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He’s gone.

He’s gone!

I sit back on my heels and let go of his hand carefully, laying it on his chest with utmost care, as if I could hurt him, and his chest doesn’t move. It will never move again.

I put my face in my hands and I cry. I’m here on the floor of the Midnight Classroom with my lover’s blood on my hands and his open throat beside me, and then I’m twenty-one years old on the day my father first felt sick, then when Morena came home from school with a fever, then I’m twenty-two when they both died in front of my eyes and I wasn’t able to save them, and I’m here now, and it’s happened again.

Not again. Please, not him, not this.

I can’t go through this again.

I can’t lose someone again.

Not him. Not now.

Then something steadies inside me underneath the crying, something harder and sharper than grief, something that flares with hope. Hope is so dangerous, I know, but it’s there, little embers that might turn into something more.

Maybe I don’t have to go through this again.

My mother prevented me from saving my father and sister.

There’s nothing preventing me now.

Morena’s skull is in the ward under my bed, and the grimoire is there with it. The chalk circle is already drawn on the floor beside me, and the tower itself is a thin place, it’s why the Midnight Class is held here.

I take my hands away from my face and I look at him, still dead, still on his back with his beautiful golden eyes staring at nothing surrounded by an endless pool of blood.

I’m still the woman who was going to bring my father and my sister back, I tell myself. I can do now what I couldn’t do before.

I lean down to his ear. “I’m going to fix this,” I tell him, and when my voice shakes I say it again, lower, so he hears me wherever he is. “I’m going to fix this. You don’t get to end this like this.”

I kiss his forehead, his skin growing colder by the second.

Then I scramble to my feet, slipping once on the blood, and start running because I know I don’t have a lot of time. I shut the door behind me and take the narrow staircase down fast enough that I nearly go over on the turn, catching the wall with one hand and keep going until I reach my floor.

Luckily I don’t see anyone, for I’m sure they’d question the blood stains on my dress, and I let myself into my room. I quickly shut the door and go straight to the warded bed. The cloth bundle with Morena’s skull comes out from underneath in both hands and I kiss the dome of it once before wrapping it in a second cloth, and the leather-bound grimoire comes next, and I grab a small knife from my shelf.

With the bundle in my arms, I step back into the hall with newfound determination that might be delusional, but it’s all I’ve got.

Death isn’t the end, not for him, not for us.

Chapter

Twenty-One

SATURNA

Everything is a blur as I climb back up to the tower, the cloth bundle with Morena pressed against my ribs, the grimoire tucked under my arm. My thighs are burning, begging for me to slow down, to stop, and my breath comes in ragged gasps that sting my lungs. If I slow I will stop, and if I stop I will think, and I cannot afford to think just yet.

He has been dead for hours, but I don’t know how many. I know that there is usually a window when it comes to bringing the newly dead back, but I don’t know how long that window is open for. Has it already closed? Is it already too late? Will all of this be for nothing?

All I know is that there is no time to second-guess anything.

Professor Sebastian Vale is on the floor exactly as I left him. His throat and eyes are open to the ceiling. The dark under him has stopped spreading, and that must mean something.

I set the bundle down on the table and unwrap Morena. She gleams in the candlelight, already looking different than she did back at the cottage or in my dorm room. It’s like she’s finally…arrived.

I need something to hold her in the circle. The Midnight Classroom has veil-work tools on a shelf against the wall, chalk basins and copper bowls and a stacked set of small iron braziers for demonstrations. I take the copper basin that’s lightest and least used-looking, because I don’t want someone else’s workings to still be in the metal, then I bring it back and settle Morena into it.