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What do you want?

And in immediate answer it says, “Vindicare.”

To take revenge. Or more: to seek justice. Vindicta is a ceremonial act. Self-redress by the injured party.

I can feel the others around me frozen and waiting. Victoria has stopped her motion with the axe. Leo’s hand is pressed to his cheek to stop the blood, and he’s shivering, but desperate to stay upright.

I turn to look at him, and see his awe at this strange creature. When I look back at the hybrid, its gaze drops from Leo back to me, dark pupils readjusting in the bright yellow eyes.

I swallow. “Contra quem?”

Against whom?

And I wait in stupefied fear for it to come screaming towards me in answer, but the hybrid just stares unblinking.

It doesn’t answer me. Instead, after a minute, it turns and stalks back into the birch trees. The whole forest creaks in answer, welcoming its return, and very soon the shadows swallow it until it’s almost like it was never there at all.

* * *

“Make a tourniquet,” I shout, and Leo is ripping fabric from his own shirt for Fred’s leg. She’s wan, pallid. Probably close to death. She’s been bleeding out for minutes, and I don’t know what it will take to stop her from dying.

“Need a Healer,” Leo says gruffly, tying the tourniquet tight. “Need to get back to the wagon. What time is it?”

But neither myself nor Victoria have any idea.

Silas was the one with the watch.

I rip from my own shirt for Leo’s face, but it’s fairly useless. I have to tie it awkwardly so the knot sits just above his left brow, fabric dipping horizontally to cover the exposed cheek. He is still bleeding profusely. It is determination and adrenaline keeping him awake now.

Victoria and I help Fred up. Leo is forced to stagger back alone. We debate taking the remains of Silas’ body, and I know Fred will hate me when I tell her I am the reason the broken corpse of her brother remains out here.

Instead, as Victoria and I start limping back with the unconscious Fred between us, Leo picks up the axe and stalks to the dead manticore. A trophy, like I took that day in Watford. Something to show the dean we have beaten this thing. He goes to the back of the beast and starts hacking, and with ease severs the scorpion stinger from the rest of the body.

“Careful,” I call, but he’s already wrapping the thing in his blazer. Any venom from that thing paralyses.

He stalks back over. “Come on,” Leo says, and leads the way back.

We stumble bloody and broken to the wagon, whose driver jumps down in true shock at seeing us. He helps us climb in, praises us—something about true Hunters, or the future of the graduate class—and drives us back to London with speed. And from there it’s a blur. Healers meet us at the gate and take a dying Fred and Leo and Victoria away. I am given a once-over before it’s determined my injuries are not worth fussing over. And then I am led onto campus with a Blood Hunter pair at my back, deposited securely by the west tower, and left alone.

There are no congratulations. No ceremony. No feast. There is nothing but the howling wind and a misted rain that starts up quickly. I stay under it and pray it drowns me.

I have seen London’s future. I have looked it in the eye.

And it wants vengeance.

30

LESSON THIRTY

“She’ll get a new leg,” the Artificer Abraham tells me once the Healer is done with Fred. It’s been nearly a week. They stopped the bleeding, put that salve on it that healed me, and have left—which I assume is a good sign, but I haven’t been in to see her yet. She was so close to death when we brought her back. And I feel nothing about that. I decided I would be the one to tell her about Silas’ body, so I’ve been very careful to not let emotion seep through.

“Make it strong,” I say. “As good as mine.”

Then Abraham opens his mouth and closes it, presumably to tell me the dean hasn’t authorised such use of materials, but I fix him a look. “You will do it,” I say.

“It will go on her tab,” he says.

I tell myself I am above making decisions for other people—though it’s not entirely true. For this, however, I concede. I won’t rope Fred into debt unless she wants it.