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She gets up and starts to dress and once again I turn away to give her privacy, though there is something about the way she does it that I think she wants me to look at her. And while that might possibly be the case, I’m not going to risk it now, not when we’re in such forced proximity to each other. If anything is awkward, it could stay awkward for a very, very long time.

Hmmm. I put that away to think about later.

When she’s done getting dressed, looking ravishing as always, she says, “If you feel it going too far, lie down and don’t fight it. I’ll be back before it matters.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re bossy?”

“All my life,” she says before she turns and goes.

The twenty minutes without her is unpleasant but not disastrous. Though I can’t see the tether, I can feel it thin steadily as she goes below and then I feel the lightheadedness of blood not going to the places it should. I lie back on the pillows and I begin to close my eyes until I realize that could be a grave mistake. So I keep them on the ceiling and I count the ribbings until I lose the thread.

And all the while my mind is turning.

To what end is this situation?

How will I live the rest of my second life like this? It’s in no way a terrible outcome to be literally attached to Saturna Greythorn, but the whole reason I never kissed her, the whole reason I never succumbed to my burning desire for her, was because it would never work out. She’s my student and I would be fired for sleeping with a student, and as much as I’ve toyed with that outcome, I can’t risk that when it could also mean a spotlight on her. She’s a secret witch in hiding and the less eyes on her, the better.

Could that have been what Caranthis talked to me about? When she told me about what we overheard in the corridor, we thought that Caranthis and the stranger were perhaps talking about my research. But then again, they could have been talking about Saturna, noticing my involvement with her. After all, I’m not the only observant one on the faculty and Caranthis is as sharp as a tack. And this meeting I had with him, presumably in his office, the vision that Saturna had when she touched me…was he asking about her, asking if she was a witch? Threatening me? Both of us? Does Caranthis know? He certainly knows something. But that’s something I’ll have to figure out when I see him.

Either way, this tether means that Saturna and I will have to be together for a long time, perhaps until I die again for good. Our whole lives. Are we ready for that? Would we survive it? We aren’t even a couple, it would be like a forced marriage of sorts. And while I wouldn’t balk at it, it will definitely complicate things in the immediate future.

There has to be a way to snap the tether, to keep me alive while keeping us both safe and free from scrutiny. Perhaps there’s a spell that the island witches know.

I’m still thinking, rambling in my thoughts, by the time she comes back.

She comes in the room with a plate of the bread, the stewed fruit, two cups of tea and a hard-boiled egg, and we eat on the bed with the tray between us. My mind was so busy drowning in my thoughts that I hadn’t had much time to think about how weak I was, but now that she’s back, I feel my strength returning.

Of course, the food helps too.

“Right,” she says, when the tray is half-empty and we’re both working on the tea. “Well, now that we’ve eaten, maybe we should start going back to your research. Try and figure out why it’s something someone would kill you over. Tell me what you remember.”

I take a moment to gather my thoughts through the murkiness of my memories and begin. I tell her the architecture of the research as it sits in my head today. The Bleeding chart I had on the wall of my apartment, the one that went back to the plague years and showed the cycle not quite doing what it was supposed to be doing. The intake records I had copied from the Mortis registrar in pieces over two years, which showed an absence in the plague years no reasonable scribe-error could explain. The column of whys I kept at the end of my notes, because asking why made my brain work in a way other prompts didn’t. The conclusion I had settled on by the time I…by the time I…

The chain goes blank at the exact point where it mattered.

“By the time you died,” she says quietly. She has her grimoire out and is making notes.

“Yes. By the time I died, I had worked out that someone at the school was involved. Someone with Mortis-level access to the records. Someone with reason to want the pattern buried. I had a certain name I was circling, someone that made me suspicious but…I don’t remember the name. I don’t remember if I had settled on it or if I had three candidates and was narrowing down or what.”

“Man or woman.”

“I don’t know,” I say after a moment.

She writes that in the grimoire with tiny printing.

“What else do you have?”

“The Bleeding being off-cycle this year. Everyone knows it. My suspicion was that something at the school was accelerating it. There are three workings I know of that would do that. Some puppet-mastery if you were moving bodies that weren’t yours, energy-drain of a certain class if you were pulling through veil-adjacent material, and…mass raising.”

She shudders at that. “Mass raising? Like Hollows? Goodness.”

“Yes. And all three leave traces. All three are difficult to hide. I had been looking for who could hide them.”

“That narrows the suspect list though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It would…if I remembered what I had narrowed it to.” I let out a growl of frustration, angry at my silly brain for being made out of sludge. Who knew dying could have such an impact?

“We can work it out again. We have what you’ve told me, the things you don’t remember. We can rebuild your argument together and see if the name comes back.”