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Camaraderie, loyalty, belonging—they’re what keep a cohort, this school, the whole kingdom waging its war against the Darkness together and functioning. Gossemort is a place to form bonds closer than family. It’s why it’s home. It’s why I can’t—won’t—leave Poppy out here to face the fiendlings alone.

“It’s not going after her that I’m faulting. It’s rushing out of Gossemort alone and without proper footwear.”

“Yes, Mother.”

A voice breaks through the woods, distant enough that I can only hear a few squeals of . . . fear? Pain? “No, no, please . . .”

That’s Poppy.

And then there is another sound. A low, predatory roar that shakes the very trees. My eyes meet Lonan’s. And we both plunge into the woods.

It’s a footrace through the trees to find her. We break through a copse of trees, and finally, there she is on the forest floor with her back to a trunk. And one of her legs is stretched out in front of her. She’s covered in blood.

Immediately the panic in me turns to focus. I am the person my cohort wants with them in an emergency, the one they will one day want beside them on a battlefield. Because in the exact situations that cause others to panic, I become a sharpened blade, as severe and exact as my scythe. Focused. Unshakable.

“You’re like this school, Vesper,” Poppy once told me. “A fortress. I’m pretty sure one of us could die and you wouldn’t shed a tear.” She didn’t mean it to hurt, and in truth, I knew she was right. I am too good with crises, too familiar with death to be rattled.

So with Poppy bleeding on the forest floor, I jump into action. “Lonan, your jacket,” I demand. He sheds the school blazer instead of arguing with me. “Search the trees,” I tell him as I press Lonan’s jacket to Poppy’s wounded leg. “It might still be here.”

I really shouldn’t be giving him orders. I’m making a mess of the chain of command. But he does as I say regardless, and I’m glad that for once he’d rather be efficient than argue with me.

“How much pain are you in? Can you walk?” I ask Poppy. Her burnished red hair falls chaotically around her face. She’s too pale. Her shoulders are trembling—shock. She laughs painfully.

“I’m all right,” she reassures. I don’t believe her. “I got it before it could escape. After it tried to tear off my leg.”

Poppy’s magic has never lent itself much to fighting. Every meiga needs an object to anchor their Light magic—an object of warfare that chooses the meiga. But Poppy’s anchor is only technically a weapon—a ring with a small box containing poison. So she carries a magicless bow and tips her arrows with her poison. Clever, but not as effective as my scythe or Lonan’s sword.

“Dead or alive, it’s not here anymore,” Lonan says.

The shadows are deeper now. The sky is nearly black. Poppy’s injury has bled through the fabric of Lonan’s blazer. If we don’t stop the bleeding, she won’t be able to stay conscious.

I tug off my cranberry school sweater embroidered with the Gossemort coat of arms and use it to try to mop up the mess of her leg. Saints, I can’t even tell where the blood is coming from. Poppy is pale and shaking.

“Can you walk?” I ask again.

She doesn’t speak, and her eyes blink too slowly.

“We have to go,” Lonan says, and together we lift Poppy and help her limp back toward the school. I pretend not to feel eyes on us as we cross through the gate.

Chapter Three

They told me they buried my mother in the graveyard of Gossemort. They lied.

Towering over the other grave markers is an angel of weathered stone. It hangs its head, tears from years of rainwater staining its cheeks. It holds its scythe like a shepherd holds their crook, guarding her supposed grave with empty eyes.

“She loved this school,” my father told me. “She belongs here, watching over you.”

I certainly feel watched. But it is no comfort.

It’s more like a splinter beneath the skin, digging its way into my awareness no matter how I try to ignore it. I know her body is not in that ground. She didn’t die. She vanished.

My father told me I’d imagined it—the day she disappeared. He said it was the desperate fantasy of a child who couldn’t handle the sight of her mother torn to shreds by fiendlings.

And though my memory of that day is hazy, with stark clarity I remember her holding my face, the smell of lilacs from her soap as she kissed my forehead goodbye. And humming—a tune I still find myself humming when my mind wanders.

And that is why I can’t shed a tear. I can’t grieve her. Instead, my heart is broken and unfeeling. But always, always, always, I feel her eyes on me, like a prickle on the back of my neck.

All students have vacated the cloisters. The courtyard with the fountain where Hugo and I soaked our feet like idiots not half an hour ago is now empty.