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I get up and go to the kitchen and pour a measure of a dark spirit I picked up at the libations store around the corner.

The burn helps, softening my nerves, tempering the rain of thoughts in my head.

It quiets all the thoughts I have except one.

I must stay away from her.

Starting Monday, I will do my best to keep real distance between us this time. I don’t care if she’s hexed me or bewitched me or what, but I will stand firm. The foundation to stay away may have crumbled tonight but there’s no reason I can’t rebuild the architecture again.

She will be Greythorn. I will be Professor Vale.

That’s all it can be.

I drink the rest of the spirit down, relishing the warmth in my chest, the way it settles over my brain like sticky fog. I get up and for the first time since I moved to Sogliano, I take one of my chairs and wedge it under the door handle, which I lock several times. Whether someone was in here or not tonight, I can’t afford to be careless anymore.

Then I lie down in my clothes on top of the quilt and close my eyes.

Her scent is on my sleeves, on my hands.

Plum, aged spirit, saffron, vanilla. It’s on me tonight the way it had been that night in September, when I touched her in the cemetery and I had come home and tried to work and failed at it. It’s as if her scent is something I can never scrub clean, her essence now a permanent stain.

God help me, I don’t want to be rid of it.

Chapter

Thirteen

SATURNA

Ifeel him before I see him, that intoxicating presence he carries with him, and when he comes through the passage and into the crypt classroom, I know, before he’s set the leather kit on the slab, that the man who had said witch against my ear two nights ago is not the man standing in front of me now.

He doesn’t even look at me.

Which isn’t a surprise and isn’t new for him either. It’s just that after the almost kiss, I can tell this distance is wholly deliberate. And, frankly, probably for the best. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though.

He unrolls the kit with precision and as usual I focus on his hands, the deft way they move across bones like a maestro at the keys. Knowing he was a boxer puts the scars on his knuckles into new light. Knowing how his hands feel against my cheek, warm and slightly calloused, makes my heart flip against my ribs and heat pool between my legs. I should probably stop staring at his hands.

He lays the bones across the slab, a radius, two tibias, two femurs, and a scapula at the center. He turns to the room and begins class, calling on us one by one until he reaches me.

“Greythorn,” he says in a gruff, clipped voice.

I dare to meet his eyes but he’s looking past me, as if I’m in the back of the room.

He gestures at the radius in front of me. I place my fingertips on the bone and close my eyes.

The feelings, that texture of life comes at me slowly tonight. The bone belongs to a laborer. He’d lived with a wife, no children. They’d been together a long time…decades. More…forty years maybe. He’d died in a bed under an open window. There is the scent of lemons in my nose, suggesting he lived on the mainland coast where the citrus trees are prolific.

I open my eyes and tell everyone that he was a laborer and the years and the window.

I keep the lemons to myself. Scent, as I’m finding out, is not something Mortis-taught magic will produce. That’s a witch ability and one that could expose me.

“Adequate,” Baz says, and he’s already turning to the next student.

That’s it? That’s all I get?

Part of me wants to push back, wants to tell him the thing that would impress him. I want to prove myself. But the other part of me knows that he’s doing me favor and leaving it at that. At adequate.

Class ends and he releases us.