29. Midnight
Midnight
One Hundred Days To Go
I ’m sat at the kitchen table in our House Inferos apartment when Lex strolls in. Her turquoise braids are now a deep purple, and she wears an orange jumper, tie-dye trousers and yellow platform trainers. She sticks her head over my shoulder looking at the scribbles I drew of Lucy’s runes.
“Whatcha doing?” she asks, bouncing on her toes and biting into something that looks way too healthy to be edible.
“Trying to figure out what the hell this means,” I say.
She scoffs, “You’re not going to be able to read that.”
“Oh?” I say and pluck her apple out of her hand.
“Well, it doesn’t look like a demonic or necro language. So it’s not something we study here.”
Her face scrunches as she examines it, as if the fact she can’t read it is deeply offensive.
“Evening, folks,” Bastien says, dramatically shoving open the apartment door.
Aurelia is in the corridor. I narrow my eyes at her as she strolls past. But Bastien slams the door shut cutting her off and strides into the kitchen to put bread in the toaster.
I’m still livid she’s in the same house as me, but grateful she found a room downstairs.
Bastien has at least attempted to be civil to her, no doubt they were having a ‘civil’ conversation outside.
Lex refused, claiming she was dead to her.
If only.
We haven’t spoken more than five words to each other all year, and I don’t plan to share another five. Especially since she’s topping me in most classes and likes to smirk at me every time any exam results are released.
Lex interrupts my stream of Aurelia hate by plucking the paper from my hand and proceeding to pace up and down the kitchen.
Bastien’s toast pops. I duck around his arms and pilfer a slice before he can take it.
“Do you mind?” he says, swatting at me.
“Not in the slightest.” I butter it, add jam and take a giant bite when Lex stops suddenly, as if she were freeze-framed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She reanimates and sprints from the kitchen. I glance at Bastien and then we both head after her.
We find her in her room, pulling out boxes, and emptying stuff from her wardrobe.
“You going to explain?” I ask.
But she doesn’t respond until she waves a very tatty-looking book at us.
“What is that?” Bastien says, his nose wrinkled at the sorry state of it.
She goes off at full speed as the pair of us try to keep up.
“I knew the shape of the rune, but it doesn’t follow any of the grammatical rules of any demonic or necro language.
So, I was thinking in the kitchen, was it a forgotten language?
Was it cypher encoded? But I knew there was something I was missing because it was familiar but wrong.
Which got me thinking maybe it was a dialect or something we haven’t been taught yet.
But obviously it wasn’t because I’m months ahead of our reading schedule, I would have known…
” She takes an enormous dramatic breath and stares at us blankly, letting silence descend.
“Demon’s sake Lex, stop being a vaj tease. What were you missing?” I ask.
She laughs. “That’s the thing. I wasn’t missing anything. I said it didn’t look like demonic or necro language because it isn’t.”
“Then what language, pray tell, is it?” Bastien says.
“That’s the weirdest part… It’s celestial. Only nobody has seen or written in the celestial language in decades…”
If that’s true, then why the hell does Lucy have angelic runes on her body?
“I have to go,” I say, plucking the sketch out of her hands and leaving the apartment.
I stroll across campus, sticking to the shadows. While it’s not against the rules to be out of doors after lights out, it is still frowned upon. Especially with the amount of security patrolling campus. But it’s the campus itself that I’m more concerned about.
I’ve been dreaming of that voice. The whisper that’s becoming more of a snarl.
A threat.
A warning.
I’ve still not reaped Lucy. It wants what it’s owed. But we never agreed to a timeframe, so it can be as angry as it wants with me. I am not obliged to reap her on a set deadline. No matter how much pressure it applies.
And it is applying pressure.
I scan the area ahead of me, it’s deathly still and quiet. Security must be patrolling the northern end of campus, and yet a gnawing sensation trickles down my spine.
“Leave me alone,” I breathe into the night.
Finis doesn’t respond, but my skin prickles like I’m being watched.
As if the buildings have eyes and ears and claws.
I’ve noticed more and more doors stay locked to me, or they swing shut harder than necessary, slapping my behind as I walk through.
My belongings go missing and then reappear.
The worst of it though, are the memories it pulls from the sliver of soul it has.
It projects Aurelia breaking my heart into mirrors and windows.
It shows my parents’ death over and over.
Some days I wonder whether Finis is haunting me or whether it’s me and I’m losing the plot.
Maybe I’ve pushed too hard, trained too long and the magic is cracking my mind.
Or maybe it’s that ever-fucking present ticking clock, the draining of time that’s sending my body into a freefall of fight or flight, burning up my adrenal glands and screwing my mind for shits and giggles.
A ribbon of dark sinuous magic is following me—a perpetual reminder that I am indebted, and the campus hasn’t forgotten. I shrug my jacket tighter around my shoulders, desperate to get out of the open and into a building.
I reach for the door handle but my hand slips through nothing.
“Finis,” I growl.
The door creaks open, I step forward only to smack my head against the wood as it slams shut. I take a breath, call my magic ready to force shadowy threads into the lock, but the door swings all the way open.
As I step inside the clock tower, both my magic and the sinuous stalker dissipate. The creaking hinges echo out a huffy laughter that follows me all the way upstairs.
“Fucking campus.”
I haven’t told Lucy about the deal I made with Finis, and I don’t intend to.
If I can win the Demonic Favour and hold the campus off long enough, it will void our deal and Lucy stays safe.
So why tell her when I am going to do everything I can to protect her?
But the fact she bears a celestial rune? That I can tell her.
I knock on the loft door at 11 p.m. Lucy opens it, and I wave my latest exam results at her. “I came third. The training is working.”
“Jolly good, because I brought you a load of homework.”
My face falls as she thrusts an enormous pile of books into my hands.
“I’ve marked up the key sections, but if you can read them all then even better,” she says.
“In all the free time I have, you mean? Between classes and reaping, and additional training and trying to maintain a friendship with my roommates, keeping my barely used bike running and helping research your contract rune?”
“Right, exactly. Between all those things.” She smiles.
The clocktower loft is a large room, with the clock mechanism’s cogs and dials and wires taking up much of a wall, though there are several windows level with it looking down on campus.
Despite how large the clock is, the room is silent, too silent.
I wonder if the building has swallowed time like it’s swallowed the ticking of the hands.
“This is the only view of campus better than my penthouse,” she says.
I approach the window and slide in next to her.
The campus is stunning, even under darkness.
Tonight is one of those rare evenings where the fog cloud has evaporated; the crisp bite of winter chewing up what heat is left and spitting out dotted skies and silvery moons instead of puffs of mist and dew.
As we stare out at our walled universe, our bodies press against each other.
Her arms radiate heat, and gods, is it enticing.
I ache to touch her. To slide my hand around her waist and pull her in.
We both agreed that no matter how much we wanted it, being with each other was too dangerous for us both.
But it makes every day agony. My body yearns for her in ways I can’t explain.
She’s recoded my DNA, mangled my brain until I see her in every pull of magic, every cut of the Veil and every line in every book.
She’s all I think about and it’s exhausting.
“Magnificent, isn’t she?” Lucy says, craning her neck to see Finis. Even this high up, it’s hard to see the top of the Tower.
“A feat of architectural genius.”
She smiles softly at me and before I can stop myself, my fingers find their way across her neck, brushing rouge streaks of hair away from her skin.
The exhaustion takes hold of me, and I am weak, so I let my lips glide over her cheekbones, one then the other.
She keeps her hands to herself, trying to resist. But we are rarely alone, and it is inevitable that her body melts under my touch.
She whimpers softly.
I press a kiss to her neck. “I know we agreed not to. But we’re safe up here, and this is killing me, Lucy. Night after night. So close to you, and yet…”
She presses her palm to my jaw, brushing her lips over mine. “You have no idea how much I want to…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence, and it slices another piece off my heart. I’ve never wanted a woman the way I ache for her.
“I have a gift for you,” I say, hunting in my pockets for the sketch of her celestial rune.
“After.” She claps her hands. “Training first. You had necromantic defence today, didn’t you?”
“Yes, those teachers from Sangui City are savage. I thought the professors here were tough.”
She grins like a sadist enjoying my academic pain and pulls out a piece of white chalk. I take it, kneel and draw a circle in the centre of the room, reciting what I know as I go.
“Professor Malrec said to draw a necro-protection circle. Then we cut a one-inch hole in the Veil and use a shade-summoning spell.”