Callum reaches across the table. He doesn't touch me; the marks won't let him, and the wards are already burning him for being here at all. He just sets one finger on the calendar, on the knot at the bottom of the inked column, on the year's last mark, and holds it there like he can stop the date from arriving if he keeps his hand on it.
And his shadow pools at his feet. Uncalled. It spreads out from him across my kitchen floor, dark and deliberate, the way it does when something in him is so far past control that the thing he keeps leashed slips its collar.
And Callum—who has spent his whole life telling his shadow exactly where to be, who dusted his mother's ledger and called it furniture—looks down at it spilling over my tile and does not tell it to stop.
"The end of the year," he says.
Nobody moves to fix the dark on the floor. We just let it be there with us, four burning marks and one bleeding hand and a knot inked twelve generations deep. Months of it ahead, the whole slow rest of the year to stand inside, knowing the date and forbidden to touch it, while Catalina waits at the far end of the calendar with her soft voice and her patience.
Except for one place. The one blank spot in all that watching—the building next door, the cold stair, whatever's sealed at the bottom of it behind a name gouged into the stone by a hand that shook. The wardens' working doesn't reach down there.
And there's a stretch coming, later, when the campus empties out and the eyes thin, the long dead middle of winter, when everyone who can go home goes home and the watchers have so much less to watch.
If there's an answer to a knot inked twelve generations deep, it's at the bottom of that stair. And the only time we'll ever get to go looking is the one time there's no one left to see us.
14
EVERLY
Three in the morning, and I'm making tea I have no intention of drinking.
I don't even like this tea. It's something the house keeps in a tin on the high shelf, gone dusty at the lid, and I climbed up for it because the climbing was something to do with my hands. The kettle ticks on the burner. Steam starts to lift off the spout, thin and uncertain in the dark, and I stand at the counter in Callister House's cold kitchen with my sleeves shoved up and watch it the way you watch a thing that might do something if you look away.
The end of the year. That's what Callum put on the table tonight, his shadow pooling at his feet like it had its own opinion. A knot inked on the Bolingbroke calendar at the far edge of spring, and Nell Fortuna's name on Wheeler's list beside it, and the two of them sitting in me together all night like a stone I swallowed and can't cough back up. Months off, and no less certain for it. The kind of dread you can't outrun because it isn't chasing you—it's just waiting at the end of the road, patient as Catalina, for the year to bring you to it.
I can't sleep. I haven't been able to sleep since they all left. The bond is loud tonight—four threads paying out of my sternum toward four corners of a campus that doesn't want any of us in the same room—and I'm lit up with all of it, wide awake at an hour built for the dead, humming like a wire somebody plucked and forgot to dampen.
The kettle starts to whine.
I take it off the heat before it can scream and wake the grad floor, and that's when I feel it.
Warmth. Coming from the wrong direction.
Not from inside me, the way my own nerves run hot when I'm scared. Fromoutside—a warmth that crosses the kitchen and arrives at my back before the person carrying it does, settling into my chest like a hand laid flat over my heart. My own pulse answers it. Doubles. I know that warmth. I've known it since a motel bathroom in Flagstaff, since the restricted stacks, since every time he set himself near a door and made himself stay there.
"You're awake," Ren says, from the corridor.
I don't turn around right away. I set the kettle down very carefully on the trivet, because if I turn around too fast I'll do something with my face that I haven't decided to do yet.
"So are you," I say. "And you're not supposed to be here."
He doesn't answer that. He comes the rest of the way into the kitchen instead, quiet the way he's always quiet, and when I do turn he's standing in the doorway in a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed up, his brown skin gone gray-blue in the bad light, and the back of his right hand is held a little away from his body the way you hold a thing that hurts.
The mark. I see it and I don't say it. He won't want me to.
Because here is what it costs him to be standing in this kitchen, and he will not say a word of it: he's fed the mark his own blood, Sanguis lying to the thing on his hand, telling thewardens and Catalina and Wheeler that Ren Ashford is asleep in his bed in Vitae Hall, breathing slow, going nowhere.
And then he crossed the whole dark campus to a house he is forbidden to come within a hundred yards of. The boundary has been burning him the entire time, low and steady, writing itself into his skin where I can see it and he won't mention it.
He came anyway.
"I felt you," he says. "An hour ago. You've been awake and—" He stops. Looks for the word. Ren always looks for the word. "Bright. It reached across campus. I couldn't lie in that bed pretending I couldn't feel it."
"I was making tea." I gesture at the kettle like it proves something. "Very normal. Very calm."
"Everly."
Just my name. He says it low, and it does something to the room.
