Chapter 3
"Miss Fairmont." Ryder's voice cuts through the classroom before I've fully crossed the threshold. "You're late."
I'm not late. I checked the clock in the corridor twice. I'm thirty seconds early.
"I'm not late," I say.
"You're not seated." He turns back to the blackboard. "In this classroom, those are the same thing."
The room holds about twenty students, all of them already seated, all of them now looking at me.
Stone walls, high windows that let in gray morning light, long tables arranged in rows facing a raised dais where Ryder stands with chalk in one hand.
I find an empty seat near the back. The student beside me, a boy with bone-pale hair, shifts his chair six inches to the left without looking at me.
Welcome to Death Magic Theory.
"We were discussing the foundational taxonomy," Ryder says, still facing the board.
He writes three words in sharp, angular script: Source.
Conduit. Vessel. "The distinction matters because misclassification is how practitioners die.
" He turns. His gaze finds me immediately, the way a blade finds the gap in armor.
"Miss Fairmont. Since you've graced us with your presence, you can tell me which of these three categories describes a null. "
Every head in the room swivels toward me.
"None of them," I say. "A null doesn't produce magic, channel it, or store it. By definition, a null is outside the taxonomy."
His face goes carefully blank.
"That's the answer a null would give," he says.
"Which is precisely why it's wrong." He sets the chalk down.
"A null placed in proximity to active death magic functions as an inverted vessel.
Not empty. Negative. It absorbs ambient energy from the surrounding field and destabilizes it.
This is why nulls have historically been barred from advanced coursework.
" He pauses. "And from most other things. "
The boy with the pale hair makes a quiet sound that isn't quite a laugh.
"Demonstrate the basic intake form," Ryder says, and he's not looking at me anymore, he's looking at the girl in the front row.
She extends her hand, and dark smoke curls from her palm in a controlled spiral.
Easy. Practiced. The kind of thing she's been doing since she was old enough to hold a thought steady.
"Now you." Ryder's eyes come back to me. "Miss Fairmont."
I put my hand out. Nothing happens. The ember that's been sitting behind my ribs since the ritual room pulses once, sluggish and unhelpful, and does exactly nothing visible.
"Nothing," Ryder says. Flat. Informational, like he's recording data rather than humiliating me in front of nineteen witnesses. "Again."
"I'm a null," I say. "Producing death magic is not something nulls—"
"I'm aware of what you are." He clasps his hands behind his back. "I'm testing whether what you are changes when placed in an active field. It doesn't appear to. Make a note of that."
He moves on. Just like that. Like I'm an experiment that failed to yield interesting data and he's already filed the result and moved past it.
I lower my hand. The girl in the front row is watching me over her shoulder with an expression caught between pity and relief that she's not me. I look at the board instead.
Source. Conduit. Vessel.
I write them down and say nothing else for the rest of the hour.
Draconic Arts is in a different wing entirely, past a courtyard where something large has scorched the flagstones in overlapping black circles and no one seems concerned about it.
The classroom is more of a training hall, ceilings vaulted high enough that I immediately understand why.
Five students are already there when I arrive.
Thane Valorix is one of them.
He's leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his eyes half-closed—dark brown eyes that should look harmless, puppy-soft, except for the way gold flickers behind them like banked fire.
His dark brown hair catches the light, and even relaxed against the wall, there's no hiding the heavy muscle across his shoulders and chest. Tanned skin, like he spends time under an actual sun instead of in stone corridors.
He looks like someone who has never in his life arrived anywhere and wondered whether he belonged there.
I find a place along the wall opposite him and set my bag down.
He pushes off the wall and crosses the room at a pace that looks casual and isn't. He stops two feet from me, looking at my bag on the floor, and then he looks up at me.
"You're in the wrong place," he says.
"The schedule says Draconic Arts, second years and crossovers, this hall, this time." I look at him. "Which part of that am I misreading?"
"The part where a null belongs in a fire discipline class." He says null the way some people say contamination. Like it might spread. "You'll slow everyone down."
"Then train faster," I say.
His jaw tightens. He looks down at my bag again, and before I understand what he's doing, fire runs from his palm in a thin, precise line, and my bag lights up from the bottom seam.
Not an explosion. A surgical burn, controlled and deliberate, moving through canvas and paper and the two textbooks I borrowed from Sage this morning until there's nothing on the floor but ash and the copper smell of burned ink.
The other students have gone very still.
I look at the ash. I look at him.
"That was my property," I say.
"Was it?" His voice is light, pleasant almost, the tone of someone who has just done something perfectly ordinary. "I thought it was clutter."
I crouch down and pick up the one thing that survived — a pen that had rolled clear of the burn radius. I stand back up and put it in my pocket.
"I'll need to replace two borrowed textbooks," I say. "If you'd like to fund that, I'll let you know the cost."
Gold flickers behind his eyes again. Not regret. Something sharper.
The instructor arrives before he can answer, and Thane moves back to his place with the unhurried certainty of someone who has won something, or thinks he has.
I spend the class with nothing to take notes on.
The hallway between Draconic Arts and the main corridor is long and poorly lit, a stretch of old stone that runs behind the east wing where the student traffic doesn't flow. I'm halfway down it when I hear footsteps behind me that don't sound like someone heading somewhere.
They sound like someone following.
I keep walking. The footsteps stay exactly the same distance behind me, which is more unsettling than if they'd gotten closer. I turn the corner into the narrower passage that cuts toward the dormitory wing, and the footsteps follow me around the turn without hesitation.
"You can stop pretending you don't know I'm here," Caspian Thorne says.
I stop walking and turn around.
He's leaning against the wall with one shoulder, watching me with the patient, half-amused expression of someone who has all the time in the world and has decided to spend some of it on me.
He's beautiful in the way sharp things are beautiful—red hair that catches light like copper wire, dark green eyes, the kind of face that makes you notice the danger a second after you've already noticed the dimples.
Broad shoulders, the easy strength of someone who's never had to prove anything.
When he smiles, I catch the flash of fangs, there and gone.
"Thorne," I say.
"Fairmont." He tilts his head. "You look tired. First full day of classes?"
"What do you want?"
"Just checking in." He pushes off the wall and walks toward me slowly, and I hold my ground because I refuse to be the person who steps back.
"You've had quite the morning. Ashford made you perform for the class.
Valorix burned your things." He stops close enough that I'd have to look up slightly to hold eye contact.
"How are you finding Nocturne Academy so far? "
"Educational," I say. "Is that all?"
"Not quite." He smiles, and it doesn't reach anything behind his eyes. "I wanted to see something."
It hits me without warning, a rush of warmth that floods up from my sternum and spreads outward through my limbs, and my pulse jumps so hard I feel it in my throat.
My skin goes hot. The warmth has a particular quality to it, something that isn't temperature exactly, something that slides under my defenses before I can identify it as external, and for three full seconds I'm standing in a hallway with my heart slamming against my ribs and heat pooling low in my stomach and absolutely no idea why.
Then I understand. Thrall.
Caspian is watching my face with complete attention, the way a scientist watches an experiment hit its peak reading.
"Interesting," he says quietly.
I take a step back. The warmth fades as the distance increases, dropping off the way a sound drops off when you move away from its source. My pulse is still elevated. I can feel it, which makes it worse, because he can feel it too, and from his expression he absolutely knows it.
"Do that again," I say, "and I will find a way to make it inconvenient for you. I don't know how yet, but I will."
He laughs. It's a real laugh, surprised out of him, and it's briefly and infuriatingly attractive. "A null threatening a vampire heir in a back corridor. This place keeps finding ways to entertain me."
"Glad I could help." I turn and walk away.
"Your pulse is still up," he calls after me. There's a smile in it.
I don't stop walking.
Sage is already in the dormitory common room when I find it, sitting cross-legged on one of the low couches with a book open across her knees and a cup of something steaming on the table beside her.
She looks up when I come in and reads my face with the efficiency of someone who has been paying attention to people for a long time.
"Sit down," she says. "I'll get you tea."
"I don't need tea."