12. Everly #2
The cold of his shadow presses higher, up my thigh, a contradiction I can't think my way around, his mouth hot and his magic freezing and both of them on me at once, and the penny taste of my own grimoire rising to meet his without my permission, the way Ren's blood rose to meet the warden's, my body agreeing to a thing before my head's been asked.
The mark buzzes.
I feel it go through him, a low warning under the kiss, copper rising faint at the back of my tongue, his deepened tether catching the bond flaring bright and starting, already, to burn.
He makes a sound against my mouth, half pain and half refusal, and doesn't pull back.
Neither do I. It becomes a thing we're doing on purpose now, the both of us, letting the leash sting rather than be the one who stops, and that's its own answer, isn't it—the size of what we'll pay just to not be the first to step away.
It's Callum who breaks it, finally, because he's Callum, because someone has to be the one who counts the cost and it's always going to be him.
He sets his forehead to mine. His shadow pulls back from my legs, slow, reluctant, draining off me like water finding its level, and the cold goes with it, and I'm left flushed and unsteady in the dark between two portraits with my heart going double.
"If they weren't watching," he says, low, not lifting his forehead from mine, "I wouldn't have stopped there." He doesn't say where he'd have stopped instead. From Callum, the not-saying is louder than the saying.
"She had a different conversation with you," I say.
It isn't a question. I've learned his faces by now, and the one he wore in that office—the cold at the bottom of the well—wasn't the face of a man who'd just been told he was being kept honest. It was the face of a man who'd been told something specific, and meant for him, and not for me.
"Yes," he says.
"Are you going to tell me what it was?"
A long pause. His thumb finds the inside of my wrist, where the cut from the map's edge still hasn't healed, and presses there, gentle, like he's checking I'm real.
"No," he says. And then, because he's honest even when it costs him: "And she didn't tell me what she said to you. She does that on purpose. So that neither of us ever knows exactly what the other one carried out of the room. It's how she keeps people from comparing notes."
I mark that and tuck it away under her name with the rest of it. The soft words, the gold light, the patience that never tips its hand, and now this—the deliberate gaps she leaves between people, so that no two of us can ever lay our stories side by side and see the whole shape of her.
"She gave me till the end of the year," I say. "In there. Before she—reassesses. She said it like it was a kindness. Like spring was a long way off and she was being generous with the time."
"I know."
"Why the end of the year?" The date's been sitting wrong in me since she said it. Catalina doesn't pick a stretch of time the way the rest of us do, because it sounds nice. She picks it because something lands on the far end of it. "Why not have it out now, if she's so sure? Why wait for spring?"
Callum is quiet. His shadow has gone still at his feet, which it does when he's deciding how much of a true thing to hand over.
"Because she's waiting for something," he says at last. "That's what she said.
Almost exactly that. I can be patient. I'm waiting for something.
" His jaw works. "She wanted me to hear it.
I just haven't worked out yet whether she wanted me to be afraid of it, or whether she wanted me to work it out myself and arrive somewhere she could already see. "
Something cold slides down behind my sternum and settles low, right where the four threads knot.
And without quite meaning to, I feel the chaos in me turn over—the color that's Felix's whole self and barely a sliver in me—and a sliver is all it gives me.
Not odds. Not a date. Just one frame, surfacing the way a card flips face-up: a girl's face, freshman young—the one from the dining hall whose air sat all wrong around her chair, the wine-colored birthmark high on her left cheek, her mouth open on a word I don't get to hear.
Frightened. I know the face. I don't have the name.
Then it's gone, and I'm left with the after-image printed behind my eyes and no idea what to do with it.
I don't tell him what I saw. He doesn't tell me what he knows. But something passes between us in the dark anyway—two halves of the same dread—and his shadow shivers once at his feet and goes flat.
"Go," he says. "Before the mark gets worse. You can stand here. I can't."
That's the cruelty of it, right there. I can stand in this corridor as long as I like.
There's nothing on the back of my hand to count the distance, nothing to burn, no warden's thread reaching for me through the stone.
I'm the only one of us who's free to stay, and the staying is useless, because the one I'd stay for is the one who has to leave.
"I'll see you," I tell him.
"Miss Grey," he says, which is what he calls me when he means something he can't afford to say plainly, and then he's moving down the corridor between the dead administrators, the Frost King rebuilding himself one degree at a time, his shadow gathered back in tight and obedient at his heels.
I give myself ten seconds. Then I pick up my bag.
***-
The walk back to Callister House is the long way, because Nyxhaven doesn't believe in short ones, and I keep to the side of the path where the afternoon light won't catch the windows, the habit the summer drilled into me so deep I do it without thinking.
My wrist aches where the map cut me. My mouth still feels the cold of him.
And the building is there.
I don't look at it on purpose—I've learned not to, the way you learn not to stare at the sun—but it presses against the edge of my awareness the whole way home anyway, the way it has since the first day, patient as Catalina and a great deal older.
Everywhere else on campus the wardens' working runs under everything, that low red tang laid into the stone, the penny taste running out through the leashed animals and the marked hands and back again. It's always there. I've stopped tasting it the way you stop tasting your own house.
The building has none of it. A blank, quiet place in the middle of all that watching, the one stretch of ground where the marks on four hands would go dark the instant they crossed into it.
The end of the year, she said. And a frightened face I can't put a name to, waiting somewhere on the far end of it.
I close my hand around the cut on my palm and keep walking, and somewhere underneath me, under all of it, something turns over in its long sleep and knows my name.