“Oh, well…she’s been narrowing in on a topic,” Rawlins said evasively. “We’ll get you something once it’s ready.”
“Surely you can give mesomesense of what you’ve been working on with her,” Lennox insisted. “Or what she’s deciding between? I might be able to weigh in, help steer the ship.”
Rawlins should have been prepared for this inquiry, but he had been too caught up in the excitement of working with Ellsbeth—well, more than justworking—to give much thought to the bureaucratic requirements of the university. His intention had been to get his arms around the problem and have a fully baked case to make before he went to Lennox and sought her approval for his student to write a thesis, even theoretically, about an illegal branch of magic. Now he was flat-footed, still reeling and trying to suss out how much Lennox knew or didn’t.
“Give her a minute, Maggie. She’s ambitious, and she knows what this means for her career, so it’s been hard to pin her down,” Rawlins said, wincing at his own choice of words.
“Surely you’ve made progress, in the many meetings you’ve had,” Lennox said, an edge entering her tone. “Most of the cohort seem to think that she’s your favorite student, so I know it’s not an issue ofneglect.”
There it was. The rumor. Thesuspicion.It was irritating to know he had been gossiped about, but also a relief in some ways, since a suspicion that ill formed and obliquely referenced meant that Lennox was in the dark about the extent of the relationship. But her hackles had been raised.
“Ellsbeth is a remarkably capable student,” Rawlins said, trying to steer the conversation in another direction. “I think there’s potential for her to do exceptional work, but that takes time…” He saw Lennox opening her mouth to speak, and added quickly, “I will impress upon her the importance of deadlines, and we’ll have something for you to consider…soon.”
Lennox frowned, but apparently thought better of pressing the matter further. “See that you do…I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the dangers of giving too long a leash to a gifted student.”
Rawlins’s eye twitched and his chest tightened; scathing replies crept up his throat, but he swallowed them down, knowing better than to provoke further conflict. “You certainly don’t,” he replied dryly, then headed back to his office.
He closed the door. The din of the gathering wafted up from down below, a murmur under the oppressive silence of his office. He could not help but try to tune his ear, attempting to overhear what was being said—as though every conversation down there were about him and Ellsbeth, and picking up on what was being said about them might somehow help him get ahead of the disaster they were hurtling toward.
Rawlins’s mind raced with troubled thoughts, and he was gripped with a fever of anxiety. He hated that feeling; it was worse than fear. When you knew what a threat was, you could take action to address it. But this was only a vague, amorphous sense of potential danger, which left him hypervigilant, buzzing with uncertainty.
He opened Ellsbeth’s email on his laptop and stared at the PDF. What had filled him with excitement ten minutes earlier…now only filled him with dread. He couldn’t believe he had been so careless, had let this go so far.
Lennox was right, unfortunately. Infuriatingly. He had somehow forgotten the lesson he should have learned with Max. He had gotten himself into an even worse situation—not only a dangerous mentorship, but one entangled with desire and irrational affection. His entire relationship with Ellsbeth was like a sports car on an open road, accelerating dangerously; it was only a matter of time before they lost control and this ended very, very badly. Heartbreak was the least of his concerns; prison, or worse, was a very real possibility.
It was time to put a stop to this while he still could.
Ellsbeth
In the morning, Ellsbeth checked her email and saw that Rawlins hadn’t replied to her ritual. She spent the day refreshing her inbox, waiting to see his name and the reply she expected—effusive with praise, possibly with an offer to help her be hired as a visiting professor at Newlyn immediately, completed degree be damned. But the email didn’t come.
On Wednesday, she sat in the front row of Rawlins’s graduate seminar. It was a lecture on numerology, the type of mind-numbing subject that surely didn’t hold Rawlins’s interest to the degree he was pretending it did. And yet his attention remained studiously fixed on his notes; he hardly looked at her once. Every time Ellsbeth tried to catch his eye, he seemed to purposefully avoid meeting her gaze. He didn’t call on her even when her hand was raised, and rather than linger as he usually did after class, he mumbled something about a staff meeting and was out of the Practicum before any of the students had even risen from their seats.
She double- and then triple-checked to be sure that the email to him had actually gone through. It had. Still, nothing back from him even to acknowledge he had receivedit.
Ellsbeth drafted and deleted a dozen messages to Rawlins, cringing at herself at the neediness that came through even over text:Just checking in to see if you read my ritual yet!?No.Hey, did you get my email?Awful. She couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t soundnagging, petulant, inane. And so she put her phone away. If he were pulling away, demanding more of his attention would only make him pull further and faster. Moreover, he hadn’t said anything to cancel their date that Saturday; it was possible he just hadn’t had a chance to readit.
Ellsbeth reread the ritual, catching a typo but otherwise almost embarrassingly impressed with herself and the clarity of her writing. She was almost certain that it would work, but she wanted Rawlins to tell her as much.
Still, the longer he went without acknowledging her, the more impatient she became. Regardless of what she believed she had achieved, there was only one way to know for certain if she had actually written a ritual capable of obscuration.
On Saturday morning, Ellsbeth enteredthe coffee shop on the corner of Thayer Street, clay compound warming in her palm. Performing the ritual in her apartment earlier had taken an hour and a half—she might have been able to do it in half the time, but her hands had been shaking and she had to start over twice. The clay compound held the ritual in stasis until it was needed.
Ellsbeth picked up a protein bar she had no intention of eating and placed it down on the counter, slightly too close to her, which meant that the girl behind the counter had to reach forward to grab it, revealing a strip of skin at her wrist. As quickly as she could, Ellsbeth touched the red clay to the girl’s wrist and in an instant felt the strange, delirious power take over when the ritual was a success. The girl’s eyes went blank and glassy, and she made no move to pull her wrist back toward her.
Ellsbeth’s heart began pumping so quickly she could feel the blood in her temples. She hadknownit was going to work, had been so confident in her gut about every single step in the ritual fitting together, inevitable and self-evident, mathematically certain. And yet seeing it actually work in practice was so shocking it was all Ellsbeth could do to remain upright.
“Small coffee, please,” she said, and then Ellsbeth realized with ajolt that she hadn’t actually planned for how she would test whether the obscuration worked properly or not. “You should charge me for a large,” she said, her voice unnaturally loud in her ears.
The girl did, the higher number bleeping across the electronic screen.
Ellsbeth let out a crazed, barking laugh.
“What?” the girl said, oblivious. Ellsbeth pulled back the clay, and then asked for almond milk.
“That costs twenty-five cents extra,” the barista said. The obscuration had worn off exactly as Ellsbeth had hoped, leaving only a faint pink mark on the girl’s wrist that would hopefully wipe away without her ever having to wonder what had left it there.
Ellsbeth left a ten-dollar tip and walked down the street with nowhere to go, working off the giddy energy of what she had just done. The clay melted and rehardened under her nails. She kneaded at it in her palm while she walked and then stopped, panicked, in the middle of the sidewalk to shove it into her backpack, like she was disposing of evidence of a crime. Because she was.
