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“What should I call you, then?” I don’t know where my voice is coming from. It sure doesn’t sound like mine. It’s lower and steadier than mine usually is, and it’s daring him in a way the rest of me is not ready to.

“Baz.” A beat. “Vale, if you can’t. But I prefer Baz. Much better than Sebastian.”

“Baz,” I say, feeling the name on my tongue.

He closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them the gold in his eyes is glinting and there’s heat behind them, heat I feel down my chest, down my back, between my thighs.

Goodness.

“If I asked you how you really read that radius,” he says, “would you tell me? Not as a professor, but as Baz?”

“No,” I say firmly, my stance surprising me. My people-pleasing has left the building, apparently.

“Why not?” he asks, his voice dipping a register, becoming gravel and smoke.

“Because you don’t actually want to know,” I inform him. “You want to confirm what you already suspect, and once you’ve confirmed it, there is no version of this where I am safe here. So, no. I will not tell you.”

Something passes across his face. Not surprise. Recognition.

“I would never…”

“You might not. I hope you wouldn’t. But the Mortis would.”

He is quiet for a long moment. The space between us is getting smaller without either of us moving. I can smell the ink and the tobacco and the warm living smell of him. My own body is doing things that I thought had gone dormant over the years. The pulse in my wrist is hard enough that I think he must be able to see it, maybe even hear it.

“Greythorn,” he says. “I’m going to ask you something and I need you to understand that it’s a professional question.”

“So now we’re back to teacher and student? No more Baz, back to Professor Vale?”

A hint of a smirk flits across his lips but he ignores that. “The fragment you read first tonight. The femur splinter. What did you feel in him?”

The question is not what I expected. Not what did I know, but what did I feel. There’s a risk in answering it. I take a deep breath.

“He was starving,” I say cautiously. “Had been for a long time. He was twenty-six when he died. He had a…a younger sister he was trying to feed.” She felt like Morena to me, their relationship was close. He would have done anything for her.

His eyes flutter closed. They stay closed longer than they should. When they open, I can’t read him again.

“How did you know about the sister?” he asks quietly.

“I felt her. In him. The way I…the way you might feel for a loose thread. Why?”

He doesn’t answer. He is looking at the slab now, at the fragments arranged there.

Then he looks up at me and the professor is gone. The man under the professor is looking at me from a long way off, and he is afraid. With a cold slow dropping in my stomach, I realize he’s afraid of me.

“I need the splinter back,” he says, his voice matter of fact, all the low smokiness gone.

I pick it up to hand it to him.

His hand comes down to take it.

Our fingers touch.

And…

The crypt disappears.

Suddenly, I’m not standing. I am not anywhere. There is a dark that is not dark, a void that vibrates with eternity and something closing…a shape, closing around a figure that is in the center of the dark and trying to run. The figure is a man. Young. Not much older than me. His mouth is open and he is screaming and no sound is coming out, and the screaming is because the dark is taking him in pieces, and the pieces are being sucked into the unknown. I can taste iron on my tongue and something else, rust, salt, old blood…old guilt. Enormous guilt, a guilt so vast it has no end and…