The bell in the east tower tolled nine, its sound moving through the campus like a heartbeat. The fog clung low along the parapets, turning the courtyard lamps into blurred coins of light.
Xavier waited at the base of Subterranean Hall D, The Cellar, as everyone affectionately called it. His hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, breath threading white in the chill that never left the stone. His face was buried in the scarf Enid had made him the semester before he left. Random pieces of glitter still clung to the yarn like small memories.
Through the narrow, barred window of the heavy iron door, he could see flickers of movement. Shadows of students working at their marble stations, the glow of candlelight catching on copper and obsidian tools. Silver had been banned from Reichenbach since the start of the academy.
The air that drifted out from the cracked door smelled faintly of iron and ozone, sharp enough to sting. Xavier tried not to imagine Thorn down there among the rest of the vampires, her pulse in rhythm with the hum of the wards, the faint glimmer of her magic echoing off the cold stone while professors scribbled notes behind their runic shields.
The door finally unlatched with a groan that sounded too much like an exhale. Thorn emerged from the dimness, cloak thrown around her shoulders, the last of the candlelight flickering against her cheekbones. There was a faint sheen at her temples. It wasn't just sweat, but the aftertaste of power. She rolled her shoulders once, as if shaking off the pull of the place, then caught sight of him waiting and hesitated in the doorway. She hadn't expected him to wait up for her, not when it was peak brooding time.
"Let me guess," she said, voice dry. "You've been out here rehearsing an argument about how I'm supposed to take it easy."
"Please," Xavier said. "You know I prefer to wing my dramatic lectures."
The corner of Thorn's mouth tipped up, the hint of a smirk ghosting through exhaustion. "Good. Because tonight's lab was basically a crash course in 'don't pass out while your blood tries to rewrite itself.'"
Xavier fell into step beside her as they started up the covered walk toward the North Wing. "That's… comforting."
"Oh, it gets better," Thorn said, voice flat but edged with dark humor.
"They started with blood metabolism trials. Testing blood substitutes while tracking heart rate, body temperature, and arterial pulse. Half the class nearly passed out before they even got through phase one. Then they killed the lights for sensory drills and told us to navigate by sound and smell alone."
She tugged her cloak tighter against the chill, her eyes still rimmed with fatigue and a faint, lingering shimmer of strain. "After that came the fun part. Controlled exposure. They piped in the scent of fresh blood and watched to see who twitched first, which was exceptionally cruel considering we weren't allowed to feed today. Pretty sure it was just an excuse for the professors to take notes on who was the weakest link."
Xavier shot her a sidelong glance, one brow lifting. "And this is legal?"
She huffed, a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
"Apparently. The school calls it training to regulate our unique metabolic and magical processes. I call it 'institutionally approved sadism.'"
He snorted. "That sounds like…"
"A science experiment?" she offered.
He shook his head. "Torture."
Thorn's smirk widened just enough to show teeth. "See? You're learning."
"No, I'm serious, Thorn..." Xavier's expression flattened, the humor fading as he studied her. "You haven't eaten today?"
Thorn rolled her eyes. "Relax. I was going to go by the infirmary and pick up a blood pouch."
"Isn't that where they're keeping—"
"The wolves? Yeah," she said, her tone clipped, though not cruel. "But it's either that or starve, and between the two, I'll risk a nurse in a hazmat charm."
They crossed beneath the arched walkway, the fog curling over the flagstones in thin, silvery ribbons that licked at their boots. The air hummed faintly, charged with the same uneasy silence that had settled over the whole campus.
The infirmary sat at the end of the courtyard, its once bright ward lights dimmed to a sickly amber. Two nurses stood at the entrance, layered in enchanted protective gear. Leather gloves etched with sigils, transparent veils of barrier glass shimmering faintly over their faces. The faint scent of disinfectant barely masked the underlying musk of fear and illness.
When the door opened, the sound hit first: low groans, the rustle of sheets, the faint metallic hiss of respirators. Wolves, half-shifted and fevered, lined the cots inside. Some were restrained by glowing bands of wardlight, while others muttered nonsense through cracked lips. The air was heavy, and the temperature off, like a storm waiting to break.
One of the nurses looked up sharply when she saw Thorn. "You here for your requisition?"
Thorn nodded once, pulling her hood up as if that might make her less conspicuous. "Yeah. Rosales. North Wing. Room 313."
The nurse gave her a wary once-over before turning to the cooler behind her, opening a steel-lined cabinet. Rows of sealed blood pouches gleamed under blue light, each marked with a signature verifying it hadn't been tampered with.
"New policy," the nurse said, voice muffled through her charm screen. "All vampires have to collect directly from us. Chain of custody, no intermediaries."
"Because of the attack?" Xavier asked quietly, his hands shoved into his pockets.
"Because of copycats," the nurse replied, setting one pouch with a pink tab on the counter. "Word travels. Someone gets clever, thinks it's funny to lace a bag, and then suddenly we've got a body to carry out. Not on my watch."
Thorn accepted the pouch, the chill of it seeping instantly through her gloves. "Comforting," she muttered.
The nurse's eyes flicked toward her. "Eat, Miss Rosales. Don't wait until the dizziness hits."
Thorn didn't argue. She turned, pushing the door open again, the fog and the cold swallowing them both as they stepped back into the night.
Thorn's fang was already catching the edge of the blood pouch as they stepped into the quad. Her mouth filled with the sickly sweet taste of synthetic blood.
The courtyard was nearly empty now, lamplight flickering against the fog. Windows burned faintly yellow along the upper wings, watchful and still.
Thorn lifted the blood pouch again, taking a steady drink as they walked beneath the cloister's archway. The fog curled around her boots like something half-alive.
Xavier glanced down at the bag in her hands, brow furrowing.
"I never asked," he said, voice low in the hush between their footsteps, "but why do yours have a pink tab on the corner?"
Thorn wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, shrugging. "It's a special blend."
He opened his mouth, probably to ask what that meant, but she took another deep drink, the red pooling warm behind the plastic, and he let the question hang.
They made it only halfway through the cloister, stone archways stretching out before them like the ribs of some ancient creature, when a familiar voice sliced neatly through the fog.
"Mr. Thorpe. Ms. Rosales."
They both turned. Professor Alarie, the North Wing dorm mother, stood in the shadow of a stone pillar, the lamplight drawing a clean edge across her face. Her tone was steady as ever, though a thread of urgency ran through it like wire.
Xavier sighed under his breath. "Are we in trouble again?"
"Probably," Thorn muttered. "At least it's Alarie; she doesn't bite."
He gave her a look. "Can't say the same about you."
Thorn didn't answer, only started forward. Alarie wasn't just another teacher; she was one of the few who hadn't treated Thorn like a hazard wrapped in a uniform. The woman had once brought her lavender tea after a particularly dreadful week during Freshman year. She hadn't flinched when Thorn's eyes went pure white during a blood draw in Nocturnal Physiology Lab. She'd earned something close to respect.
"Come on," Thorn said quietly. "If she's looking for us after curfew, it's not just detention."
Alarie's rooms occupied the narrow corner of the North Wing overlooking the inner quad. The casement windows bowed from age, their glass leaded in diamond panes. Her study smelled faintly of coffee and iron ink, a scent Thorn had come to associate with quiet sanctuary more than discipline.
Maps covered one wall in hexagonal tiles, marked with parish lines, fault traces, and ward diagrams. Shelves sagged under the weight of tomes whose spines had long since surrendered their titles.
The door clicked shut behind them. Alarie exhaled and, almost absentmindedly, touched a slim silver chain at her throat, as if confirming it was still there.
"You've heard the rumors, I assume?" she asked.
"About the infection?" Xavier said.
"No." Her gaze sharpened. "About the song."
Thorn's shoulders went still. Her gaze turned to meet Xavier's, both of them unsure. "You... know about it?"
"Of course." Alarie moved to the desk, fingertips combing lightly through a drift of parchment as though hunting a specific weight of paper. "It's not new. Reichenbach's founders built this academy atop the remains of a sect called The Minstrels of Mercury. They were resonance practitioners. Sorcerers who believed sound could bridge the boundary between worlds."
"Then why isn't something being done about it?" The tone in Thorn's voice turned bitter.
"No one will acknowledge that it's actually the song causing the damage, not when it's existed peacefully for so long," Alarie muttered.
"Okay, then let me rephrase: why aren't you doing something about it? You are a teacher."
"Well, because I can't exactly hear the music."
Thorn's voice thinned. "So you can't hear it? But you can tell it's happening?"
Alarie's lips pressed together, the smallest waver running through her composure. "When I was a student here, I couldn't hear the melody the way some could, but I saw it. The way light bends when the song's close. How reflections ripple in glass when someone hums it without realizing."
She tapped a finger lightly against the chain at her throat, where a faint charm glinted beneath her collar. "It doesn't sound alone. It distorts everything it touches. Some of us learn to notice the distortion, even if our ears stay silent." Her eyes met Thorn's, steady and almost regretful.
"So, no, I can't hear it. But I know the look of those who can. The way they go still for half a second, like the air just pulled their name out of them."
Thorn folded her arms. "So why can we hear it and not everyone else?"
Alarie's expression flickered, concern crossing recognition. "Because you are both naturally attuned. The song recognizes an opening when it finds one." Her gaze cut between them, clinical and kind all at once.
"Something fractured, or powerful enough to echo it."
"Attuned?" Xavier asked.
Alarie drew a leather-bound journal from the shelf and laid it on the desk. Dust swirled, buoyant in the lamplight. A sigil was branded into the cover: a circle cleaved by an uneven line, traced faintly in gold.
"Attuned," she repeated, softer this time. "Not chosen. Not cursed. Just… resonant."
"So why are the wolves the only ones reacting if we're the ones that can hear it?"
Alarie stilled, one hand resting on the closed journal. For a moment, she said nothing, eyes on the tall window where night pressed its face against the glass.
"Well... werewolves are perfect conductors for it. Their magic is lunar, rhythmic, and extremely volatile. It's constantly in motion."
Thorn turned to Xavier for a moment, the nervous question hung on her tongue. "But why not fangs? I mean, I've felt it. It burns just like silver, so it must react like silver."
"It does, but vampires, as you might know, Thorn, are magically static.
Their bodies run on preserved energy and necromantic equilibrium, not living pulse. So, it's kinda like screaming into a tomb," Alarie explained.
"There's no echo. Only silence."
Ms. Alarie turned her attention back to the journal and opened it to a page of etched rings and densely annotated text. A robed figure stood at the center of sketched waveforms, mouth parted. The ink itself hums. No glow, just the suggestion of motion.
"That symbol—" Thorn began.
"—the Minstrels' mark," Alarie finished. "They called it the breath between worlds." She shut the book with a quiet finality. "You might wonder why the wards haven't stopped it." The pause was answer enough. Alarie chose her words like stepping stones. "The Minstrels weren't entirely disbanded. The founders sealed their magic below and layered the academy on top, using architecture as a form of wardwork. When the wards strain, when a song leaks through the grain of the wood, you're hearing what was buried and what someone is now daring to wake."
Thorn's pulse ticked faster. "Someone."
"Yes." Alarie's thumb pressed briefly against the journal's spine. "And the song is choosing who it can move through." She slid open a desk drawer and set down a small cloth-wrapped bundle. "Take this."
Xavier unwrapped it. Another journal, narrower, with scorched edges. Handwritten in a precise nineteenth-century hand.
"One of theirs," Alarie said. "It survived the purge. Read it, take notes, and then put it somewhere the head steward will never think to look."
"Are we… sanctioned to be doing this?" Xavier asked.
"Absolutely not," she said without a blink.
"So why are you giving this to us?"
Xavier and Thorn glanced up at each other at that, confusion written over both of their faces.
"The teachers have been talking about the incident in Mrs. Weaver's class. Xavier, your sketches... the sigils that translated sound into geometry and broke the hold the music had on the wolves."
"And Thorn... your hybrid magic. It channels the geometry Xavier created and puts it into shadow resonance, changing the sound—"
"This isn't making any sense, Ms. A," Thorn argued, brows furrowed.
"I know, and I wish I could explain more, but we must keep this between us. If the other teachers found out I gave you this information, there would be dire consequences."
Thorn opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Nothing she could ask could make this make any more sense.
"Be careful," Alarie continued. "The song doesn't just echo." Her eyes were steady, almost pitying. "It listens."
She nodded toward the door.
Dismissed.
The corridor outside felt colder than it had a minute before, as if the walls had overheard and wanted to keep a secret. Xavier tucked the journal under his arm, its weight out of proportion to paper.
"Well," Thorn murmured, breath fogging in the draft, "that wasn't ominous at all."
"You're the one who wanted answers," Xavier said.
"Yeah," she sighed, jamming her hands into her pockets. "But it doesn't mean we learned anything from that."
The two of them climbed the stairs, the air thick with the faint hum of enchantments and old wood. Thorn fished her key from her pocket, the metal catching the dim light as she slid it into the lock. The door gave a soft click as it opened into a room that felt unexpectedly alive.
Xavier stopped just inside, blinking. He hadn't known what to expect. He had never been inside Thorn and Pippa's dorm before.
He slightly expected something gothic, maybe, or chaotic, two polar opposites shoved together by random assignment. But the space was seamless. Warm. Human.
The walls were the stale eggshell white of Reichenbach, but hung with sketches, pressed flowers, and bits of parchment covered in looping handwriting. Fairy lights threaded along the shelves, their glow soft as candlelight. Books were stacked everywhere. Under the window, beside the bed, along the sill, spines worn and familiar.
Two beds sat across from each other, dressed in matching quilts patterned with small dark red flowers. A throw blanket of forest green was draped at the foot of Thorn's bed, and a tray with half-melted wax sat beside a stack of notes. Matching lamps, the kind that doubled as candle warmers, cast amber halos that made the shadows dance gently against the walls.
An old wooden violin stand waited in the corner by the window. The violin itself gleamed with dark varnish and ebony fittings, clearly kept in tune and polished with care.
Potted vines trailed down from the shelves, curling around the corners of old frames. Tiny leaves glistened in the low light.
"I didn't know Pippa had a green thumb," Xavier murmured, brushing a fingertip along one of the vines. "Or played the violin."
Thorn brushed past him, setting her bag by the foot of her bed. "She doesn't," she said simply.
He looked back at her, the realization dawning slowly. His gaze flicked from the plants to the violin. The image didn't match the version of her he'd built in his head. The sharp-tongued hybrid who spoke in threats and half-truths.
The room smelled faintly of lavender and old paper, like a library trying to pretend it was a garden. And that made sense. It strangely felt like Thorn. Composed on the surface, but quietly alive in every corner. Even the candlelight seemed to move with her breathing.
Xavier didn't comment on it. He just followed her lead as she lowered herself to the floor, cross-legged beside the small wooden table. The journal lay between them like something half-alive, its spine creaking in quiet protest each time a page turned, the sound sharp against the hush of the dorm.
"Shit," Xavier muttered, squinting at the page. "Some of it's in Latin."
"Of course it is," Thorn said, leaning over, her hair falling like a curtain between them. "Give it here."
He passed the journal over with a small, resigned sigh. "Oh yeah, obviously you'd be the one who actually knows how to read it."
Thorn smirked faintly, tracing the faded script with her thumb. "Perks of a classical education," she murmured, her voice soft but edged with focus.
The candlelight flickered over her face as she began to translate, each word unraveling like a secret too old to want to be spoken.
Xavier leaned back against the wall, watching her eyes move over the page, sharp, steady, and a little haunted. "Guess I'll just sit here and look pretty, then."
She didn't look up. "You can try. Don't know how well you'll do."
"October 3rd, 1849
We had believed the sound to be a trick of pressure, the wind howling through the mountains, or the old copper pipes of the chapel settling with the cold. Yet tonight, as the hour struck two, it began again. Not wind. Not the earth. Something deeper. A note that hums beneath thought.
It did not enter through the ear, but through the bone. We felt it before we heard it. A vibration within the ribs, as though the body itself had become an instrument. Every candle in the hall guttered. Every clock stilled.
Those who remained in the circle reported visions: a silver mist rising from the floorboards, shapes moving just beyond the eye's reach. The sound wove itself through our hearts like a thread, aligning pulse to rhythm until no one could tell where their heartbeat ended and the song began.
I must record this clearly... it was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that drowning might be, if one had never known air.
Brother Casimir called it the Voice of Mercury. He believes it is not of this world, but a bridge between them. I fear he may be right.
We have decided to answer it.
Tomorrow, we sing back."
They didn't speak for a while. The words breathed on their own.
Xavier leaned back against the foot of Thorn's bed, sketchbook balanced on a knee. "A bridge between worlds." He tapped the margin, thoughtful. "That's not music as ornament. That's music as mechanism."
Thorn traced a finger over a sketched spiral. "Resonance as lockpick."
He started to draw. Not copying, exactly, but mapping. Circles, broken rings, lines traveling through the page like tunnels. The lamplight caught graphite, making the lines look wet.
She watched him work, despite herself. Despite the sting behind her ribs every time she took too deep a breath. Despite the way her bones still hummed faintly from the brush of Danny's cold mist at the infirmary door.
"You don't have to—" she began, and stopped. She didn't know the end of the sentence. Break yourself open to understand it? He already had.
He kept drawing, jaw set. Something about his focus bit at her. She stood, crossed to the trunk under her bed, and pulled out the Acoustics in the Old Wards archive from a week ago, the one with the forgotten sub-levels marked in sepia.
"Hold up."
Xavier glanced over, then reached without thinking: his palm flattened the pages, knuckles smudging a line of graphite onto the book's margin.
Thorn slid one of his tracing sheets over the map. The geometry in his sketch and the old plans didn't match line for line, but when she rotated the page, the circles nested. One symbol glowed only in the mind's eye, as if seeing overlap created light.
"There," she said.
"Where?"
She tapped the overlay, pulse quickening. "Beneath the chapel." The mark sat like a single held note at the center of intersecting rings, old corridors feeding into it like veins. "Whatever this is, they built around it."
As if their attention had nudged something awake, the room went quieter. Even the rain outside sounded as if it were listening.
Xavier's pencil moved again. He drew the chapel's rose window from memory; he had passed it whenever he had gone for a run, though that started to happen less and less once the wolves began to drop like flies. The damp pattern he'd noticed in Maren's wallpaper joined onto the page shortly. The hidden runes braided through the vines. Threads connected in his head; he could feel them knitting.
The lines he'd been sketching pulsed gold at the edges, just for a second, from the trick of lamplight, or not a trick at all.
Thorn's brows furrowed as she reached out and smacked the pencil from his hand. It clattered to the floor, a small, hard protest that cracked the air.
"What the hell—" he started.
"You were humming it," she snapped, fear riding high and thin through the anger. "The song."
Xavier hadn't even noticed.
"You are not immune to this," she continued.
He stared at her, chest lifting too fast, words finding the first sharp edge. "I'm more immune than you are."
Silence took the room by the throat.
Her pulse hammered. She swallowed it, forcing her voice to be small. "You don't get to make yourself into some sort of martyr."
His gaze held. Something in him softened, but not by much. "Then stop me."
They stood there, two stubborn points in a circle neither had drawn, while the wind washed against the window like the sea.
A soft knock broke the spell.
"Thorn? You decent?" Pippa's voice, muffled through the door, came with the papery rustle of take-out bags. "I brought bribery."
Thorn stepped back, exhaled like she remembered how. "Yeah," she called. "Come in."
Pippa edged inside a lopsided pastry box, her braid half undone, eyes too bright. She clocked the open journal, the map, the overlay, the atmosphere. Her smile tried on sarcasm and stuck. "Oh no. My roommate joined a conspiracy club."
"Only part-time," Thorn said, deadpan. "The benefits are trash."
Pippa grabbed their electric kettle and set it on the desk. "Well, at least we have tea. Both of you look like you've been exorcising an organ, which calls for Earl Grey."
Xavier managed the smallest huff. "Just the brain."
Pippa's gaze, quick and greedy for reassurance, flicked between them. "Sugar?"
Xavier rubbed the back of his neck nervously, "I don't actually drink tea..."
Both Thorn and Pippa turned to him, blinking in silence before they pulled out a third cup from their bookshelf anyway.
"Tonight you do." Pippa smiled as the kettle roared to life, heating the water. Thorn moved around her expertly, pulling the drawer of their desk open to retrieve sugar packets and small spoons.
"Why do you have all of this stuff?"
Thorn shrugged, tearing open a sugar packet with her teeth. "Because campus tea tastes like wet parchment, and I have standards."
Pippa snorted, pouring the hot water into each cup. "She says that like she doesn't hoard snacks like a dragon. Half this drawer is contraband from the dining hall."
"That's slander," Thorn said, stirring lazily. "You can't prove anything."
Pippa giggled and looked back into the drawer and ran a hand through her blonde hair, "Oh crap, we ran out of honey. Put it on the list?"
Thorn was already moving to the small shopping list that lay on Pippa's nightstand. Groceries became the only sense of normalcy in the chaos.
"I'm going to go grab honey from the dining hall. I'll be right back. No tin foil hats before I return."
"No promises," Thorn called out, as the door closed with a soft click. Tea bags sat at the bottom of each steaming cup, the color changing almost instantly.
"Anyway," Thorn's gaze returned to the overlay on the floor. The chapel mark waited, patient as a grave.
"That's our next stop," Xavier said.
"Congratulations, Thorpe," Thorn murmured, not looking away. "You've officially had the worst idea in this duo."
"I didn't know there were rankings."
"There are always rankings." She traced the circle once, fingertip hovering just above the paper. The faintest shiver of sound, more felt than heard, skated along the floorboards, like a bow barely touching a string.
They both heard it.
Pippa's footsteps faded down the hall until even the sound of her braid brushing her shoulder was gone. The kettle clicked as it cooled. The dorm exhaled into stillness.
Thorn sat back down beside the map, the candle burning low between them. Wax pooled at its base, trembling faintly each time the wind rattled the window.
"You realize this is suicide, right?" she said finally, her voice quieter than she meant it to be.
"Most things worth doing here are," Xavier said. He didn't look up, just kept his hand hovering over the overlay. "If the Minstrels built something under the chapel, it's not going to wait for us to be ready."
Thorn rested her chin in her hand, studying the ink and graphite, the way the lines seemed to hum when they lined up just right. "You think we can actually stop it?"
He hesitated. "I think if we don't, no one else will."
That silence between them wasn't heavy. It was exact, like the moment before a note is struck.
Thorn reached for her mug, half-cold now, and muttered, "Tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow," Xavier echoed.
The word hung in the air a little too long.