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I brought Baz back from the dead.

I look down at him, at the ugly scar across his throat that still looks raw and healing but at least isn’t bleeding and then I start crying so hard I have to put my face down on his chest to keep from shaking apart, and he brings his hand up slowly, as if his hand is a thing he has to remember how to use, and he puts it on the back of my head.

“Saturna.”

“I know. I’ve got you.”

“I’m cold.”

“I know. We’ll get you warm.”

He frowns. “What happened to me? I don’t understand…”

I can only shake my head. There is so much I don’t know yet. What I have done to myself, what I have given up from myself to resurrect him, because witch or not, everyone knows there is a cost when it comes to magic, and the heaviest cost comes with performing The Darkest Art. I will know all of it in time, no one gets off that easy. For now, there is a man alive under my hands who was not alive a short while ago, and that is enough for me.

I keep my face on his chest and I feel it rise and fall.

“I’m serious, though,” he says. “What happened to me?”

I close my eyes, and I’m nearly falling asleep with exhaustion.

Still, I manage to answer him.

“You died.”

Chapter

Twenty-Two

BAZ

The ceiling has the particular ribbing of the fourth-floor east wing, which means I’m in a student’s room.

Which means something is terribly wrong.

I don’t move for a while. My tongue feels like it’s been coated in melted pennies. My head is so heavy against a pillow that I worry I won’t be able to move it at all, and there’s a low-grade headache pulsing in my temples. There’s a window to my left and it’s dark; a candle on the washstand across the room flickers low; and a beautiful woman asleep in a chair near the lamp, her dark red hair spilling over her.

I stare at her for a moment, needing the time to remember who she is. She’s gorgeous, voluptuous, maybe in her late-twenties but it’s hard to tell when she looks quite young and full-cheeked in her sleep, with her knees pulled up against her chest. The more I stare at her though, the more that something doesn’t seem right. Her pale skin is borderline grey and there are deep purple circles under her eyes. She’s partly bundled under a coat, but there’s something odd and familiar about that coat.

It’s a man’s coat.

It’s my coat.

And it’s wet with something that looks like blood.

I sit up and immediately regret it.

The room spins and my arms are stiff in the sockets. My throat burns, not just from the inside but from the outside. I bring a hand up to it and the skin at the hollow of my throat is a wet ridge, running ear to ear, a cord of tissue, and when I look at my fingers there’s faint blood on them.

What happened to me?

I look over at the girl and that’s when I remember.

Saturna.

This is Saturna Greythorn, a second-year student and suspected witch, a woman I’ve been getting closer and closer to since she started school in September.

But why am I in her room? As far as I know, we are close but not that close. I’ve been thinking about being in her room, thinking about being alone with her, I know that much, but our relationship has never evolved to that point. Especially with what happened at the formal dinner, when I nearly kissed her.