Chapter 42 - Part 1: Taking the Bait (Patreon)

The scrape on my palm from Kara's sparring floor had closed by the end of Alchemy. By the end of History, nobody in our row smelled of dust any more. Aria had our tray loaded before I found the queue.

The thing on my plate was the size of my fist. It had eight arms folded under a ridged grey shell, and a ring of black beads along the rim that caught the light from the vaults. A pale sauce pooled under it. One arm had come uncurled on the way from the counter and lay across the edge of the plate.

I pushed it back with my fork. It stayed where I put it.

"You crack it from underneath." Aria showed me on her own, thumb under the shell, a wet pop. "Then you just, like, slurp."

I cracked mine. The inside was soft and white and tasted of salt and caramel, and the sauce carried the warm, heavy finish the hall put in half its dishes. I had a second mouthful before I looked at the thing again.

Isabella had cut hers into even pieces and eaten four of them. She laid her knife parallel to the rim of the plate. "Have you finished your project with Valentina?"

"Almost." I pulled an arm off the shell. "One more session. The diagrams are done."

"And the lady herself?"

"Cooperative." I chewed. "Initially she wanted to redraw everything I touched. Now she brings her half on time and asks before she changes anything."

Aria pointed her fork at me. "She's scared of the grade. Totally. Everyone knows the she can't take a bad mark, her whole house's reputation is held together with tape."

"Spit and old debts," Isabella said.

"Maybe." I wiped sauce off my thumb. "Still. She isn't being obnoxious while we work."

"If she could only be like that all the time." Aria dropped her chin onto her palm.

"One can dream."

Aria laughed, loud enough that two girls at the next table looked over. She waved her fork at them, then swung back to us. "Okay. Okay, so. Undead. What are we doing? Because I'm not standing in a graveyard at three in the morning for no reason, Lily."

Isabella turned her plate a quarter. "Professor Kara said she cares only for the kills. I believe that is bait."

"Bait how?" Aria said.

"How so?" I asked at the same moment.

"She does not lift a curfew so that a class may practise on corpses." Isabella folded her napkin once along the middle. "The highest grade will go to whoever finds the cause and resolves it. The undead we destroy will be additional points, and one would need a great many of them to reach a good grade that way."

I put my fork down. "Finding the cause means going where they come from."

"Yes."

"That's more dangerous."

"It is."

Aria slid down her chair until her knees knocked mine under the table. "Can't we just, like, pass? Kill a few skeletons, get a nice middle mark, go to the baths when they reopen?"

"No." Isabella looked at her, then at me. "I am not going to settle for mediocre. If we are doing this, we will do it properly."

Aria groaned at the ceiling. I looked at the shell on my plate, the cracked half, the arm I had pulled off. Isabella waited. She could wait longer than I could.

"All right. But we are careful about it."

"We will be careful."

"Fiiine." Aria sat back up. Her tail came round the chair leg and flicked Isabella's ankle. "But if we spend a week poking round crypts for nothing, I'm pinning it on you, Your Ladyship."

"Accepted." Isabella picked up her knife. "Then it is settled. My apartment, after the last seminar."

"Can we order food in? Your kitchen has nothing in it except wine and that weird jar."

"The jar is not for eating."

"See, that's what you said last time, and then—"

"Aria."

"Okay, okay." Aria speared a piece of my shell and ate it before I could pull the plate back. "Different thing. Lily, are you coming to the market this weekend? Because there's this stall that does stockings with these little silver—"

I had my fork halfway down when Isabella stopped cutting. Her knife stayed in the shell. She was looking past my shoulder.

Aria's sentence ran out. Heels came across the stone behind me, unhurried, and stopped close enough that I felt breath on my neck.

"Nightstar."

I set the fork on the plate and turned in my chair. Aria and Isabella turned with me.

*

Valentina had one hand on the back of my chair. Her nails were lacquered the same red as her mouth, and the tip of one rested against my shoulder blade through the shirt.

"What do you want?"

"Good afternoon to you too." She took the hand back and folded her arms. "Our project is due the day after tomorrow."

"I know."

"And we meet tomorrow. Fourth bell. The east reading room."

"I know that too." I kept my elbow on the table. "Certainly, you didn't cross the whole hall to tell me what I already know."

Her chin came up. Behind me, Isabella drew her knife out of the shell and laid it down beside the plate, and the click carried. Valentina's glance went to it and came back.

"I've decided," she said, "that I will allow you to join my group. For Kara's assignment."

Aria made a noise into her cup.

"Allow," I said.

"It's a generous offer. My group will take the top grade, and you would be useful." She smoothed her skirt with the flat of one hand. "I don't say that about many people."

"I already have a group." I tipped my head across the table, at Isabella sitting straight with her hands folded, at Aria with her fork still raised and her tail stiff against the chair leg.

Valentina's mouth thinned. She looked at Aria the way she looked at a stain.

I smiled at her. "You're welcome to join us, though. If you'd like."

Aria's fork came down on her plate. "You cannot be serious."

I leaned across until my horn nearly knocked hers. "She won't say yes," I said, low.

Aria looked at me for a second. Then she sat back, swung one leg over the other, and raised her voice enough for the next table to hear. "Fine! Sure! She can join. The more the merrier, right, Bella?"

Isabella lifted one eyebrow and said nothing at all.

Valentina's face went through two colours. Her wings came half open and her tail cracked once against the side of the next chair, and the girl sitting in it moved her tray.

"I am not," Valentina said, "joining a team of peasants. Play in the dirt with them if that's what you want." She pointed at me, and the finger shook before she steadied it. "But don't come complaining to me when I overtake you."

She turned on her heel. Her heels went back across the stone faster than they had come, and two of the girls who had been watching from the column studied their plates as she passed.

Aria watched her all the way to the doors. Then she picked her fork back up and pointed it at the space Valentina had left.

"Is it just me," she said, "or has she, like, totally lost her edge?" She chewed on the end of the fork. "It almost makes her cute. Almost."

"She was perfectly unpleasant."

"Unpleasant lite." Aria swung round in her chair to face me fully, knee against mine. "So what happened? Between the two of you."

"Nothing." I picked the arm off the shell and put it down again. "Seriously. I don't know."

"Nothing." Aria drew the word out. "Babe. You stole her heart. You sat in a reading room with her for, like, a week, and you stole her stupid Morgenstern heart."

"Don't joke about that."

"Who's joking?"

"It is consistent, though," Isabella said.

I looked at her. She had picked her knife up again and was cutting the last piece into two even halves.

"Right?" Aria slapped the table, and the cups jumped. "Right! From the first day she only ever cared about Lily. Lily this, Nightstar that, commoner this. Then she finally gets her alone, one on one, no us, and suddenly she's bearable? Come on."

"She's just doing her part," I said. "That's all."

"She asks before she changes anything," Isabella said, without looking up. "Your words."

"Stop it. Both of you." I pushed my cup back from the edge of the table. "It's not funny."

Aria grinned at me. Her tail came round the chair leg and patted my ankle twice. "Fine. Fine, I'll stop." She leaned in until her shoulder pressed mine, and dropped her voice to nearly nothing. "But don't forget to tell me when you finally decide to fuck her brains out. I want details. I want, like, a diagram."

Isabella ate one half of the last piece and set her knife parallel to the rim again.

I let out a breath. The shell on my plate had gone cold, the sauce skinned over at the edges. I put two fingers against the rim and pushed it to the middle of the table, past Aria's cup.

"Let's just go to the Occult Tower."

Aria laughed and was on her feet before I was. Isabella folded her napkin and rose after us.

*

By the time Zellaris began wrapping up the lecture the diagram over the demonstration floor had shrunk to a single ring of red runes turning at waist height, and the top tier was already empty. Students filed down the aisle steps. Someone near the door was still arguing about whether "until death" counted for a demon.

"Go ahead," I said to Isabella at the door. "I'll be a second."

Aria hooked her chin over my shoulder. "A second like a second, or a second like you're going to stand there and flirt with the professor?"

"Like a second."

"Boo." She kissed my cheek and ran after Isabella before I could say anything. Their steps went down the stairwell and the door swung shut on its weight.

Since London I had wanted one answer, and Morgana had not given it to me. I went down the tiers with my book under my arm and stopped at the rail around the demonstration floor.

"Professor. Have you got a moment?"

Zellaris looked up. "For you, darling, several." She set the last plate in its slot and closed the lid. "What is it?"

"Can a mortal possess a demon?"

She did not answer straight away. One finger tapped the lid of the rack, twice, and the ring of runes behind her finished its turn and guttered out.

"No," she said.

"No?"

"No." She came round the rack and leaned on the rail beside me, near enough that her perfume reached me, something bitter and floral. "We have not covered possession yet. But since you ask, the reason is twofold, usually. Well." She lifted one blue hand and turned it over. "A mortal is flesh and spirit. Two things. The body is separate, a house the spirit lives in. Houses can be broken into. That is rather the point of my second-year syllabus."

"And us?"

"We are spirit. Only spirit." She pressed two fingers to her own collarbone. "This is a manifestation. A shell, cut to fit exactly. Pushing another soul into it would be like pouring water into a glass already full to the brim. It has nowhere to go."

I had my thumb on the edge of the book's cover. I took it off.

"So there's no other way a mortal could do it."

"Not that I know of." She smiled. "Then again, mortals are endlessly inventive about their own ruin. Perhaps one of them has managed it somewhere." The smile stayed where it was while her head tilted. "Why the sudden interest, Lily? You are not running some little experiment of your own, are you?"

"Nothing like that." I shifted the book to my other arm. "I read about possession in the library. Everything I found went one direction. Demon into mortal. Nothing about the other way, so I wondered."

"Hm." She reached out and straightened my collar where Aria had pulled it. Her fingers were cool. "Do not crowd your head with second-year material, sweetheart. I would hate to see you fall behind in another professor's subjects because you were reading ahead in mine. We will get there when it is time."

"I won't fall behind."

"See that you don't."

"Thank you, Professor."

She patted my cheek once and went back to her rack.

I climbed the tiers. At the top I pushed the door open, and from the stairwell below came Aria's voice, loud, counting the steps out to Isabella in a game I didn't know the rules of. I let the door close behind me and went down to them.