Page 25 of The Exorcism of Faeries

Tomorrow. She’d go back for it tomorrow. When Murdoch was in session.

Sonder

“Would you pay feckin’ attention?”

Sonder dragged his gaze from Miss Morrow’s belongings and focused on Nolan Kelleher’s disgruntled face. “You drone on so much, I stopped listening.”

Kelleher’s nostrils flared. The two of them had never been close, despite living together for the better part of six years almost a decade ago in Briseis. It was amazing how much could remain hidden within the same walls when no effort was put forth.

Sonder, however, had put forth quite a lot of effort back then to sift out all Kelleher’s secrets. Being an integral part of a secret society would do that to a man, make him thirst to fill his arsenal with the secrets of his fellows—just in case.

“Rochford wants your work to have results sooner rather than later. He’s getting impatient, pressing Lynch and me to put pressure on you.”

“Is it grand being Rochford’s lapdog? Does he scratch you behind your ears and offer you treats?”

Kelleher’s ears were turning red and Sonder suppressed a smile. “Just because your proposition for Achilles House was accepted and my ideas were not, does not make you better than me, Sonder Murdoch.”

“There, there, Kelleher. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Sonder stood and rounded his desk, unintentionally pulled toward Miss Morrow’s things on his side table. “Message received.” He made a purposefully disrespectful and flippant hand motion for Kelleher to leave. Which he did, in a huff.

Sonder closed and locked the door before returning to the abandoned satchel. For a long moment, he stared at it. And then he was opening it, pulling out a notebook, then another and another.

An hour and two glasses of whiskey disappeared before he realised how engrossed he’d been. Ariatne Morrow was no dolt. Her notes were thorough, her sketches clean, her ideas unique. To his surprise, his favourite pages were the ones where she had clearly been distracted or bored in classes he surmised were too simple for her and she’d drawn little fairytale creatures. Wills-o-the-wisp and trooping faeries, gargoyles and dragons.

One notebook was entirely filled with abstract ideas about the Plague cadavers she’d cut into and had no idea he knew about. Her observations were astute and accurate, but her foolishness to carry around anything of the sort. . .

He came to his senses and put everything back in order, but paused to look over the book titles in her bag, chuckling when he realised none of them were textbooks, but fiction titles.The Iliad, To the Lighthouse, Vanity Fair, a new title:The Secret History, and only one he had not read himself:The Canterville Ghostby Oscar Wilde.

Sonder scribbled the title on his blotter and left for a night at Achilles House.

Atta

“Uh oh.” Emmy caught Atta in the common room on Third of Briseis House, staring into the fireplace. “Today didn’t go so well?” she ventured, sitting down next to Atta on the sofa.

“He’s a bastard.”

Emmy rubbed a small circle on her back. “We tried to tell ya’, hun.”

“I can’t be kicked out of Trinity,” Atta said quietly. Emmy’s hand disappeared and then her presence after it as she went to the common fridge and pulled out a half-drunk naggin of whiskey.

She handed it to Atta. “Sip, then spill.”

Immensely grateful for Emmy’s calming presence, she twisted off the lid and considered a sip of the cheap liquor straight from the bottle, but then remembered the Plague and the body she’d dropped off to feckin’ Gold Stitch after her miserable shift at Gallaghers’. “Cup?”

Emmy laughed her deep, husky chuckle and left, returning with a fancy champagne flute.

Atta filled it to the brim, lying to herself that the germs were only on the lip of the bottle, not in the liquor because of the alcohol content. She took a gulp, and Emmy snatched the flute, doing the same.

“There we are. Now, spill.”

“Murdoch said I have to just sit in his classes and observe before I can even make copies or fetch him coffee.”

“Prick,” Emmy interjected supportively, taking it upon herself to drink half the flute of whiskey.

“And then I called him a bastard and stormed out.”

Emmy gaped at her. “You did not.”

“I did.”

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