Chapter 30 Brittany
I didn't sign up for this.
I signed up for a degree. Specifically, a degree in applied blood magic from the only institution in New England that accepts mundane-born students, which I would use to build a career in magical veterinary science, because animals are better than people and blood magic is the only discipline that lets you talk to them.
That was the plan. Four years. Keep my head down.
Graduate. Get out. Open a practice somewhere quiet where nobody knows what a grimoire is and nobody cares.
Instead I got Everly Grey.
She showed up on the first day in pink tennis shoes and a purple sundress and a yellow cardigan that made my eyes hurt, carrying a plate of homemade snickerdoodles and a smile so genuine it was physically painful to look at.
I thought she'd last a week. Mundane-raised, no magical training, scholarship kid at a school that eats scholarship kids for breakfast. She'd wash out, cry, go home to whatever nice suburb produced her, and I'd have my room to myself again.
She didn't wash out. She didn't cry—well, she cried, but she did it at night when she thought I was sleeping, and then she got up in the morning and went to class and sat in the front row and took notes and raised her hand and kept going.
She kept going when the storms hit. She kept going when the shadows came.
She kept going when four of the most powerful students on campus decided to make her life a waking nightmare and she had no magic, no allies, and no reason to believe it would get better.
She brought me snickerdoodles on the first day. She named her pillow Frank. She talked to Herbert like he was a person, not a pet, and he responded to her within a week—something that took me three months to achieve and that I've never told her because I refuse to give her the satisfaction.
I didn't sign up for any of this. But here I am.
I watch the taillights until they disappear.
It doesn't take long. The 4Runner's taillights glow red for a moment—bright, functional, because I maintain my car—and then Callum's shadows eat what's left of them, and within thirty seconds the car is just a sound in the dark, and then it's not even that.
Gone.
I stand in the parking lot with my arms crossed and Herbert on my shoulder and I count to sixty because I need something to do with my brain that isn't thinking about what I just did.
One. Two. Three. The cold is sharp on my face and my fingers and the tip of my nose, October in New England, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and stays.
Twelve. Thirteen. Herbert shifts his weight on my collar.
His legs are tense—he knows something's wrong. He always knows.
Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
I gave her my car. I gave her my keys and my security map and my emergency cash and the flashlight with the skull sticker and a note I wrote at two in the morning while everyone pretended to sleep. I gave her everything I have that's worth anything and I told her to go and she went.
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
The campus is quiet behind me. Callum's storm cover is fading—the clouds thinning, the moon coming back, silver light spilling across the Gothic spires and the stone paths and the oak trees with their reaching shadows.
It's beautiful. It's always been beautiful.
That's the trick of this place—it looks like a painting, like a dream, like somewhere you'd give anything to belong.
You don't notice the teeth until they're in you.
Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.
Sixty.
I turn around.
Nyxhaven University looks the same as it did the day I arrived.
Freshman orientation, August, my mother's borrowed sedan pulling up to Bellamy Hall and my mother crying in the driver's seat because her daughter got into a school she'd never heard of, a magical school, a world she couldn't follow me into.
I told her I'd be fine. I told her I'd call every Sunday.
I told her this was the opportunity of a lifetime, which is what the acceptance letter said, in gold ink on cream paper, and I believed it because I was seventeen and I didn't know yet that opportunities and traps look exactly the same from the outside.
I walk back.
The parking lot to Bellamy Hall is a three-minute walk. I've done it thousands of times—from the car to the dorm, from the dorm to the car, the route I mapped first because it was the fastest way out if things went bad. Things went bad. And I'm walking the wrong direction.
The campus is empty at this hour. Just me and Herbert and the moonlight and the sound of my boots on stone.
The security ward at the east gate has reset—I feel the faint hum of it, a vibration in my back teeth, there and gone.
They're through. They made it. Whatever happens next, they're outside the wards and heading north and Everly is driving my car with four boys who don't deserve her and the note I wrote is in her bag and she'll read it tomorrow or the next day or whenever she's brave enough, and I hope—
I hope she knows.
I hope the note says what I meant it to say, even though I'm shit with words and worse with feelings and the thing I wrote at two AM with a stolen pen probably sounds more like a maintenance report than a love letter. Not that it's a love letter. It's a—
It's a Brittany letter. She'll know what that means.
The quad is empty. The dining hall is dark.
The library windows are black. I pass Ossium Hall, its gargoyles watching me with stone eyes, and Fulmen Hall with its lightning rods catching moonlight, and the rose garden outside Vitae Hall where the thornbushes bloom crimson all year and the air smells like blood and flowers.
I pass the eastern clearing. The one Everly found—the pentagon in the grass, the foundation stones of a building that isn't there anymore.
I know about it because she told me, that night, the night before the demonstration.
Her voice quiet and wondering, describing the way her four magics went silent when she stepped inside the outline. The way the stones were warm.
I stop. Look at the clearing in the moonlight. The grass is silver. The stones are dark shapes in the earth, half-buried, patient.
I don't feel what Everly feels. I don't have four magics humming in my chest. I don't have a bond, a connection, a door that opened and won't close. I'm just a failing Sanguis student with a spider and a stolen French press and a GPA that's circling the drain.
But standing here, in the outline of a building that was destroyed before I was born, I feel something.
A pull. Faint. So faint I could be imagining it—could be the cold, could be the adrenaline, could be the fact that I haven't slept in thirty-six hours and my best friend just drove away in my car and I'm alone on a campus run by a woman who makes people disappear.
My stomach turns over. The nausea—the same nausea I get in Sanguis class, the same nausea that hits me when storms pass or when the Mors students practice in the courtyard. It rolls through me, sharp and quick, and I press my hand to my mouth and breathe through it the way I always do.
Bad dining hall food. Hangovers. The flu that never quite arrives.
I take my hand away. Keep walking.
Bellamy Hall is ahead. Grey stone, choking ivy, the golden plaque by the door that I've read a thousand times and never thought about: Isadora Bellamy, 1659-1682, Who Gave Her Life In Defense Of Magicks Known And Unknown.
She was twenty-three. Younger than me. She gave her life in defense of something, and they put her name on a building, and that's the version of sacrifice that gets a plaque.
The version that gets a plaque isn't the version Catalina has in mind.
I push through the front door. The stairwell is dark. My boots echo on the stone steps—the only sound in a building full of sleeping students who don't know that five of their classmates just fled into the night and the girl climbing the stairs is the reason they got out.
Room 217.
The door is unlocked. I step inside. The room smells like too many people—stale air, Atlas's ozone, the copper tang of Ren's blood magic, Felix's burnt sugar. The floor is scuffed where Atlas paced. A card is caught under my desk—the Fracture, branching paths. Felix missed one.
Everly's bed is stripped. Her closet is half-empty. Frank the pillow is gone—she took it, the idiot, she's on the run from a five-generation death cult and she packed a decorative pillow she named in her sleep.
I sit on my bed. Herbert crawls from my shoulder to the pillow. His web between the headboard and the lamp is intact—nobody disturbed it. Rule three. At least they listened to one thing.
The room is quiet. The room has never been this quiet.
Even before Everly, there was Herbert's faint rustling and the hum of the building's magic and the sounds of a place that's lived in.
Now it's just me and the spider and the moonlight coming through the window and the absence of a girl who smelled like snickerdoodles and talked in her sleep and changed my life by handing me a plate of cookies on the first day like it was the simplest thing in the world.
I close my eyes. My throat hurts. My chest hurts. Everything hurts, in the particular way that things hurt when you've done the right thing and the right thing is terrible.
"She's going to be okay," I say to Herbert. "They'll keep her safe. Four magically bonded idiots and a probability professor in Vermont. It's fine."
Herbert watches me with all eight eyes. He doesn't look convinced.
"It's fine," I say again.
It's not fine. Nothing about this is fine.
But I've survived Nyxhaven for a year and a half on stubbornness and exit strategies and the unwillingness to let this place take anything from me that I haven't chosen to give, and I will survive this too.
I'll go to class. I'll take notes. I'll fail Sanguis theory for the third time and eat bad dining hall food and maintain Herbert's web and wait for the text that tells me they're safe.
And if Catalina comes for me—
A knock on the door.
Not a student knock. Not the tentative tap of a freshman locked out of their room or the aggressive bang of a neighbor complaining about noise. A knock that is quiet and precise and patient, three measured raps that sound like they were rehearsed.
My blood goes cold.
I open the door.
Catalina Bolingbroke is standing in the hallway of Bellamy Hall at twenty past midnight in a cream suit and pearl earrings—both of them, she's replaced the one she lost—with her hands folded and her platinum hair in its twist and her smile that stops at her cheekbones.
She looks at me. Past me, into the room—the stripped bed, the half-empty closet, the absence of five people who were here three hours ago.
"Miss Leigh." Her voice is warm. Pleasant. The voice she uses for donors and parents and people she's about to dismantle. "It seems your friends have left campus without authorization."
My heart is hammering. I feel it in my throat, my wrists, the tips of my fingers. Herbert is on my shoulder. His legs are braced. Every strand of web in the room behind me is vibrating.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I say.
The smile widens. It still doesn't reach her eyes.
"Of course you don't." She unfolds her hands. Refolds them. The pearl ring catches the fluorescent hallway light. "May I come in? I think we should talk about your friends. And about your future at this institution."
She steps forward. I don't step back—I refuse to step back, refuse to give her an inch, refuse to do the thing that every instinct in my body is screaming at me to do, which is run.
I'm done running. The person I'd run to just drove away in my car.
"Sure," I say. My voice comes out flat. Steady. The deadpan that has gotten me through eighteen months of this place, the armor that is the only thing I have left. "Come on in. I'll make coffee."
Catalina Bolingbroke walks into my dorm room, and I close the door behind her, and somewhere on a highway heading north, five people I love are driving toward a future I can't see.
Herbert's webs tremble in the draft.
I put the kettle on.