Paper Confines

xxxii. Traces

PAPER CONFINES.
32. / Traces

✶

When the door's lock clicked, Colette was half-asleep and pressed to Nadya with her chin on the top of her head.

The sound startled her backwards, which startled a sleeping Nadya out of bed, her hair unwoven from her braid by Colette's fingers and standing in an arc by the tug of static. She cursed loudly as she hit the floor, and by the time Reid walked in with Claude, Nadya was wincing through expletives and Colette was stretched horizontally across the bed to check on her.

Claude was still in formal robes, and slightly dusty, but otherwise looked comparatively unstirred. Colette supposed an absence of duelling and Living Death would explain that, but he hadn't avoided the Knights entirely.

"About time," he teased, glancing between them.

Nadya pulled herself upright and crossed her arms. "Bite me, Ozanich."

"You've had enough of that for all of us, the way I hear it."

"Not quite."

Colette sat back against the pillows and tucked her legs in, her dress skirts in a heap at her ankles. She pictured herself looking more ferocious than she felt, half-fetal and barefoot, the pearly blue fabric of her last nice dress in tatters. How long since her hair had been down and flat and streaked red by blood like summer berries? Since she had sisters to squeeze the colours through the strands, a brother to twirl her braids and call them pretty—since Bordeaux fell and she held their bodies close, washed the colours of death away in the morning and cut the hair to her eyes?

She curled further into herself.

"Not quite indeed," Claude said.

Reid's perpetual frown deepened as she took her coat from the foot of the bed and presumably noticed an absence of weight.

Nadya pointed languidly across the room from still-crossed arms. "It's—"

But Reid was already two long strides over, muttering exasperatedly under her breath, words fortunately unheard. She plucked the book from the desk Colette had left it as if it was going to grow legs and sprint for the crack under the door.

"This is not to be paltered with," she asserted, tucking it once more in her pocket.

"We didn't do anything to it," Nadya assured, albeit a touch guiltily, "just looked at it."

"This book could be cursed enough that just looking at it is all it might take. We wear warded coats in my line of work; keeping it with me is not only for my sake."

Colette frowned. "All it might take for what?"

"For an attachment to be made," she said obviously, "for you to be influenced, for it to steal, or control, or learn from you. Certain forms of dark magic have a sentience to them, and if not a goal they're tasked with by their creator, one they will make for themselves. Can you imagine, do you think, what sort of goal something like that might have?"

"Nothing noble, I suppose," Nadya muttered.

"No," Reid concurred, "Nothing noble. Any pull you find yourself feeling towards it—even abused at the root by your desire to help my sister—consider it with the same trust you would the pull of a parasite. You offer it shelter, food, magic, a culture to grow and strengthen. Dark magic is innately self-preserving, and wickedly smart about it depending on its source and kind, both of which we know extraordinarily little about."

"We know its source."

That his name was etched down the side was a kind reminder. Colette chewed at her lip. "We may not know what the magic is exactly, but it is Tom's. Unfortunately, he is not incapable."