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Not that Luke finds tonight’s coronation anything other than a deeply solemn occasion. He has all the grace and majesty befitting his old life. I watch Finlay try to pretend all is normal, all is fine, while casting nervous glances at Luke as we walk.
Tonight doesn’t feel like Hallowe’en, but then when has Hallowe’en felt like a challenge to complete? As we reach the grounds, chilled October air numbs my face. I see the braziers from the year before, the students milling around dressed as various animals. Only there’s something different this year about the costumes. There are a great number of—
“Hissssssssssss!” comes a voice from my right-hand side. “Don’t go thinking you’ll be nicking my alcohol this Hallowe’en, loser.” Li’s face is a painted mask in a hundred varieties of green, and beside her Arabella is the same. They’re snakes — and as I glance between the braziers, I note they aren’t the only ones. The overwhelming majority of the students here are dressed as snakes. At least last year, Arabella had been vaguely similar, with shimmering green make-up to recreate the scales of the Loch Ness monster. But last time Li had been the devil, sauntering and confident andhot. I wonder if she’s secretly disappointed about this demotion.
“Why are there so many snakes?” I ask into the freezing night air, ignoring Li.
“Yeah, you think this is funny?” Li huffs. “We thought we were coordinated,” she says, indicating herself and Arabella, “but turns out we’ve coordinated with half the school.”
I can’t feasibly protect Luke if half the school wants him gone.Rory’s words from earlier flash abruptly to the front of my mind and, with the quiet unlocking of this memory, all at once I know. I know the truth. I know everything about this world, about Rory, about what he’s been doing all day.
“Snakes,” I murmur, and then laugh at the audacity. The students against Luke are snakes — and Rory has made it so.
Beside me, Li bristles. “At least I’m not a fucking squirrel,” she spits, turning to Danny. “And is heactuallywearing a crown? Here? He must be off his head.”
“It’s Samhain,” I tell her with a rigid smile, and it may just be the first time I’ve spoken this word sincerely. “The truth always comes out tonight.”
“Why don’t you have a costume?” Arabella asks in an accusing tone, as though I may have been gifted one and had decided not to wear it. “They’remandatory,” she adds, enunciating every syllable of the latter word.
But all of a sudden I feel an enormous sense of peace. Because while I’d been anxious as to Rory’s whereabouts, I’m now finding him everywhere I turn. “I didn’t get one,” I say with a shrug, and smile as I contemplate this — for what can be scarier to others in elaborate facades than in being yourself? The costumes aren’t a coincidence. The costumes, and lack thereof, are very much deliberate.
“Pretense is not a necessary endeavor,” a voice cuts in smoothly, “at Samhain or indeed any other time of the year.” Rory’s eyes slide across Li’s scale-green face, and that’s when I note they’re differently colored than usual. “I see you’re in your true form.”
Li shakes her head in disgust. “You bastard.”
“Likewise,” Rory says easily. And there is an easiness to him tonight — he’s remarkably more relaxed than I’ve known him in recent days. This is the grand finale, I suppose, for one who believes in rituals. For the superstitious among us, maybe there is comfort in the idea that Lochkelvin and her students will finally be protected once more.
I’m still staring up at his eyes in fascination. They don’t have the strange yellow tinge of last year, when he’d been a wolf. There’s no elaborate costume this time, either — only his eyes have changed, to a thick ring of piercing gold, his pupils dark and sharp. It doesn’t have the same softness as a wolf but an almost unnatural roundness with an edge like a blade. And surrounding each jet-black pupil is an array of dazzling colors — greens and burnished reds, and even fragments of dark blue when the light of the brazier strikes them a certain way.
He looks breathtaking.
“Your eyes,” I murmur. “What are they?” And the moment those penetrating eyes cut to me, I know. I know then what it can only be.
In a tone both fond and fierce, Rory answers, “An eagle.”
