Chapter 8 Callum
The walk to the Administration building takes seven minutes if I cut through the east garden. I've timed it. I time most things—it helps to know exactly how long you have before you need to be somewhere, what you can fit into the gaps, how to arrange the hours so nothing is wasted.
The shadows under the old oaks reach toward me as I pass. They always do. Most Mors students learn to ignore it, the way their magic pulls at darkness like a magnet, but I've never minded. Shadows are honest. They don't pretend to be anything other than what they are.
I adjust my cuffs. Straighten my collar. Check the line of my blazer in the reflection of a window as I pass. Everything in its place.
Mother's office is on the third floor, corner suite, windows overlooking the main quad so she can watch the students cross between classes. She says it helps her stay connected to the pulse of campus life. I think she just likes watching.
Her assistant—a nervous Tumult woman who's been here longer than I've been alive—waves me through without announcement. Expected, then. She knew I was coming before I texted.
She always knows.
The office is exactly as it always is: immaculate, elegant, suffocating.
White walls, white furniture, white orchids in a crystal vase that catch the afternoon light and throw small rainbows across the ceiling.
The desk is glass and chrome, bare except for a slim laptop and a single fountain pen aligned precisely parallel to the edge.
No papers. No clutter. Nothing out of place.
Mother stands at the window with her back to me, platinum hair swept into a smooth twist at the base of her neck. Her suit is cream-colored, tailored so precisely it might have been sewn directly onto her body. She doesn't turn when I enter.
"Close the door, Callum."
I close it. The click of the latch sounds very loud in the silence.
"Sit."
There are two chairs facing the desk—white leather, low-backed, designed to make the occupant feel exposed. I've sat in them hundreds of times. I still hate them.
I sit. Fold my hands in my lap. Wait.
She lets me wait. That's part of it too, the silence, the sense that her attention is a gift she hasn't decided to give yet.
I watch her reflection in the window glass—the sharp line of her profile, the pearl earrings she always wears, the way her fingers tap once against her crossed arms before going still.
Finally, she turns. Smiles.
It's the smile she uses for donors and board members and parents who are concerned about their children's progress. Warm. Professional. It stops somewhere around her cheekbones and never quite reaches her eyes.
"Tell me about the Grey girl."
I tell her.
The words come out the way she taught me—precise, factual, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for opinion. The Mors demonstration. The student who lost control of his shadow manipulation. The spell that tore loose and went for Everly Grey like iron filings to a magnet.
"She didn't shield," I say. "Didn't try to deflect it. She just—put her hands up. And it went in."
"In." Mother's voice is thoughtful. She's moved to her desk now, settled into her chair with the kind of perfect posture that makes my spine ache in sympathy. "Not around. Not through. In."
"Yes."
"And afterward?"
"The shadows responded to her. Briefly. They curled around her hands before dissipating." I pause. This is the part I've been turning over in my mind since it happened, the image I can't stop seeing. "Like they recognized her."
"Mmm." She picks up the fountain pen, turns it between her fingers. Not writing anything—just touching it, the way she does when she's thinking. "How long did the whole thing take? From the moment the spell broke loose to the moment it finished entering her?"
"Three seconds. Maybe four."
"Did she lose consciousness?"
"No."
"Did she seem disoriented afterward? Confused? In pain?"
"She was shaking. Cold. But lucid." I think about her face in that moment—pale, scared, but still asking questions. Still pushing back when I tried to remove her from the room. "More lucid than she should have been."
Mother sets down the pen. Aligns it with the edge of the desk. When she looks up at me, her smile has changed—still warm, still professional, but there's something underneath it now. Satisfaction. The expression of someone whose long game is finally paying off.
"Good," she says. "That's very good."
The thing about my mother is that she never wastes words.
When I was seven, she told me that Bolingbrokes do not cry, and I never cried in front of her again.
When I was twelve, she told me I would be Mors president by my third year, and I was.
When I was sixteen, she told me there were things about our family's history that I wasn't ready to know, and I didn't ask again until I was eighteen.
So when she says "good," she means it. When she smiles like that, she's pleased.
And when she's pleased about something involving Everly Grey, I know I should be worried.
"You knew." The words come out before I can stop them. "When you admitted her. You knew what she was."
"I suspected." Mother doesn't seem bothered by the accusation.
If anything, she looks amused. "There were signs.
The way her application materials kept..
. shifting. Little inconsistencies that smoothed themselves out before anyone could question them.
Her test scores were perfectly average in a way that felt intentional.
And her family history—" She waves a hand.
"Mundane-blocked on both sides going back three generations, but before that? Gaps. Curious gaps."
"You set this up."
"I created conditions that would allow her to reveal herself, yes. The scholarship. The testing demonstration. The four of you." Her eyes meet mine, ice-blue and utterly calm. "You've all played your parts beautifully."
I should feel something about that. Used, maybe. Manipulated. I adjust my collar instead, smoothing the fabric where it lies against my throat, and keep my voice level.
"What do you want with her?"
"Right now? Information. Every time she absorbs something, every time her magic manifests, every reaction she has—I want it documented. I want to know what she's capable of."
"And after?"
The smile again. That warm, terrible smile.
"The Bolingbrokes have handled situations like this for generations, Callum. It's what we do. What we've always done." She stands, moves around the desk, stops in front of my chair so I have to look up at her. "She's not a threat. She's an opportunity. One we haven't had in a very long time."
"An opportunity for what?"
Her hand touches my shoulder. Light, brief, the closest thing to affection she ever offers.
"Trust me," she says. "As you always have. Keep watching her. Make sure the other three continue their... testing. Push her limits. See what else she can do." A pause. "But nothing permanent. Not yet."
The "not yet" settles in my stomach like a stone.
"Yes, Mother."
"Good boy."
She returns to her desk. Opens her laptop. I've been dismissed.
I leave without looking back.
The others are waiting in the study room on the second floor of Ossium Hall—the one with the door that only opens for Mors students, the one where the shadows pool so thick you can barely see the walls.
Atlas is pacing. Of course he is. He's never been able to hold still when he's upset, and he's been upset since the moment he heard what happened. Lightning crackles at his fingertips, barely contained, responding to the storm in his blood.
Felix is lounging on the ancient sofa, shuffling his cards in that endless rhythm he never seems to stop. Shuffle-cut-shuffle. His eyes track me as I enter—green, sharp, calculating things happening behind them that I've never been able to read.
Ren stands by the window, arms crossed, watching the graveyard below. He doesn't turn when I come in. Doesn't need to.
"Well?" Atlas stops pacing. "What did the administration say?"
Not "what did your mother say." They don't know about that. They think I went to report the incident to the dean, to get official guidance on how to proceed. I let them think it.
"We continue as planned." I move to the fireplace, stand with my back to the flames so I can see all three of them. "Increase pressure. Push her limits. See what she can do."
"She swallowed a shadow spell." Atlas's voice is sharp enough to cut. "She swallowed it, Callum. Like it was nothing. And you want us to push her harder?"
"I want us to understand what we're dealing with."
"We know what we're dealing with. She's a—" He stops. Can't make himself say it. The word sits in the room anyway, heavy as a corpse.
"She's a grimoire," Felix says mildly, flipping a card between his fingers. "Or something close to it. Probably the first one in a century. And you're scared."
"I'm not scared."
"You're terrified." Felix's smile doesn't reach his eyes. "We all are. The question is what we do about it."
Ren finally turns from the window. His face is unreadable—it always is, that careful blankness that I've never been able to get past—but something in his posture has shifted.
"She was bleeding," he says quietly. "In combat training last week. I walked past her."
"I know."
"You know." His voice is flat. "You told me to."
I don't confirm or deny. I don't need to.
"The pressure continues," I say instead. "Atlas, keep her off-balance. Storms, electrical interference, whatever you can do without causing permanent damage. Felix, you've already been running your experiments—keep it up. And Ren—"
"I know what you want me to do."
"Good."
The room is quiet for a moment. Shadows curl in the corners, thick and dark and familiar. I watch them without meaning to—the way they move, the way they breathe, the way they've always felt more like home than anywhere else.
"Callum." Felix's voice cuts through the silence. "What aren't you telling us?"
I meet his eyes. Hold them.
"Nothing you need to know."
He doesn't believe me. I can see it in the tilt of his head, the way his cards have gone still for just a moment before resuming their endless shuffle. Felix has always been too perceptive for his own good.
But he doesn't push. None of them do.
They leave one by one—Atlas first, still crackling with restrained lightning, then Felix with his cards and his knowing smile, and finally Ren, who pauses at the door and looks back at me with those quiet brown eyes.
"She's not what you think she is," he says.
"What do you think she is?"
A long pause. The shadows in the room lean toward him, toward me, toward the space between us.
"Scared," he says finally. "Just like the rest of us."
He closes the door behind him.
I stay in the study for a long time after they're gone.
The fire has burned down to embers. The shadows have grown thick enough to swallow the furniture, pooling around my feet like dark water.
I should go back to my room. Should review notes for tomorrow's lecture.
Should do any of the hundred things that need doing, the endless list of obligations that keeps my hours structured and my mind occupied.
Instead, I pull out my phone. Open the student directory. Find her file.
Everly Grey. Eighteen. Undeclared discipline. Scholarship student, first in her family to attend Nyxhaven, no known magical lineage on record.
The photo is from orientation—the one they make everyone take, posed in front of the main building with its Gothic arches and climbing ivy. She's wearing a purple sundress and pink tennis shoes, and she's smiling like she doesn't know what's coming.
She doesn't smile like that anymore. I've noticed.
I stare at the photo for longer than I should. Then I close the app, pocket the phone, and straighten my cuffs.
The shadows welcome me as I walk back to my room. They always do.