Chapter 8
CALLUM
The motel in west Texas has a balcony. I use the word loosely—it’s a concrete ledge barely wide enough for two people, accessed through a sliding glass door that sticks, overlooking a parking lot and a stretch of desert that goes dark and flat and infinite once the sun drops.
It’s the nicest thing about this place. The room has roaches. I saw one in the bathroom and said nothing because there’s no point—we can’t afford better, and complaining about accommodations when you’re a fugitive is the kind of behavior that makes people stop feeling sorry for you.
I don’t want their pity. I don’t want anything from any of them. That’s what I keep telling myself, and the frequency with which I have to repeat it should probably concern me.
Texas is miserable. The heat I expected, in the abstract—I’ve read about desert climates, seen photographs, understood intellectually that temperatures above a hundred degrees exist. Understanding it intellectually and standing in it are different things entirely.
My shirt sticks to my back. My hair won’t behave.
I’ve sweated through every piece of clothing I own, which is four items, because I left Nyxhaven with what I was wearing and what fits in a jacket pocket, and I’m fairly certain I haven’t been this disheveled since birth.
Everly finds this entertaining. She made us stop at a roadside attraction today—a place billing itself as THE WORLD’S SECOND-LARGEST BALL OF TWINE, emphasis theirs—and insisted we look at it.
“We might die,” she said, pulling into the dirt lot like she’d discovered buried treasure. “We should see things.”
“That,” I said, staring at several tons of wound twine baking in the sun, “is a thing.”
“It’s the world’s second-largest thing. Very important distinction.”
“I’d hate to see what they considered first.”
She grinned at me. Actually grinned—entirely too warm for someone who should, by any reasonable measure, hate me. I made her first months at Nyxhaven hell. Deliberate, targeted, methodical hell, because my mother asked and I didn’t have the spine to refuse.
That she grins at me now is a fact I don’t know what to do with. The moral inventory of Callum Bolingbroke is a short and unflattering document, and she keeps grinning at me anyway.
The balcony. Midnight.
I’m out here because the room is suffocating—not the heat, though that’s bad enough, but the closeness of it.
Five people in a space designed for two, and the bond between us like a frequency I can’t tune out.
It’s quiet tonight, at least. Quieter than it’s been.
My pocket is empty where the phone used to be—three weeks of buzzing, and now nothing.
Mother can’t reach me. The silence should feel like freedom.
It feels like waiting. Felix is shuffling cards in his sleep—I can hear it through the door, that soft rhythmic thwick thwick thwick, and I’m fairly certain the man deals in his dreams. Ren is in the chair by the window, pretending to sleep, not sleeping.
He never sleeps. I’ve started to wonder if blood mages can.
The sliding door scrapes. Everly.
She’s in the moose shirt. It’s been washed so many times the moose is now a suggestion—a brownish blur with antler-shaped hopes. She’s carrying two bottles of water from the vending machine, the one that charged us four dollars each and dispensed them warm.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks, sitting beside me on the ledge.
“Never could.”
This is true. Sleep has never come easy to a Bolingbroke—my mother doesn’t sleep, I don’t think my grandfather did either, and I’ve been sitting in dark rooms waiting for threats since I was old enough to understand that threats come. It’s exhausting. It’s also the only behavior I know.
She hands me a water bottle. Warm. I drink it anyway.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to regardless.”
“Why did you do it?” She’s not looking at me. Looking out at the parking lot, the desert, the dark. Her voice is quiet—not careful, not gentle, just quiet, the way you speak when you’re not sure you want the answer. “All of it. The bullying. The cruelty. Making my life hell.”
I should have an answer for this. I’ve had weeks to prepare one—weeks in this car, watching her bring Ren extra portions and ground Atlas through his nightmares and tease Felix until his real face shows up underneath the charm.
Weeks to construct something that puts me in a light that isn’t pitch black.
I don’t have anything. The truth is ugly, and I don’t have the energy to dress it up.
“Because my mother told me to,” I say.
It lands. I watch it land—the way her shoulders tighten, the small exhale. She’s sorting me. People do this constantly—decide what you are so they know how to handle you. I’ve been watching people do it my whole life. Mother built a career on it.
“That’s it?” she says. “She told you to, so you did?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s a shit answer, Callum.”
“I know.”
The silence sits between us. Not the car kind, where everyone’s quiet because they’re afraid of what they’ll say. This is the kind where someone has left a door open and is waiting to see if you’ll walk through it.
I should walk through it. Should tell her about the archives, the files with CONCLUDED stamped across them, the photographs of other grimoires—dozens, going back generations—and the neat, clinical language used to describe what happened to each one. Contained. Redirected. Neutralized. Concluded.
I should tell her that handled is a family business.
I don’t.
“I’m not a good person,” I say instead.
“I know.”
“I’m not going to become one because you brought me a pillow and took me to see twine.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why are you sitting here?”
She looks at me then. Full on. Grey eyes, dark with something I can’t categorize and don’t want to. Closer to recognition than forgiveness. She sees exactly what I am and has decided to sit down next to it anyway.
“Because you’re here,” she says. “And I’m here. And we’re stuck with each other, and I’d rather be stuck with someone I understand than someone I’m guessing about.”
“You don’t understand me.”
“No. But I’m starting to.”
The desert wind comes in warm and dry and carrying dust. We’re close enough that I can feel the heat of her arm next to mine, not touching, just present. The bond hums. Quiet, for once. Not painful. Just—there. A frequency I can feel in my teeth.
I should move. Should stand up, go inside, take the bathtub, maintain the distance I’ve been cultivating since the car. Distance is safe. Distance is what Bolingbrokes do—we observe, we calculate, we don’t let people near us because near is where the leverage lives.
I don’t move.
She doesn’t either.
We sit on the balcony of a terrible motel in west Texas with warm water and roaches inside and the desert stretching dark in every direction, and neither of us says another word for a very long time.
Whatever this is, it isn’t forgiveness. But neither of us is standing up.
I stay until her breathing evens out and she’s fallen asleep with her head tipped against the wall, and then I go inside and lie in the bathtub and stare at the ceiling and think about all the things I should have told her and all the reasons I didn’t and the particular shade of grey that lives between doing the right thing and being incapable of it.