Everly #3
Felix goes last, because he has a flair for the dramatic. He stops where the others didn't quite, tips his head back at me, and produces a card from somewhere it wasn't.
"Nine AM tomorrow. Don't be late."
"I'm never late."
"You're always a little late." He's already turning. "It's one of the things that makes you predictably unpredictable."
The card flicks once between his fingers, a last bright piece of motion, and then he rounds the corner, and then he's gone.
I make myself move. Down the office steps and across the green, the long way to Callister House because Nyxhaven doesn't believe in short ones—Catalina's building at one end of the quad and my new dorm at the other, all that manicured distance strung out between them like she measured it personally. Maybe she did.
The threads pay out behind me as I walk, four lines unspooling toward four sets of footsteps already gone in four directions.
I keep to the side of the path where the afternoon light doesn't catch the windows, the habit the summer drilled into me.
There's no mark on the back of my hand to burn if I wander.
Just the eyes I can't see, and the certainty that they're watching anyway.
Then I'm standing on the steps of Callister House by myself.
The bond pulls taut. It doesn't hurt the way distance used to hurt, before Cyrus and his magic helped us reforge the bond. It just aches, low and steady.
Ten seconds. I give myself exactly ten.
Then I pick up my bag and turn around, and the front door swings open before my key has finished turning.
The cold reaches me before the door is all the way open—a stone cold, older than weather, the kind that's been in these walls so long it stopped being temperature and started being the house's state of being.
Then the smell finds me: wood polish laid over something underneath that quit being a smell a century ago and became the plaster itself.
Three stories of dark wood and aged plaster climb away from me, a staircase curving right—
—and at the top of the first landing, on a brass stand, head cocked three degrees past anywhere a living bird would hold it: a taxidermied raven.
Glass eyes. Already turned toward the door. Already on my face, like somebody gave it my arrival time.
I stop, key still in the lock, and reach with my magic, the way I learned to reach this summer, with all of the disciplines inside me.
The raven answers the way a wire answers: not alive, but live.
Blood magic, the penny taste ghosting faint across the back of my tongue, threaded through dead feathers and glass eyes, and a thin line of it running out of the bird and away, under the floorboards or through the walls, off to somewhere I can't follow from a doorway.
So this is how they're watching me, with dead things spelled to report back.
Knowing doesn't make it any less strange to stand in a Victorian entrance hall while a dead bird tracks my face like an assignment.
"Hi," I tell it.
The raven holds its position. Committed to the role.
Something at the edge of my vision settles into a shape, and I turn to it: to my left, through the parlor door, a fox.
Posed on an ottoman, one forepaw lifted mid-step, head angled just enough to keep me in its sightline.
It has the same eerie glass eyes as the raven and the same stiff, posed quality, even as it moves and twitches like it's still alive.
I follow where it's looking and find the third one—a cat, sphinx-still on a console table in the corridor, watching me in the idle and disdainful way of felines.
Three dead animals, one house, and me. Somewhere on the far end of the feed, Wheeler. And behind Wheeler, always, Catalina.
"Good morning," I say to the room in general, and I head for the stairs, because the alternative is standing in a doorway letting a fox win.
I'm halfway up the first flight when a girl comes down it, a junior maybe, carrying an empty mug and moving too carefully, like she pulled a muscle or injured something recently. Her eyes come to my face and don't quite land, sliding a little past me.
"You're the new one," she says.
"Everly."
She doesn't give me her name. Just nods, politely and distantly. "The second-floor bathroom shower runs cold after seven. Go before then if you want hot water."
She keeps going down. "Thank you—" I start, but she's already around the landing, and I'm thanking the banister.
At the landing I have to pass the raven close enough to touch. Its eyes follow me without the head moving. I give it a nod. It does not reciprocate.
The second-floor corridor runs left and right from the top of the stairs. My room is the second door on the left. Out of habit—Bellamy Hall muscle memory—I turn right first, and stop.
At the end of the right-hand corridor there's a door standing a few inches open, and past it, where the building's outside wall should be, a passage continues into space the building doesn't have.
The air near it is different. Not threatening, exactly, but there's a presence.
Like a hand settling between my shoulder blades, gentle, steering.
This way, it says, in a quiet, distant voice.
I stand there for three whole seconds. Then I turn around and walk to my room.
Not today. Not without knowing what it is.
Some creepy things at this magical university shouldn't be investigated without proper preparation, I've discovered to my dismay.
My room is spartan, old and empty of any warmth, both literally and metaphorically.
The air tastes of dust and cold candle wax.
There's a window to the campus with old, thick glass, a solid wood desk beneath it, a bed made with white linen sheets against the righthand wall, a mirror in the corner that looks too ornate to move, and a wardrobe whose brass handles squeak when I try them.
The room has high ceilings and dark floorboards worn pale down the middle by decades or even centuries of feet.
Like every empty room in Nyxhaven, there's a sense that someone or something was occupying the space just before I arrived, and is slightly put off by my presence.
I drop the polka-dot suitcase on the bed and sit down next to it.
The mattress is firmer than Bellamy Hall's. I'll get used to it, I'm sure, since I had worse on the road with the guys this summer. Everly Grey, eternal optimist, learner of unfamiliar mattresses, befriender of birds that can't blink.
I unpack one thing at a time, because my hands need a job. Clothes into the wardrobe. Four books onto the desk. Notebook. The purple stuffed cat Felix won for me by cheating with chaos magic at one of those old claw machines. He looks lonely and a little dinged up.
Yeah. Same.
At the bottom of the suitcase: the snickerdoodles.
Half a bag, baked at two in the morning before we drove the last stretch, slightly stale now.
I took them out of the oven already knowing the summer wasn't going to end in our favor.
I packed them anyway. Home has always been something warm you can give away, and apparently I would rather carry stale proof of that than admit defeat.
I set them on the desk next to the stuffed animal. The world's saddest care package.
My phone buzzes. Brittany.
status report
Alive, I type back. Being watched by three taxidermied animals. Could be worse.
how much worse
I greeted the raven. We have an understanding.
you didn't name it
I didn't name it.
good. Herbert says don't name it.
Tell Herbert I appreciate the input.
he's a spider. he doesn't have input. he just looked at me when I said your name.
A pause. Then:
Catalina came by Bellamy Hall this morning. Asking about summer.
I sit up straighter. What did you say?
That I hadn't heard from you since June. She seemed to believe me.
Did she?
She smiled, Brittany sends. Which means I've no idea.
I put the phone face-down on the mattress.
Above me: footsteps. Slow and deliberate, one end of the room to the other. A stop. Then the same path again, the same length, the same pause at the same spot. Back and forth, back and forth, like someone who is haunted or hunted by something, maybe both.
After a while, it stops.
I get up and go find the kitchen.
Worn countertops, dusty open shelves, and a beaten up kettle grab my attention. The room smells like gas and burnt toast and the cold that lives in stone floors, the kind that finds you straight through your socks. I'm filling the kettle at the sink when a door opens behind me.
One of the grad students walks through. He has dark circles under his eyes and a thick notebook wedged under one arm.
He crosses to the tap without looking at me and fills a glass, and his hand isn't quite steady doing it, the water trembling at the rim.
He drinks it standing at the sink, slow and careful, like he doesn't trust himself not to drop it if he walks away.
"Hi," I say.
He looks over. Something behind his eyes takes a second to find me. "Oh. You're the new one."
"Everly."
He nods at that the way the girl on the stairs did. "They keep the good kettle in the third cabinet."
"There's a second kettle?"
"Wheeler brings equipment sometimes. For the sessions." Something moves through his face. His brows tense and then relax, like he was confused for a moment only to forget why. "Anyway. Third cabinet."
He goes back upstairs without finishing his water, one hand riding the rail the whole way, taking the steps like he's not sure he'll make it up them.
I find the newer kettle in the third cabinet, an electric one instead of beaten stainless steel, so I plug it in and turn it on.
I try very hard not to think about living in a house full of people who seem uninterested or even incapable of standing up straight, much less socializing or, dare I say it, becoming new friends and allies.
I stand at the window over the sink while the water heats, and I look out the window at the building next door.