Chapter 4 #2
"The door locked from the outside. It requires a key I don't have. I was on the wrong floor for where I was trying to go, which means someone redirected me." I set a stack down and reach for the next one. "And my uniform was destroyed this morning. Both of them."
A pause. He's reading a record, or pretending to. "File a report with the dormitory warden."
"And if the dormitory warden doesn't take it seriously?"
"Then file it again." His voice is even. "The system exists for a reason."
"The system," I say, "exists for people the system was built for. I've been here four days."
He sets the record down and turns to look at me, and I'm closer to him than I realized, the alcove being what it is, and the cold that comes off him at close range has a specific texture, like standing too near something that has absorbed all the heat from the air around it. I don't step back.
"You're going to tell me it was Seraphina Vale," he says.
"I'm going to tell you that whoever it was has access to my room and knows my schedule," I say. "Which is a specific kind of problem."
His eyes shift. He turns back to the records. "I'll look into it."
"You don't believe me."
"I didn't say that." He reaches past me for a loose sheet that's slipped behind the stack, and for a moment his arm is next to mine and the cold is immediate and close and I feel it across the back of my hand. He straightens. "I said I'd look into it."
I turn back to my stack. My hand is still registering the cold. I focus on the records, on dates and warden names, on the rhythm of sorting something disordered into something that makes sense.
"Professor," I say, after another few minutes of silence.
"Ashford."
"What?"
"In this context, you can use Ashford." He says it without inflection, like it's a rule he's clarifying rather than a concession he's making.
"Fine." I pull a misfiled record from the wrong year and move it. "Ashford. Why are you supervising detention personally? Don't you have faculty things to do?"
"I have many things to do." He doesn't elaborate.
"You could have sent someone else."
"I could have." He picks up the next record, and I watch his profile from the corner of my eye, the sharp angle of his jaw, controlled stillness. "The Bone Chapel has a specific resonance. Students who haven't spent time here before sometimes find it disorienting."
"You're saying it's haunted."
"I'm saying the consecration wards are old and the death magic that saturates this building has a weight to it." He sets the record in the correct pile. "Some people find that distressing."
"And you thought I'd be one of them."
"I thought you might be." He pauses, almost imperceptibly. "You're not."
"No," I say. "I grew up in a house where people used me as a battery. Whatever this chapel is putting out, it's quieter than that."
He goes very still beside me for just a second, then picks up the next record like nothing happened.
I almost say something else. I decide not to.
He moves to pull the next stack from the shelf behind me, reaching across to take it down, and for a moment he's close enough that I can feel the cold of him all down my left side. My breath catches slightly, not from fear. I'm annoyed that it does.
"You're in the way," I say.
"I'm retrieving a stack."
"Retrieve it faster."
He pulls the stack down and steps back, and when I look at him his expression is still controlled, still exactly what it always is, except for something at the corner of his mouth.
He doesn't smile. But it's the closest thing to a smile I've seen on him, and I'm choosing to notice it the way I choose to notice small things that matter more than they look.
"Faster," he says, setting the stack beside me. "Noted."
I turn back to the records so he can't see my face.
We're nearly finished when the chapel doors open.
Neither of us moves immediately. The sound is wrong, not the creak of someone arriving for a purpose, but a slow drag, like something pushing through a barrier it isn't supposed to cross. The sconce flames gutter and go blue-white, colder and lower than they've been all night.
I come out of the alcove first.
It's at the far end of the chapel, near the main doors.
Roughly shaped, the way smoke is roughly shaped before it disperses, but this doesn't disperse.
It holds together, pulling inward against its own edges, and the air around it has gone so cold I can see my own breath in sharp, rapid puffs.
It doesn't have eyes exactly, but there's an orientation to it, a direction of attention, and it's aimed at me.
Ryder steps out of the alcove behind me and stops at my shoulder.
"Don't move," he says, low and flat.
"I wasn't planning to."
The thing at the end of the chapel shifts, a slow lateral movement that doesn't make any sound. The bone panels on the nearest wall vibrate faintly, a high, thin sound at the edge of hearing.
Then Ryder moves past me, and the death magic that comes off him sharpens from background cold to something actively cutting, and whatever is at the end of the chapel recoils.
It folds back on itself, the edges fraying, and in the space of a few seconds it pulls apart and the cold goes with it, bleeding out through the stone walls until the chapel temperature is merely winter-unpleasant instead of wrong.
The sconce flames come back up, orange and ordinary.
I let out a breath.
"What was that," I say. Not a question, exactly.
"A wraith." He's still facing the far end of the chapel, watching the empty space where it was. "A young one. Barely formed."
"On campus."
"Apparently."
I look at the bone panels, still faintly trembling in the aftermath. "Is this a common occurrence?"
"No." Something in his voice has gone tighter than usual, controlled in a way that suggests it's an effort.
"It isn't." He turns back toward me, and his expression is exactly what it always is, except his eyes have gone colder than before, a different kind of cold than the magic, something that lives behind the professional distance.
"The chapel wards should have prevented entry. Someone weakened them."
"Deliberately?"
He doesn't answer right away. He picks up the last stack of records from the alcove entrance and sets them on the nearest pew with a precise, controlled motion. "Finish the catalog. I need to report this to the Headmaster."
"You're leaving me here."
"The wraith is gone and I've just reinforced the threshold." He picks up his coat from the pew where he left it. "You'll be fine."
"What if another one comes?"
"Then you'll have a very interesting story to tell at breakfast." He's already moving toward the side door.
He stops with his hand on the frame and doesn't turn around.
"Fairmont. The report I file will include the wards violation.
I'll also file the separate report about the dormitory and the basement. "
I look at his back. "You said you'd look into it."
"I'm looking into it." He pushes the door open. "Finish the catalog."
He's gone before I can say anything else, the door swinging shut with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
I go back to the alcove. I pick up the last stack. I sort them by date, then by name, then I stack them in the correct order and leave them on the reading shelf where someone can actually find them.
The chapel is quiet around me, all bone panels and cold flame and the silence that comes after something wrong has left. I don't find it distressing. I find it honest. This building doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.
I'm the last one to leave, and I lock the door behind me with the key Ryder left on the pew without mentioning that he'd left it.
Outside, the campus is dark and still, and somewhere in the east wing a light burns in a high window, and I don't look up at it twice.