I don’t do that anymore.
The examination room door opens behind me.
Six more students to assess. Six more dark Nephilim who will sit in the metal chair and let the crystals probe their ordinary shadows and walk out with standard results that were honestly earned rather than manufactured by a Voice that their classmate used to rewrite reality two seats before them.
I walk toward the dormitory.
My shadows — still wearing Bael’s vampire layer, still heavy and cold and wrong-feeling — stay compressed against my body.
Ordinary. Dead.
The performance of a woman whose biggest accomplishment today is being unremarkable.
Inside, beneath the vampire mask and the careful control and the steady pace of a student heading back to her room after a routine assessment, the crimson pulses.
Faint. Buried.
But present.
Always present.
And getting harder to hide every day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ashley
I don’t go backto the dormitory after the examination.
I can’t.
The thought of walking into that building with the blue sensor lights pulsing in every corridor and my shadows still shaking beneath Bael’s vampire layer from the crystal probe — the thought of lying in my bed six feet from my roommate and pretending to sleep while the detection grid maps every twitch of darkness my body produces — makes my chest close up with a claustrophobia that has nothing to do with small spaces and everything to do with being watched by things designed to find you.
I take the blood path instead.
Down through the east wing utility corridors that no one uses after hours, through the maintenance access that Bael’s shadows keep permanently unlocked, into the tunnel system that runs beneath the academy in veins of ancient darkness too deep for Voss’s equipment to read.
My footsteps echo off stone that has been here since the bedrock formed, and the sound is the loneliest thing I’ve heard all day.
The sanctuary opens around me like hands cupping water.
Rune-light. Stone columns. The deep, dark, familiar space that has been the only place in this school where I can exist as myself since the first week of term.
My shadows release the moment the door seals behind me — the vampire layer still present but the living darkness beneath it surging outward with the desperate relief of something that’s been held underwater and has finally found air.
I extend them.
Not just into the sanctuary — outward, upward, through the tunnel network and into the stone foundations of every building on campus.
My shadows threading through the gaps between bricks, running along water pipes, slipping through the cracks in floorboards to emerge as hair-thin tendrils in classrooms, corridors, offices.
The spy network.
The web of living darkness that I’ve been building since October and that the detection grid has forced me to use more carefully but hasn’t destroyed because the shadows know how to be small when they need to be — thin enough that the sensors read them as normal shadow bleed rather than the extended intelligence network of an Ascendant who is monitoring every room in the building simultaneously.
The information flows back to me in fragments.
Impressions rather than images — my shadows don’t see the way eyes see. They feel. Vibrations. Temperature shifts. The weight of bodies moving through space and the particular quality of attention that humans carry when they’re focused versus distracted versus afraid.
