“Did you just cast a tunnel?”
He doesn’t wait for me to follow, so I have to clamber after him to keep up.
“I revealed a tunnel. The tree trunk is the illusion, and an old one. The founders knew that the university would need to be a public front, so they dug tunnels for easy movement and caves for storage before the campus was built.”
“They dug all these to get around more easily?”
“These are fail-safes. Escape routes. The original Merlins warded them to mask aether so that Shadowborn cannot follow, even above ground.”
I tug my phone out of my pocket, but there’s no cell signal. The battery’s half-dead, so I could use the flashlight, but why drain it when Sel’s lighting the way plenty himself? “Why are we here and not the Lodge? You could have run us back there—”
He stops and fixes me with a glare. “I don’t know why those things attacked us or where they came from, and neither, it seems, do you. I’m not going to lead them right to Nicholas, even with the Lodge’s wards in place. If they’re anything like the hounds, they’ve caught our scent and will be on the hunt for us and no one else. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Why didn’t you sense them?”
His eyes drop and he keeps walking, pulling the only light source with him. “I’m not sure.” Something in his voice sounds off, like he’s holding back an answer he doesn’t want to say out loud.
“How did they steal your aether?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does that mean you’ve never seen a hellfox before?”
He turns around abruptly, and I almost stumble into him. “What are you?”
“I—”
“The truth,” he demands. “How did you generate that aether at your fingertips?”
I blink. “I didn’t generate anything—”
He regards me through narrow eyes. “This explains why you distracted me that night at the Quarry when I was hunting the isel. I detected a flare of your aether, then incorrectly assumed my senses had led me astray.” He leans closer with his flame fingers and points at my chest with his other hand. “But just a few minutes ago you were cooking aether like a furnace, right here.”
“Back off!” I push his hand away and cross my arms over my chest. The scent of even Sel’s small casting is filling the tunnel and clinging to my nose.
“You don’t know how to navigate these tunnels, and even if you could, you can’t open any of the doors to the surface,” he says, raising a brow, “so you may as well be honest. How did you do that?”
I want desperately to stomp off, but he’s right. I have no idea where to go. He watches me come to this conclusion as if dealing with a small, stubborn child who wants to protest their way out of bedtime. I resent everything about his face, from his ridiculous hair to his cambion eyes to the irritating smirk tugging at the side of his goddamn mouth. “I don’t know.” I can hear the petulance in my own voice, and I hate that, too.
Sel narrows his golden eyes to calculating slits while he inspects my face. A beat passes. “You’re telling the truth, at least about what you are and where your power comes from.”
“Yes! I am!” That much is true. I don’t know what I am and neither does Patricia. That I know about root, that my mother was a practitioner—I’ll never tell him those things.
His face takes on a considering expression. “My mother was a Merlin and an aether scholar. She studied demonology, Gate aether, runes, ancient texts, you name it. I was a precocious child, so I often snuck into her office to read her gramarye and those of Merlins before us.”
I grit my teeth, unnerved that he has brought up his own mother. Can he see that I was thinking about mine? “Is this story going somewhere?”
Sel ignores me. “With that upbringing, I, more than most, understand that our magic, if you will, is at its core and in its very fundamentals, a type of physics.” He extends his arm in the dim light. The tattoo claiming most of his forearm is a bold black circle divided by five lines into five equal segments. “Earth, air, water, fire, and aether, or what medieval alchemists called ‘quintessence.’ Every Merlin is taught that aether cannot be created or destroyed, only infused into a body or manipulated into temporary mass. So”—he looks directly into my eyes—“how is it that you, Briana Matthews, defy every law of aether that thousands of Merlins have followed for the past fifteen centuries?”
I stare back, scared of what he’s saying but refusing to show him that. “Maybe the Order doesn’t know everything about magic in the world.”
He hums and steps back. “There are a lot of things the Order does not know.” He walks ahead again without adding a word to that enigmatic comment, and I have no choice but to follow.
The deeper we go, the more the scent of rotting things overwhelms me. I tug my T-shirt up over my nose for relief, then pull it down again because it’s freezing here.
After a while I ask him the question that needs to be asked. “Are you going to turn me over to the Regents?”
He answers without looking back. “I haven’t decided. Why are you really joining our Order?”
He’s a Merlin. I can’t trust him with the real answer, and doing so would go against everything Nick’s specifically warned me about.
“You must be thinking up a lie,” he muses, “because you’re taking too long for the truth.” He stops again and gives me an expectant look.
I pull together the best possible, truest answer I can and look him right in the eyes while I say it. “I asked Nick to help me join because I need to understand the things I’ve seen, and I need to know why I see them.”
“What does Nicholas think of your ability to generate aether?”
“I… he doesn’t know about that. It’s only happened once before. Randomly, the night of the initiation. I thought it might be a reaction to the Oath. I didn’t know…”
He searches my face for a moment; then his lips curl back in disgust. “You truly have no idea what you are, and Nicholas, ever the hero, offered to help you find out by bringing you into an ancient secret society for which you had no background knowledge or training?”
I shift under his gaze. “Well, no, I sort of… pushed him to sponsor me. It was more my idea than his.”
He looks completely appalled. “You’re both fools, then.” He grimaces. “And so am I for believing you could be anything other than a silly little Unanedig girl.” He whirls away and stalks down the dirt corridor, muttering under his breath.
My jaw drops. “I thought you just said I defy ‘every law of aether’!”
“I did”—he sneers over his shoulder—“but I’ve been watching you closely all week, and apparently you can defy our laws while still being a silly little Unanedig girl. Congratulations.”
It’s our first meeting at the Quarry cliffside all over again—as soon as he’d found the isel, he’d dismissed me wholesale, because if you’re not Sel’s prey, you’re not worth his time. “Aren’t you supposed to… to… investigate anomalies?” I say, hurrying behind him, half-indignant and half-relieved.