46. Midnight
Midnight
Thirty-Six Hours To Go
I come to standing in the courtyard of Finis Tower.
“You okay?” Lex says.
“Yeah, you were away with the Fae for a hot second,” Bastien adds.
“What?” I say and try to shake off the vision. I don’t even know how I got here. Did I finish the exam?
“The results are going to be here any minute,” Lex says, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
The courtyard is crammed. Every student waits with bated breath.
Lex, Bastien and I stand hand in hand as Alistair and Thalia pin the results up.
We rush to the wall with everyone else. All of us fighting to reach the grading lists. Whoops of joy and celebration echo around the tower and slowly the crowd thins enough we can push to the front.
This time, I don’t torture myself.
Bastien and Lex hold my hands so tight my fingers go numb. Lex is top of her class and fifth overall in the cohort. Bastien is second in his resurrection class and seventh overall.
All of us inhale in synch and hold a collective breath as we come to the Veil results.
My heart rate slows as I stare at the list of names. A hollow ringing trills in my ears.
I blink.
It has to be wrong.
I blink again.
Lex makes a strangled sound next to me.
Bastien rips the paper from the tower wall and scrunches it up. They’re shouting. Noise fills the courtyard. But I can’t hear anything. I continue blinking at the space where my name was.
Next to a number two. Beneath Aurelia Ravena.
She won.
She fucking took everything from me, and now she’s taken this.
I lost.
My chest is hollow, fluttering. Heart rate erratic. Everything is numb and loud and so, so silent.
I take a step. And then another. I need to keep moving.
Run.
Yeah, I should run.
I still have my scythe, I could fight him. I won’t give up.
A year of fucking training, working every night, every break, every spare second and all for Aurelia to snatch it from me.
Fucking Aurelia.
I really thought I stood a chance. My fingers curl around my scythe, furious that this is the choice I’m left with: my soul, or the woman I love.
How is that a choice?
Fuck the Demonic Favour. Fuck Ignatius. Fuck Aurelia. Fuck Architecti.
Architecti. Oh gods, there is a far greater danger in our midst, and no one realises. I’m not even sure Ignatius knows.
“Where’s Lucy?” I say to Lex and Bastien.
They shrug at me.
“Are you okay?” one of them asks. But I’m already making my way inside and down to the observation room. She said she was going to watch the exams.
I scan the observation deck. Lucy was definitely here earlier.
I check the whole of the fifth floor. Every practice and exam room, the reading areas and the other observation deck in case she moved.
She’s vanished.
I return to the first observation area and notice a stray notebook. Probably just a student’s. But my feet take me to it anyway.
It’s leather, stained and worn, that soft velvet only well-loved leather can produce. There’s a fountain pen knocked on the floor, ink splats haloing the nib. The lid missing.
My eyes narrow, I open the front page to see an inscription:
If lost, please return to the contracts office and Professor Corvine.
My fingers go cold, my chest heavy. Why would she leave her notebook?
I head back to the courtyard, but she’s not there either. My stomach turns. I can’t imagine her leaving before she saw the results. My throat goes dry. Ignatius said there was a break-in, what if the Societas got in again today, knowing we would be distracted with the exams.
A group of professors stride past.
“Hey, Professor Morrow, have you seen Professor Corvine?” I say, trying to suppress the quake in my voice. Her brow cinches, one neat little line. Thalia seems off, but I can’t place why.
“No? She was watching your Veilwalker exams last I saw her.”
“You didn’t see her leave?”
“No, sorry, perhaps she’s gone to help with organising the celebrations later.”
There’s a rumble around us. The earth trembles and it’s far louder and more aggressive than usual. My arms fill with goosebumps.
My gut coils in on itself, my tongue sours. Something is wrong.
She didn’t just leave. My contract with Ignatius will have to wait.
“I… I need to go.”
She didn’t say goodbye. She abandoned her notebook. Something isn’t right. Lucy wouldn’t vanish without saying goodbye. Not on exam day, not after everything she’s done to help me.
Bastien appears outside the Great Library entrance.
“Hey? Where did you go, what’s happened?”
“Lucy is missing.”
“Missing how? Where have you checked? She probably went back to Inferos.” He shrugs.
I grab him by the arms, forcing him to look at me. “I’m telling you, she’s missing.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll help you look.”
“I’m going to check her apartment. You check the lecture halls and her office.”
We part outside the Great Library, and he sets off to the southern area of campus while I head north towards the three Houses.
I bump into Lex en route and she helps, heading towards the theatre, pubs and shops, agreeing to meet us at the cloisters.
When I reach the penthouse in House Inferos, my blood turns to ice.
Her door is open. My fingers tremble as I push it open to see the apartment trashed. Her belongings are strewn across the floor. Kitchen draws upturned. Cupboards thrown open.
The frail skeleton moth lays dead on the carpet, one wing torn clean off and discarded a foot away from the rest.
“Oh,” I say and my eyes sting. It’s so stupid, it wasn’t even alive, and I hated them. But it’s this dead moth that unleashes the flood gates.
I pick him up and carry him to the moth room and rest him against the foliage.
“Mortem,” I shout.
He materialises instantly. He trembles, his fur stuck out at all angles, his eyes wide as he mewls at me. He pads across the floor and jumps into my arms.
He’s never done that, never sought affection.
It makes bile claw at the back of my throat. I stroke him until he ceases trembling.
“What did you see, buddy? What happened?”
He makes a dry hacking sound. Oh gods, eww, a hairball at this time?
I put him down as he makes strange arching shapes with his body and wretches until a vile, squelching lump plops on the floor.
He looks up at me with sad eyes and toes the lump.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I say. My nose wrinkles as I reach down to prod the gloopy fur. There’s something hard inside it.
“Eww,” I groan as I poke the middle of the furball and pull out the lump.
“What the hell?” I say as I scrape the goop off to reveal a hard metal pin. The logo of the Societas.
“The Societas have her?” I say, my head snapping to look at the miserable not-quite-dead cat.
“Meow,” he nods.
I bolt out the door. I can’t do this on my own. I have no idea where they would have taken her. All I know is that if I don’t get to her fast, they’ll kill her.
I run until my thighs burn and sweat flings off me like rain. I run straight to my death sentence and into Ignatius’s office.
I shove the door open so hard it bounces off the wall.
Ignatius stands, his eyes hot and dark.
“What do you think?—”
“Lucy is missing,” I cut him off. It’s only then that I see the horns protruding from the man sat in front of Ignatius’s desk.
Chancellor Arcadius. Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck.
“I—I mean Professor Corvine, she’s… gone. I went to take my paper to her apartment as I was late and needed the mark. And her door was open. Her apartment was trashed. Her cat… he said the Societas took her.”
That statement causes the chancellor to round on me.
“This is the truth?” He towers above me; he must be over seven feet tall.
“Every word of it, sir.”
The chancellor glances at Ignatius. “Fix this. And don’t fuck it up.”
“Yes, Chancellor,” Ignatius says.
The chancellor strides out of the office, slamming the door shut.
“Architecti isn’t the angel we need to worry about,” I spit.
“You’re not making any sense.”
I shake my head. “It was never her. She isn’t a fallen angel.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Her sister pushed her. You trapped the wrong angel.”
I have never seen a devil pale the way Ignatius does in this moment.
“You’re wrong,” he snarls.
“You trapped the wrong fucking angel, and you used Lucy to do it. And now she’s in jeopardy because an entire fucking society wants Architecti back.”
He pulls a hand over his face. “You don’t understand. I had to do it.”
“Do what, Ignatius? You’re not saying anything helpful and every second we stay here, Lucy is in danger.”
“If the Societas have her, I know where they’ll have taken her…”
“Just like that?” I say, suspicion narrowing my eyes.
“It’s not necromantic physics, Midnight. They want to resurrect Architecti, where do you think they’ll be?”
It takes a second. But then I scold myself for not thinking of it earlier and going straight there. “The basement. As close to the Veil as they can get safely.”
He swallows, his skin turning grey. “We have to get her back or…”
“What did you do?” I say, stepping away from him.
“There’s a reason the Societas can’t release Architecti.”
“Speak faster, Ignatius…” And I know I’m playing with fire. If I spoke to him at any other time like this, he’d probably reap my soul there and then. But tonight is different. Tonight is happening because he fucked up and I am here to help.
“Architecti is an angel. She’s celestial. You can’t just use any old magic to bind them. It’s like trying to trap a wraith with a shoelace.”
“What did you use?” A chill settles in my core.
Ignatius has never seemed old, always youthful in that way only immortals can pull off.
But right now, he seems as ancient as the gods themselves.
“Ignatius… what did you use?”
He blinks, startled by my question. He swallows hard and finally looks at me.
“The Veil. I used the fabric of the Veil. If they release her, they bring down the Veil, too.”