Page 140 of The Alchemists

She hadn’t really thought about what to do if he lost. As his Orb fell, as it smashed into shards of light on the black sand, so did her heart. But something was wrong. He was smiling. He was lifting Adriana off the ground and whirling her around with manic glee. He had wanted so badly, though, to win. She didn’t understand.

Part of her, the part that wanted progress and moving history slightly in the right direction, was glad for Adriana, the first woman of color to win the championships, only the fourth woman ever, in almost two hundred years. But the bigger part of her was devastated. And the smaller part of her, leftover in the darkness from last night, was angry. She was angry that Seb wasn’t upset. Angry that this seemed to matter so much less to him than he’d implied. Angry that he could just move on because he could move on.

Already he looked different from the person he’d been before his bout with Danielson. He looked like he knew who he was. Already he was leaving her behind.

She could see it clearly now. In a year, he’d be ready to go on a date. In five, he’d be able to talk about her without a lump in his throat. In ten, his children might not even know she’d existed. By that time, their nine months together would seem so small compared to everything else, compared to the history he’d make after her.

“You okay?” Tori squeezed her arm.

“Yeah.” Lily plastered a terrible approximation of a smile on her face.

She pasted it on during the closing ceremony, the banquet, the impromptu party in the pub at the Alumnae House, where Seb held court alongside the Méridas, all of them getting plastered and messily affectionate. Lily sat in a corner, drinking a cocktail she didn’t really want, watching life happen around her. She couldn’t stop thinking about Van Bergen’s letters.

There hadn’t been as much in them as she’d hoped, and they hadn’t tipped the scales for her one way or the other about Selene’s death. Van Bergen’s letters hadn’t described his wife as depressed. But she was distracted, confused, sometimes anxious. Sometimes she thought her skin was on fire. All of it was almost familiar to Lily, in the back of her mind.

Selene, she thought, Selene, who are you?

Before she knew it, she was getting up, draining her cocktail. When she slipped out of the room, no one noticed. Night was rolling in and bringing with it a storm. The hazy sky turned gray, and then black, as she walked toward campus. The towering clouds rushing toward her gave her a strange sense of vertigo.

All of the streets surrounding Windermere, the ones with off-campus housing or bars, were chaotically alive, the gold from their open doors and windows spilling into the petrichor-heavy air. The weather had turned with the storm, and her jacket felt claustrophobic. The streets were already shimmering wet from the mist settling as the pressure dropped.

Campus itself was a riot of noise and cantrips. They went off like fireworks, some of them actually fireworks, without the danger of blowing your hand off. Someone had started a magical bonfire on the quad, and no one seemed to be stopping it. In the mass of bodies and kegs, she saw Hawleyhurst and was too slow looking away. He caught her eye, and in it was a malicious promise. He followed her with his gaze. A great gust of wind hissed across the quad, sending a mass of sparks up from the fire and Lily’s hair lashing against her face. Not very far away, thunder boomed, following a crack of lightning that lit the malevolent spires of clouds in the night sky. The very air around her felt dense and charged.

Checking behind her with an illuminating cantrip to make sure no one—visible or otherwise—was following her, she broke easily into the library. She paused in the atrium, breathing in the quiet and absence of chaos. Briefly, she went up to the tower room to get the flashlight and supply pack, the disc. Outside, the clouds that had hung low and close over the day opened, spitting rain against the diamond-paned windows, melting the last, stubborn snow in a stream toward street gutters. A call, then a text, came in from Seb. She silenced her phone and pressed the hidden button behind the unicorn tapestry.

She gritted her teeth against the cacophony of the stone iris opening, ignored the throbbing in her heart, and descended into the endless darkness.

SEB

It was a night.

It was a night not unlike the night he and Adriana had promised each other the bout of a lifetime. It had the same charge, the same current running through it. It was a night dense with promise and possibility. The banquet had come and gone, and their party at the pub grew messier—deliciously so—by the second. The spotlight on the Cantrèa finalists had faded after Adriana had done an acceptable number of victory shots. Seb had matched her, albeit with much more grimacing. Everyone was following the threads of the night’s separate possibilities.

Across the pub, Daphne and Asher were wrapped up in each other, and they were far from the only ones. Tori, Liesl, and Raf had disappeared a while ago, with a bottle of wine and wicked smiles, only reappearing briefly after the storm started to procure another bottle before heading upstairs to “dry off.” This was Seb’s favorite kind of debauchery, and he’d missed it all year, but he breathed it in now.

Seb and Adriana were half-hidden in the velvet-covered window seat. They’d let the drapes out of their brass hooks for privacy as they talked, but as the evening progressed their conversation required fewer and fewer words. The electrical charge that had pinged between them for years had finally tipped into overload. The circuit was going to blow.

It was practically mind-boggling that they had never kissed, but that first year, Raf had beaten her to the punch, and since then, fate had kept throwing other partners in the way.

Other partners.

Seb placed his hand against the window. Instantly, its clamminess drew him back, at least a little way, into his senses. Where was Lily? He tried to recall the last time he’d seen her and couldn’t. He stuck his head around the drapes, scanning the pub, but she wasn’t there.

“Lily?” Adriana said.

He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about Lily for even five minutes, much less fifty, but she’d been strangely flighty, hanging around the edges all night, and he’d been too much in demand to get her alone and find out what was going on, and then too many shots in to care.

She didn’t answer the first call or the third. So, he texted, and then texted again, tapping his phone against the window seat as he waited. Steadily, a nagging anxiety replaced the ache. He pushed his way across the party to discern her whereabouts.

“You’re worried.” Adriana appeared at his elbow as he stared from the doorway into the lobby of the inn.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just this feeling.”

The more he thought about it, the more he realized the feeling was Magic, spreading out in tendrils through his mind, twisting itself into the shape of her name. His stomach dropped.