Page 11 of The Bound Zodiac

“That’s exactly what I needed to hear right now.”

‘Welcome.’

There was a soft knock at my door. When I opened it, all five of them were standing in the corridor. Lucas in a dark coat with his glasses on again, making him look much older than his twenty-five years, Rowan beside him with his hair tied back, Theo and Phoenix shoulder to shoulder smiling gently, and Jamie leaning against the far wall with his hood up, a thin curl of smoke escaping from beneath it.

“I do know the way to the library by now.”

Lucas arched a brow. “We’re not going to the library, love.”

I held out my arm and let Noodle climb it, his cool weight settling around my shoulders in his usual spot. His head came to rest above my collarbone, tongue flicking once against my jaw.

“Be nice tonight, Nood.”

‘No.’

I groaned, just imagining the kind of chaos he could cause. But I refused to leave him behind. If there was one thing in my chaotic life that was a constant, it was Noodle.

We took the path through the grove, the fog hanging low between the trees, and nobody spoke much. Theo, who could fill an hour with conversation, walked quietly at my side with his hands in his pockets. The guys fanned out around me like some kind of shield. Well, I supposed that’s exactly what they were going to become, weren’t they?

The entrance wasn’t in the library. I’d assumed it would be, because everything important at Imperium seemed to route through those restricted archives, but Lucas led us instead to a low stone building off the western courtyard that I’d walked past a hundred times and dismissed.

Inside, past shelves of actual, boring storage, folding chairs, crates of candles, a shelf of chipped teapots that had no business being adjacent to an ancient secret chamber, there was a door. Old wood, iron bands, no handle.

Lucas pressed his palm flat against it. For a moment nothing happened, and then the iron warmed to a dull orange, and the door swung inward onto a spiral stair descending into the dark.

“Of course it’s a creepy staircase,” I muttered. “It’s always a creepy staircase.”

“Would you have preferred an elevator?” Rowan asked.

“Absolutely. And a lobby with a vending machine.”

The stairs went down a long way. The air changed as we descended, growing cooler and heavier, and beneath the cold there was something else, a low vibration I felt in my teeth before I heard it. There was magic saturated in the ground all around the academy, but it was extra potent down here.

‘The earth sings,’ Noodle said. I patted his head, both for his comfort and my own.

The stairway opened into a chamber that stole whatever clever remark I’d been preparing right out of my mouth. It was vast, round, carved from the bedrock itself, the ceiling lost somewhere above the reach of the torchlight. Iron sconces lined the curved walls, their flames burning low and steady, and the floor was smooth dark stone worn glossy by centuries of feet.

In the center of the chamber, the floor was scorched. A great starburst of blackened stone maybe thirty feet across, its edges feathering out into streaks and rays, as if something unimaginably bright had burned there once.

The First Crossing. The place where the last Ophis had stood, ten thousand years ago, and sealed the door behind our entire species.

My magic surged so suddenly that Noodle’s coil tightened around my shoulders, and somewhere in the chamber, fabric rustled as thirty robed figures turned to look at me.

“Breathe, love,” Theo said quietly, close to my ear. “It passes. The first time we each stood in this room, it did the same thing to us. The raw magic of the home worlds still lingers here.”

I breathed. Or tried to. The surge of magic didn’t vanish, but it settled ever so slightly, banking down from a flood to a strong current, and the metallic taste at the back of my throat faded. When my vision cleared properly, I made myself look at the people instead of the scorch mark on the floor.

They stood in a loose crescent on the far side of the scorch mark, all in the same heavy dark robes, and my first thought was that these guys had coaxed me down here into some kind of weird ass cult, and I was about to be the not-so-virgin sacrifice.

But then I realized there were faces I recognized, not personally of course, but from reputation and the fact that I’d spent the last couple of weeks online stalking each of the guys and their families.

Arthur Bennett, unmistakable with the same aristocratic bearing he’d handed down to Lucas, and beside him a tall old woman with a long silver braid over her shoulder and dark eyes that were already smiling at me.

Phoenix crossed the chamber and hugged her, this small adorable woman disappearing entirely against his enormous frame, and she patted his back twice like he was still a boy. “Gran,” he said with affection.

“You’ve gotten bigger,” she accused. “I told you to stop that.” She chuffed him on the arm playfully.

Phoenix crossed his arms as he stood back and smirked. “I saw you last month, Gran, I think your age is showing.”