Chapter 7 Everly
Ossium Hall looks like the kind of place where vampires hold dinner parties and no one leaves alive.
It's nestled in a valley on the northeastern edge of campus, all seven stories of Victorian Gothic architecture rising out of the mist like something from a fever dream.
Flying buttresses claw at the grey sky. Gargoyles crouch on every corner, their stone eyes following me as I walk up the path.
The windows are tall and narrow and dark, and I swear one of them blinks.
"Charming," I mutter to myself, clutching my notebook against my chest like a shield. "Very welcoming. Not at all like walking into my own funeral."
The inner courtyard is worse. It's a graveyard an actual graveyard, headstones and mausoleums and everything, because apparently the Mors fraternity thought it would be fun to bury their dead in the middle of their living space.
The stones are old, weathered, names worn away by centuries of rain.
Some of them have fresh flowers. Some of them are cracked open, and I decide very firmly not to think about why.
I'm here for Professor Parker's Elemental Studies assignment: attend a Mors demonstration, observe the sensory experience of death magic, write two pages about temperature shifts and ambient energy.
Simple. Academic. The kind of thing that shouldn't make my palms sweat and my heart pound against my ribs like it's trying to escape.
But the cracked sphere in my bag has been pulsing since I stepped onto Mors territory, and I can feel something in the air here, something heavy and cold and patient, like the house itself is holding its breath.
I really, really don't want to go inside.
I go inside anyway.
The demonstration hall is on the second floor, a cavernous room with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that filter the afternoon light into shades of grey and silver.
Rows of wooden benches face a raised platform at the front, and there's a smell in the air that reminds me of old books and candle wax and something else underneath, something metallic and ancient that I can't quite name.
About a dozen students are already seated, a mix of disciplines here for the same assignment, notebooks open, pens ready. I find a spot near the back, away from the Mors students in their silver and white who cluster near the front like they own the place. Which, technically, they do.
Professor Thorne stands on the platform, arranging what looks like a collection of bones on a velvet cloth.
He's younger than I expected — maybe forty, with salt-and-pepper hair and the kind of gaunt, angular face that would look at home in a Renaissance painting of martyred saints.
His Stylus Mortis rests on the table beside him, bone-white with silver inlay that catches the dim light.
"Welcome," he says, and his voice is surprisingly warm for a man who teaches students how to commune with the dead.
"Today's demonstration will cover fundamental shadow manipulation — the building blocks of Mors magic.
You'll observe, take notes, and resist the urge to panic.
" A thin smile. "Death magic can be unsettling for the uninitiated.
If you feel faint, there's a bucket by the door. "
A few nervous laughs. I don't laugh. I'm too busy noticing that my notebook has started trembling in my hands.
And I'm too busy noticing Callum Bolingbroke.
He's standing against the far wall, arms crossed, watching the room with the kind of detached attention that makes you feel like a specimen under glass.
Silver blazer, white shirt, platinum hair catching the light from the stained glass windows like he planned it that way.
He probably did. Everything about Callum Bolingbroke looks planned — from the perfect press of his collar to the careful neutrality of his expression, like emotion is something that happens to other people.
His eyes find me almost immediately. Hold for a moment. Then slide away, dismissive, like I'm not worth the effort of acknowledging.
I hate that it stings. I hate even more that I noticed the exact shade of blue his eyes turn in this light—pale as frost, pale as morning sky, pale as something dead.
Focus, I tell myself. You're here to take notes. Not to catalogue the eye colors of people who want you gone.
The demonstration starts simply enough.
Thorne calls up a student—a Mors junior with sharp cheekbones and an eager expression—and walks him through the basics of shadow manipulation. The student raises his Stylus Mortis, speaks words in a language I don't recognize, and the shadows in the corner of the room begin to move.
It's subtle at first. A darkening, like someone dimmed the lights. Then the shadows peel away from the wall, stretching and curling like smoke, responding to the motion of the student's wand. They flow across the floor in lazy spirals, pool around his feet, climb up his legs like affectionate cats.
I write in my notebook: Cold at the edges. Pressure behind the eyes. Smell like old libraries and turned earth. Temperature drop — maybe five degrees? Hard to tell if physical or psychological.
The demonstration continues. More students volunteer, each one manipulating the shadows in different ways — forming shapes, creating barriers, snuffing out candles from across the room.
Thorne narrates each technique with the dry enthusiasm of someone who's taught this class a thousand times.
The other observers scribble notes, occasionally gasping at a particularly impressive display.
I keep writing. Keep breathing. Keep ignoring the way the sphere in my bag is pulsing faster, warmer, like a second heartbeat pressed against my hip.
And then everything goes wrong.
The student is showing off. I can tell by the way he flourishes his wand, the way he grins at his friends in the front row, the way he pulls more shadow than the previous demonstrations required.
He's drawing darkness from every corner of the room, weaving it into a spiraling column that stretches toward the ceiling, and Thorne is frowning, starting to say something—
The shadow tears loose.
One moment it's a controlled spiral. The next it's a wild thing, a thrashing mass of darkness that rips away from the student's wand and surges across the room like a wave.
The student stumbles backward, face gone white.
Someone screams. Thorne is shouting something, raising his own wand, but the shadow isn't listening to him.
It's coming toward me.
Not randomly—not the chaotic scatter of a spell gone wrong.
It's moving with purpose, with hunger, cutting through the air like it knows exactly where it wants to go.
Like it can feel me the same way I can feel it, that cold heavy presence that's been pressing against my chest since I walked into this building.
I don't think. I throw up my hands.
And the shadow goes in.
Cold.
Cold like I've never felt before, cold that burns, cold that reaches into my chest and wraps around my lungs and squeezes.
I can't breathe. Can't see — my vision goes dark at the edges, then darker, then nothing but black and the sensation of something pouring into me like ice water through a crack in a dam.
It hurts. God, it hurts, a deep bone-ache that spreads from my fingers up my arms and into my chest, settling behind my ribs like a stone. I feel it moving inside me, finding space, making room for itself in places I didn't know were empty.
And then—just as suddenly—it stops.
The cold is still there, but it's quiet now. Settled. Like a fire that's burned down to embers, banked but not gone.
I open my eyes.
Shadows are curling around my fingers. Thin wisps of darkness, twining between my knuckles, spiraling up my wrists. They move when I move, responding to some instinct I don't understand, and when I flex my hands they dissipate into nothing — smoke in sunlight, gone like they were never there.
The room is completely silent.
I look up. Every face is turned toward me—the observers frozen in their seats, the Mors students pale and staring, Thorne with his wand raised and his mouth open like he's forgotten what he was going to say.
The student who lost control looks like he might faint.
Someone's knocked over the bucket by the door.
And Callum.
Callum is already moving, crossing the room in long strides that eat up the distance between us like he's been waiting for this moment, like he knew it was coming.
His mask is cracked, I can see it in the tension around his jaw, the tightness of his shoulders, the way his hands are clenched at his sides.
For one brief, disorienting second, I see something underneath the ice.
Fear. Pure, undiluted fear.
Then it's gone. The mask slides back into place, smooth and cold as marble, and when he reaches me his voice is perfectly controlled.
"That was dangerous." He takes my elbow—not gently, his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise—and pulls me to my feet. "You're coming with me."
"I didn't—" My voice comes out hoarse, scraped raw. "I didn't do anything. It just—"
"Now, Miss Grey."
He's already walking, half-dragging me toward the door, and I'm too shaken to resist. The cold is still in my bones.
There's something new sitting behind my ribs, something that wasn't there before, and I can feel shadows now really feel them, the way I felt the storm gathering before Atlas tried to fry me.
Every dark corner of this room is whispering to me in a language I don't understand.
We pass Thorne on the way out. He doesn't try to stop us. He just watches, face grey, and I hear him say to someone behind us: "Clear the room. Get the dean. Now."
The walk across campus is a blur.
Callum doesn't let go of my arm. Doesn't speak. Doesn't look at me. His grip is tight enough that I'll have fingerprint bruises tomorrow, and his pace is fast enough that I have to half-jog to keep up with his ridiculously long legs.
I try to say something — anything, some kind of protest or question or demand for an explanation — but the words won't come.
I'm too cold. Too hollow. The thing inside me is heavy and quiet and there, a presence I can't ignore, and every shadow we pass seems to lean toward me like a plant toward sunlight.
Halfway to Bellamy Hall, Callum pulls out his phone. Types something one-handed, fast, still not breaking stride.
I catch a glimpse of the screen before he angles it away. Two words.
Mother.
And below that, in the message he's typing: Confirmed. She pulled it in. The whole thing. Keeping her here for now.
My stomach drops.
"Who are you texting?"
"No one you need to concern yourself with."
"That's bullshit and we both know it." The anger cuts through the cold, warming me enough to find my voice. "What the hell is going on? What just happened to me?"
Callum stops walking. We're at the steps of Bellamy Hall, grey stone and choking ivy, and he finally turns to look at me. His eyes are ice-blue and completely unreadable.
"What happened," he says slowly, like he's explaining something to a particularly dim child, "is that you swallowed a shadow spell that should have torn you apart.
You pulled death magic into yourself like—like drinking water, like breathing, and you're standing here asking questions instead of bleeding from your eyes. "
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting." He releases my arm—finally—and takes a step back. "Go to your room. Stay there. Don't talk to anyone about what happened until you hear from the administration."
"And if I don't?"
Something flickers across his face. That crack in the mask again, there and gone so fast I almost miss it. "Then you'll make things significantly worse for yourself. And for everyone else."
He's already turning away, phone back in his hand, dismissing me like I'm nothing. Like I'm a problem he's solved, a task he's completed, a box he's checked off some invisible list.
"Callum."
He pauses. Doesn't turn around.
"You're scared of me." I don't know why I say it. Maybe because I'm tired of being the only one who's afraid. "I saw it. In there. When the shadow went into me—you were terrified."
A long moment of silence. The wind picks up, stirring dead leaves across the path, and somewhere in the distance a bell is ringing—the same bell that marks the hour, the same bell I've heard every day since I got here, but it sounds different now. Darker. Heavier.
"Go to your room, Miss Grey." His voice is quiet. Controlled. But there's something underneath it that wasn't there before — a thread of something that might be exhaustion, or resignation, or something else entirely. "This isn't over."
He walks away without looking back.
I sit on my bed for a long time after that.
The sphere is warm against my palm, its four colors swirling faster than I've ever seen them. Shadow and lightning and blood-red and chaos-purple, pressing against the cracked glass like they're trying to break free.
There's something new inside me now. Something cold and old and hungry, curled up behind my ribs like it's been waiting there all along.
When I close my eyes, I can feel shadows — not see them, feel them, the way you feel warmth from a fire or cold from an open window.
They're everywhere. In the corners of the room.
Under the bed. In the spaces between heartbeats.
They're whispering to me. I don't know what they're saying yet.
But I'm starting to think I'm going to find out.