Chapter 35: Returning - Part 1

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 backwards without looking where she was going, her tail sweeping arcs of pure delight behind her.

"I cannot believe you," she said. "I literally cannot. The feedback chamber? The—and then the thing with the silk and the—" She pressed both hands to her face and made a noise that wasn't quite a word.

"We agreed not to talk about it."

"We did not agree to that."

"I'm agreeing now. Unilaterally."

"You can't unilaterally agree to things, that's just deciding." She pointed at me, still walking backwards, still somehow not colliding with anything. "You don't get to do half the things you did tonight and then just walk out here looking all composed and—" she gestured at my uniform, my face, my general existence, "—that."

"I know what I did." The cobblestones rang under our heels, and a pair of lesser demons moved aside without looking up. "I was there."

"Then you know you can't weasel out of it. Not for at least a week. Minimum. I'm going to be thinking about the leash for a week, Lily."

"Please don't."

"Too late. Already happening." She dropped back to walk beside me, shoulder bumping mine, tail still moving. "You get all shy out here like you didn't just spend the last two hours—"

"Aria."

"I'm just saying." Her grin was enormous and showed no sign of diminishing. She looked past me. "Isabella. Back me up."

Isabella walked on my left, her hands clasped behind her back, wings folded with their usual precision. She considered the question for a full three seconds, which was either fairness or cruelty.

"Your reactions are certainly amusing," she said. "The contrast is notable. Very controlled with a whip in your hand. Considerably less so when someone points it out afterward."

"See?" Aria spread her arms wide.

"I was hoping for neutrality."

"She's not neutral, she's just quiet about it." Aria hooked her arm back through mine. "That's worse, actually. That's more devastating."

The obsidian spire of the Academy's outer wall appeared above the rooflines ahead, its surface catching the lava-glow from the channels below. I watched it instead of Aria's face.

"So if I stop reacting," I said, "you'll stop."

Aria laughed, full and genuine, loud enough that a vendor two stalls over turned to look. "Stop reacting. You. As if you could."

She wasn't wrong. That was the problem with Aria, specifically. She located the precise angle where I was most transparent and parked herself there.

I exhaled through my nose.

"Let's just go back to the dorms."

*

The courtyard between the main building and the workshop wing had filled with the usual morning traffic, students cutting across the flagstones toward first period, when a folded square of parchment materialized in the air in front of my face. It hung there, waiting, the wax seal already broken as if the letter expected to be opened.

Around me, dozens of identical letters bloomed into existence over dozens of heads. A ripple of startled noise passed through the crowd.

"Ooh, what's this?" Aria plucked hers from the air and turned it over twice before actually reading it, her tail curling upward in curiosity.

I unfolded mine. Isabella did the same beside me, her eyes moving down the page with the same clinical speed she gave everything.

Due to escalating undead activity in the outlying territories, all students are strictly prohibited from traveling beyond the Ardorkeep city walls until further notice. Violations will result in disciplinary action and are undertaken entirely at the student's own risk.

Signed, Headmistress Valencia.

"Nooo." Aria's shoulders dropped, the letter drooping in her grip. "No, no, no. The hot springs. Minaria's hot springs."

"There are other bathhouses within the walls," Isabella said, refolding her own letter with two precise creases.

"The good ones cost a fortune, Bella. Minaria actually knows what she's doing. She reads you in like two seconds and knows exactly what oil to use, what temperature, everything. The places inside the walls just slap you in a tub and call it luxury."

I read the letter again. Outlying territories. Undead activity.

"Do either of you think this has anything to do with what we ran into at the springs?"

Isabella considered this, tail motionless. "Possibly. Though for the Academy to resort to ban rather than simply warning students, the situation would need to have escalated considerably beyond two wandering revenants."

"Or," Aria said, brightening, "some pureblood's darling daughter got nibbled on and daddy sent a very strongly worded letter to Valencia."

"Or that," Isabella agreed. "Regardless, the city will handle it. Ardorkeep does not tolerate undead incursions near its borders for long, not of this scale."

Aria nodded, already resigned, tucking the letter into her bag. "Yeah. Sometimes you just gotta remind the dead who's actually in charge around here." She said it lightly, the way she said most things about mortals and lesser creatures, and kept walking.

We crossed the courtyard toward the lecture hall. Valentina came the other way, flanked by two of her usual entourage, and passed within arm's reach without a single glance in our direction. No sneer, no comment about commoners or bloodlines, nothing. She simply walked past as if we were furniture.

Aria's steps slowed. She leaned in close enough that her breath stirred my hair.

"Okay, so," she whispered. "I think I had that backwards. It wasn't her doing something to you."

*

Professor Zellaris dismissed us with a wave, the loophole diagrams on the chalkboard already smearing themselves into nonsense as the enchantment reset for the next class. I gathered my notes and found Aria and Isabella waiting near the door.

"So about that trip to London," I said, falling into step between them.

Aria's tail perked. "Great, so when do we—"

"I'm thinking I go alone this time."

Her tail drooped like a rope going slack. "Aw, come on. I wanted to meet the vampire guy. Valerian, right? The one who owns half a nightclub and apparently thinks you're mysterious."

"Next trip. There's something I want to handle without an audience."

"Fineee." She stretched the word out, already pivoting, and then stopped dead in the corridor. "Oh shit. We forgot."

"Forgot what?"

"Isabella's punishment!"

Isabella's expression didn't change. She kept walking, gaze fixed somewhere past both our shoulders, the picture of a woman who had heard nothing at all.

Right. That was supposed to happen two days ago.

"Yeah, but then there was the trip and Valentina and the whole—" Aria waved a hand at the general chaos of the week.

"We could tell her now."

"But Moira's seduction lecture was Wednesday, that would've been perfect—" Aria sighed, long and theatrical. "Fine. Now works. Guess she dodged the best part."

Isabella finally turned, ice-blue eyes flat with resignation rather than surprise. "I am thrilled to have been included in this conversation. What, precisely, is the punishment?"

"It's simple." I kept my voice even, professional, the way I'd have delivered a project brief. "For one day, you act like Aria. Talk like her. Move like her. React like her."

Isabella went very still. "You cannot be serious."

"She's deadly serious," Aria chirped, looping an arm through mine. "I really wanted the Moira version, front row, full seduction-theory chaos. But I'll take what I can get."

Isabella made a sound low in her throat, something between a groan and a sigh that had given up halfway through.

"Hey." Aria's tone sharpened with mock offense. "Acting like me isn't that bad. I mean, maybe for you. But still."

"When," Isabella said, "does this begin."

"Now's as good a time as any," I said.

Isabella closed her eyes for a long moment, gathering herself the way she might before a duel. When she opened them, her posture had gone loose at the shoulders, hip cocked, and her voice climbed half an octave into something bright and breathless.

"Okay, so like—" she said, gesturing with both hands, the movement stiff and deliberate, "—I have to act like this for a whole day? That's so unfair, I didn't even do anything, well I did, but it wasn't that bad, and now I have to—" she paused, visibly hating every syllable, "—bounce while I say things? Is that a requirement? Do I have to bounce?"

*

The chalk lines needed one more pass at the northeast anchor point, the line gone thin where my hand had wobbled an hour ago. I knelt and redrew it, steady this time, while behind me the room carried on without any real need for my attention.

Aria lay flat on her back across the bed, legs kicked up against the headboard, tail flicking lazy arcs through the air. "This is gonna be so boring," she said, to the ceiling more than to anyone. "Like, what am I even supposed to do for a whole weekend with no Lily drama?"

"You'll survive." I checked the final glyph against my notes.

"I know I'll survive, I'm just saying it'll be boring." She rolled onto her stomach, chin propped on her hands, watching me with the particular focus she reserved for things she'd already decided to complain about regardless of my answer. "You better not forget. Next time you go, we're all going. Vampire club, the whole thing."

"I said I wouldn't forget." I hadn't, and I wouldn't. "Besides, you've still got Isabella. And Bellas."

At the edge of the bed, Isabella sat with her spine straight out of long habit, feet resting in Bellas's lap while he worked his thumbs into her arch with the quiet concentration he brought to everything. She said nothing, which was itself an answer.

"Right," Aria said, then twisted toward her with sudden purpose. "Speaking of. Don't think you're getting out of your punishment by just sitting there being all silent and mysterious."

"I was not avoiding it." Isabella's voice came out a half-step higher than her usual register, the words rushing together at the end in a way that didn't belong to her at all. "I simply do not understand how you locate the energy to talk this much, about this little, for this long."

Aria beamed. "Aw. I'll show you how."

I bit back the smile that wanted out and finished the last connecting rune, chalk dust pale on my fingers. The circle glowed faint at the edges, waiting.

"Okay, go do your magic thing," Aria said, waving a hand at me without lifting her head from the pillow. "But if you're not back by Sinday, I'm taking dibs on the wardrobe. All of it. The good boots too."

"Don't you dare."

She grinned, wide and unrepentant, tail giving one satisfied thump against the mattress.

I stepped into the circle and spoke the activation phrase. The room folded away in a rush of cold light, chalk lines burning gold for half a second before the world reassembled itself around me.

Daniel's living room. The leather sofa. The bookshelf with its spines out of order.

Daniel came around the doorframe from the kitchen at the sound, a mug in one hand, and nearly dropped it. "Christ—" He caught himself, steadying the mug before it sloshed over his knuckles. "You couldn't send a letter first? Something? Anything?"

"I would if I could." I glanced down at myself, glamour already settling into place, ordinary and human. "You know that."

He set the mug down on the side table, exhaling through his nose, some of the colour coming back into his face. "Fair. Still. My heart's not what it used to be."

"Your heart is several centuries more durable than it used to be."

"Details." He dropped onto the sofa, rubbing a hand over his jaw, and some of the humor drained out of his expression, replaced by the particular tiredness of someone who'd spent days at a task with nothing to show for it. "You want tea, or should I just tell you and let you leave again."

"Tell me." I stayed standing, arms loosely crossed, bracing without meaning to. "Did you make any progress?"