An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 24

Omicron Chi Lambda partied like they had invented it. Liam helped Ellory out of the passenger seat, and her sneakers immediately flattened an abandoned water bottle that shot brown droplets of liquor into the gutter. She had worn a mesh corset top, black with pale pink floral embroidery, and a pair of high-waisted black jeans. Her shoulders and belly button were freezing, but Tai had assured her that the inside of the frat house would be like a furnace.

As was often the case with these things, Tai was right.

Music loud enough to make the walls tremble. Writhing bodies slick with sweat. Alcohol bottles on windowsills and side tables. It would have reminded Ellory of the night that she and Liam had met, but this was less of a party and more of a rager. Just squeezing through the crowds without ending up wearing someone’s mixed drink was an exercise in patience. Only Liam’s hand on the small of her back, the tips of his fingers barely dipping into her pocket, kept her from getting lost in the crowded, cavernous room.

A week had passed since she had unofficially joined the paper. She hadn’t heard from Stasie, and she hadn’t reached out to Hudson, but she had heard from Liam, and his texts had pulled her from her frustrated spirals. She had continued to scour books and search the internet for further signs of the Old Masters, she continued to watch her surroundings for looming enforcers and glitches in the Matrix, but it was nice to have Liam remind her that there was more to her life than school and murders.

She wished only that it were enough to settle her conflicted heart.

This was their second date, and Ellory still felt like she was playing a role—and she couldn’t decide if she wanted to commit to it or not. She hardly qualified as a prize to be shown off, but there had to be a reason he took her out only in group settings. It felt performative rather than intimate, and yet she always had a good time.

Maybe her mind was trying to ruin this for her. It wouldn’t be the first time.

They pinballed from group to group until Liam introduced her to the entire lacrosse team, all carbon copies of his build and charisma. “This is my…Ellory,” he said, and it was only a little awkward. Ellory knew the polite thing to do would be to correct him with a decisive label, but she also didn’t want to define the relationship because it was the polite thing to do . Instead, she told a man who identified himself as Beau that she liked his shirt.

“Oh, thanks,” he said, beaming down at the photo of a slumbering toddler on the front. “That’s my kid. Do you want see a better picture?”

Six pictures in, Liam slipped away to find them some drinks. Eleven pictures in, Ellory’s curiosity won out.

“Do I pass muster?” she asked, winding a curl around one of her fingers. It sprang free, framing her face. “I know Liam’s dated the likes of Graveses and Mayhews, so I’m a little worried.”

Beau’s eyes flicked to her and then at something over her shoulder. He cleared his throat. “That was a while ago. Blackwood talks about you all the time.”

Joy bloomed in her chest. Still, she turned, catching sight of a woman standing near the wall with a Corona bottle in one hand and her phone in the other.

Her skin was unseasonably golden, blessed with the color of an increasingly invisible sun, and long lashes surrounded eyes the pale gray of mountain mist. Reddish-brown hair framed her face in a tight curl pattern, decorated by a silver headband that matched her sparkling long-sleeved top. Her earrings dangled toward her shoulders, shaped like guillotines.

Their eyes met, and Ellory’s cheeks grew hot.

“Is that her?” she asked without daring to be the first to look away. “His ex?”

“I don’t want to be involved,” said Beau. “But yes. Can I interest you in more pictures?”

Ellory wandered toward the woman—the Mayhew—before he had even finished speaking. With everything going on, she had completely forgotten to track her down, and now the party was secondary, another step on the inevitable path to truth.

To her credit, the Mayhew woman didn’t pretend she hadn’t been staring. Those gray eyes watched unblinkingly as Ellory cut through the crowd, her eyebrows lowering as the space between them shrank. She put her phone away and took a sip of her Corona, leaving a perfect smudge of pomegranate lipstick.

“Hey,” said Ellory.

The woman smiled. “Hey.”

She introduced herself as Farrah Mayhew. Her handshake was firm but not combative. Her nails were painted lily pad green. She was strikingly pretty in a way that made Ellory glad she had missed the entirety of her relationship with Liam. Independently, Farrah and Liam drew helpless longing gazes. Together, they must have been devastating. A bisexual’s nightmare. Ellory would never have gotten any studying done.

“So, you and Liam, huh?” said Farrah. “Ugh, sorry.” She ducked her head, her cheeks alight with a rose-petal blush. “Asking about it probably makes me seem like an asshole, but I can’t help myself.”

“I’m willing to abandon decorum if you are,” Ellory said. “Though my question is going to be a lot more morbid.”

Farrah took another sip of her Corona. “I’m intrigued.” But clearly, whatever Farrah had expected her to bring up, Malcolm Mayhew wasn’t it. She blinked twice, birdlike, eyebrows knitting together. “My uncle? How do you know about that?”

“I stumbled on the wrong article at the right time, I guess. Do you know much about him?”

Farrah’s mouth opened and closed. She looked down at her bottle, thumb circling the lip. “Not really. He was my father’s younger brother. He died here on campus.” Her wry smile returned. “I’m a legacy student. That’s not the legacy I would’ve chosen, but at least you’re only the second person to ask me about it this week.”

“Second?”

But even as Ellory’s lips formed the question, she knew down to her marrow what—who—had gotten to Farrah first:

“Hudson Graves.”

***

The next two hours of the party passed in a blur. Ellory stayed close to Liam’s side, laughing at jokes she couldn’t remember and cheering at stunts that needed the intervention of the campus police. Every so often, she would feel eyes on her, but the sensation would fade as soon as she turned around. Farrah had left the party. Beau was playing a drinking game. Liam crowded Ellory against a kitchen counter and kissed her with a mouth that tasted of vodka shooters and weed. Even though she’d been drinking nothing but soda, she felt drunk on his attention.

Ellory retouched her hair and makeup in an upstairs bedroom, her skin slick with sweat. There was a vanity mirror here, plus a desk that was laden with abandoned beer cans, makeup-remover wipes, and a snapped nail file from those who had used the room before her. Under the lights, her dark skin glowed and the bags beneath her eyes looked deeper, like gathered shadows at the bottom of lit basement stairs. She should have gotten Farrah Mayhew’s number before she’d left, or at least asked her more questions. Maybe she could get her info from Liam on their way home, but that might invite unwanted questions.

She blotted her lipstick with a tissue, frowning into the mirror. Or maybe she could demand answers from Hudson, since he’d already done her work for her.

It always came down to Hudson Graves in the end.

Ellory nodded a greeting as she passed another woman stumbling in with a mascara wand held aloft. But she had taken only two steps when a sudden flurry of cool air through the hallway drew her into another room. This open bedroom was dark and sparsely decorated, but sheer curtains ruffled in the same breeze that offered her scant relief from the heat of the party. She should have gone back downstairs—where she’d left Liam in the kitchen playing bartender, even though the only mixed drink in his repertoire was a rum and coke—but she felt like a cartoon animal following a scent trail to a freshly baked pie on a windowsill. There was nowhere to go but forward. There was nothing to see but what lay at the end of that trail.

Hudson Graves glanced back at her from a balcony railing.

“Of course,” they said as one.

With his back against the handrail, his face was cast in shadow and impossible to read. The sky was the silver blue of a swordfish, stars like spilled glitter across the dark. This hidden balcony was barely large enough for three men of Hudson’s size, but it was perfect for the two of them; she placed her hands on the railing with almost enough room between them to open an umbrella. Out here, the music was muted, and the night was cold. Hudson smelled of lager and shea, with the underlying musk of long-dried sweat. The glass door occasionally rattled, but a pleased sigh fell from Ellory’s lips as the chill wrapped around her sweaty body.

Somewhere, she heard the sharp cry of an owl.

“There are owls on campus?” she asked almost without meaning to. Trees crept like burglars toward the fraternity, trapped beyond the white-gold circle of the porch lights, but everyone else was inside. Her shoulders tightened. “Is this frat part of—”

“I’ve been to parties here before, and I’ve never seen anything strange,” said Hudson, before she could work herself into a panic. “I think there have always been owls by Warren. Owls and crows. Hummingbirds and robins.”

Releasing a slow, meditative breath, Ellory chanced a look at him. Beneath his peacoat, he wore a mint-green collared shirt beneath a black sweatshirt with the Capricorn constellation in gold on the front. Under it were the words AMBITIOUS, RELIABLE, and HONEST. He’d paired it with herringbone slacks in a shade of paper-bag brown. He looked like he’d been on his way to a poetry reading and instead stumbled into this frat party. She half expected him to have brought a book.

When her gaze returned to Hudson’s face, she caught him studying her outfit with mild amusement. She curved her body toward him, her hip against the railing, and raised her eyebrows challengingly. “Enjoying the party?”

“I needed a break,” he said. He lifted a Keystone Light to his lips, throat bobbing as he emptied the can. Then he pitched it through the narrow crack in the glass door, where it clattered somewhere out of view. “Enjoying your date?”

She turned back to the empty yard. “I needed a break, too.”

Hudson made an understanding noise, which took away some of her shame at the admission. She’d spent the whole night feeling like she wasn’t having enough fun, going through the motions of a part she was the understudy for. If she’d asked, Liam would have been happy to leave with her, and maybe that was why she hadn’t asked. He was making the effort to draw her into his world, while she hadn’t even let him set foot in her dorm. Sometimes, the curve of his smile made her stomach swoop like she was at the apex of a roller coaster. Sometimes, it felt like she was just passing the time until they both got bored.

But Hudson didn’t need to know that.

“I met Farrah Mayhew downstairs,” Ellory said. “She said you’d talked to her about her uncle Malcolm.”

“Are we just going to ignore how we left things, then?”

Ellory had never thought of Hudson Graves as awkward, but a muscle in his jaw ticked as they fell into silence. It was like he was unsure what to say to her when they weren’t at each other’s throats. There was something impossibly endearing about it. She couldn’t tell how much he’d had to drink, but it had clearly taken a hammer to those walls he lived behind. He was an exposed hermit crab, and she felt, suddenly, that she could either watch him die or build a new protective shell around the softness he was showing her.

His hands were in the pockets of his coat, his face turned away, but she could feel him watching her in his peripheral vision. Waiting for what she would do next.

Most of the time, she existed in a state of rage, some of it directed at him. After she’d gotten over her hurt, she’d felt a certain relief at having a concrete excuse to push him away. No part of her school year had been normal, but he made her volatile, until not even she knew what her next move would be. It was exhilarating, but it was also exhausting.

She was tired of feeling angry. At him, anyway.

“I shouldn’t have said some of those things,” Ellory admitted. “But I meant others. I need to be able to trust you, Graves. I’m already questioning everything. I don’t want to question this.”

A light flashed in the gloom. Hudson pulled his phone from his pocket, the screen facing her. She caught the name—CAIRO—before he squinted down at it, frowned, and let it ring out. “I know Liam told you. About my brother.”

“He told me that you have a brother,” Ellory corrected.

“Cairo’s older by six years. I’m the only member of the family he still speaks to, and even then, barely.” He returned his phone to his pocket. The curtains swayed back and forth, shifting the chiaroscuro of his face. That muscle ticked again, like he was uncertain how much he wanted to tell her but certain he wanted to be heard. Ellory held her breath, held perfectly still. Then: “I don’t blame him. If I could get away from us, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah?” Ellory said, instead of I’m sorry . “Are they all as bad as you?”

Hudson chuckled at that, though it was a low and bitter sound. “Worse.”

He sank to the floor, his back still against the railing, his legs sprawled before him. Ellory almost joined him, but she assumed it was the cover of darkness and the illusion of privacy that had him baring his soul. She didn’t want to take those security blankets away.

“The first time I did magic, I was nine, I think…” he said without looking at her. “My father is a cruel man. His standards aren’t simply exacting; they’re impossible. Cairo and I are his living legacies, so he’s harder on us than anyone else. And when my mother stood up for us, they would have fights. Vicious, brutal fights that lasted for days. Weeks. One week, I just…lost it.”

Ellory could see the picture his words painted, of a little boy in a little suit—for she couldn’t imagine Hudson Graves in anything else—pressed against the wall behind his mother as his parents tore into each other with a violence at odds with their opulent surroundings. The swirling guilt and rage and fear consolidating into a desire for the fighting to stop. Cataclysmic magic that reverberated through his body, shattering the windows and drawing his wary brother from the bedroom down the hall. Standing there with glass shards at his feet and his heart beating out his chest and blood leaving narrow rivulets between his nose and lips.

And then darkness.

Her vision felt familiar, felt right . Like a kinship she had always felt between them had revealed its thick roots, and now something powerful could grow.

“When I woke up, they said I had imagined it. I could barely remember anything, so it was easy to believe all these years. Coincidences could be explained away. This strange awareness I have, this pull toward the inexplicable, that was just my personality. But when you came to me, when I started helping you, I didn’t just want answers for you. I wanted answers for myself. I just had to go home to get them.”

Ellory glanced down at him. “You went home?”

“Well, if I had magic, then I must have always had it, right? If I couldn’t trust my memories, I wanted to go through the family records. So I confronted my parents and—and it’s true. My father, my brother, and I can all do magic. And they’ve known since I was nine .” Another bleak laugh shattered his composure. “The worst part of it is that I suspected that something changed that year. There was a shift in the way my father looked at us, treated us. Everything got worse.” Hudson’s hand tore through his platinum curls. “Sometimes, I wish he hated us. It would have been easier than squeezing droplets of affection from a riverbed gone dry.”

The remnants of his story faded into the night, leaving the air thick with vulnerability. Familiarity shivered through Ellory’s body again, as if she’d heard this before. She had never met Hudson’s father, and yet she could almost picture a stern white man with his son’s dark eyes, demanding and detached. The ensuing silence threatened to choke all the life from this moment, silence in which Hudson could put himself back together and regret everything he’d shared.

Ellory’s shoulders curled in on each other as she opened a wound of her own. “I get that. I—to be cruel, my parents would have to be present. Since they sent me here, I’ve spoken to them a handful of times, and every time they say they love me. I know they love me. I just wish—”

“That it mattered.”

“That it mattered,” she confirmed in a whisper. “But I don’t even feel it.”

“I get that.” The echo of her words from his lips made another shiver run through her. His head tipped back, thunk ing against the balustrade. “I shouldn’t have told you any of that. I must be drunker than I thought.”

“You shouldn’t have hidden the magic thing from me in the first place. I would have understood. I would have believed you. As for the rest…I won’t tell anyone about your family. We all have things we don’t say out loud.” Carefully, Ellory sank down beside him. Their thighs brushed. “Is everything all right? No offense, but you don’t strike me as the kind of guy to drink to excess. Too uptight.”

Hudson snorted. “I’m not uptight.”

“You’re wearing a button-down to a frat party.”

“I like this button-down.”

“Graves.”

“I’m tired , Morgan,” he gritted out, gaze on the remote sky. “Of all of it. The pageantry and the exams and the fucking rot of this place. Magic is real, and yet, every day, we march a little closer to death, wasting hours and hours performing for people who will never give a shit about us. Who will lie to and use and discard us. I’m tired of it.” She couldn’t be sure in the dark, but his eyes seemed brighter than usual. “If my family had magic at their fingertips all this time, then anyone could, and we wouldn’t even remember . But with Cairo gone, I’m the one thing keeping my family together. I’m our only chance. Even with my faith in them shattered, I can’t live down the disappointment in my father’s eyes. I won’t. Fuck this, but fuck him most of all.”

Hudson’s breath caught. Ellory had closed her hand around his, and even with the full force of his attention on that, she couldn’t bring herself to let go. He’d gone as still as a startled rabbit, like he’d forgotten they were real people with real limbs. His eyes found hers, so wide that their whites were like moons in a penumbral eclipse. She looked back steadily, searchingly.

“Would it be so bad,” she murmured, “if we actually tried being on the same side for a while?”

“No,” he whispered back, “I guess it wouldn’t.”

His fingers slid between hers. Their palms kissed. Ellory studied the shadows gathered at the other end of the balcony, because if she thought too much about what she was doing, what they were doing, she would have to put a stop to it.

“I’m tired, too,” she said. “Going here feels like everyone was born with boats, while I’m only just learning to swim. The great lie of higher education is that getting a degree—hell, getting as many degrees as you can—is the only way to be successful. My aunt’s bought into it. My parents have bought into it. And here I am, killing myself for a piece of paper in the hopes of getting a job I don’t even want.” It burned to admit it, but he was burning with her. Their truths would keep them warm. “I don’t even want to be rich. I want to be happy. That’s what success means to me. But I just don’t know any other way to get there.”

“I imagine it’s a lot easier without some arrogant rich guy mocking you in your classes,” said Hudson, thumb tracing her skin in a comforting glide.

Ellory was surprised into laughing. “God, you were such a dick . Are you going to finally tell me why you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you, Morgan. I just had no reason to like you.”

“And now?”

“You’re fine.” A smile tugged at his lips. “I’m only slightly indifferent.”

“Careful. I might swoon.”

It felt good, to share a laugh with him, like they were inching toward something that had been inevitable from the start. His gaze fell to her mouth, tracked the path of her tongue as it wet her lower lip. Her lashes dipped to half-mast, the rest of her senses roaring to awareness. His scent, shea butter and bergamot. His touch, smooth, warm skin wrapped protectively around her hand. His eyes, an endless sacred darkness focused wholly on her. She could hear his every shaky breath, feel how much he wanted her in the quiet between each one, and the night around them tightened in anticipation.

She could imagine perfectly, what it would be like to kiss him, the softness of his lips contrasting with the scratch of his stubble. He’d hold her just shy of too tight, fingers leaving bruising marks across her dark skin that she would fit her own fingers to for days afterward, heat pooling between her thighs every time she remembered this moment. They would devour each other if they could, her body hungering for him in a way she’d never felt for anyone before. She would even let him take her right here, on a semipublic balcony, her jeans dangling from one ankle as she rode him against the railing with only the stars to witness. His teeth set in her shoulder. Her hands shoved beneath his shirts. Their primal cries of pleasure.

It felt like salvation.

It felt like a memory.

“I miss you all the damn time,” Hudson whispered. His words sounded like they encompassed so much more than their recent time apart. Her chest ached with every tender breath. “I miss you so much, it ruins me.”

“What if you don’t remember? What if you never do?”

“You’ll remind me.” She turned into the darkness, her hands cupping a face she knew as well as her own. Stubble scratched her fingertips as she tipped his jaw up until their gazes locked. “Hey, you trust me, don’t you? Try trusting yourself.”

He snorted. “Myself? I was a monster before I met you.”

“Finally, you admit it.” She waited until she saw a reluctant smile on that sharp mouth. Then her expression sobered, because she needed him; this wouldn’t work without him, without both of them together, even when they weren’t. “But you’re not that guy anymore. I trust you. We can end this.”

“Okay,” he sighed. He turned his head, pressing a kiss to the inside of her wrist. “I… Okay.”

Inside, glass broke, and someone swore just loud enough for Ellory to hear. The music paused briefly, then roared back in, disinterested in whatever chaos it was burying. Whatever that—vision, memory?—was, the details fled on the wind like a kaleidoscope of startled butterflies.

Ellory slid her hand free. It felt cold. “I should get back to Liam.”

“Have fun,” Hudson said evenly.

Something about his voice made Ellory want to snatch the words back, to linger in this little world, but the moment was over. It was enough to end on a truce, their weapons lowered so they could both live to fight another day. Besides, if anything happened between them, it would not be on the balcony at a party she had come to on a date with another man. Her hunger could not be sated at the funeral of her morals.

Shame heated her cheeks as she mumbled a goodbye. When she dared to take one last look, Hudson was sitting in the same spot, half hidden by the curtains, his hand curled in the space she’d occupied, his eyes on the stars.