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“What happened? Did Professor Vale say something to you?”

I nod. “Just a note about my technique.”

She looks at my face and purses her lips together. “Mhmm. Your cheeks have gone very pink.”

“It’s cold out here.”

“It is cold,” she agrees, pushing off the railing and falling into step beside me. But the look she gives me says she knows cold has nothing to do with it.

We walk back to the Mortis and the warmth of the building folds around us as we step inside. At the ramp we part ways and I close my door and lean back against it, as if to keep something outside. I let out a long exhale and flex my hand.

My right hand is still warm where he touched it. It’s not my imagination either, it’s actual warmth, as if the heat of his fingers left something behind that the night air couldn’t erase.

I think about the way he said the stone is the anchor and how his voice sounded when he said it, low and certain and close enough that I could feel his breath move the hair at my ear. I think about what I felt in that second of contact—the focused intensity, the tightly wound thing underneath—and I let myself, just for a moment, imagine his hand not moving mine to the headstone but staying on it. His fingers pressing between mine. His thumb against the pulse point in my wrist. His mouth that close to my throat.

Then I stop wondering, because I have a chapter to finish reading and a mother to visit on Saturday and absolutely no business thinking about my professor’s hands at any time of day.

Ever.

Outside, the sky is still red. The Bleeding, settling in.

Soon, I’ll be back home to see my mother, to sit in the chair beside hers and hold her cold hand and pretend that everything is the same as when I left.

But something has shifted, and I can feel it the way you feel a change in the weather before the storm arrives.

Something is coming.

Chapter

Six

BAZ

Midnight is the last ferry out of Mortua and as usual, it’s empty but for me and the captain, who has never said more to me than hello, and that was years ago. He stays in his wheelhouse with his pipe and his contempt, and I stand at the stern with my coat collar up.

The Mortis takes a long time to recede. A quarter mile out, half a mile, and the sea wall still blocks the horizon like a cliff. The faces in the stonework don’t disappear until the mist takes them, then it all disappears under the red-dark of the new night. I manage to keep my eyes on the water.

I used to count the faces in the wall, when I first took this job. A way to quiet the mind, to keep the nerves at bay. I was the new professor at an infamous school—there was plenty for my brain to spiral over. The fact that I don’t count them anymore must mean something.

My mind drifts like the fog, focusing on the Cemetery Class.

Veronelle Caine was precise, as always. She reads bones like her magic is a surgical instrument. She got the sex, age, cause of death, and probable origin, all in sixty seconds, her hands steady the entire time. She doesn’t learn, which is going to be a problem for her in third-year, but tonight she did well.

The Hallward boy doesn’t read and he doesn’t absorb. Puts his hands flat and lets the bone come to him. It takes longer than Caine sometimes, but he gets more out of it. He apologized to a femur once, under his breath, when he was concentrating and forgot I was in the room. I pretended not to hear. The last thing a boy like Ambrose Hallward needs is for a professor to tell him to stop being soft.

His twin, Avelene, stayed back from the slab on Monday. The slab is hard for her, but the headstone wasn’t. She was crouched at a grave for the second half of the exercise with her mouth moving soundlessly, as if reading the memory of the stone itself rather than the dead beneath it, which wasn’t what I’d set them to do. Still, I let her do it. Magic is magic, and the students who break my exercises properly are usually the ones worth watching. I’ll ask her about it eventually, if I can remember.

Winterbourne. Sable Winterbourne is strange and I still don’t know what to do with her. She’s competent in a way that doesn’t quite account for itself. Something about her reading tonight came out too clean, too easily, as if she’d read the bone yesterday and only now was performing the part. I’ll come back to her too. Probably.

Locke. Harken Locke was there. Whether anything of him is present on any given evening is a different question.

The ferry hits a swell. I widen my stance without thinking about it and my thoughts spin to Saturna Greythorn, the new girl from the islands.

In the crypts she opened on a radius older than she was and read the woman in it as if she were flipping through a book. When I asked her how, she gave me a textbook answer that should have appeased me, but her eyes didn’t match the statement.

No, those big, bright-blue eyes had the look of a student assembling a lie. In the cemetery she opened on the whole plot before she narrowed, and I watched her full mouth tighten when the dead started coming at her from six directions at once. She was about to lose her grip, so I had to move her off onto the headstone.

My hand on hers. It was purely instructive.