Chapter Nineteen
The ceremony concluded without any interruption from wailing banshees or wandering ghouls, and Maggie’s cheeks were sore from so much smiling.
At every turn, Arthur Taliesin was surprising her.
She had been delighted by his candid speech and relished in the student reactions around her.
She felt a secret thrill that she already knew this Taliesin because he’d let her in before anyone else.
She was walking through the crowd, turning around every now and then to see if she could see him through the throng, but she got caught up in the swell of people with Dahlia.
Every other year, this was when Dahlia and Maggie would return to Ilex Hall and unearth a dusty bottle of liquor from one of their desk drawers to give a final toast to the year, but instead they decided to walk the long way past Ilex Hall toward Maggie’s apartment to have their end-of-the-year drink there.
They stepped over the rope sectioning off this part of campus from curious family members, and stopped beneath the hawthorn, tossing their caps onto one of the picnic tables.
They watched the swirling miasma on the third floor, tinted purple and glimmering, shadows skating past the windows that sent shivers down Maggie’s spine.
“What a weird end to the year,” Dahlia muttered as she looked up at the third floor.
Maggie was quiet, watching the pall intently.
Did it seem stronger? Brighter? She had been here yesterday, but she couldn’t remember if she had glanced upward, realizing with a strange sinking in her stomach that she was starting to get used to the way the otherworldly magic had infiltrated campus.
But there was something about how the pall seemed to press against the windows that made the hair on her arms stand on end.
“Dahlia—” Maggie began, reaching out to touch her friend’s regalia at her elbow.
At the same time, Dahlia said, “Something is wrong.”
They watched as the pall moved, looking more alive than before, and the lights flickered. When they came on, they lit the wards Taliesin had drawn, and she could see it now. Fracture lines in the liquid chalk, cracks visible even from here.
“The wards are failing,” Maggie gasped. If those wards failed, the pall would no longer be contained.
It would fill every inch of Ilex Hall, becoming more of a beacon for fantasmia and, maybe, continuing to grow even beyond the building.
She didn’t even know what happened if a pall grew larger than a building.
She had to find Taliesin, and she had to find him now.
She tore off toward the graduation ceremony, Dahlia not far behind, leaving their caps on the table, forgotten.
—
Maggie hung up her regalia on the back of their office door as Arthur filled the canister of a chalk pen, tucking it into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. He filled the next and tossed it to Maggie, who put it in her cardigan pocket.
Maggie’s phone buzzed, and she opened it to see frantic, mothering texts from Dahlia, who had finally gone home after Taliesin and Maggie had begged her.
You will text me the instant you are out of that pall.
If I don’t hear from you by 9, I will come in there myself.
Maggie responded with promises to call her later, and put the phone in her desk drawer.
It wouldn’t work within the pall anyway; the otherworldly surge of magic would fry the spelltech.
Taliesin was strangely silent, and she could feel his unease.
He fidgeted about the room, looking for something to do with his hands, and settled on buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket.
“Do you have anything we can use as a face covering?” he asked, and she found two old T-shirts from club days, tossing Taliesin the Hawthorn Hummingbirds a cappella shirt and keeping the Tarot Team shirt for herself.
Maggie couldn’t quite find the same energy to be nervous herself.
She brimmed with something like excitement, though she understood the danger they would be in.
She wanted to see the pall that had undone Arthur Taliesin so thoroughly; she wanted to see what kind of magic it was that he couldn’t tame.
There was a bitter part of her that maybe wanted to see if she could be the one who could tame it instead.
“Maggie,” Taliesin began. “There’s something I need to tell you.” He ran his hands through his hair and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I should have…” He paused, and then he sighed.
“What is it?”
“The third floor is swarmed with unsettled dead.”
“I know that,” she said, could hear and feel the faint reverberation of their energy even now. “I’ll be careful.”
“No,” he said. “You have to promise me. Promise me you won’t let one touch you.”
Like the pall itself, a touch from one of the unsettled dead could affect a person’s mental state. Maggie knew that, but she didn’t quite understand Taliesin’s fear. “I’ve read—”
“It’s nothing like what you’ve read,” he interrupted her, his voice harsh. “Just trust me. Promise me.”
She narrowed her eyes, but then said, “Okay, I promise.”
Finally, when there was nothing else they could prepare, Taliesin sighed again. “Let’s get this over with.”
—
The first thing Maggie noticed when she entered the pall wasn’t the way the chill seemed to take up residence in her chest or the strange, viscous quality of the atmosphere.
It was the slight pressure of Taliesin’s hand on the small of her back.
It wasn’t the smell of ether, sulfuric and bitter, but the subtle spice of his cologne lingering on her skin after he’d leaned over to deactivate the same rune he’d drawn the day the pall fell.
They slipped through the door, one after the other, as quickly as possible so none of the otherworldly particles or the slime that seemed to pulse with life could escape.
Once inside, Maggie placed her hand on top of Taliesin’s and whispered the Diadhan word for seal to keep the pall from spreading until they left.
Maggie didn’t let her hand linger on top of Taliesin’s, instead tugging up the T-shirt she’d tied around her neck.
Taliesin followed suit, covering his mouth and nose against the dust and debris floating around them, against the particles of unseen elements that could burrow in the body.
Maggie made a move to walk down the hall, but then Taliesin grabbed her elbow.
“Maggie, wait,” he said with a stern edge to his voice.
“We are going to fix the wards and go. I don’t want you in here any longer than you need to be.
” She couldn’t see half of his face behind the covering, but his eyes were pleading.
Worried. “Stay by my side. Time is different in here.”
Unexpected pleasure coiled through her at his concern, cutting through whatever nerves she felt about the pall around her.
She searched for something witty to say back, something about how bossy he was being, but the only embarrassing thought in her head was that she might like it. Instead, she just nodded.
Maggie had read all of Taliesin’s reports from front to back, poring over the details of each page until she was confident she could face this, but it was different seeing it in person.
It was different being within the thrall of this nightmare.
Everything had a quality of unreality that Maggie couldn’t quite explain, as if her brain couldn’t process what she was seeing and feeling and hearing.
Fractured beams of sunlight from outside filtered through deep purple, turning her skin a shadowed mauve.
The faefire lamps still flickered above them, casting eerie shapes as they blinked off and on.
The air felt thick, something to swim through, and pall slime coated the floor.
Maggie wondered idly if it would soak through her shoes.
The flotsam and jetsam of that final day of classes floated aimlessly.
A metal measuring tool flew by, faster than Maggie thought it should, and she reached out to touch it, changing its trajectory through the miasma.
It careened into a wall, its metal pieces striking together and creating a reverberating clang that startled them both.
Maggie was sure she could see the sound waves as they moved through the clouds of otherworldly dust, and she couldn’t stop staring.
“There are thirty warded windows on this floor.” Taliesin’s voice interrupted her reverie. “We need to move quickly.”
“Let’s start in 309,” Maggie suggested, just as a paper advertising the campus Beltane fair floated by.
Beltane seemed so far away here, a dream of a night while now she was stuck in a nightmare.
Maggie led the way, but Taliesin was close behind her, his head turning from side to side.
“What are you looking for?” she whispered.
“The unsettled dead,” he said. “Can’t you hear them?
” Just above the baseline static that seemed to accompany the pall there was a faint, hum-like moan.
These were not the fantasmia plaguing Galloway—not a wraith, ghoul, or banshee—but once-settled souls who temporarily found themselves back on this plane.
They were confused and desperate to return to their rest, and somehow all of it was contained in the melancholy sound they made.
The sound seemed to burrow in her chest.
“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Classroom 309 was frozen in time. Chairs were knocked over, and anything lighter than a pencil was at risk of taking flight.
The warding runes were drawn on the row of windows at the back of the classroom.
As she made her way around toppled desks, Maggie caught her reflection in the glass and saw that even her hair had lifted from her shoulders, spreading behind her like a strange coronet.