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I assure you, I never believed those rumors,” Morcant said. “I was one of the few who defended your character. You’ve always been a decent sort.”

“Mm-hm.” Valenti didn’t sound convinced. “So you just asked me here in the dead of night to clear the air?”

“Well, given your reputation, you can’t blame me for wishing to distance our association for now, but that is only temporary. I asked you here for quite the opposite purpose. I hated to see you thrown out unfairly and hoped, between us, we could prove you were falsely accused.”

Valenti didn’t have an answer to that immediately.

It was apparent he hadn’t expected this; what he had expected, Ambrose could only speculate.

Perhaps he’d come for closure, perhaps for curiosity’s sake, or maybe for the vindication of telling Morcant what sort of spiky object he could insert in himself.

“Why would you do that?” Valenti said finally.

“I’d love to tell you it’s out of the goodness of my heart, but I’m afraid it’s more selfish than that. Emery …” Morcant paused, letting the name hang in the air a second longer. “I don’t wish to speak ill of a troubled student, but I believe I’m to be the next target of his manipulations.”

Emery wrung his hands, fingers knotted together like tangled skeins of yarn. Ambrose repressed the urge to reach over and steady them.

“Emery was a good kid,” Valenti said.

“He was a very good student, I agree, but he is troubled.”

“Troubled, but not the way you mean. ”

“He abused alcohol and raised the specters of a plague of rats,” Morcant said, as if gently pointing out the food Valenti had stuck in his teeth. “He’s barely passing several classes; these points are all academic.”

Stubbornly, Valenti would not be moved. “I don’t believe he sent those messages.”

“They came from his e-mail address.”

“He never said anything like that to me before. Not in person, let alone over e-mail. My university e-mail. He’s a smart kid. Too smart for that.”

“Precisely. He’s intelligent enough to know this would be a foolproof way to indict you. The faculty would be too paranoid about the potential scandal to look at things any more deeply, so they rushed to the most expedient means of sweeping the problem under the rug: getting rid of you.”

“But what does that accomplish for Emery?” Valenti demanded.

“Who’s to say what rewards are concocted from a deranged mind’s deranged actions?

” Morcant said, but his annoyance was like a hangnail caught in the smooth fabric of his facade.

It unraveled and snagged, more conspicuous because of how confident he normally appeared.

His familiar gave some of it away, too, stomping its hooves.

Valenti directed his questions at more lethal avenues. “What has you so convinced Emery did this maliciously, and that you’re his next target?”

“His behavior has escalated,” Morcant said. “He’s made several attempts on my life now. One nearly succeeded.”

Emery’s nails had begun to leave crescent divots in the skin of his arm where he gripped himself, and Ambrose couldn’t resist it any longer. He reached over and pried Emery’s fingers free, squeezing his hand.

Emery looked at him, shocked. Ambrose hoped his gaze conveyed a silent entreaty to stay calm, that he was not alone.

Emery looked back toward the bridge, but he also leaned ever so slightly closer.

Valenti narrowed his eyes. “What evidence do you have?”

“Will my hospital records do?” Morcant pressed.

“ No . If e-mails can be falsified, so can hospital records, and so far you’ve given me nothing concrete connected to Emery himself. Did anyone think to check if his e-mail had been hacked, or if it was sent from an IP other than his own?”

Morcant glared at Valenti. “There’s no need to be aggressive. I’m trying to help you.”

“Help me? Then help me understand. Emery is a student who moved here quite recently, had no support from family or scholarships, yet seemed, in spite of all that, quite all right before he started taking your class. You, on the other hand, are a well-established professor, well connected to the college’s faculty, enmeshed in charities and local politics, with plenty of friends in high places who trust you.

It would be easy for you to manipulate the scenario I found myself in, and equally simple to reach out to those more powerful rather than meeting with a social pariah in the dead of night.

And why have you brought your daughter along? ” He gestured to Hellebore.

She’d stayed out of the conversation, leaning back against the rail of the bridge until that moment. She straightened and stepped forward.

Morcant let out an annoyed sigh. “You know, you could have had your job back, but I can’t abide a man of learning who asks so many inane questions.”

With the flick of his wrist, he cast a spell, and Valenti vanished. His cane clattered to the cobblestones as something iridescent and blue disintegrated in the palm of Morcant’s hand.

Blue morpho butterfly wings had been on his shopping list. Emery had said they were used in transmutation spells.

It appeared as though Valenti had vanished, but as Morcant said, “Hellebore,” and she ran across the bridge toward them, Ambrose caught sight of a small skittering shadow.

A rat. Morcant had transformed Valenti into a rat.

He ran straight toward the place they hid, aiming to lose his pursuer amongst the planters and picnic tables of the restaurant. He vanished briefly from view, then scaled the wall and appeared in the flower bed right in front of them.

Hellebore cast a spell, and Valenti froze in place.

She was rushing toward them, and Ambrose suppressed the instinct to run. The wall was between them, and they were invisible. They just had to be quiet.

Hellebore stopped practically face-to-face with them, but her attention was solely on the paralyzed rat. She picked him up, then yowled. He’d sunk his teeth into her finger.

“What is it?” Morcant snapped impatiently. He hadn’t moved from the bridge.

“He bit me.” Hellebore now held Valenti by the tail. He twitched but could hardly move otherwise.

Ambrose’s heart rabbited in his chest. What would they do with Valenti now? Emery seemed to be thinking along the same lines, clenching Ambrose’s hand in his.

“Your paralysis spells need work.” Morcant opened a portal. “Come.”

Hellebore trudged after him. Emery jolted into motion, dragging Ambrose along and mouthing the words, We have to follow them .

There wasn’t time to debate. The enchantment made their footsteps eerily silent as they ran toward the bridge. Morcant was already through, turning to beckon Hellebore after him.

She crossed through the portal. They had seconds and very little space. If they tripped over one another and fell into Hellebore—Ambrose, rather than risk it, swung Emery over his shoulder. He wasn’t that much shorter, but he was thin, light, and surprised enough to withhold a protest.

Ambrose stepped through after Hellebore moments before the portal closed. He backpedaled a few paces to put distance between them. Panting, he looked around to regain his bearings.

They were in a garden. To their backs was a terraced house, narrow, and stretching up three stories.

It had the leaning look of a cake with too many layers.

Around them, the garden hosted a slew of plants that could be used for tithes, many the dangerous variety. They had labels with skulls on them.

Was this Morcant’s home?

Emery wiggled to be put down. Heat climbed up Ambrose’s neck and cheeks as Emery slid to the ground—a long slide down Ambrose’s body.

They retreated to a crab apple tree, which offered a degree of shelter from the drizzle.

Invisibility did not feel safe enough at this proximity to two people who’d surely try to kill them if they were found out.

Once behind the tree, Emery didn’t step away or put distance between them.

His hand had lowered, curled around Ambrose’s bicep, keeping him close.

For safety, if the tense line of Emery’s spine and the vein throbbing in his neck were any indication.

He put his back to the tree trunk and looked around it at Morcant.

A shed hunkered between bushes, its face so covered in ivy that its door looked like the mouth of a green cave. Morcant went inside and emerged with a small cage.

Valenti, still hanging by his tail, gave a spasm of horror, but could do no more to escape.

Hellebore put him inside the cage and closed the door. “What are you going to do with him now? People will notice he’s missing.”

“Nobody is going to shed a tear over a man accused of abusing his students.”

That was quite rich coming from a man who actually was abusing his students.

“This could be bad,” Hellebore insisted. “You’re not picking up a bum off the street. People knew this guy. He could—”

“When he turns up dead in a year, I’ll doctor the body to make it look like a suicide. Nobody will bat an eye. I’ll be even more powerful by then. A year or two after that, we’ll move on from Bellgrave and find another haunt, so stop worrying.”

In a year. He planned to have another initiate sacrifice Valenti. Still, Morcant’s arrogance bordered on hubris, believing himself not only immortal but untouchable.

He took the cage with Valenti’s shivering rat body in the bottom and stowed it in the shed. He closed the door, securing it shut with a chain and padlock, then instructed Hellebore to tithe a strand of hair for an enchanted lock.

Ambrose held his breath as the two witches headed back toward the house, passing a few feet from the tree where he and Emery hid. Though the fear of discovery made his heart beat hard, it beat harder still when Emery subtly ducked his head against Ambrose’s chest to hide.