I remembered with horror when I’d reached him through the scrying water, back in Wales, on graduation day—that moment when I’d tried to grab him and had got a handful of maw-mouth instead. Orion had never fought a maw-mouth before. I’d killed the only maw-mouth that had ever made it upstairs in the Scholomance. What if his power, his power that let him pull mana out of mals, had been overwhelmed by taking in that torrent of polluted malia? A century of torment and malice crammed down his throat all in one rush. I couldn’t help wanting to reach out to him—
And he shuddered all over and pressed his entire body up against the dome and came swimming through the cold honey of the wall, one fingertip after another curling away, making it inside, and then his hands, and his face surfacing out of the gold glitter as it slid away, and then he fought his shoulders through, one after another, and thrashed the rest of the way in, falling through onto the floor. And I couldn’t fight Orion, I couldn’t, but as he got up and came at me, I snarled at him in rage and agony, “You bastard, if you come any closer, I’ll beat your skull in,” and heaved up my chair-leg pry bar to bash at him with it, because I could imagine that, the way I couldn’t imagine dissolving him into maggots or commanding him to stop existing or melting the flesh off his bones. But I could hit him with a stick; I’d been ready for that at almost any given moment since I’d met him, and as if he’d believed me, Orion slowed, mid-stride, and stopped just barely out of range.
His face had stayed serenely untroubled all this while, inhumanly blank, but now the very faintest hint of a frown line wobbled into view on his forehead. We all stood squared off, none of us moving. I was still gulping, cramming rage and horror back down my throat together, and he said, “Galadriel,” moving his mouth wrongly around the sound of my name, breaking it into too many syllables, as if he was trying to remember how to speak. “Galadriel.” It was better the second time, and then he said it again, “Galadriel,” and it wasn’t right, it wasn’t the way Orion had once said my name, where he’d almost made me like hearing it, but at least it sounded like a human being talking.
He stopped after that, as if satisfied he’d got it right. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t come at us again, either. He just stood there, looking at me.
We all stayed frozen in place there for what in retrospect felt a silly amount of time, until Orion carried on not trying to kill us for long enough that we finally began to believe he wasn’t going to start again. And once we did believe that, we spent another good long while whispering to one another about what the hell we were going to do with him. Liesel made a case for leaving him in the school while we went and got some sort of help, which Aadhya rolled her eyes at, and I didn’t even bother vetoing out loud. The next obvious answer was to take him straight home to his mum and dad in New York, only that was even more obviously wrong.
“Anywhere else you would take him, New York will come,” Liesel said. “And if not, then someone else will come. Orion Lake cannot be hidden quietly away anywhere in the world.”
“I’ll have a go at it, anyway,” I said grimly. “I’m taking him to my mum.”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what Mum would do with Orion. Based on past experience, she’d want nothing to do with him, except to get me away from him. Horribly, I could even have seen her point. Orion wasn’t trying to kill us at the moment, but it felt very much at the moment. My own skin was still crawling with a visceral terror at even being in arm’s reach. It wasn’t just me, either; Liesel wasn’t taking her eyes off him, her hands poised out to her sides just ready to come up into casting position, and Aadhya kept putting her hand out in front of me every time I looked at him, I think out of the same instinct to stop someone leaning a bit too far out over a mortal cliff, a child or a drunk, someone you didn’t quite trust to keep themselves from going over.
Aad was right not to trust me. I’d have immediately done anything, however stupid and reckless, to try to save him, except that I completely understood on a visceral level that I couldn’t do anything of any use. Whatever had happened to him, whatever Patience had done to him, I hadn’t a hope of fixing it. The only spell I could have cast on him that would have worked was the exact spell I’d come in here to cast: I could have looked at Orion and told him he was already dead, and he would have had to believe me, exactly the way Patience would have had to believe me. Of course Orion was dead. He’d been locked alone inside the Scholomance with half the maleficaria in the world, with the single worst mal in the world. I’d come in knowing he was dead, and I still knew it. I could have convinced him, too.
What I needed was someone to convince both of us that he was still alive, that he was still somewhere in there, smothering under the weight of a million maleficaria. And the only person I knew with any chance of that was Mum.
“And how are we going to get him there?” Liesel snapped, deeply irritated by my ongoing refusal to negotiate with reality. “Will you take his hand and lead him along? Will you be taking him on an aeroplane perhaps? How will we even remove him from this tourist park?”
I hadn’t answers for any of these really excellent questions. I looked at Orion, his eyes bright and glossy and fixed on me, and I took a step away towards the doors of the gym. His head turned to follow me. I swallowed and took a few more steps, tensed throughout my body, and I barely managed to keep from letting out a whimper when he went into motion again; Liesel and Aadhya both scrambled to stay ahead of me. But he only came a few steps more and stopped again, just out of reach again. I needed a lot of deep breathing before my heart stopped thumping, and I was leaking tears while it did. It was wrong, wrong wrong wrong to be standing here afraid of Orion. No one in their right mind would ever have been rude to this thing wearing his face.
“I don’t care,” I said, when I could get words out. “I’m taking him to Wales even if I have to walk there.”
* * *
Lucky for me and probably a lot of other people, after I made my grand pronouncement, Liesel gave up on trying to persuade me to do anything sensible and instead put her brain on solving all the problems she considered unnecessary that I was nevertheless creating for myself and by extension her. She led us back to the workshop, and Aadhya cobbled together a spell holder for her out of the bits and pieces left around. Fortunately, those included several bits of maleficaria, and Aadhya’s affinity was in working with exotic materials. She put together a pendant out of the teardrop-shaped eyecase that had come off a chitter, surrounded by fragments of the shells of at least half a dozen mournlets tied on with sirenspider silk, and Liesel put a spell of obfuscation into it, and then handed it to me. “Put it on him,” she said.