I look at his arm, knowing he’s offering me much more than an escort and a tour.
He’s offering friendship.
And despite the deception, and the fact that there’s probably a lot more to the story he’s not sharing, deep inside he still feels like a friend. Maybe the only one I have here.
I take a sip of the latte, sweet and delicious, even better than the ones at Froth.
“Perfect,” I say with a sigh.
“Yeah?” Kirin’s smile breaks through the last of the tension between us like the dawn. “Does that mean I’m forgiven?”
“I meant the latte.” Then, rolling my eyes and offering a smile of my own, I finally take his arm. “This little tour of yours better be good, or I’m totally getting my money back.”
Eighteen
STEVIE
“Okay, so the House of Iron and Bone,” I say, following Kirin down yet another red stone path. The entire campus is connected by them, a vast web lined with the same flowers I saw with Dr. Devane earlier. There are bike trails, too, running around the perimeter of the campus and through the desert behind the dorms, and free bike stations at most of the buildings so students can just hop on and ride anytime. “How did they get Iron and Bone from pentacles?”
“I’m so glad you asked,” Kirin says, his eyes lighting up like they do at every single one of my questions. He really is in his element, and I suspect he knows even more about the campus and its history than the architects and founders themselves. “In the legends about the First Fool—basically, the guy who sacrificed himself to the elemental deities so humans could access magick—the first pentacle was crafted from iron of the earth and—are you ready for this? The dude’sactualbones.”
“Of course! Becausethat’snot creepy at all.”
“It gets creepier. The chalice of blood and sorrow was fashioned from the top of his skull and filled with his blood and tears, which his ancestors then drank to unlock their own channels to the magick.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Eww.”
“The first sword was said to be forged from flames stoked by his final breaths—hence the breath and blade bit.”
“What about the wands? Did they just set him on fire after that? I mean, what else, right?”
“Actually, they performed a prolonged sexual rite, capturing and infusing the wand with the essence of his final moments of ecstasy—flame and fury. Then they cut off his head—that’s when they made the chalice.”
“Wow, the first mages were kind of extra, huh?”
“You don’t know the half of it. But you will. You’ll be expected to memorize all the old legends and write so many essays on it that by the time you graduate, you’ll never be able to look at a Tarot deck the same way.” Kirin laughs, but it’s not the shocking stories that linger in my mind.
It’s his last words.
By the time you graduate.
Graduate. From magick school. Me. The idea still feels so foreign, so forbidden. When I told Trello that my legacy was to be caught between two worlds, I meant it. Now, I wonder if that feeling will ever pass. If I’ll ever feel totally comfortable on this strange new path.
“What do you think of my tour so far?” Kirin asks, still grinning. “I told you I was a good guide.”
I drain the last of my latte, toss the cup into a nearby trash container. It vaporizes in a cloud of pink smoke before it even hits the rim—magickal recycling at its finest.
“I think you’re quite possibly thecreepiestguide in existence,” I say.
“What? I haven’t even shown you the Chapel of Severed Heads yet!”
“You can’t be serious.”
He wriggles his eyebrows, making his glasses jump. “The clergy wears rosaries made of baby teeth.”
At my horrified gasp, Kirin unleashes a laugh so big and bright, a few students ahead of us on the path turn to look, then start laughing too, infected with his charm.
“It’s all just legends, Stevie,” he says. “The first written records we have about it are from the fifteenth century, and those are just translations of the originals, which likely date back thousands of years before that. Who knows how much was changed or mistranslated, or misheard from back when the stories were all passed down orally. For a long time, nothing was written down at all, for fear the non-magickal humans would find out about our world.”
