Chapter 20
Something is wrong with the house.
I feel it the second I come in from class—a change in the air, a wrongness behind my eyes, the pressure-drop before weather.
I stayed late in the library because I couldn't concentrate, and I couldn't concentrate because Kage never showed to combat class.
His spot on the field sat empty the whole session, no explanation, and after, I waited by the equipment shed like an idiot until the light went, telling myself he'd been sent on one of Midus's errands and he'd turn up.
He didn't.
I told myself it was nothing but it didn’t stop the stupid feelings bubbling up in my throat as I accepted defeat and left our usual spot.
But now I’m home and this place feels… off too.
The evening staff aren't at their posts. No one by the doors, the stairs, the ends of the halls. Every other night there's a body at each of those spots. Tonight there's nobody. Just two in the front hall, polishing silver that doesn't need it, heads down, not looking at me.
The not-looking, I'm used to. The empty posts make the hair on my arms stand up.
Somebody sent them away. You don't clear a house by accident.
Aamon's gone. I know that much—it's a dispensary night, one of the few times he excuses himself to take care of his… dietary needs, and he told me this morning he'd be out past midnight. So it's me and Leopold and a skeleton staff, in a house built to hold a small army.
"Calypso, darling." Leopold's voice drifts out from the dining room, warm as anything. "Come to dinner. You've kept me waiting."
I roll my eyes at the wall. Darling. He only trots that one out when he's performing for an audience, and there's no audience tonight, which means the audience is me. I go anyway. Refusing dinner would be its own kind of tell. I drop my bag on the chair beside my usual one, and sit.
The table's set for two. Candles, the good silver, a bottle of something red he's already poured.
He's at the head, uniform jacket still on, and whatever emptied the halls hasn't effected him at all.
If anything he looks lighter than usual—the wound-tight watchfulness he's worn since the vault gone slack, replaced by something almost peaceful.
It should be a relief to see–a pleasant-faced Leopold. It isn't. He’s too much of a wildcard.
"You look tired," he says.
"I've been studying."
"Have you." He turns his glass by the stem, watching the wine climb the sides. It is wine this time, I can tell by the thickness of the stain. "Late in the library. Alone."
"That's usually how studying works."
His mouth curves, and he lets it go, and we eat. Or he watches me eat and moves food around his own plate, the way he does, cutting it into pieces that never reach his mouth. At least this time he has a plate in front of him instead of staring at me the whole time.
The quiet stretches. It isn't the comfortable kind. Every so often he surfaces from wherever he's gone behind his eyes and looks at me down the length of the table with an expression I can't read.
"Are you keeping up?" he asks. "With the coursework."
"Well enough."
"Mm. It's a great deal to ask of a first-year.
Most of your cohort had a proper foundation—primary school, coven tutelage, the ordinary scaffolding.
" He turns his glass. "You had a cell and a chemical drip.
It's remarkable you can read a warding diagram at all, when you think about it.
I do hope the others aren't leaving you behind. "
I keep my fork moving and try not to let my face react to the slight diss. "I manage."
"And your friends? The little witch you eat lunch with. The Marchand girl."
Something in me goes still at friends, at the specificity of it, but I keep my fork moving. "Nellie's fine. When you’re not threatening her, that is."
"Good. It's good to have people." He says it like a throwaway line.
"It gives a life shape. Stakes. Something to lose.
" He sets down his knife. "I've been thinking a great deal lately about the things we're willing to do for the people we can't afford to lose.
What we'll break. Who we'll become." His eyes lift to mine. "Haven't you?"
The wine sits untouched in front of me. I don't trust my hand not to give something away if I pick it up. "I don't know what you mean," I say.
"No. I don't suppose you do. Not yet." He smiles, and it's almost fond, and it's the worst thing I've seen on his face all night. "Eat, Calypso. You'll need it."
And that—you'll need it—changes the vibe from being off to straight up wrong.
He's in a mood, and he's stopped hiding it. Whatever patience he's been performing for me these last weeks is gone tonight, worn through, and something about the empty house and the wine and the digs tells me I'm running out of time to be useful to him.
Which means I need to make my move.
Half the staff gone. Aamon out past midnight. Leopold parked at this table with his whole attention on me instead of on wherever he keeps his secrets. I won't get a night like this again—an empty house and a locked study and no one in the halls to stop me.
Whatever he's hiding, I have to find it before whatever's coming gets here. My gut's been screaming it since I walked in the door.
"May I be excused?" I say, in the flattest, most exhausted voice I own. "I've got reading to finish and a headache building. I won't be good company."
He studies me a moment. Then, magnanimous: "Of course. Rest. Tomorrow's an important day."
I don't ask what makes tomorrow important. I take my bag off the chair and I go, and I make it look like I'm going up to my rooms right until the landing, where I stop, and wait, and listen, and don't.
I go up the first flight, past the landing, and then—when no sound follows me, when the dining room stays quiet and Leopold stays in it—I double back down the servants' stairs instead.
Everyone underestimates the same thing about me. It can be a gift if you use it right. Leopold included: I don't leave locked boxes alone.
I couldn't leave the vault door alone. I can't leave Shandy alone—possibly caught in something with teeth that runs straight back through these walls.
And I can't leave alone the study Leopold keeps locked.
Whatever he scored from behind that vault door is important–maybe enough to be behind lock and key.
The halls are dark and dead. Lights banked to nothing, no bodies at their usual posts, the whole ground floor holding its breath.
I move barefoot along the runners, having kicked my shoes off for stealth purposes at the top of the stairs.
I count doors, and I find the study. East wing, ground floor.
A door heavier than the others, locked, of course.
I don't know the first thing about picking a lock.
But I know how to break things. It's the only thing I've ever been reliably good at.
I can’t help but smile. It’s worth a shot.
I wrap my hand around the knob and reach for the fire behind my sternum.
Slow, careful, a trickle and not a flood—the way Aamon taught me, observe, name, meter it out—and the heat crawls down my arm and pools in my palm until the light of it bleeds white between my fingers, throwing my own shadow hard against the wall.
The metal warms. Then it gives, softening at the edges, and I grit my teeth and haul back on it with everything I've got.
The knob tears out of the door in a shriek of splintering wood and a fistful of ruined brass.
The door drifts open on its own, nothing left to hold it shut. A laugh falls out of me like an exhale.
Jackpot.
Inside: a desk, shelves, a bank of filing cabinets along the far wall, the held-breath quiet of a room nobody's supposed to enter. Moonlight through the shutters lays it out in bars of silver and black. I leave the lights off as if the darkness might protect me.
I go straight to the cabinets.
They're labeled—luck for me, or arrogance on Leopold’s part.
Household. Accounts. Correspondence. I start with Household and it's exactly what it says, staff files, wages, contracts, and I almost move on before a word snags me: half the files aren't employment records at all.
They're donor records. Names, blood types, feeding schedules, a column tracking something labeled decline.
Page after page of people logged like livestock.
I make myself keep turning. I don't have time to be sick.
Accounts is money—vast, ugly amounts of it, routed through names I don't recognize and a few I do. I file the ones I do.
The house creaks somewhere above me and I freeze, every muscle locked, listening. A bead of sweat rolls down my spine as I hold my breath.
Seconds tick by. I realize it was just the house settling. Just old wood in the cold. I breathe out and keep going.
Correspondence is locked separately, a slimmer drawer with its own mechanism, and I don't have another lock-break in me that isn’t tempting fate to bring the roof down, so I leave it.
But my eyes keep going back to the bottom of the cabinet, to the last drawer, the one my gut flagged the second I walked in.
No label at all. The only unlabeled drawer in a room where everything is labeled.
That's the one. Things you don't name are the things you're most afraid of.
I crouch. I get my fingers into the pull. It's heavier than the others, or locked, or both—it doesn't want to come—and I brace and work it and feel it start to give, a quarter inch, half, the runners groaning, a folder edge showing pale in the dark—
The overhead light snaps on.
"You know," Leopold says from the doorway, "I truly hoped you'd be better than this."
I freeze, my heart stalling in my chest.
Oh god.
I straighten, take my hand off the drawer, and turn. He's taken his jacket off since dinner, cuffs turned back. His eyes are trained to my every move, but his gaze isn’t angry.
It’s tired.
"How–how long have you been standing there?" I ask.