“Yeah.” I took another drink. “Not sure I fucking blame him either.”
The wind shifted, bringing the smell of pine and wet stone up through the window. I remembered Jupiter leaning out of this exact window, hair whipping around her face, pointing at Cassiopeia and telling me I had the attention span of a goldfish after catching me staring at her ass. That was before I’d tasted her. The night I’d lost my heart to her entirely.
I dragged a hand down my face. My knuckles were still split from training with Eris this morning. Eris had been hammering at the heavy bags in the combat hall before dawn every day since she left, and the rest of us had learned to leave him alone about it, because the alternative was Eris taking a swing at one of us and someone ending up in the infirmary.
Our trip to Imperium hadn’t made anything better. Actually it made things ten times worse. It was clear that Jupiter had moved on and was done with us. Those Stardust fuckers had her in their sights and she didn’t seem reluctant enough.
Draco had started disappearing for whole afternoons, no one knew where, and nobody had the stomach to ask. But I always found him up here at the end of the night, staring at the stars. Percy and I drank. Percy and I smoked. Percy and I sat in the wreckage of our common room night after night, agonizing over our choices.
The only thing we’d done right in weeks was the mission in Jersey. The Assembly had tossed us a Class Four like a bone to a starving dog, probably hoping we’d get ourselves killed and solve their political problem. We’d torn through it in under seven minutes. Percy had opened it up with a strike that hadsplit its skull down the spine, and I’d finished it while it was still twitching.
Eris had laughed while he killed three more, making twenty copies of himself and converging all at once like a deranged maniac that only wanted carnage. Draco had been the one with enough presence of mind to notice the last bane skulking at the edge of the breach, and we’d bagged that one alive, wrapped it in containment wards, and dragged it back to the caves below Dominion for training. A gift for ourselves. Something to beat on when the need got bad.
The need was always bad.
“My father called again,” I said. “Third time this week.”
“Mine too.”
“Mine’s threatening to pull my funding if I don’t ‘fix the situation.’ Like I can just—“ I stopped. Swallowed. “Percy’s father sent him a letter. Like an actual letter. Addressed it to ‘Percival Callahan, Failure of the Nightfall Shield.’”
Draco’s mouth moved in what might, once, have been a smile. “Charming.”
“He did tell me that Melissa and her father have officially been exiled and their magic was bound, so there’s that.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.” I rolled the bottle between my palms. “Doesn’t bring her back.”
“No.”
The first week after Jupiter had gone, the vultures started circling before her flight had even landed. Axis candidates I’d never noticed in four years had suddenly been everywhere. Waiting outside our quarters. Slipping notes under the door. Cornering us in hallways.
One had the audacity to ask me, to my face, when we’d be “opening the position.” I hadn’t hit her. I’d wanted to. Percy had, instead, told her in a voice that had gone absolutely flat andabsolutely quiet, that if she or any of her power-chasing friends approached us again, he’d see to it personally that they were reviewed for manipulative conduct. Word had traveled fast. The corridor outside our quarters had been empty for two weeks now. People crossed the courtyard to avoid us.
I tipped my head back against the cold stone of the window frame and stared up at the rafters of the tower. Somewhere up in the dark, a bat was moving around and scratching at something. The ceiling next to the massive skylight was painted with the old constellation map, faded and flaking off, and I could just make out the serpent where it wound between Hercules and Scorpius.
Ophiuchus. Her sign.
I stared at it until my eyes burned.
“I felt something,” Draco said suddenly.
I rolled my head sideways against the stone to look at him. He hadn’t moved. His eyes were still fixed on whatever he wasn’t seeing.
“What?”
“Last night.” He took a slow pull from the bottle, swallowed, set it down on the sill between us. His fingers stayed wrapped around the neck. “Through the bond. Something came through.”
I sat up straighter. The cold that had been numbing my spine suddenly felt like a blade pressed flat against it. “From her?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean,something. She’s been locked down like a fucking vault. I can’t even feel her breathe. What came through?”
He finally turned his head. His hazel eyes were bloodshot, sunken, the skin under them so bruised he looked like someone had taken a fist to his face. But there was something else in them too. Something raw and half-crazed that I recognized because I saw it in the mirror every morning.
“She had an orgasm sometime around midnight.” I stopped breathing. “It was powerful. I couldn’t get a full read on her. Her emotions, her thoughts, her surroundings, nothing. The wall was still up. Butthat—that came through. I don’t know how. Maybe she lost control for half a second. Maybe the pleasure was too big to hold behind the wall. I don’t fucking know. But I felt it, Aiden. I felt her come, and it fucked me up so bad I had to walk the grounds until four in the morning just to remember how to breathe again.”
