I say, stating the obvious and instantly regretting it.
Obviously, she knows she’s a demon. But they don’t exactly dance in the streets of Ora City.
They come to the city to make deals and then return to the underworld or campus or wherever they subsist. Save the few who find they have a taste for our realm.
Lex’s mouth twitches like she’s trying not to laugh at me.
She sighs. “How astute of you. Park your bike over there and make your way to the cloisters. You’ll be greeted and placed into a testing group. I assume you both have your invitations?”
Lex whips hers out, the stark white card sharp against the red whorls and dark parchment of mine.
They both falter at the sight of my letter. It makes my insides shift and plummet. Am I mistaken? Did I not get in? Is this all a desperate delusion I created?
I am a confident woman. But this professor is terrifying. She carries a severity reserved for librarians and mothers of teenagers who fuuuucked up. She makes me feel like a child, and I shrink away.
“How odd. It seems like a valid invite, though. Welcome to Finis Academy. I’m Professor Evadne Verrill. Omnia mors aequat.”
“Death renders all equal,” I breathe, and she nods approvingly.
“I take care of the library.”
Of course she does. I daren’t interrupt her to say that, though. Lex visibly brightens at the news. Verrill narrows her eyes through her narrower glasses.
“You’ll find yourself in my area often, if you know what’s good for you.”
I’m about to thank her when she steps in front of us, arm out, blocking our view.
She spits out a caustic sentence. All hard edges, clicks and guttural noises.
Lex grabs my hand and squeezes; this must be a necromantic language she’s so desperate to learn.
A silvery-white flash erupts from the building behind us. It twists and coils and threads through the air until it loops around Verrill’s arms. Screeching ricochets off the building and rends the atmosphere, and I clap my hands to my ears. A charred limb flops onto the cobbles in front of us.
Silence.
Lex is still bouncing on her toes, like this is exciting and not bonkers.
Verrill turns to us, flustered, her severe demeanour bent and misshapen.
We peer around her stiff form. Hanging at head height is the silvery thread that peeled off the building behind her.
Only now it’s stitched like a dress hem.
As we stare, the thread fades and the strips of air either side undulate like a pregnant belly.
“Wh… What is that…?” Lex asks.
Verrill bristles and kicks the desiccating limb behind her into a bush.
“Off you go,” she says, making it clear it wasn’t a request. I swallow hard and drag Lex away, though her gaze never leaves the bush.
“I think it was a wraith, or maybe ashspawn,” Lex says.
“I thought those things were tucked safely inside the Veil,” I say as I park my bike in a bay, lift the keys and hoist my bag onto my shoulder.
“So did I,” Lex mutters. “But I guess this is the gateway between realms for a reason.”
“Mercedes Midnight,” an all too familiar voice says. His caramel-coal tone slices through what was turning out to be a good day.
“Ignatius…” I say.
Lex hovers, reluctant to leave.
“It’s okay, I’ll catch you up,” I say.
She hovers a moment longer and then heads for the cloisters, though she checks over her shoulder twice before disappearing.
“I think it’s time we had a talk, don’t you?” Ignatius says.