Chapter 3
CALLUM
I'm already awake when her phone number lights up the screen, lying in a bathtub in a Comfort Inn outside Indianapolis with a towel folded under my head and my phone on the edge of the tub.
Around me, shadows have gathered, pulling in close and warm like an old friend or a comforting blanket.
Before the phone rang I was staring at the ceiling, which has a crack that runs from the light fixture to the corner.
I've been following it with my eyes for hours.
Her contact isn't saved in this phone, but it doesn't matter. I have it memorized. Perfectly. Permanently. Whether I want it that way or not.
That's how a lot of things in my life go.
I don't answer the call.
It buzzes again. And again. Three calls, each ninety seconds apart, because Mother is nothing if not exact.
She taught me that. People break on the third attempt, Callum.
Not the first—the first they can ignore.
The second they talk themselves out of. The third, they pick up, because they can't stand not knowing anymore.
I don't answer. I can stand not knowing. Especially because I already know.
She won't leave a voicemail. Never does. Voicemails are records, and Catalina Bolingbroke doesn't leave records of anything unless those records are in her control.
In the next room, through a wall so thin I can hear every movement, the others are sleeping.
Or not. Everly's restless, tossing, her side of the bond guttering like a candle in a near-constant breeze.
Atlas is deep under, his nightmares brewing but not quite alive yet.
Ren is awake, holding the masking spell, his pulse that same maddening metronome it always is.
Felix is half-gone, but his chaos magic never fully stops—I can feel it ticking, this low persistent hum, like a gambler counting cards in his sleep.
The phone buzzes a fourth time.
I flinch.
I hate that I do. It's this trained-dog reflex in my body that just won't go away. Mother calls, my hands reach for the phone, my spine straightens, and I report for duty.
The fact that she built that into me before I was old enough to know what the obedience was for.
Bolingbrokes do not ignore summons. Bolingbrokes do not make Mother wait.
Bolingbrokes straighten their cuffs and walk into the office and sit in the white chair and answer when called upon but not before.
I let the phone buzz until the voicemail picks up. The phone goes dark. Shadows writhe around the screen, smothering it before another call can come through.
I sit up in the bathtub. The porcelain is cold against my back.
Everything in this bathroom is cold and hard and slightly damp, and I am somehow meant to find this preferable to the alternative, which is being in a room with other people who might see me without the version of myself I've spent twenty years constructing.
The facts. I should organize the facts. That's something I can do.
We are in Indianapolis, Indiana. Roughly 1,600 miles from where Felix claims his chaos mage lives.
We have $184 left of Brittany's cash. At our burn rate, four more days before we're sleeping in the car.
Mother has the Bolingbroke network, the Administration, resources I can't even fully catalogue. We have a borrowed car and a probability mage who looks like he hasn't eaten in a week and a bond none of us understand.
And I know things I haven't told them.
That one doesn't sit like a fact. It sits like a splinter. Something I can feel every time I move but can't get at without tearing skin.
I told them about the letters. That last morning in Brittany's room, I told them about the form letters sent to families—Your daughter has decided to leave Nyxhaven for personal reasons. I told them what I knew.
I didn't tell them what I know.
The archives go deeper than letters. There are ledgers.
Financial records kept in the Bolingbroke tradition—pristine, thorough, damning if you read them right.
Money trails for every handling. Transportation.
Facility rentals. Payments to people listed only by initials.
What it costs to make someone disappear, itemized and tallied, because the Bolingbrokes have always believed that even atrocity should be well-organized.
There is a room in the Bolingbroke estate. Third floor, east wing, behind a door that only opens for shadow magic. I found it when I was sixteen—the year Mother told me I wasn't ready to know certain things. The year I stopped asking her and started looking for myself.
Twenty-three files. Each one a person. Each one ends the same way: a date, a final entry, and the word concluded.
Not handled. Concluded. Like closing a ledger. Balancing the books. A person reduced to an entry marked complete.
I haven't told them about the room. About the files.
About how concluded and handled are different words for the same thing, or about the initials in the ledgers that I've spent two years quietly matching against Nyxhaven's faculty roster.
Some of those initials belong to people who are still teaching.
Who are still walking the halls and grading papers and sitting across from Catalina Bolingbroke at faculty meetings, and they know what they did, and they went home after and ate dinner and slept in their beds and got up the next morning and did it again.
I will tell them. I have to tell them. Everly needs to see the whole shape of this thing, not just the edges I've shown her so far.
But telling them means telling them what my family actually is.
What we've done. What we've been doing for five generations while the rest of the magical world looked away because it was easier to look away, because the Bolingbrokes handle things and who wants to ask what that means when the handling keeps things clean?
We're not an old family. We're not a legacy. We're the people you call when you need something ugly done quietly, and you want it done right.
And I'm one of us. Whether I chose it or not.
The phone buzzes again. Behind the toilet, where I threw it earlier. The case is military-grade—Mother buys quality, even for leashes—and it didn't break, just slid into the corner and kept buzzing like a thing that can't take a hint.
The shadows in the bathroom surge. Up the walls, across the ceiling, eating the light from the bare bulb until I'm sitting in near-dark. I pull them back. Force the breath—four counts in, seven hold, eight out. The shadows retreat. My pulse evens.
A knock on the connecting door.
I check my cuffs. My collar. Pointless—I've been sleeping in yesterday's clothes in a bathtub. There's nothing to straighten. But the hands do it anyway. The ritual of looking like someone who has things under control, even when everything that matters is falling apart.
"It's unlocked."
The door opens. Everly. She's wearing an oversized t-shirt she bought at a gas station in Pennsylvania—grey, cartoon moose, the words PENNSYLVANIA: IT'S NOT JUST A STATE, IT'S A LIFESTYLE. Her hair is a disaster. She's holding a pillow.
She doesn't say anything. Walks in, sets the pillow on the edge of the tub, walks out.
It's hers. Not Frank—the flat, institutional motel pillow. The one she was sleeping on. Still warm.
I know about Frank because Mother asked me to watch her.
Document the scholarship girl. Habits. Patterns.
Vulnerabilities. I had shadow wards in the Callister House corridor.
Brittany Leigh said it into the hallway once, talking through a closed door late at night.
You talk in your sleep. His name is Frank. I put it in a report.
Now it's in my hands.
I pick it up.
The door is already closed. Through the bond I feel her—just a quick pulse, nothing fancy, nothing that demands a response. Just here. Just take it. And then she's gone.
I put the pillow behind my head. The tub is still cold.
Always going to be cold. But the pillow is warm from her, and it smells like the cheap vanilla shampoo she grabbed off the same gas station rack as the moose shirt, and it might be the most decent thing anyone has done for me in years.
I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to hold something kind without looking for the angle, and the fact that there is no angle—that she just did it because she's Everly and that's what she does—makes it worse. Better. I don't know which.
Bolingbrokes do not cry.
I don't cry.
I lie in the bathtub with my face against her pillow and I think about the third floor and the twenty-three files and the word concluded and the fact that the girl who just gave me her pillow without asking for anything is exactly the kind of person those files are about.
My phone buzzes from behind the toilet.
I leave it there.
---
We drive west in the morning. Felix navigates. Atlas glares at the road like it personally wronged him. Ren rides shotgun with the masking spell running and doesn't speak, and his bandage needs changing again, and he still hasn't said a word about it.
At a gas station outside Terre Haute, I buy coffee. Five cups. Black for me. Two sugars for Felix. Cream and sugar for Everly. Black with cream for Atlas. Tea for Ren, because he doesn't drink coffee and somebody should have noticed that by now.
I noticed because I watch people. It's what I was raised for—observe, record, report. The useful skill of a boy trained to surveil, repurposed now for something my mother never intended.
I hand out the cups without comment. Felix raises an eyebrow. Atlas takes his without looking. Ren wraps both hands around the tea and closes his eyes, and through the bond I catch a flash of surprise before he covers it.
Everly looks at the coffee. Looks at me.
"Cream and sugar," she says.
"Yes."
"You noticed."
"I notice everything. It comes with the surname."
She takes a sip. Something crosses her face—not quite a smile. Something more careful than that. Like she's holding the smile in her hands and deciding whether it's safe to put down.
"Thank you," she says.
"Don't." Too sharp. I hear it as it leaves. Try to soften. "Don't thank me. It's coffee."
But it's not coffee. We both know that. It's the pillow and the coffee and the bathtub and the phone I threw at the wall and the twenty-three files I haven't told her about and the fact that I spent six months making her life hell because my mother pointed and I aimed, and now the best I can do—the absolute best—is get her drink order right.
That's what I am. Someone who notices how people take their coffee.
Someone who watched and reported and obeyed.
And the fact that I'm trying to use those same skills for something good now doesn't make them good skills.
It just makes me someone who's finally paying attention to what he's been doing with his hands.
We get back in the car. I sit behind Ren and put my seatbelt on and straighten my collar and don't think about my phone, back in my pocket now, silent, Mother's missed calls lined up in a row I know she's keeping track of somewhere.
Everly pulls out. The highway opens west.
In my chest, four heartbeats that aren't mine. A bond I didn't choose. A girl in a moose shirt who keeps handing me things I haven't earned and looking at me like I might be someone worth handing things to.
The shadows settle around me.
I let them.