Academy of Infernal Arts

The table in the east reading room had nothing left on it but two stacks of parchment and the inkwell. Valentina had rolled the diagrams an hour ago and tied them with a black ribbon she must have brought from home, because the library only gave out string. "So." She squared her stack against the ta

The candle on the little shrine had burned down a full finger's width since Lilith took the stool, and the wax had run over the lip of the dish onto the shelf. Mona would scrape it off later, whoever Mona was. Seluna had said the name twice already, each time while shoving something out of sight wit

Aria had reached the bottom landing by the time I caught up, one hand on the newel post, swinging herself round it. Isabella waited by the outer door with her wings folded flat. "Finally." Aria let go of the post and fell in beside me, bumping my hip with hers. "So? What did you and Professor Blue t

When had she last sat anywhere without a reason? The chair had been grown, its arms curved up out of the terrace boards and were worn smooth where other guests had rested their wrists. Lilith had one leg crossed over the other and the cup balanced on her knee. The elves had given the drink a name fo

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,

Something moved at the edge of her sight, by the doors Cassius had just slammed through. A trolley rolled across the threshold, its wheels ticking over the grain of the floor, pushed by two maids in grey linen and white caps. The taller maid had a copper braid stuffed badly under her cap. The other

The cab sat at the kerb two streets short of Daniel's with its engine ticking over and its hazard lights going. The rear windows had fogged on the inside. I got out and shut the door, and the bang of it carried down the empty road. Felix had both hands on the wheel. His shirt was buttoned one hole o

The corridor ran straight for forty paces, its walls grown from pale heartwood and polished by centuries of palms. Seluna kept her shoulder to the left side, where the lamps sat farther apart and the fungus in the sconces gave off less light. Sylrena's apron strings brushed her elbow with each step.

The lift opened on a corridor colder than any of the others. By then I'd seen lockers stacked with binding kits, a lunar calendar with three dates ringed in red marker, and a break room where a vampire in a lanyard had lifted his mug to Lancelot over the kettle. This floor had the same drop ceiling

The table had grown out of the floor. Its surface ran with the grain of the tree, a single lip of pale wood that curved up at the edges to keep plates from sliding, and a dish of blackberries sat in a hollow the carvers had never cut. Morning came through the leaves above the long window in green pa

Morgana let the silence run. She turned the laptop a few degrees toward herself, glanced at whatever was on it, and left it open. "Well. We're alone, or as alone as this building gets. What is so important that it can't be said in front of two men who've held clearance longer than Agent Clarke has b

The step back happened before she decided to take it. Her heel caught the packed earth and she steadied herself, and the crack came a half-second later. Silence. Then the leaves came down. Not from the target. The target was gone, a hole punched through its centre wide enough to fit her torso, the s

The car slowed, and the plain hedges gave way to the unremarkable front of a building I'd already learned wasn't remotely what it seemed. "We've arrived," Lancelot said, which I could have worked out from the fact that the car had stopped. Daniel. He'd stayed behind at the house, and I hadn't seen a

Yareli crossed to the door and pulled it open. She stopped there, hand still on the latch, and looked up. Then further up. Sylrena glanced over from the bench and found the doorway filled almost entirely by Drakul's shoulders, the low ceiling of the entry making him stoop to fit under the frame. "Wh

The doorbell went, sharp against the quiet. Daniel stood. "I'll get it." I stayed on the sofa, nails already tucked back to human blunt, glamour settled over my horns and skin like a coat I'd learned to shrug on without thinking. Voices reached me from the hall, muffled by the door frame. "Are you a

The water in the leaf-shaped tub held the warmth of the stones beneath it, and Gaearien let her shoulders sink until the surface reached her collarbone. Steam curled off the edges where the great vein-ridges rose to cup the water. "Did you know," Elatan said from the next room, "that our daughter le

Daniel lost the ninth game in a row around half eleven. He set his controller down on the cushion between us with deliberate care, the kind that meant he was deciding not to throw it. "I'm done," he said. "Sore loser." "It's not fair, and you know it." He gestured at me with one hand. "You've got in

The elk went down before Drakul's swing finished its arc, the greatsword's edge parting the neck clean and sending the head into the ferns a body-length off. "No, no, no." Seluna dropped her bow arm, string still humming. "You do not swing a greatsword at the elk. You use a bow." "What is the differ

Tristan pulled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and turned it between his fingers, but didn't light it. 'Liam Dawnstar. I've looked into his whole life on paper. He has an engineering degree, was a foster child, has no criminal record and has no memberships or subscriptions to anything weirder t

The door closed behind her and Drakul did not move from the spot where he'd stood during the audience, three paces left of the threshold, back to the wall. Vespera settled into the chair nearest the window and crossed one ankle over her knee, spine loose against the wood, shoulders unhurried, as tho

Daniel held up both hands. "Hold on. It's nothing like that. We're friends." "We're friends," I said, in case flat agreement carried more weight than his protest. Tristan smirked around the cigarette he still hadn't lit and gave us a look that did the work of an entire paragraph. "Sure." Daniel's mo

Two weeks had softened the guest branch into something like a routine. Lilith knew where the sun fell across the terrace by midmorning, knew which servant carried the good tea and which one still flinched at her horns. Meetings came and went, formal and toothless, and the real conversations happened

Daniel had written the number on a torn strip of paper and set it on the coffee table, squared to the edge like that would help. He'd made tea neither of us wanted and let it go cold on a coaster. The card sat beside the paper, scorch mark up. "You could just text him," Daniel said. "I could." I pic

The door opened and Lilith walked through first, Vespera a step behind her shoulder, Drakul filling the frame after them. She crossed to her chair and settled into it, tail curling once beneath the hem of her robe before going still. "I hope your private discussion proved productive," she said, smil

The man rounded the corner a half-second behind me and stopped, head turning left, then right, scanning brick and shadow like he'd lost something he expected to still be holding. I looked him over from the dark. Late thirties, coat too thin for the weather, hands empty. Nothing in his posture read a

The council chamber's smaller sibling sat one level down from the main hall, a round table grown from a single branch, its surface polished to a shine that held the glow of the wall fungus. Lilith settled into her chair with her hands folded, spine straight, the posture of a diplomat who had done th

Daniel picked at a loose thread on his sleeve before answering. "I went to the club. The warehouse. Faith actually helped me get in the right headspace for it—didn't take much convincing, honestly. Half the AOR's already chasing shadows over you." "You told her?" The words came out flatter than I me

The letter sat on the writing desk, its seal already broken, the Conclave's world tree sigil pressed into green wax rather than the usual crimson. Lilith set it down and smoothed the parchment flat with two fingers. "The Queen wants a joint meeting," she said. "Us, the Solarians, all three parties i

The Pleasure Dome's entrance sealed behind us with a low resonant click, and the street air hit cold by comparison, carrying sulphur and the distant ring of the market quarter. My heels found the cobblestones. I straightened my necktie out of habit. Aria immediately spun to face me, walking backward

"Fine." Sylrena spat the word like it tasted bad. "Fine, you fix him. You better fix him." "I'll do what I can." "You better do more than that." Her voice climbed, cracked at the edge. "This is your fault. You did this to him." "You attacked me first, if I recall correctly." Lune's tone stayed level

I moved toward a rack that looked, comparatively, least likely to draw blood. Simple leather cuffs, a plain collar, nothing with buckles arranged in configurations that required a physics degree to escape. Tame, by the standards of a room where the far wall held something with hooks suspended from t

Quick update: yes, I'm alive, and yes, it's coming. Just taking longer to write than I expected (and turning out longer too). Mostly because I had to do some research for the sex scene. Which was harder than I thought, to be honest (pun intended).

Lilith tilted her head, searching the man's face for a hook to hang the memory on. Nothing snagged. "I'm sorry. Have we met? You'll have to remind me." The woman's jaw tightened. Her hand finally closed around an arrow shaft, not drawing, just holding. "You don't remember." "I meet a great many peop

The room they led us to smelled of warm oil and something floral I couldn't name, low couches arranged in a loose triangle so we could see each other without straining. I lay face down on mine, chin resting on folded arms, and let the woman assigned to me press her palms flat against my shoulder bla

Isabella waited at the edge of the Academy grounds, spine straight against the wrought-iron gate, the picture of someone who had not been standing there impatiently for several minutes. "You are late," she said, though her gaze had already shifted past Aria to settle on me. "We're fashionably late,"

The lead elder's silence stretched a beat too long, the particular quiet of someone calculating how many years he could stall before committing to anything. Lilith recognized the shape of it. She'd built her in-game empire on exactly that kind of silence, watching other players talk themselves into

We worked in silence for a stretch, the library's ambient hum filling the space between us. I made my way through the ambient mana section methodically, pulling the relevant framework from lectures and translating it into something presentable. My quill moved in a steady rhythm. Across the table, Va

Nyssa hovered at the edge of a terrace three levels down from the mistress's quarters, wings cutting neat figures in the evening air. The bioluminescent fungi along the wood grain cast enough light to navigate by, and the tree's architecture was laughably simple once you understood how the branches

Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a heads up. I've been hitting a bit of a creative wall lately, and writing this month has felt tougher than usual. I think my mind just needs a proper reset. So I'm going to take things slow until next Wednesday and keep the writing to a minimum for now. There m

The path back to the settlement centre cut between two cultivated plots, and the smell changed: something sweet and wrong, like overripe fruit left in heat. I heard the group before I saw them. A short line of mortals moving along the dirt track, their wrists bound together with a single rope. Six o

Seluna knocked twice before pushing the door open, and the room beyond was exactly what the rest of Lunethel was not. The quarters were functional. A map covered half the writing table, weighted at its corners with a hunting knife and two smooth river stones. A shortbow leaned against the wall in ar

The questions had covered considerable ground. Courtship customs. Dietary peculiarities. The mechanics of demonic hierarchy and whether rank was inherited or seized. Whether demons dreamed. Whether they grieved. Seluna asked the way she moved through forest terrain—each question placed carefully, te

The list ran to eight items. I read it twice, then folded it into my palm. Blood Sap, Ghost Vine, Luxapus Secretion, Nibbler's Teeth, Nether Ooze, Screaming Bark, Soulleaf, Strangler's Root. Quantities were modest for most—two vials of this, a bundle of that—except the Ghost Vine, which required eno

The carriage rolled to a stop and Lilith heard the marshland quiet settle around them—no birdsong she recognised, no insect noise, just the deep green hush of a forest that had been old before most of her demon lords were born. She looked out the window at the world tree. Even knowing it was there,

We left the alcove single file, the path too narrow for anything else. Aria fell into step beside me once the stonework widened onto the main terrace, her shoulder bumping mine. "Okay so." She grabbed my arm with both hands. "In the beginning I thought you were just, like, flopping the whole thing o

The carriage hit a root and Helena's portfolio slid off her knee. She caught it before it opened. "All I'm asking," she said, "is that you remember where we are and why we're here." Cassius examined his rings with the mild interest of a man checking the time. "You'll need to be more specific, my dea

The two suns hung low over the mountains, the younger one still pale and milky where it cleared the eastern peaks. The rooftop balcony caught the morning without shadow—the purple crystal pulsed its slow rhythm at the centre, and the carved parapet threw no shade at all from this angle. The green sp

The lecture hall had been warm in the particular way of rooms where the heating couldn't be adjusted and nobody had thought to open a window in living memory. Professor Tenebris's voice still sat somewhere behind my eyes, drilling the distinction between Transmutation and Manifestation into the soft

"Absolutely not." The words hit the table like a fist. Clement's vestments rustled as the nearest guard straightened, and the innkeeper found urgent business in the back room. Lilith's expression didn't change. She turned the cup in her fingers, patient, and let the silence stretch. "It seems I over