My excitement dimmed a fraction when I recalled the actual reason for the trip. Linus wasn’t escorting a potential student. He was seeking more answers about my condition, ones that could reshape my future yet again or even cost me my life. “It’s worth playing lab rat to get a guided tour.”
“I planned on taking you there in three months, during the faculty tourney.” He glanced up at me then. “I’m required to participate each year.” Annoyance flattened his lips. “The university parades us around to entice new students and encourage benefactors to dig deep. The whole event is nothing more than peacocks strutting.” He shrugged. “You’re welcome to wait until then if you’d prefer, assuming you want to attend. You’re under no obligation to go now if you’re uncomfortable.”
No amount of flapping my lips produced more than a wheezing gasp. The faculty tourney?
When I was a kid, Maud had regaled me with stories about the complex and unique magics performed during the tourney. According to her, it was one of the few events where the Society played nice alongside vampires, wargs, and all manner of supernatural competitors who had only their tenure in common.
In a world where the Society kept us segregated from other supernaturals as often as possible, to an almost xenophobic degree, the event was legendary for its diversity.
For some, attendance was a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Exerting great effort, I muffled my inner fangirl for moment. “How?”
Campus security was rumored to be airtight to protect all those Society darlings. Students and staff were issued ID cards that allowed them passage through its outmost ring of wards, but that was just the start.
“We each get a plus-one.” His lips quirked in a knowing smile. “It’s a shame to let the ticket go to waste.”
“This is amazing.” I sprang from my chair and dashed behind him, bending down to wrap him up in a backward hug. “Thank you.” The chill of his skin seeped through his clothes into me, but I was getting used to the cold. “In case you can’t tell, that’s Grier for count me in.”
“We really have to work on your early-warning system,” he chided, but he didn’t shrug me off him. “There are requirements for attendance, but we can discuss those later. You’re moving along quickly in your studies. I doubt it will be an issue.”
I planted a smacking kiss on his cheek then returned to my seat. “What’s on the agenda for tonight?”
No response.
“I’m not opposed to working with Keet again, but I think it’s time we accepted that Julius is never going to play nice with him. Keet is too small. He sets off Julius’s predatory instincts.”
I cracked open my grimoire and thumbed to my notes on our last lesson. The pages were smeared with dried poop. I could read my notes through the flaking mess, but ugh. I didn’t want to touch it. Surely there had to be a sigil for cleaning paper we could use without erasing all my work.
The utter silence finally registered, and I peeled myself away from the grimoire to check on Linus.
Frozen in his chair, fingers pressed to his cheek, he stared at me like he had never seen me before.
“Too much? Sorry about that. I get excited.” Sinking low in my seat, I attempted to vanish in the face of his apparent mortification. “I’ll keep my lips to myself next time.”
“No,” he rasped, lowering his hand and shaking his head like he was waking from a dream. “Don’t.”
The shiver racing through me this time couldn’t be blamed on the temperature of his skin, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. “So…familiars?”
“Ah. Yes.” He corrected his posture. “Familiars.” He flipped a few pages through his syllabus. “Julius is exceptionally well-behaved, but you’re right. He can’t fight his instincts with Keet. After thinking on it, I don’t believe the issue is the typical predator-prey response. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not because Keet is undead. Julius might view him as a potential threat to me, which would explain why he keeps attacking him despite my orders.”
“Hmm.” For someone whose brain was working triple time, you’d think I could come up with something deeper than what sounded like me clearing my throat, but I was still hung up on the rasp of that single syllable: Don’t. “You might be right. I hadn’t considered that.” There. Much more focused and studious. “Too bad we can’t test the theory, but there’s not another familiar like Keet.”
The glint in Linus’s eyes betrayed his curiosity. “Have you tried making another?”
I almost choked on my snort. “No.”
The quirk of his brows invited an explanation I might as well give him.
“Maud was never the same with me after that. Our lessons shifted overnight. She confiscated my copies of On Human Souls and Progeny: What to Expect When You’re Resuscitating to Build a Better Ward and Our Homes, Our Castles. The last thing I ever would have done was create another.” I winced under the burden of memory. “He’s the reason she declared me assistant material.”
Linus smoothed his hand across the page while looking at me, like he might absorb the information through his fingertips.
“All my life, I thought it was because I wasn’t good enough. Now I get it. Or I think I do. He was a symbol of what I was capable of, and she must have been thinking ahead to how that magic would translate to humans when I performed my first resuscitation.” A hint of bitterness soured my mood. “That’s why she made sure that would never happen.”
Except it had, in Atramentous. Somewhere out there, I had progeny I didn’t remember making.
“Maud loved you very much.”
“She did.” That truth was the bedrock my life had been built upon. “I just wish she had trusted me.”
“We can’t know what long-term plans she had for you, but I doubt she would have kept you in the dark forever. She must have known that, even as an assistant, you were bound to draw attention to yourself. She’d seen your drawings. She knew your brain is hardwired differently than ours.”
“So what you’re saying is…I really am a freak of nature.”
“No.” He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. “I’m saying you’re a miracle.”
“That’s not how it feels.” I held very still beneath his touch. “I wish she were here, that I could talk to her.” I huffed out a laugh. “Or Mom. Mom would be nice. She must have had all the answers.”
No one ran that hard for that long unless they had a good idea of how afraid they ought to be.
“Maud was a packrat. She kept everything. There are boxes full of letters in the basement.” He stifled a laugh. “I spent an entire summer down there sorting through correspondence between her and Dame Hildebrand Gershwin after Maud received a wedding invitation.”
“Husband number eight?” That seemed about right. Dame Gershwin was a man-eater.
Divorce might be frowned upon by the Society, but there were no laws against marrying humans, fragile by comparison, who lived much shorter lives. Still, eight husbands in four-hundred-odd years must have set a record.
“Nine,” he decided after a moment’s pause. “Dame Gershwin wrote an inflammatory note about Maud’s taste in men back in the twenties, after Maud stole her boyfriend. Almost eight decades later, Maud wanted to throw the words back in Dame Gershwin’s face when she married the man, who Maud dumped after a weekend fling, but she couldn’t remember the exact phrasing.” His tone sobered. “Some of those letters might be from Evangeline.”
A hard clench in my gut had me sliding my hand back to my lap. “I can’t access the basement.”
“I’m thinking on some exercises that might help with that.” He picked up a pen and smoothed the page in front of him flat. “It requires some advanced techniques we haven’t covered yet. We can try in a few months, if you’re comfortable with that.”
A few months would give me a firmer grasp on his character, and it would give me time to decide if I wanted to unleash the secrets she felt safer locked away. “Okay.”
Pleased, he returned to where he’d left off earlier. “Let’s get started. Turn to page…”
It was going to be a long night.
The walk back to Woolworth House left my nape prickling with the certainty I was being watched. Most likely it was Amelie, but I had grown so used to Taz leaping from the foliage, legs scissoring, that it took a conscious effort to keep from scanning the bushes for her.
“I’m off to work,” I told Woolly as I hit the stairs and ducked in my bedroom. I placed Eileen on a stand I had rescued from the attic that allowed her to see out the window. Once I got her settled, I dug around in the top drawer of my desk. When my fingers brushed metal, I pulled a necklace strung with a dented brass button over my head. “See you in four.”
Mr. Voorhees, the owner of River Street Steam, had yet to let me work more than half a shift for him. He blamed me for the brutal attack on his daughter, Marit. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if his grudge came from him believing I was directly responsible or if he was grumpy I hadn’t sacrificed myself to save her fast enough.
My first encounter with Oscar had ended with him hurling a handful of steak knives at Marit. Not fun. But he had been a terrified little boy defending himself the best way he knew how, and I couldn’t fault him for that. Sadly, as the only witness to the stabbing besides the victim, my boss wanted nothing to do with me. Marit’s conviction I had saved her life was the only reason I still had a job.
Had I been dependent upon my income from working in the demo crew aboard the Cora Ann to keep the lights on and food in my belly, I would have turned in my notice by now. As it was, I could afford to work part-time, and it suited my schedule.
Linus got two hours, most nights, Taz got two, or she used to, and work got four. Homework cost me another two, but that still left me six hours to stream TV or hang out with Amelie before battling the last eight out in bed. At least tonight I was shaking things up by spending those hours packing.