"What if another one comes?"
"Then you'll have a very interesting story to tell at breakfast." He's already moving toward the side door. He stops with his hand on the frame and doesn't turn around. "Fairmont. The report I file will include the wards violation. I'll also file the separate report about the dormitory and the basement."
I look at his back. "You said you'd look into it."
"I'm looking into it." He pushes the door open. "Finish the catalog."
He's gone before I can say anything else, the door swinging shut with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
I go back to the alcove. I pick up the last stack. I sort them by date, then by name, then I stack them in the correct order and leave them on the reading shelf where someone can actually find them.
The chapel is quiet around me, all bone panels and cold flame and the silence that comes after something wrong has left. I don't find it distressing. I find it honest. This building doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.
I'm the last one to leave, and I lock the door behind me with the key Ryder left on the pew without mentioning that he'd left it.
Outside, the campus is dark and still, and somewhere in the east wing a light burns in a high window, and I don't look up at it twice.
Chapter 5
"You're being summoned," Sage says, appearing at my elbow with the particular energy of someone who has bad news and has decided the fastest delivery is the kindest. "Vampire House. Caspian Thorne wants you in front of the tribunal by the third bell."
"The tribunal," I repeat. "For what?"
"Apparently something went missing from the Vampire House treasury room last night." She keeps her voice low. We're in the main corridor between the dining hall and the east wing, and the morning foot traffic is thick enough that sound carries. "A ring. Old bloodline crest, irreplaceable, the usual category of thing that makes vampires dramatic."
"And they think I took it."
"Seraphina told someone she saw you near the east corridor last night." Sage's jaw tightens. "Which you weren't. You were finishing detention in the Bone Chapel."
"Which I can prove, since Ashford was there for most of it." I shift my bag to my other shoulder. "Fine. Where's the tribunal?"
"There isn't one, actually. Thorne is handling it himself. Privately." She says the word privately the way you'd say sharp edge. "Which is either better or worse than a full tribunal and I genuinely don't know which."
It's worse. Obviously it's worse. Anything Caspian Thorne handles privately is worse by definition.
The Vampire House occupies the academy's oldest wing, where the stone corridors are narrower and the ceilings are lower and the air carries a specific quality that I can only describe as permission withheld. Like the building itself is deciding about you. The students I pass in the corridor either ignore me with practiced precision or watch me go by with the particular attention of people cataloging what they're seeing for later use.
A prefect meets me at the entrance to the private residential floor and escorts me without speaking to a door at the end of a corridor lined with iron sconces. He knocks once, opens it, and steps aside.
I walk in.
Caspian Thorne's private rooms are not what I expected, though I couldn't have told you what I expected. There's a desk. Bookshelves running floor to ceiling on two walls. A low settee that looks like it has never been used for sitting. The light is low and comes from candles rather than the sconces in the corridor, which tells me something about preference. He's standing at the window with his back to me when I enter, and he doesn't turn around until the door clicks shut.
"Angelic Fairmont," he says. His voice has a particular quality, like something expensive that's been sharpened. "Null. Four-house anomaly. Detention record already." He turns, and he looks exactly like every warning about him that I've been given. He looks like someone designed to make you forget warnings. "Sit down."
"I'll stand."
He considers this for exactly one second. Then he moves away from the window, not toward me, just across the room, circling toward the desk in a way that requires him to pass closer to me than the room necessitates. I hold my ground.
"A ring was taken from the treasury room," he says. "Last night, between the tenth and eleventh bells. You were placed near the east corridor by a witness."
"I was in the Bone Chapel from the ninth bell onward. Professor Ashford can confirm it."
"Ashford left at some point before the eleventh bell. His own report says so." He stops at the desk, picks up a document, sets it down without reading it. "That leaves a gap."
"The gap in which I was sorting consecration records by date and then by warden name, alone, in a chapel full of bone panels and cold flame. It's a very compelling alibi, I agree."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. He doesn't let it become anything. "The witness was specific."
