I stop, key still in the lock, and reach with my magic, the way I learned to reach this summer, with all of the disciplines inside me. The raven answers the way a wire answers: not alive, but live. Blood magic, the penny taste ghosting faint across the back of my tongue, threaded through dead feathers and glass eyes, and a thin line of it running out of the bird and away, under the floorboards or through the walls, off to somewhere I can't follow from a doorway. So this is how they're watching me, with dead things spelled to report back.
Knowing doesn't make it any less strange to stand in a Victorian entrance hall while a dead bird tracks my face like an assignment.
"Hi," I tell it.
The raven holds its position. Committed to the role.
Something at the edge of my vision settles into a shape, and I turn to it: to my left, through the parlor door, a fox. Posed on an ottoman, one forepaw lifted mid-step, head angled just enough to keep me in its sightline. It has the same eerie glass eyes as the raven and the same stiff, posed quality, even as it moves and twitches like it's still alive. I follow where it's looking and find the third one—a cat, sphinx-still on a console table in the corridor, watching me in the idle and disdainful way of felines.
Three dead animals, one house, and me. Somewhere on the far end of the feed, Wheeler. And behind Wheeler, always, Catalina.
"Good morning," I say to the room in general, and I head for the stairs, because the alternative is standing in a doorway letting a fox win.
I'm halfway up the first flight when a girl comes down it, a junior maybe, carrying an empty mug and moving too carefully, like she pulled a muscle or injured something recently. Her eyes come to my face and don't quite land, sliding a little past me.
"You're the new one," she says.
"Everly."
She doesn't give me her name. Just nods, politely and distantly. "The second-floor bathroom shower runs cold after seven. Go before then if you want hot water."
She keeps going down. "Thank you—" I start, but she's already around the landing, and I'm thanking the banister.
At the landing I have to pass the raven close enough to touch. Its eyes follow me without the head moving. I give it a nod. It does not reciprocate.
The second-floor corridor runs left and right from the top of the stairs. My room is the second door on the left. Out of habit—Bellamy Hall muscle memory—I turn right first, and stop.
At the end of the right-hand corridor there's a door standing a few inches open, and past it, where the building's outside wall should be, a passage continues into space the building doesn't have. The air near it is different. Not threatening, exactly, but there's a presence. Like a hand settling between my shoulder blades, gentle, steering.
This way,it says, in a quiet, distant voice.
I stand there for three whole seconds. Then I turn around and walk to my room.
Not today. Not without knowing what it is.
Some creepy things at this magical university shouldn't be investigated without proper preparation, I've discovered to my dismay.
My room is spartan, old and empty of any warmth, both literally and metaphorically. The air tastes of dust and cold candle wax. There's a window to the campus with old, thick glass, a solid wood desk beneath it, a bed made with white linen sheets against the righthand wall, a mirror in the corner that looks too ornate to move, and a wardrobe whose brass handles squeak when I try them. The room has high ceilings and dark floorboards worn pale down the middle by decades or evencenturies of feet. Like every empty room in Nyxhaven, there's a sense that someone or something was occupying the space just before I arrived, and is slightly put off by my presence.
I drop the polka-dot suitcase on the bed and sit down next to it.
The mattress is firmer than Bellamy Hall's. I'll get used to it, I'm sure, since I had worse on the road with the guys this summer. Everly Grey, eternal optimist, learner of unfamiliar mattresses, befriender of birds that can't blink.
I unpack one thing at a time, because my hands need a job. Clothes into the wardrobe. Four books onto the desk. Notebook. The purple stuffed cat Felix won for me by cheating with chaos magic at one of those old claw machines. He looks lonely and a little dinged up.
Yeah. Same.
At the bottom of the suitcase: the snickerdoodles. Half a bag, baked at two in the morning before we drove the last stretch, slightly stale now. I took them out of the oven already knowing the summer wasn't going to end in our favor. I packed them anyway. Home has always been something warm you can give away, and apparently I would rather carry stale proof of that than admit defeat.
I set them on the desk next to the stuffed animal. The world's saddest care package.
My phone buzzes. Brittany.
status report
Alive,I type back.Being watched by three taxidermied animals. Could be worse.
how much worse
