Page 80 of Foresyth Conservatory
“Fine.” I sighed, knowing I was agreeing to something I didn’t fully understand. “I’ll bring you your pen. And the magick.”
*
Leaving the library, I felt both triumphant and frustrated. I now had a plan for getting a map of the tunnels—an essential tool for navigating to Julian’s coordinates. But I also had new tasks to complete, tasks that involved people I’d been trying to avoid. Both Aspen and Sequoia had become part of this puzzle, whether I liked it or not.
Julian the puzzle-maker. If he were still alive, he’d no doubt be giddy about the lengths I was going to solve his masterpiece.
Leone’s words sat heavy in my chest, pressing down like a weight I couldn’t shake.
You’re going to have to bring the magick.
I had wanted to scoff, to push back, to tell him he was being ridiculous.Magickwasn’t real. It wasn’t tangible, it wasn’t measurable, it was just belief. Faith dressed up in ritual.
But wasn’t that what I had told myself when I first arrived at Foresyth?
Before I saw Nina’s bloodfizzleinto the earth at the Tramping Ground, swallowed whole by the soil as if it had never been there? It didn’t clot, didn’t dry, didn’t even stain. It had simply vanished. And the air had hummed when it happened, thick and charged, like something unseen had consumed it.
BeforeThe Book of Skornburned in my hands, not from heat, not from any chemical residue, but from a warmth that implied the Book was pulsing andalive? I tried to explain it away but failed.
Before I heardhervoice.
You pray to a false God.
Sophia had whispered in my ear, her breath sweeping against my skin. I had felt it—felther—the weight of an ancient deity pressing against my ribs. I had told myself it was the elixir, a side effect, a hallucination. But it didn’t feel like a hallucination.
And Aspen—
I hated that my thoughts kept circling back to him, hated that my body still remembered the heat of him, the way my breath had caught when his fingers laced with mine. He had shattered his sculpture, and in that moment, the air between us had shifted. The pull had been instant, magnetic, unbearable. It hadn’t been fully my choice to kisshim. Something else had been at work, something that had reached inside me and turned me inside out.
And the creature in the tunnels…God, that thing. Thatthing.
I had seen its eyes, green and phosphorescent, filled with hatred and hunger. Not a trick of biology, not some undiscovered species. It was something else, something created, something stitched together by hands that should never have touched the canvas of life itself.
So, what the hell was I still trying to prove?
I could keep pretending that magick wasn’t real. Keep trying to twist it into rationalizations, into tricks of the mind and body. But deep down, I already knew.
The things I had seen at Foresyth—the things I hadfelt—they weren’t illusions.
They were reality.
And that terrified me.
Because if magick was real, then that meant Julian hadn’t just been killed by a human. It meant he had been killed by something far worse than I was prepared to face.
Chapter 27: The Lovers
The sound of cawing at my window ripped me out of a dreamless sleep. The crow was perched at my window, pecking at the seeds I had left. It jerked its head up, its black gaze piercing mine. I shooed it away irritably and reached for the tall glass of water on my desk. I took a long chug and then crumpled to the floor on the side of my bed.
You’re so close.My father’s voice caressed my ear as I clutched the glass so tightly that my fingers turned white. It was a feeling, not a thought, I realized. I honestly had no way of knowing how close I was to uncoiling the secrets at Foresyth or understanding my father’s dark origins with this place. But I had afeelingthat I was close.
And that had to be enough. So much for fact, not feeling.
When I had gathered enough strength and eaten a few more stray muffins from my bag, I made my way down the rickety stairs. I considered giving Leone the broken compass or the paperweight that sat on my desk as the magickal artifact needed for the map. But something inside me prevented me from pursuing that type of indifference.
If there was one thing I’d learned about magick at Foresyth, it was that it needed intention.
There was no truth in giving him a useless paperweight. It simply wouldn’t work. As magickally uninclined as I was, even I knew that.
