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By the time she finishes I have taken us further along the sea wall than I had meant to and we are in the deep shadow of the east wing where the bone saints are set thickest into the stone, hundreds of skulls mortared into the wall at the tide line and above it, pale against the dark stonework, catching the red of the sky in thin little glints.

“Well, fuck,” I say. Frankly, the only reaction suitable for knowing there was a Hollow in the school.

“Yes. Absolutely worthy of a curse. I know.”

I run my hand through my hair, trying to think of what that means. It’s not like Hollows aren’t an anomaly here, sometimes they get raised, a by-product of sorts when it comes to necromancy. But I have never seen any here. I’ve actually never seen one in general and I’m glad for it.

“And it saw you,” I muse. “And it chose not to attack.”

“Well, whether it chose to or not I don’t know, but suddenly I was less interesting than whatever was down those stairs.”

“And you told no one except Avelene? You should have told me.”

She doesn’t answer that. She knows she couldn’t have told me. After all, I had been hot and cold with her since the formal.

“Yes, well, I’m telling you now,” she says softly.

I run my hand down the side of my face again. My brain is already putting the Hollow next to the chart, next to the missing bodies, next to the Bleeding acceleration, next to the open door on my landing. It’s trying to shape into something concrete. Whatever is pulling the dead through has started leaving things behind on this side. One of them walked past her in a corridor and looked at her and chose not to take her. Which means one of two things, and I don’t like either of them.

“Either whatever walked past you doesn’t eat and only moves,” I say slowly, “which would be new. I mean, I’ve never heard of a Hollow that didn’t attack. Or it was looking for something and you weren’t it.”

“What was it looking for though? Aren’t they brainless?”

I muse over that. “They are. Which is why it’s interesting to me that it saw you and then chose to go another way. It’s the choosing that’s strange here. Not only did it not attack you, but it chose to ignore you and go elsewhere. That’s very curious.”

No idea what it means though. Perhaps this one wasn’t as brainless as they seem. My first instinct is to say that someone accidentally raised one, perhaps even one of the professors. In that event, they would have put it back. Hetch told me that had happened to him at one point. But what if…what if this Hollow wasn’t accidentally raised? What if it was raised and…given directions.

But if that were the case, the directions to ignore Saturna also seem rather strange.

I hear footsteps on the sea wall before I see the shine of the lantern, someone coming from the direction of the water gate, unhurried, official. A night watcher making rounds.

I don’t think. I instinctively take her by the arm and pull her back into the alcove cut into the wall, the two of us pressed into the shadow, my hand at her shoulder keeping her still. The lantern swings past and the footsteps continue and fade.

Neither of us move.

She’s close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through the cold, which is something, given how cold the night has turned. The robe has slipped a little further off her shoulder and the white of the shift is bright in the dark. Bright and revealing, the cold making her nipples prominent. God help me, I can’t help but look.

She catches me looking. I don’t even have the good sense to look away, to pretend I wasn’t. In this moment I realize I’m no longer a gentleman. I’m not sure who I am really, other than a hot-blooded male with a soft, beguiling witch in my hands.

So I let myself stare. I take her all in.

The hair at the sides of her face is loose, framing her features like waves of shimmering red wine, and I want to push them back just to have a reason to touch her face. She has a good mouth, a mouth I have been trying not to stare at since the day she first stepped into my classroom, large, full lips that seem impossibly pink and soft and are quick to smile.

And now those lips are curving up at me.

“What?” I say, my voice suddenly hoarse, as if I had the breath knocked out of me.

“Nothing,” she says. “This just reminds me of something…”

I raise my brows for her to go on, and find myself taking one step closer so I’m pressed against her. “Oh? And what is that?”

She raises her chin. “When you called me a witch.”

“Hmmm,” I say, and now I can’t help myself, now I am reaching for her and brushing her soft silky strands away from her face, tucking them behind her ears. Her skin is cold and warm at the same time and her breath hitches audibly as I bring my fingers to her chin and hold her there. “Would you like me to call you one again? How about…sorceress? I think that word is far more accurate.”

“I don’t want you to call me anything,” she says and with a molten look in her eyes that I can’t mistake for anything else, I know what she’s asking me to do.

Being the gentleman that I am, wanting to give a lady whatever she asks, I oblige.