An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 10

For someone so popular, Hudson Graves was often alone. He disdained company the same way he disdained everything else, stalking around the campus like a tiger with his fitted peacoats and pointed stares. Trying to find him at first proved an exercise in frustration. Every professor claimed he’d just left. Every teammate claimed he’d called out of practice. Every so-called friend told her to mind her own business.

Ellory wasn’t desperate enough to show up at his house uninvited, so she kept prowling his usual hangouts and glowering at the unanswered text she’d sent him that morning. He’d left her on READ, as if she’d broken some unspoken etiquette rule by using his number for anything other than its designated purpose. The mass of contradictions that was Hudson Graves made it even more unlikely that she had truly been the author of the note claiming he could help her. He was as helpful as a match was to an oil spill.

Ellory had once thought him to be everywhere—especially places she didn’t want him to be—but it was almost dark when she stumbled over him in the bowels of the Graves, surrounded by books that lined his lone table like an electric fence. He was on the second floor, or the seventh floor, depending on how she decided to count. Here, only one level up from the basement she avoided, there were so few students that it was almost like a private stadium. The entire space smelled faintly of decaying flowers, a stench both musty and saccharine that burned the back of her throat and the inside of her nose. And it was silent, the hollow kind, a lack of sound that made sure its absence was felt. The carpeting even swallowed any noise from her heeled ankle boots.

A chill caressed her spine. She kept walking.

But when Ellory pushed a column of books to the side to reveal Hudson, she had to stop and stare. He wore a lemon-yellow knit sweater that was the loudest thing in the building. Perhaps the loudest thing she’d ever witnessed.

“Surely,” Hudson said without glancing up from the book he was reading, “you have better things to do than follow me around.”

“How many rubber duckies had to die to make this outfit?”

“What—”

“One million? Two million?”

“—do you want?”

“You look like Arthur Read,” Ellory finished with a flourish. Hudson rubbed his temples, which filled her with a particular sense of satisfaction. The anger was still there, writhing like a nest of wasps, but she was never above this level of pettiness where he was concerned. “But I do actually want something, yeah.”

He gestured for her to sit down, but she ignored him to set the note on top of the book he still hadn’t closed. While he examined it, she examined him. He’d paired the sweater with neutral colors: a gray button-down and beige slacks. Dark crescents sagged beneath his eyes, and his light-brown skin was sallow with exhaustion. From a distance, he’d seemed intimidatingly put together, wrapped in the caution tape that was his personality and his book barrier. Now that she could see the cracks in his performance, it dulled the edges of her displeasure.

Hudson’s eyebrows were pinched as he flicked the note away. “Help with what?”

“Why don’t you tell me ?”

Her tone made his brows pinch further. “It sounds like you’re accusing me of something, but I didn’t buy tickets to this circus. Can you translate the clownery into words I can understand?”

Ellory sat down. The crumpled note now hung off one of the cleared edges of the table, and she grabbed it before it could fall. She spread it out between them, but Hudson didn’t even bother to look at it this time.

“You’ve been playing tricks on me all year,” she snapped, “and I want it to stop. This isn’t—”

“I didn’t write this,” said Hudson. “And I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His face and tone held no hint of deception. Ellory narrowed her eyes.

“Morgan, I have to do research for my thesis, so—”

Ellory snatched the book out from in front of him before he could use it to ignore her again. She heard him call her unfathomably juvenile as she left the table, but he still followed her all the way to a study room. As she stepped across the threshold of the one closest to the elevators, she felt it: the sense that she’d been in this room before, even though she couldn’t remember studying on this floor at all. The lighting shifted from midafternoon to late night and back again, as if another version of the room were trying to press in on her. Resigned to his fate, Hudson had closed the glass door behind them, leaving them in a space empty of anything but a round table and enough chairs for a small group. Alabaster walls enclosed them on three sides.

It was all so suddenly familiar that Ellory thought she might be sick.

“All right, Morgan,” Hudson said, folding his arms over his bright yellow sweater. “You have my attention. What is going with you?”

The story burst out of her like she’d been waiting to tell it to him, a geyser of not-quite-coincidences and glitches in the Matrix, of déjà vu and dread and disappearing tattoos. Halfway through, Hudson’s posture loosened, his arms falling to his sides and that focused stare turning sharp with concentration. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t run. She would have run.

Ellory set his stolen book down on the table. “…and if it hasn’t been you messing with me, then I don’t know what to do or what’s going on. It’s too early in the school year for a psychotic break, don’t you think?”

Hudson said nothing for such a long time that Ellory grew self-conscious.

“You don’t believe me,” she sighed. “Why would you believe me? I barely believe me.”

“No, I do,” Hudson finally said. “I believe you.”

Ellory’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Hudson was looking at one of the walls, rubbing his chin like a cartoon villain stroking an imaginary beard. The sight almost made her smile, but shock had numbed her to anything but her own breathing.

“You’re one of the few on this campus whom I would consider my intellectual equal,” Hudson continued. “Imagine what it would say about me if you needed to be committed.”

That sounded more like him. Ellory scowled.

“Besides, you forgot that I was there that day. When you stopped that ball from hitting you in the face. The wind alone couldn’t do that.” Now Hudson was looking at her, his eyes the deep brown of burning firewood. “True, I’m approaching this with a healthy amount of scientific skepticism, but paranormal phenomena have been researched at all levels of society for centuries. And I’ve yet to find a rational explanation for…that.”

Ellory’s mouth remembered to form words: “Okay.”

She could think of nothing to add. She’d expected a longer fight. She’d expected to have to cite her notes. She’d expected…anything other than easy acceptance. His faith in her made it all feel real. That sour tang of dread returned. When it had been a thesis, it had felt almost like a game. Now she didn’t think she was wrong, but she suddenly, desperately wanted to be.

“Maybe this is all a mistake—”

“Come now, Morgan.” Hudson stepped close enough to back her into the table. But all he did was take his book and move away, leaving behind the faint scent of shea butter. “It’s worth looking into. At the very least, this might make for a more interesting subject for my thesis.”

“Magic? That hardly seems compatible with a degree in political science.”

“Divine right of kings. Occult sciences. Western esotericism. The bloody history of belief in preternatural forces that shape political systems and justify who gets to wield power within them is more novel than my original pitch.”

“Are you single-handedly trying to prove the myth that human beings use only ten percent of their brain by making sure ninety percent of yours is made up of pure bullshit?” But she was smiling, and not even against her will. Him getting something out of her misery was more acceptable than his belief, the kind of belief she hadn’t even been able to get from her parents as a kid or her best friend as an adult. “But fine. What do we do now?”

“I,” he said, lifting his book, “am going back to work. You can meet me at my house this weekend. My roommates are going to a matinee, so if you come around eleven in the morning, we should have some privacy.”

He left without waiting for her response, assuming—arrogantly but correctly—that she would agree. After all, it wasn’t as though she had a choice.