Chapter 17 Callum
I used to like this walk.
East garden, seven minutes, the oaks dropping their shadows across the path like offerings.
My shadows reaching back. A conversation I've been having with these trees since I was eight years old and Mother first brought me to campus for a donor gala and I snuck outside because the hors d'oeuvres were terrible and the adults were worse.
The trees haven't changed. Something else has.
My shadows keep pulling southeast. Toward Bellamy Hall, toward the freshman dorms, toward a location I refuse to acknowledge because acknowledging it means examining why, and examining why is a door I'm not opening.
I yank them back. They go reluctantly, like dogs being dragged from a scent.
I've never had to fight my own magic before.
It's irritating in a way I can't afford to think about.
I check my cuffs. Fine. Check them again. Also fine. The gesture used to be automatic—straighten, smooth, move on. Lately it's started to feel like winding a clock. Like if I stop adjusting, the whole mechanism seizes.
Mother's text came forty minutes ago. Just a time. 3:00. No hello. No context. The way she's summoned me since I was twelve. It never used to bother me. It still doesn't bother me.
I'm noting it. That's all.
The assistant—Margaret, her name is Margaret, I've known her my entire life and I just realized I've never used her first name in conversation—waves me through.
Her hands are trembling against her keyboard.
I notice because I've started noticing things like that.
Collateral details. The way people at the edges of Mother's orbit vibrate at a frequency that looks a lot like fear if you let yourself see it.
Three months ago I didn't let myself see it. Three months ago I walked this path and sat in the white chair and delivered my reports and the machinery of it all felt clean. Purposeful. Like I was part of something precise.
The door to her office is open. Mother never leaves her door open.
I go in anyway. What else would I do.
The orchids need water.
That's the first thing I notice—stupid, irrelevant, but there it is.
The white orchids in the crystal vase have started to droop, their petals going translucent at the edges, and Mother hasn't replaced them yet.
She replaces them every Monday. It's Wednesday.
The orchids are dying on her desk and she hasn't noticed or hasn't cared, and either option is so unlike her that it sticks in my brain like a splinter.
The second thing I notice is the papers.
They're spread across the glass desk in a fan—old parchment, the real thing, edges cracked and yellowing, handled with the cotton gloves that are folded beside them.
Ink that's gone from black to the color of dried blood.
Diagrams. Geometric patterns, concentric circles, a notation system I half-recognize from the family crypts—the archaic Mors shorthand that hasn't been taught at Nyxhaven in sixty years.
In the center of the largest page: a five-pointed star. A human figure drawn inside it, arms spread, head tilted back. Lines radiating outward from each limb to the points of the star, and at each point a word pressed so hard into the parchment that the ink has bled through to the other side.
My shadows contract. Pull tight against my body like hackles rising. I've felt them do this exactly once before—in the family crypts, when I was fourteen, when Mother showed me the room where Bolingbrokes store the things they don't want history to remember.
These are family papers. Old ones. The kind that live in locked drawers in locked rooms in the parts of the estate that don't appear on floor plans.
Mother is at the window. Cream suit. Platinum hair in the twist. She's looking out over the quad with the expression she wears when she's watching students—pleasant, removed, the way a bird watcher looks at sparrows.
"Close the door, Callum."
I close it. Sit. The white leather chair does its job—makes me feel exposed, examined, like I'm the specimen and she's the glass.
She lets me wait. Fourteen seconds. I count because counting is something I can control and this room has a way of stripping control from everyone who isn't her.
She turns. Smiles.
I know this smile. Donor smile. Board-of-trustees smile. The one that makes you feel warm and welcome and completely certain that you're being managed. It reaches her cheekbones and stops dead, like it ran into glass.
"How is Grey?"
Three months of the same question. Three months of me sitting in this chair and delivering my answer in the voice she built for me—precise, factual, scraped clean of anything that could be mistaken for an opinion or, God forbid, a feeling.
"Three absorptions confirmed. Shadow, storm, blood.
No overcapacity indicators, no loss of control.
" The words come out right. They always come out right.
"She's been in the restricted section. She's found the Grimoire Girls material, the Schism records, the Concordia Hall references. She knows what she is."
"Good." Mother sits. Her posture is mine—or mine is hers, the original and the copy, and lately I've been wondering which parts of me are the copy and which parts were mine to begin with. "The others?"
"Knox had an uncontrolled storm event. Three days ago.
Major output, no direction. He's compromised.
" I pause. This is the part where the report gets complicated, because the clean version and the true version are diverging and the gap is getting harder to bridge.
"Ferrix is observing. Ashford is keeping his distance. "
"Distance." She says the single word the way she says everything interesting—like she's holding it up to the light and turning it. "Curious. Blood mages usually can't resist a grimoire's power. Ashford is fighting his own instincts."
Not a question. She already knows. She's always already known—my reports are audits, not revelations. She checks my answers against the answers she already has and measures the gap between what I tell her and what's true. I've been passing that test for years. I'm less certain I'm passing it now.
"I want a full demonstration." She folds her hands. The pearl ring on her ring finger catches the light. Her nails are manicured like always, perfect in every way, not a chip or a rough edge anywhere on her body. "All four presidents, channeling simultaneously. All directed at Grey."
The cold in my chest is not shadow magic. "That's not standard."
"No."
"Four simultaneous channels into a single subject—there's no precedent. The energy load alone could—"
"Callum." Just my name. Just the two syllables, delivered with the particular patience she reserves for moments when I'm being slow.
"I'll handle the faculty. Professor Warrick has concerns, naturally.
I've scheduled a meeting with her Thursday to discuss the safety protocols we’ll have in place.
" She picks up her fountain pen, uncaps it, makes a note on a pad I didn't notice beside the diagrams. Her handwriting is perfect.
"The venue will be the Proving Grounds. Friday evening, after scheduled classes.
I'll need you to coordinate the other three presidents and ensure they understand the channeling sequence. "
The mundanity of it hits me harder than the horror. She's scheduling this like it’s some kind of faculty review. Venue, time, logistics. Safety protocols, which means she's already decided what level of damage is acceptable and built a framework to contain it.
"What are we testing for?" I ask.
"Full capacity." She caps the pen. Aligns it with the desk's edge.
"I need to see how she responds to all four disciplines at once.
Whether she can hold them. Whether there's a threshold.
" The smile again, thinner now—a blade showing through silk.
"The Bolingbrokes have been waiting a long time for this, Callum. We can't waste the opportunity."
Opportunity. The word lands in my stomach like stones.
"And if she can't hold it? If the load is too much?"
"Then we'll have important data." She says it the way she'd say then we'll reschedule. "Either outcome advances our understanding."
I look at the diagrams. The star. The figure with its arms spread.
The words at each point that my shadows flinch from.
I want to ask what the diagrams are for—what ceremony requires a five-pointed star and a human figure drawn inside it like a target.
I want to ask what the Bolingbrokes have been waiting for and what viable means and what happens to subjects that aren't viable.
I ask none of these things. I already know the answer to the last one. It's written in eleven documents in the restricted section, in a phrase that Mother's family has been using for five generations.
"Where did these come from?" I nod at the parchment.
"Family archives." Light. Done. Moving on. "Coordinate with the others. Friday. And Callum—" She looks up from her pad and her eyes catch mine and hold them, ice-blue to ice-blue, the mirror I've been looking into my entire life. "This is what Bolingbrokes do. Don't overthink it."
Don't overthink it. Which means: don't think about it at all. Don't examine. Don't question. Deliver the report, execute the order, trust the process, go to bed. The same instructions she's been giving me in different words since I could talk.
"Yes, Mother."
I leave. The orchids droop in their vase. Nobody waters them.
* * *
Atlas is in the Tempest weight room because Atlas is always in the weight room when his body is the only thing that still does what he tells it to.
The room smells like ozone and sweat and the metallic tang of scorched metal from lightning he couldn't keep out of the barbell.
Scorch marks on the ceiling. A cracked mirror on the far wall that nobody's bothered to replace because it'll just crack again.