29. Asha
Asha
Five AM rolls around too soon.
I know the time because Tobin is standing over the bed with a tiny silver light hovering above his palm and the expression that says he is about to say something unforgivably practical.
“Wake up,” he says.
I glare at him. “I am awake. You woke me up by hovering over me.”
“We leave in eight minutes.”
“I hope the weapon chamber eats you.”
Leith’s arm tightens around my waist for half a second before he releases me and sits up behind me. His body is cold at my back, solid and quiet. I want to drag him back down and refuse the entire day on principle.
Hale groans from the other side of the bed, face buried in a pillow. “Five is a crime.”
“You suggested sleep,” Tobin says. “This is what happens after sleep.”
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
My body aches in every possible direction.
Some of it is from sex. Some of it is from falling down the Astrology Tower.
Some of it is from being stuck in this ridiculous witch shell while my actual divine body lounges in a basin underground, waiting for a ghost to try and steal it.
I ask again… how is this my life now?
“Fine,” I grumble, meaning anything but fine. “Let me have a shower at least.”
“Two minutes,” Tobin says, snapping his fingers at me, which would have them removed if I were in my real form.
I shove out of bed, grab clean clothes and march into the bathroom. The shower is fast, vicious and hot enough to fix my mood. By the time I come out, hair damp and tied back, the three of them are dressed in black like we coordinated our impending crime.
Hale looks me over. “You look murderous.”
“I’m awake. Same thing.”
Tobin hands me a small silver charm on a chain. “Wear this.”
I stare at it. “What is it?”
“Null thread. It will blur your magical signature just enough that the wards won’t immediately recognise you as the academy’s current favourite problem.”
“Thoughtful.”
“You won’t be sarcastic when it saves your arse from SilverGate trying to shred you into confetti.”
I ignore the remark, take it and put it on. The charm sits cold against my skin, then warms with a pulse that feels like Tobin’s magic.
Hale stares at it momentarily. “Are we moving?”
“We’re moving,” Tobin says.
Leith opens the door without a sound. The corridor waits beyond it, dim and empty. It makes my skin prickle.
Or maybe that’s the charm. Either way, I don’t like it.
We slip into the hallway.
SilverGate at five in the morning is a different monster. During the day, it snarls through students, bells, lectures and polished cruelty. Now it waits in the walls with one eye open, pretending to sleep. The lamps burn low. Shadows gather in the corners, too neat to be accidental.
The residence tower doesn’t object when we leave.
That worries me.
SilverGate always objects. Even when it helps, it does it with a dramatic injury and a lesson no one asked for. This quiet cooperation feels deliberate.
“Anyone else feel like we’re walking into a trap?” I ask.
“Yes,” Tobin says.
“Good. Just checking.”
The rain has stopped, which makes the courtyard stranger. SilverGate without rain feels unfinished, too still, too clean. The stones shine under the permanent night sky. The Bell Tower stands silent in the centre of everything, looking smug about the fact that it knows more than we do.
I give it the finger.
We cut across the courtyard towards the lower academic wing. There is no one lurking around—except us.
The lower academic wing crouches at the edge of the main building, squat and ugly compared to the towers. It has narrow windows, ironwork over the stone, and a door that looks like it wants witnesses before it murders someone.
Leith slows first.
I stop beside him. “What?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His attention fixes on the door. His magic spreads from him in a thin, dark line, so controlled I barely feel it through the bond.
Then he exhales.
“It knows me,” he says.
Hale flexes his fingers. Fire crawls under his skin, muted for once. “And that means?”
“Not sure.”
“Trust is a beautiful thing,” I mutter.
“Do you trust me?” Leith asks without looking.
“Are you asking because you need more reassurance?”
“Maybe.”
Tobin steps up on Leith’s other side. “Don’t touch anything until he says.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Hale says.
We all look at him.
He scowls. “I wasn’t.”
Leith lifts one hand and places two fingers against the seam of the door.
The stone around it darkens.
Old magic presses out from the frame and brushes against Leith’s power. It makes every tiny hair on my arms rise.
It recognises him.
I can feel it happen with this bond shit. A small, almost imperceptible shift in the pressure against my skin. The ward doesn’t open, but it stops pushing back.
Leith’s hand goes flat against the door. His magic moves against the old stone in careful increments, slow and deliberate.
“Two inner wards are Blackridge’s,” he murmurs. “The outer layers belong to the academy.”
“And?” Tobin asks.
“The academy’s layers aren’t blocking me.”
“Blackridge’s?”
Leith is quiet for long enough to make me want to kick something. “They’re watching.”
“Watching you, or watching all of us?” I ask.
“Me,” he says. “The rest of you are secondary.”
Hale shifts beside me, his fire a low, barely contained simmer. “Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning they were built to recognise a specific type of power and assess intent before they decide whether to let it through.” Leith turns his head slightly, not enough to look at us, just enough to let me know he’s still present inside whatever strange negotiation he’s conducting with a wall. “They’re assessing me now.”
“How long does that take?”
“Depends on what they find.”
Hale and I exchange a grim look.
I stand outside the door with Hale on one side and Tobin on the other, watching a reaper negotiate with a door at five in the morning, and I think, not for the first time, that my life before this was significantly less complicated.
I had a throne, a realm, a collection of gods who feared me appropriately.
I did not have to wait for architecture to make up its mind.
“If it decides against you?” I ask.
“It won’t.”
“You avoided my actual question.”
Leith finally glances back at me, just briefly. “Then we run.”
Hale’s fire spits once. “Running is not a plan.”
“It becomes one quickly when a ward system decides to express its displeasure through the structural integrity of the floor.”
“Speaking from experience?” I ask.
“Once. Briefly.”
Tobin’s magic drifts outward in a thin diagnostic sweep, barely a whisper of light. “The outer academy layer is fully passive now. Whatever SilverGate thinks of this, it’s stepped back.”
“Because it wants us inside,” I say.
“Most likely.”
“That’s still the trap,” I mutter.
“Yes,” Tobin agrees, with the calm of someone who has accounted for the trap and decided to walk into it anyway because the alternative is worse.
“Leith?”
“Mm?”
“Are Blackridge’s wards still up?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re thinking about it?” Hale asks.
Leith doesn’t answer.
I study the back of his head and try to feel through the bond what’s happening on his end. It’s like pressing my ear against a wall and hearing water moving somewhere inside it. Present. Directional. Impossible to interpret precisely.
Then the door opens.
Leith lowers his hand.
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” I mutter, staring at the black hole that has been revealed.
“Me either,” Leith mutters back.
“Does kind of put you in the same classification as Blackridge, though,” Tobin whispers.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Yeah, shut up, Tobe. It puts Blackridge in the same classification as Leith,” Hale snorts, too loudly for my liking.
“All of you shut up and move,” Leith grits out.
Tobin goes first because he’s the one who will notice a trap before it closes. Hale follows, his fire dropping to almost nothing, a discipline I don’t see from him often. Leith steps through, and I go last, because I want to notice everything behind me before I commit to a room I can’t read yet.
The door shuts behind me without being touched.
The chamber is not what I expected.
Although I don’t know what I expected. A dramatic arsenal, maybe, or racks of gleaming weapons. Possibly shelves of contained power humming behind glass, or a stash that looks like it cost Blackridge something to accumulate.
What I get is a low-ceilinged room with plain stone walls and a silence that means everything in here is paying close attention.
Three long tables run down the middle, each one holding a single object on display.
I move slowly past the first table.
A pair of gauntlets made from black metal, laced through with something that glows as I pass and then goes still.
The second table holds a blade that looks ordinary until my eyes try to track the edge and keep sliding off it.
The third holds a box. It’s sealed with no visible lock, and the air above it is several degrees colder than everything else in the room.
“No weapons,” Hale says quietly, his voice stripped of its usual volume.
“There are weapons,” Tobin says, moving to the far wall where shelves hold smaller objects behind nothing I can visibly identify as a barrier, but which his magic clearly finds significant. “They’re just not the kind you swing.”
I stop at the second table and look at the blade without trying to look at the edge.
“Midnight spears,” Hale says. “That’s what we came for. What does one look like?”
Tobin moves to the shelves and doesn’t answer immediately, which means he either doesn’t know or he’s sorting through seventeen possible answers and discarding the ones that aren’t useful.
Leith moves to the far end of the room, his magic spreading low along the floor. He looks at each object in turn with that calm, assessing stillness that I’ve started to read as him recording threats rather than admiring the collection.
“Good question. What did daylight spears look like?” He fires the question at me.
“Like the sun in a long strip with a pointy end,” I reply with a wince.
“So we are looking for that, but made from midnight,” Tobin says.
“That was really intelligent. Thank you for that,” Hale mutters, but looks around and then freezes. “A bit like that?”
I follow his line of sight.
In the far corner, behind a shelf I didn’t see when we came in, three objects hang suspended in the air. They’re long, narrow and black at the core, but not a flat black. It moves, breathes, pulls light toward itself, and keeps it.
Like the absence of the sun, shaped into something that could be thrown.
“I’d say that’s a pretty good guess,” I whisper.
Leith is already moving towards them, his magic spreading ahead of him in a low, careful sweep. “There’s a containment field. It’s passive. It isn’t trying to stop us; it’s just holding them stable.”
“Can you take it down?” I ask.
“I don’t need to.” He stops in front of them and studies the suspension without touching it. “They’re already responding to the room being open.”
“Please tell me this charm is working and they don’t recognise me and want to stab me,” I murmur, only half joking.
Tobin, of fucking course, takes me seriously. “I’d stand well back if I were you. Behind Hale.”
“Hey,” Hale snaps. “You put me up as a shield, I expect you to buy me dinner first.”
“Do you want her dead or alive?”
That shuts him up, and he moves to stand in front of me. But the spears don’t seem to want to kill me. At least not yet.