The floor tilts a little under me. The leash isn't just on him. It's on the thing between us.
"Okay," I say, because it's all I've got, and becauseokayis what comes out when the truth is too big to pick up yet.
He nods, once. That's all. But he told me so I'd be careful, not so I'd be afraid, and I tuck it into the drawer with everything else I'm not ready to look at. Right next to the taste of his lips on mine, the sweep of his tongue in my mouth, our bodies tangled up in the summer heat as this thing between us grew too big too fast.
Felix is last, and Felix being Felix, he makes the whole thing look like the best part of his day.
He has his deck out before the Tumult warden even waves him forward, left hand walking a card knuckle to knuckle while he lays his right flat on the table like he's dealing himself in. "Morning," he says, bright as anything. "Love what you've done with the hair. Bold. Not everyone can pull off that kind of haircut, what do they call it? Oh yeah, bad."
The warden's mouth thins, but he doesn't say anything. Just shakes a die loose into his palm and casts it across the table, and while it's still tumbling something flickers at the edge of my vision, giddy and gone, like a bet about to land, and I brace for the penny taste, and it comes, but nothing is carved and nothing is drawn.
The die tumbles onto the table face up. Reality slides, smooth as a card off the top of the deck, into the version where the mark was on Felix's hand all along—that same looping half moon, dark and raised and pulsing, sitting there like it's been his for years and I just never looked.
Callum's blood had to be dragged to the surface. Ren's rose to meet it. Felix's was never given a choice at all—somewhere in the roll, every future where his hand stayed bare came up losing.
The house, as always, wins.
Felix doesn't even glance at it. "Six," he says, admiring the die where it landed, like the roll happened to somebody else's hand. "First try, too. You should come by Long Shot sometimes—I'd love to play your odds." The card in his left hand keeps walking, knuckle to knuckle, his smile so sharp it cuts. "There's a storm rolling in on Thursday, by the way, though I'm sure you already know."
The warden collects his die without answering. Felix winks at him.
And for exactly one second, between the wink and the next card, I catch the corner of his eye, and can see the truth, which is that he's scared shitless and smiling just to cover it up.
Ten weeks in a car with Felix Ferrix taught me how to see through him. His smile climbs to a certain height and stops, like a tide line, and everything above the line is for the rest of us. Below it he's somewhere else, three branches down some future where everything goes to shit, watching it play out. On the surface he's grinning so that nobody has to ask what he's lookingat. He sees the futures fanned out in front of him the way I see colors. Most of his are bad, though he's rarely willing to admit just how bad.
Outside Flagstaff he took a spell that was meant for me. It should have caught me in the throat, and instead it tore through his shoulder, because he'd already seen the branch where I died and stepped into the space where I'd be standing. Ren knelt on the cracked tile of a motel bathroom for forty minutes with his hands glowing red, putting him back together, and Felix told jokes the entire time, about the grout, about the color of his own blood. I laughed at them then because he needed me to. I understand him now. His dark and flippant sense of humor is the only thing he has to protect both himself and everyone else from the future he sees.
I want to cross the office and put my hand over his free one, card and all. I want it badly enough that the bond leans toward him, a bright ache drawing tight along the thread that stretches between us. But the warden is still at the table, Catalina is at the window, and one of the many things I've learned, here at Nyxhaven, is to hold my emotions in check around the people in charge.
Four men who were once strangers to me, then enemies, and now bonded to me in ways I still don't comprehend, stand around the room with ward marks on the back of their hands. I would trust them with my life, but to keep the danger at bay, I'll have to keep them all at arm's length. For now.
Then the Sanguis warden comes to me.
I put my hand on the table before anyone can decide for me—palm down, fingers loose, the way Ren did. If they're leashing all of us, I'd rather wear mine where I can see it. The warden sets his knife to the back of my hand and casts, and the penny taste floods my mouth so sharp my eyes sting.
Nothing takes.
The mark beads up dark against my skin and then slides off my skin, every drop, like water off glass. No curl. No half moon. Nothing in me rises to meet the working, and nothing settles into it. The warden frowns and goes again, more magic this time, the taste swelling metallic and huge—and still it pools and runs and refuses to stick, sliding off the back of my hand to bead on the table.
For one second the room is very quiet, and the warden looks up—not at me. At Catalina.
"An oversight." Her voice doesn't change. She hasn't turned from the window, as though a working sliding off a student's hand is the dullest thing that could happen in here. "Miss Grey will be watched by other means. We're finished."
And that's all. The warden steps back. The moment ends, smooth and final, and the room rearranges itself around the story that nothing strange just happened—a faulty spell, an oversight, nothing more.
I don't buy it. I felt what that was. The mark didn't fail; it slid offme,off whatever I am, the same way every rule in this place has been sliding off me since I showed up with a grimoire, all four disciplines in one body where a single one was supposed to be. And Catalina didn't blink. I can't tell whether that's because nothing surprises her or because she already knew it wouldn't take, and not knowing which is so much worse than the mark would have been.
So there's no leash for me. No knife that holds, no conductor, no die. I'm not being collaredtothem—I'm the thing they're being collared awayfrom,and I get to stand here untouched. I would have worn it. I put my hand down in a heartbeat. Being the one exception in the room is worse than any mark, and I have to study the floor and breathe until I can live with it.
Catalina turns from the window, finally showing the room her face. She's beautiful the way a blade is beautiful: clean lines,cold purpose, nothing wasted. Callum got his bones from her. Everything else he has, he had to fight her for.
"You understand the terms." Her face is neutral, but her eyes are a warning. "The five of you will have daily Graduate Independent Study sessions at Callister House. One hour, supervised. Professor Wheeler has been reinstated to oversee them."
Wheeler.Ten weeks ago, in Brittany's dorm room, Wheeler was the plan—the disgraced Tumult professor with the warded house in the Vermont mountains, the one who'd spent years digging through grimoire history outside approved channels, who'd reached out to Felix with chaos magic because he'd been waiting for someone like me to surface. We were halfway across Connecticut when Felix read the odds and turned the car around.Compromised,he said.
Catalina knew about Wheeler before we did. I'd assumed that meant the man was finished, rotting in whatever quiet hole Nyxhaven keeps for professors who pick the wrong side. It meant she'd turned him somehow. The cold of that walks up my spine one vertebra at a time.
The man who waited three years for me to surface answers to her now, and he's going to be standing in my house every single day, supervising the only moments I'll get to have with the guys.
