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The chaos breaks over us like a wave.

Chapter

Thirty-One

SATURNA

The first scream comes from somewhere near the main doors and by the time I turn to look, everything has changed.

I feel it before I even see it, like a pressure change, the air going thick and cold and teeming with bad things. My hands freeze and my breath mists in front of my mask. Around me students are still turning, still trying to locate the sound, still processing.

Baz is at my side. I don’t know when he got there, one moment I was watching him across the room looking like he’d seen a ghost, and the next he was beside me with his body angled between me and the wall and the tether between us is burning bright and taut and I feel his heartbeat through it, belonging to a man who is both frightened and functioning.

Then the east wall breaks open.

The stone goes soft with some sort of alchemy, the material changing, becoming more pliable, and from it the first Hollow steps through into the silver candlelight.

This is not the same Hollow I encountered in the hall. This one has purpose and its white eyes are looking around the room, seeking something.

Then a second tear opens in the north wall, and a third near the faculty table, and now everyone is screaming.

“Stay together,” Baz says, close to my ear.

Oh, if only he knew. I’m not about to let him die twice.

I reach for my magic.

It comes up cold and chartreuse and I feel the physical cost of it immediately, the chill spreading up from my hands, frost forming at the tips of my fingers, and I push it outward as a ward, as a wide hard barrier between us and the nearest Hollow, the kind that takes everything I have to hold and burns through me like I’ve swallowed ice. The Hollow hits it and stops. It looks at me and I look back at it through my mask and I think: it knows what I am. Whatever is driving it, it knows what I am and it’s going to keep coming.

I hold the ward and look for my friends.

Avelene is twenty feet away, pressed against one of the long tables with Ambrose in front of her, and even across the chaos I can see that she’s the most frightened I’ve ever seen her, jaw tight, eyes wide, cane raised in front of her like she’ll use it, which she absolutely will. Ambrose has his hands out and he’s doing something, a working I don’t recognize, and it’s holding, whatever it is, a small bubble of protection around the two of them.

Harken is in the middle of the room with a group of students pressed behind him, and the Hollows keep walking past them. Not around, but past them, their ivory eyes sliding off the whole cluster like they can’t see them at all. Even I didn’t see him there at first, not until I looked twice. Which, come to think of it, is how it’s always been with Harken, isn’t it?

Meanwhile Nelle is standing by the door and doesn’t appear to do anything but watch the crowd.

Then Professor Wellspring moves.

She comes from the faculty end of the dais and she’s heading toward a cluster of students caught between two Hollows near the center of the room, and I see what she’s going to do before she does it, something terribly foolish and brave.

I open my mouth but she’s already there, hands out, a working half-formed in the air between her palms, and the Hollows turn toward her in unison with that terrible directed quality, and the one on the left moves faster than anything dead should move.

It takes her by the throat, the Hollow’s fingers sinking into her flesh and her magic fails immediately. Then the Hollow reaches down with snapping teeth and rips her jugular clean off, a torrent of blood rushing out and onto the floor. The Hollow continues to feed, eating the rest of my teacher, the screams of the students she saved continue to rise, and I have to look away.

I hold my ward and keep moving.

The tether pulls when I get too far from Baz and I feel the waning flicker of it and I adjust. Any other time we could bear to be apart, but with the energy I’m expending with my magic, I can tell our tether is shorter than usual. I concentrate on keeping Baz close while keeping the ward between us and the nearest Hollow. The gown is not ideal for this, but I’m managing. In fact, most of the students are managing to hold their own against the onslaught.

Across the room, through the chaos of the ballroom and the tears in the wall, I find Sable.

She’s in full-on witch mode, doing something that looks from the outside like a warding working, formal and structured, the kind you learn in Hetch’s class. But I know it’s absolutely not that. I watch her carefully and I feel something in my bones and blood, a recognition that goes deeper than sight. She looks up at exactly the same moment and finds me across the room and we look at each other for a nod and then we go back to work.

We are not alone in this room. That’s the thing she told me in the corridor and I feel it now, the relief of working magic in a roomful of people who can’t see what I’m doing and one person who can and has chosen to stand beside it.

Caranthis.

He positions himself at the center of the room with the precision of someone who was prepared to go into battle all along, and in the preternatural way he moves I understand that he’s not just managing the students, he’s managing what the rest can see. He’s hiding us. He directs attendants, calls instructions, keeps himself between the faculty viewing angle and the places where Sable and I are working. It’s so deliberate and effective that it acts like a second ward, a social one, built from authority and timing.