Page 58 of The Alchemists

“Ha ha, Sebastian. Get fucked.”

Asher returned to the bar cart and decanted the evening’s first drink, passing it around. It swirled honey gold, and sharp spices wafted toward Seb as he accepted it. He could drink six in a row without thinking if he wasn’t careful and Asher was particularly obliging.

Asher grinned. “O Muse,” he said, naming it, then raised his glass. “To dying young and leaving beautiful corpses.”

“Keats wasn’t beautiful—he’s gotten an upgrade.” Tori laughed.

“Leave Keats alone,” Seb bristled, adjusting his deep burgundy cravat.

“Come to think of it, Seb—have you chosen a single Halloween costume that isn’t someone who dies early?”

Tori choked on her drink.

“Hey, out of all of us, I live the longest. Byron died an august thirty-six.”

“Last year was Patroklus, the year before that was Chopin⁠—”

“I didn’t pick those years.”

“Yes, you did,” Tori said. “You picked last year.”

“No.” He tried to keep his voice light. “Conrad picked last year.”

“Oh. Right.” Tori became suddenly interested in her drink.

The reminder dragged Seb backward to the Halloween prior. Technically, the Homeric theme had been Conrad’s pick, but it had been Seb’s idea. Going as Achilles and Patroklus—flanked by Asher as Odysseus and Tori as Athena—had been the most overtly gay thing Seb had ever done, and it had been one of the best nights of his life, a shimmering collection of moments against which he’d weighed everything that had come after.

Looking at it from the other side, though, he remembered everything he’d shoved under the rug at the time—how hard he’d had to plead to get Conrad to go along with the idea; how their only real dance together had been in an empty conference room; how when Seb had run his hand through Conrad’s bronze curls, he’d been shaken off, and they’d fought about it, in terse whispers, behind a vending machine, before Conrad had finally stopped him with a kiss and they’d left the dance early.

“Let’s take some photos. Gemma will be here any minute,” Seb said, pulling himself out of the spiral. Relief and a tiny flame of pride sparked through him as he realized he’d done it. Maybe it does get easier.

“At least I had the good sense not to invite my date to our most private sanctum,” Tori said, glaring.

“Who’s your date?” The boys said in unison.

“Exactly.”

“What’s Gemma going as, anyway?” Asher said, topping off their drinks.

“No idea—she said it was a surprise.” Seb didn’t even bother to hide the sigh in his voice.

Tori groaned.

Asher gave him another look.

LILY

Lily stared aimlessly out the window of the Metaphysics library, watching the wind push the black branches of the tree outside back and forth against the dark sky. She’d planned to distract herself with the Elumnara, but her mind proved determined to fix on one train of thought. All she could think about was Sebastian piloting a sexily attired Gemma around the dance floor; the last thing she wanted to think about was Sebastian piloting a sexily attired Gemma around the dance floor.

Daphne had texted her the other day, asking if she wanted to go to the dance with a few of her dorm friends, but Lily had texted back, “no costume.” It wasn’t a lie. It was a truth, but the truth was that watching Sebastian dance with Gemma might destroy her. She’d been touched, anyway, that Daphne had offered. Maybe Daphne was as sick of Gemma and Sebastian as Lily was. It seemed like there was a zero percent chance that Gemma ever shut up about him.

Their phone call had shifted something in her, irreparably. She couldn’t pretend anymore, not after listening to his voice right there in the privacy of darkness and the dead of night; not after her entire body, and all her skin, had felt itchy and needful and wrong under her comforter. After hanging up, she’d crept down the back stairs and out the kitchen door, stood shivering in the yard, restless and nearly naked. She’d stared up at the waxing Reaper’s Moon, waiting for answers that never came, and crawled back into bed with frozen-numb feet.

“Lily?”

She turned around. Professor Chant stood in the library entrance wearing glasses and a charcoal quarter-zip. His hair looked like it needed a wash.

“Professor Chant? What are you doing here?”