I follow behind him until a familiar smell reaches my nose halfway down the hall. I stop. To my right is an open door, and suddenly I realize why the smell is familiar. This room belongs to Nick. The color scheme is similar to his room at the Lodge—blues and whites on the twin bed in the corner and in the checkered curtains. There’s a small desk and two large bookcases.

“We don’t have time for you to snoop around your boyfriend’s childhood room.” Sel sounds utterly annoyed.

I scowl at him in the darkness, knowing full well he can see it, but catch up to where he’s standing at the very end of the hall. I join him in front of a wide wooden door.

“I probably should have thought about doing this before,” he says with a hint of chagrin. He takes the two finely engraved silver rings off his left hand and adds them to the empty fingers on his right, so that all four fingers have rings on them.

“You should have thought about your jewelry?”

He side-eyes me. “No, breaking into Lord Davis’s records. And, for your information, silver conducts aether best.” He calls a tiny, bright sphere of aether into his palm, letting it rotate and build until it becomes a small spinning planet with white clouds swirling across the surface.

His brows knit together. The spinning ball changes shape, stretching into a very thin, translucent blade. As I watch, it hardens in layers, growing denser with every passing second, until it forms into a razor-sharp point, with the base still swirling in a ball in Sel’s hand. He wraps his fingers around the handle and draws the blade down the seam of the door until the latch releases. The door unhitches with a quiet click.

Sel says we have about an hour before Nick and his father come home. I ask him again if we can just wait, ask Nick to help us, and he glares at me before pointing to the other side of Lord Davis’s office where there are at least four sets of filing cabinets up against a wall.

“What are we looking for exactly?”

“Records, membership details, witness accounts, anything someone might have documented about the attacks.”

We divide and conquer, with Sel taking one side of the room and me taking the other. I go slow with one injured arm, but can use my right fingers to hold single pages. After ten minutes, Sel speaks up.

“You’re good for him, you know.”

We both know exactly who he’s talking about.

He pulls another drawer open. “He’s always been self-righteous, but now he has focus. Before you showed up, he defied his father to prove to himself that he doesn’t care what the man thinks. Now he’s actually considering the legacy he used to shove aside.”