I make a note to find out her name.
Two tables over, a girl in a band tee over a long black dress is watching me.
Not unfriendly. Not friendly. One earbud in, one dangling, a fork she keeps turning over in her fingers, her plate mostly untouched, the way it goes when somebody came for the company and didn't find any. When my eyes find hers, she lifts two fingers off the tablecloth. The entirety of her greeting.
Then she looks back down at her plate like that was the entire conversation.
Brittany Leigh. Second-year, Callister House, the one with the blackout curtains and the purple fairy lights, who lives a floorabove me and hasn't once, these first couple of weeks, pretended any part of our current situation is fine. She left a skull box of tissues outside my door the first night and didn't mention it. She shares the whiskey without being asked.
She also won't come sit with me. Not in here. The wrong person deciding the two of us are friends would cost us both more than the company's worth, and Brittany worked that out before I did—three steps ahead, the way she always is, and never once making a show of it. So we do this instead. Two fingers off the tablecloth. A whole conversation in the one language the room can't read.
I lift two fingers back, even though she's already not looking. It still feels like something. A small thing I tuck beside the coffee.
***-
I go back in the afternoon.
I know, okay. I know. I've been there twice already, and Catalina counts things, and the building has eyes—not the taxidermied kind, not exactly, but the kind of old attention that stone develops when enough magic has been worked in its walls over enough years. I'm not invisible when I slip in. I'm just betting that whatever I find is worth the risk of being found.
That's the bet. I'm not sure it's a good one. But here I am.
The front room looks the same: dust on the shelves, old light through grime-thick windows, set up to look like somewhere everybody gave up on years ago. I know the costume by now. Three visits in and I can tell the dead-neglect smell from the alive-underneath one. The air in here isn't the air of an unused room. It's the air of a room holding its breath.
I go to the back wall.
I'd noted the texture on the first visit—ran my hand along it, couldn't figure out what was off—and on the second I got close enough to understand: the stone here is smooth in a way that takes a hundred years, minimum. The smoothness of hands. Someone has been touching this wall for a very long time.
Something at the back of my throat pricks. That taste—flat metal and something older underneath, old blood magic, deeper and more layered than anything I've caught in Wheeler's parlor sessions. My grimoire recognizes it before I do. That's what it does: recognizes. Turns toward it the way a compass needle turns north—not because I told it to, but because some part of me wants this before the rest of me gets a vote.
I run my hand along the wall until I find the edge.
The passage isn't hidden, exactly. It's set back in the corner the staging doesn't quite cover, carved stone on both sides of the frame, an arch at the top, and the cold breath of air coming up from below. It isn't the cold of the room. It's the cold of underground, of deep unventilated places, of stone that doesn't see sunlight and never has.
It should make me want to step back. Instead I catch myself leaning in, a half-inch toward the cold before I've decided to, and I tuck the leaning away with the rest of the things I can't explain about myself lately.
A staircase goes down.
My phone light touches the first eight steps—worn smooth in the center, the kind of smooth that's decades of feet—and the underside of the arch, and then dark. It isn't the kind of dark my light couldn't reach if I walked farther. It's a dark that sits there with patience, thick and old, the kind that has been waiting for company so long it's stopped expecting it.
The cold pours up out of the stairwell and over my shoes, a real cold, the kind that's lived underground so long it's forgotten how to be anything else. It's so quiet down there that I canhear my own pulse going in my ears, and under that, fainter, something that might be water moving or might be the building breathing or might just be me, wanting it to be something. My breath fogs in the phone-light. I'm shivering, and not all of it is the temperature.
I look at the arch.
The symbols carved into the frame don't match anything I've been taught. Not Mors—not the clean geometric score of death magic, those deliberate sharp angles. Not Sanguis—not the spiraling thread, the double-helix implied in blood discipline's iconography. Not Tempest's forked fracture lines, not Tumult's branching and doubling-back.
These are older. Simpler. The kind of symbol you'd get if you stripped a thing down to its roots and then carved those, before anyone had come along and given the roots their proper names.
The grimoire turns harder. My teeth taste copper.
I photograph all four sides of the arch, flash off, and try to keep my hands steady while the taste climbs to the back of my molars. I get nine photographs.
I don't take the stairs. I want to. I want to very badly, and that's the part that unsettles me more than the dark does, because it isn't curiosity and it isn't nerve. It's the low pull I've been feeling for weeks now and pretending not to, a wanting with no person on the end of it. No thread, no face. Just a draw coming up out of the ground the way warmth comes up out of a vent, patient, addressed to me.
All summer the loudest thing in my body was the bond and how much the distance hurt. The hurt's gone now, all four of them settled and quiet, and into that quiet this has crept: something down there that wants me to come down, and something in me that wants to go.
The pull is sharp enough that I have to physically step back and remind myself I'm here on borrowed time, that Wheeler isdue back in the building at six, that I haven't told anyone where I am. There's a list of things I haven't told anyone, and the staircase is going on it. So is the wanting.
I take a photograph of the lowest step visible—the worn-smooth center, the edge of the seventh stair going into dark—and then I put my phone away.
