What if he knew, and he was going to let her die anyway?
Chapter 23
Aurelie
Despite Professor Sheldrake’s warning, Aurelie worked herself until she collapsed with exhaustion. With only her and a single guard on campus, she had free rein at the university, which meant more hours to spend on the portal. Even her uncle’s servants had been dismissed, unaware that Aurelie was staying behind. Because she hadn’t told them. A part of her was relieved: if she created any demons this week, she would endanger no one but herself.
At this point, the portal was little more than a wooden frame, the metal plates at last arranged in the correct pattern before it. Thirty-six large stone blocks were stacked in the corner, though Aurelie couldn’t lift a single one on her own. When they’d been delivered by four strong men, she’d had to lie to the guard that they were for Mr. Morel, who was replacing a stone wall near the cemetery. She would need to build a pulley system to get them in the frame, but that alone could take days. What Everard was asking of her was impossible, and perhaps that was the point. Perhaps he wanted to torture her, to prove to her how insignificant her creations were. How insignificantshewas.
She knew what Kiara would say: that it was time to involve the authorities. But Everard had warned her that if she went to the police, her uncle would die. She had briefly considered telling Daisy, who might be willing to help her. But she would inevitably tell Des, who would killherif he knew the truth. He’d never understand allher lies and deception, not considering demons had murdered his parents. But Aurelie was alone in this world, too, and she couldn’t let Uncle Leo die because of her own foolish pride.
Yule was coming in just five days, and Everard, in all his magnanimity, had set her deadline for the day after. She’d spent all of this morning working on the runes, her eyes swimming from staring at old books yellowed with age. More than once, as the hours ticked by with so little progress, she considered inscribing the runes without translating them—but something stopped her every time. She couldn’t forget Sheldrake’s sharp rebuke when she’d suggested it:One can’t teach common sense. She was desperate, but she wouldn’t give in to panic.
So far, she had put together the following meanings: ancient; thorn; balance; rebirth; shadow; renewal, soul; transformation; portal; broken. Still, every one of those runes had two or three meanings, and she could be translating them entirely wrong, for all she knew.
When her stomach rumbled so loudly she could no longer ignore it, she threw a sheet half-heartedly over the portal and locked up, heading back to her laboratory. She collapsed into her desk chair for a moment, only planning to catch her breath before heading to her uncle’s cottage for sustenance, but she’d carelessly left her sketchbook open earlier, and the drawing of the dream demon stared up at her with its awful, blank face.
Thesomniahad been trying to warn her about something; of that, she had no doubt. And given Everard’s connection to demons, was it possible it had been trying to warn her abouthim? Everard did want more from her, after all. Had it known about Uncle Leo somehow? The portal?
She closed her eyes and remembered the face of the little femalenatia, the way she’d said,It’s you. What would have happened if Des hadn’t slammed into her then?
She had nearly fallen asleep when she startled at the sound of breaking glass. Mephisto stood at the foot of her desk, next to the now-shattered jar of its seed droppings, blinking innocently.
“Mephisto!”
It scuttled away, tipping over its water bowl in the process.
This was the last thing she had time for. The seeds were tiny, as small as the radish seeds she’d used in Mephisto’s creation. She’d started collecting them at the time, afraid to throw them away for fear they might germinate somewhere and sprout into an unknown plant that would reveal what Aurelie had done. Now, it was more habit than anything else that kept her from discarding them.
With a sigh, she carefully picked up the pieces of glass and put them in her waste bin, then scooped up the seeds and placed them in a beaker. She took in the messy room, as disorganized as her own addled brain. Books and sketches were strewn haphazardly over every surface. A pile of dirty laundry nearly to her waist was heaped in one corner. She only had one clean dress left, and her remaining shift was so small it hardly reached her knees.
With another hearty sigh, she tossed her laundry into a basket and made the trek back across campus to her uncle’s cottage. The snow was already a foot deep and showed no signs of stopping. She hoped Willoughby was keeping warm in his guardhouse.
Aurelie wasted another hour she didn’t have scrubbing her clothing in the large washtub in the servants’ work area, then pinned it up on the lines there, stoking the small furnace to drythem. Her underthings and stockings hung at wonky angles, likely to dry as wrinkled as they’d been before she washed them, but at least she wouldn’t smell.
Afterward, she rummaged in the pantry and fashioned herself a meal of bread, cheese, and dried sausage, grateful the servants had left the larder somewhat stocked. Sitting in the library, she debated starting a fire but decided it wasn’t worth the firewood, considering she couldn’t stay and enjoy it. For a moment, she had an overwhelming surge of self-pity, her eyes welling with tears.
Miles and the Applebaum brothers had been right about her. Des, too. She was silly and self-important. She should have listened to Uncle Leo, made herself meek and pliant and married the first man to ask for her hand. She had brought pain and misery to the person she most loved, all because she wanted to prove herself right. And the cruelest irony was that Uncle Leo was the one who had been right all along: shecouldn’ttake care of herself. A few weeks unsupervised, and she’d destroyed everything.
But even as she had these thoughts, they rang hollow in her mind. Marrying Miles would only have made both of them miserable for eternity. And now that she’d messed everything up, the least she could do was make it right. She dried her tears on her sleeve and steeled herself for another cold journey across campus. She would have liked to curl up in her bedroom here, but she had too much work to do.
Wrapping her coat tighter around herself as she stepped into the snowy night, Aurelie realized how different it was to be alone by circumstance instead of choice. She enjoyed peace and quiet, but that was only because she was generally surrounded by people andnoise. In the absence of those things, Wisteria University no longer felt like the home she’d grown up in. It felt more like a graveyard, the buildings massive tombstones that loomed above her, a tiny mouse in a dangerous world.
Aurelie was nearing Easton Hall when she heard the sound of a man’s cheerful whistle. She smiled to herself. Willoughby, making his rounds. He couldn’t know she was still on campus; otherwise he’d insist on calling back the servants. But it helped that he was here, too, that she wasn’t entirely on her own. Across town, Kiara was cozied up with her family, preparing for Yule. It wasn’t too late to fix everything. Not yet.
As she neared her lab, she noticed that one of the other doors on the long hallway was ajar. She hadn’t bothered to go in these old, forgotten classrooms for years, having long since plundered them for her own needs. But as she went to close the door, she decided to poke her head in for a minute. It was possible there was something here that could help her, something useful that she hadn’t needed previously.
All of the old classrooms were dingy and eerie. They were mostly used for storage now, and in the light of her lamp, furniture hulked under dusty sheets like the ghosts of strange beasts. She heard a scuttling nearby that she attributed to Mephisto or rats; presumably one of them had squeaked through the door at some point in the last day or two.
At the back of the room, she discovered a box of old iron charms that would have been handed out to graduating students at one point. She sifted through them by the light of her oil lamp, smiling at the various shapes: an owl for wisdom, a key for knowledge, a pillar forfortitude. If only they were weapons instead, she thought with a sigh. Still, iron was always handy, especially if one were conjuring demons.
In another box she found small bags of salt, also a graduation gift for seniors back in her parents’ days. She didn’t use salt on her own demons usually, since she never knew where they’d appear. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a little extra on hand.
As she began to unlock the door to her laboratory, she paused at the noises coming from the other side. There was none of Mephisto’s scuttling, but clattering and banging, as though someone were ransacking the place. It sounded far larger than anything Mephisto could do, and the demon had no reason to go rummaging around her lab, anyway.
Aurelie racked her brain for what could possibly have gotten into the lab with the door and window locked. There wasn’t a rat in the world large enough to make this much commotion, and she couldn’t imagine a demon would have gotten in without—
Aurelie gasped and clapped her hand to her mouth as the clattering stopped. She’d been harried when she swept up the seeds Mephisto had scattered, and she couldn’t be certain she’d gotten all of them. What if one had landed in the spilled water and germinated?