I didn't have to look up to verify who stood behind her. I didn't acknowledge him as he peeled himself from the wall he was lazily lounging against. I stuck my shaking hands into my cloak and turned sharply down the corridor, bypassing the gauntlet of the crowd, who were now looking vaguely confused and disoriented.
His magic—mixed with another warmly familiar one in sepia tones—reached out and blanketed the overwhelming patterns overlaying my vision. The world around me shook for a moment, then settled.
I wanted to reach for him—like a drowning woman being offered a lifeline—but instead clenched my shaking hands into fists and continued walking without acknowledgment. I couldn't allow the bone-deep feeling of relief and longing to settle. I had to hold on to the surge of vexation and worry that was just as thick and overwhelming.
“I prefer the lust version myself,” Constantine said, falling into step beside me. “That type of demon is most welcome, especially in the evening when the hours drag by.”
“You should be in class right now,” I said without looking at him.
“And yet here I am. You're welcome, darling.”
“You shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't be here.” He should be safe on campus. “I was doing fine. I am doing fine.”
I focused straight ahead instead of on the people who were plastering themselves to the sides of the hallway as we passed. Even at nineteen-years-old, Constantine often provoked that reaction on his own. He held a weird position in the compound—not quite ally, not quite enemy—and was only allowed in because of some deal he had made. I still didn't know what it was.
“Fine?” His voice sharpened from its default negligent state. “You can't hide from me beneath that hood.”
I picked up my pace. “I'm not hiding.”
“Your makeup is uneven again.”
“I’m not wearing...” I firmed my lips and started to scrub at my cheek using my shoulder, but then thought better of it. My cloak was made to withstand my paint temporarily, but it was always a bad idea to push it.
“Even on you, blooded paint streaks aren't appealing,” he said lazily.
“Noted,” I said stiffly.
He blocked my way, moving silently and quickly. He reached out and tilted my chin to the side, then tilted it to the other—the movement exposing my face fully to the light.
Magic rushed through me, and the paint that had been relentlessly pushing for release finally settled.
“Why do you keep doing this?” he whispered. “No, don’t answer. I know what you will say. What caused all of that color to explode with nowhere else to go, darling? You look like a horror movie that got the colors all wrong.”
“I got the job done. I saved another one.”
He examined me for a long moment, mouth tight, then let his hand drop to his belt. “You need rest. I just used an amount of muse juice that would make a politician weep.” He touched a small glass vial filled with sand that was dancing with delicate, spoken movements.
I forced my gaze away from the vial, and with it my yearning. Home was gone.
“I got the job done,” I reiterated.
“Did you?”
I created a memory ball of Liam in my palm and held it out to the side for him as I resumed moving.
Constantine looked the memory over, keeping pace once again. “Charming,” he said with disdain.
I rolled my eyes, but my shoulders eased at the normality of the statement. I collapsed the ball into my cloak for recycling.
“And the atrium testing is working fine,” I said. “As is the city. Will is going to be ecstatic, which he will be without your report because the progress is available remotely.
I stole a look upward when he didn’t respond.
“You shouldn't be here,” I repeated with less bite. I was far too hungry for the company to deny it when it was in front of me. “It's too dangerous.”
“I am a scientific envoy, attending a conference in Ravishkan for two weeks,” he said, voice regaining its lassitude. “You, on the other hand, are a terrorist, labeled as such by the Department. I think of the two of us, you have little to say on the matter of danger.”
His feigned lethargy couldn't hide the tight tension coiled within him.
I climbed a series of steps at the end of the hall and stopped in front of the lone door.
“This isn't Ravishkan. You are going to get caught in a vortex somewhere, Con. And they will throw you into a hole even I can't find.”
I was barely keeping up with finding the newly Awakened mages. I hadn’t even come close to locating the ones the Department had taken before I’d been expelled from campus.
“They haven't caught me yet. Just like they haven't caught you,” he said in a blasé manner that contradicted every sharp, pointed feeling emanating from him.
I opened my mouth to argue then shut it with a grinding of teeth. I reached my fingers toward the door and let my magic slip into my self-made lock—a trick the Origin Book, Ori, had taught me the first time I'd manually picked a lock in front of it.
Constantine looked inside as the door swung open. “Ah, the hovel. I've missed it so.”
“You were just here. You are always here, like you are worried that I'll disappear if you don't check often enough. And it's not a hovel,” I said, entering my turret.
Papers were scattered everywhere, like a bomb had gone off. I checked the wards to make certain that was the only result from the earlier explosion.
“No, you are right, of course,” he mused. “It's more like a shanty with a really tall roof.”
Ori was crisscrossing the room, flying through the cross sections like a frantic pigeon stuck in a too small space. Upon seeing me, the book dove into a downward spiral. It blasted around my head, making my hair lift in the harsh breeze.
“Charming,” Constantine said.
His lip curled further as he glanced at the foot-high, real-time hologram of Axer trouncing combat mages on the practice fields.
Adjacent to Dare’s hologram were two others that were currently active. Neph was dancing with the other muses around the flagpoles on Top Circle, a look of sad intensity on her features. Olivia was intently pouring over a text. Will’s usual spot held vacant white smoke—he was probably off in the cafeteria, but he’d pop up when he was in one of the designated observation spots, usually with Mike.
All reminders of what I had once, and had no longer.
I had known Constantine was up to something when his figure disappeared from the hologram batch this morning. He was almost always in his lab or with Stevens these days—both places that showed his holo.
“Your vocabulary is shrinking.” I locked the door and removed my cloak, shedding it heavily, like the hundred-pound armor it seemed instead of the nearly weightless material it was. “And you created that holo feed of your roommate—created all the feeds—but that one specifically so that I could, how did you phrase it, ‘learn new moves’?”
“A constant regret.”