An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 41

The fire that had torched half of Riverside Campus was still the main topic of conversation at Professor Preston Colt’s salon. Sofia Aston and Percy Wallis sat side by side on the couch, having a conversation that made Percy’s face flush pleasantly. Tai Daniels and Cody Flores were in the kitchen, helping the cook carry tonight’s dinner—Samoan inspired—to the table. Professor Colt and Imani Khalif lingered over his wine cabinet, a glass in his hand and a borrowed book of poems in hers. Liam Blackwood and Farrah Mayhew had disappeared, likely to kiss in the mirror-lined hallway that led to the bathroom. Ellory had caught them more than once, and each time, the quiet happiness on Liam’s face had made her hurry away smiling.

With each passing day, she slowly relaxed. Colt was a phenomenal actor, but he was normal even with no one to perform for. He taught his classes and held these salons. He went to the farm for fresh cheese, and he did TED Talks in his wide collection of tweed suits. He no longer smiled like a man with a secret more substantial than his own intellect. And Ellory would continue to keep an eye on him to make sure that remained true.

In the meantime, there was no reason not to take advantage of the fact that his offer to work with her had very much been real. Maybe during her original freshman fall semester, it had been a means for him to watch her for signs of magical potential, but his recommendation would still open doors for her once she graduated for real.

He owed her that much.

“Hey.”

Ellory tore her eyes from Colt to focus on Liam, who had appeared at her side with two glasses of a dark liquid she assumed was brandy. His sweater was royal purple, and his hair was windswept, and he was smiling, always smiling, even here in the waking world, where they barely knew each other.

“You know the point of these things is to network, right?” He extended one of the glasses. “You can’t keep wallflowering. We can all see you.”

Ellory took the glass, but she didn’t drink from it. “Is it wallflowering if I’m in front of a window?”

Behind her, the sun had finally set, a half-moon taking its place against the navy sky. Colt had never planted those evergreen trees, since that conversation had been erased alongside the dreamworld and the Old Masters, but the bare branches that remained were beautiful in their own way. They were a testament to the resilience of living things, that they could lose it all and still blossom given a little time.

Like them, she just needed a little time.

Liam chuckled around his next sip. “Come sit with us. Farrah wants to ask you about your research project with Colt.”

“And you?”

“Me?” He shrugged. “I think you’re cool. Come prove me right.”

Ellory was no more able to resist him here than she had been in her dreamworld. She let his golden retriever–esque enthusiasm sweep her away, until she was sandwiched between Liam and Farrah in the dining room, deep in conversation about school assignments and bookstores, lacrosse practice and charity functions.

It wasn’t that Ellory had avoided Liam since destroying the Old Masters and putting the Lost Eight and the Graves Ghost to rest, but she hadn’t gone out of her way to fulfill her promise to a man who didn’t exist either. Her memories of what hadn’t been were as painful for her as the three years of time she’d lost, trapped in the tower of a lodge that no longer existed, and she already felt out of sync with the world. Tai had Cody. The other Godwin Scholars had one another. Ellory had a love that only she remembered and an aunt she spent half her phone calls lying to.

She’d started keeping a journal, just so the things she’d lost in that world—the memories of Miss Claudette, of the attack on the fictitious quad, of all the things magic had taken away without her even realizing—were preserved. She was strong enough now to pick which memories she wanted to give away to cast her spells, but it calmed her to know that something, somewhere, would remember what she couldn’t.

But Ellory couldn’t sulk forever, especially not in the wake of Liam’s innocent olive branch. She had freed herself—freed them all—so they could live a life that they chose. It was time for her to start living it.

After all, the pain was part of what made it real.

***

The journalism major at Warren University was a prestigious murder weapon.

Ellory stared in dismay at her blank Word document and the article she hadn’t written that was due to her editor in four hours. Boone had moved the deadline three times already, and she dreaded asking him for another extension. He was a nightmare to work under. Her writing had never been better, but her sanity had dwindled to frequent daydreams of slamming his head into one of the printers.

It was only three weeks into the spring semester of her freshman year—the semester she’d missed the first time around—and already stress flavored the stagnant air inside Graves Library. Ellory had witnessed six breakdowns in the hour since she’d claimed this table, and she was doing her best to avoid becoming the seventh. Two freshmen giggled their way through a muted video on their phones, and that was the only levity in the room. Every other station was packed with studying students, red-eyed and pale, carrying flasks filled with either coffee or vodka.

Ellory wouldn’t judge either way.

She returned her attention to the cursor that mocked her with every blink. Then a shadow fell over the table, and her article became the last thing on her mind.

Hudson Graves stood before her like he’d stepped from the pages of an airline magazine. His hair was styled into its usual fade, but the black curls that tumbled over his forehead were not, for once, dyed white blond. His natural hair color looked good on him.

Then again, what didn’t?

“Can I sit here?” he asked, as though he expected her to stab him through the hand. “All the other tables on this floor are full.”

Ellory stared at him for a little too long before she managed a silent nod.

Every day. She had come to the Graves every day in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the man pulling out the chair across from her. Since she had switched her major, they no longer had classes together. Colt’s research project had become her new work-study, so she and Hudson didn’t run into each other at the coffee shop. And she wasn’t bold enough to take a car to the off-campus housing of three graduating seniors who barely knew who she was.

So she’d come to the Graves before and after classes, staying until she ran out of work to do and felt guilty hoarding a table from someone who actually needed it. All she had learned so far was that Hudson must have come to the library only to see her, because without their preexisting relationship, he was never fucking here .

Until now.

“Yes, my family donated this library,” Hudson drawled without looking up from his textbook. “Please stop staring at me.”

“Huh? Oh. No, that’s not—no.”

He gave her a disbelieving look. “That’s not…?”

“All my eloquence went into this article, I’m afraid.” She rubbed her eyes and forced herself to focus on something other than how beautiful he was. How much she missed him. How much time they’d already lost. “And the only thing I’ve even written so far is Warren University .”

Hudson’s mouth twitched like he wanted to smile. “I thought you seemed familiar. You work with my roommate on the Warren Communiqué .”

“I suffer from your roommate on the Warren Communiqué .”

The smile broke free. “We do have a bet going on which of you will attempt to kill him first.”

“If he keeps going the way he’s going, it’ll be more of a Murder on the Orient Express situation. We’ll each grab a letter opener and just lay into him.”

She mimed stabbing, gratified when Hudson chuckled. There had been a tension to his shoulders under the weight of her gaze that slowly disappeared as he warmed up to her. He brought up Julius Caesar, comparing her to Brutus. She countered with the Praetorian Guard, as one who wouldn’t act alone without benefit to the group. They moved from Roman history to Greek plays to Egyptian gods, their work forgotten on the table.

Ellory felt it then: That push and pull. That give-and-take. That sense of a circuit completing, igniting a spinous connection between them. Sometimes, love was driving through the night to reach the other’s side or the gift of a warm coat in a cold orchard. Sometimes, love was heated touches and whispered secrets and fighting through the dark to be each other’s light. But sometimes love was an exposed wound, combative and destructive and obsessive in its desire to be expressed.

She and Hudson were not in love, not yet, perhaps not ever. But she had chosen him again and again. He had found her again and again. Their lives were meant to be intertwined. In a volatile world, they were the only thing that made sense.

I’ve had the honor of watching you fall in love with me again and again. Give me the chance to fall in love with you a second time.

“I have to finish this article,” she said reluctantly. An hour had passed, and he was keeping a list of her favorite Hercule Poirot mysteries, but if she missed her deadline, then Boone might stab her . “But would it be inappropriate of me to ask for your number?”

His eyes sparkled. “So you can find out what I think of the books?”

“Something like that.”

Hudson wrote it down on a new sheet of paper, which he pushed across the table. When Ellory reached for it, their fingers brushed, and she felt a spark that left her breathless. He was still staring at her when she looked up, searching for something she knew he wouldn’t find. Not yet.

But as she wrote her number under his, tore the page in half, and passed it back, she thought, Maybe someday .

Of all the things reclaiming her magic had given her, perhaps the most important of them all was time . Magic had ensured Aunt Carol always had her heart medication, pills duplicated whenever she ran low, so they could both reduce their hours at work. Magic had eased her financial insecurity, credit cards paid off with money they didn’t really have, so she had the space to do things she wanted instead of only things that she needed. That was all true power was, in the end: the ability to live a comfortable life.

Without the Old Masters, those who remembered that magic existed had been reduced to the circle of students she had rescued from the tower. They had yet to gather in the same room again, but sometimes Tai, Cody, and Ellory would drive out to the farthest reaches of Hartford and practice what little wild magic they had retained. Sharing their magic for stronger spells. Collapsing in joyful exhaustion to watch the passing clouds. If Sofia, David, Imani, or Ximena still used their powers, Ellory wasn’t close enough to them to ask.

But they were free to make that choice. The ghosts that had once haunted the campus were finally at rest. And no one but her editor had tried to kill her lately.

For now, that was enough.

“Maybe I’ll see you around, Morgan,” Hudson said, packing up his bag and lingering by the table.

“Ellory,” she said. “You can call me Ellory , if you want.”

“All right.”

There was a wrinkle between his eyebrows, like he wanted to say something more but couldn’t imagine what that something more would be. He visibly let it go and wandered off with a wave that was only slightly awkward coming from him.

Minutes later, her phone buzzed on the table, and the screen flashed with his name.

graves: hello ellory

Her smile widened from the rush of new beginnings. Someday had never felt so close.

Just like that, her writer’s block cleared, and the opening of her article poured out of her like something from a partially remembered dream: WARREN UNIVERSITY STARTED AS A JOKE…