Not a lot weird. Maybe he was just sleepy. It was just … as they reached the head of the line, he avoided stepping on a discarded candy bar wrapper on the final stair, and for a second, he thought he was stepping over a brightly colored lily instead.

Nope nope nope, Matthew thought. Gonna be okay here.

By the time he pulled himself together, he realized what the wait was for: Adam Parrish. The stairs led to a tiny solarium, a wizard’s lofty lair thrust high over the quaint dark roofs of Cambridge. The haphazard arrangement of tables, chairs, and halogen lamps suggested that many students over many years had composed it. It smelled comfortingly old, like the Barns. Adam sat at a table right in the middle of it, looking gaunt and poised as he always did, his long hands parallel-parked on the edge of the table. On the table in front of him was a stack of tarot cards and a mug stuffed with bills and gift cards. In a chair near him was a gloriously large student wearing a sweater vest Matthew quite liked the look of.

“Hello,” Declan said.

Adam’s tone was dry. “Everyone in your family likes to make a surprise entrance, don’t they?”

Declan smiled blandly and tapped the side of his phone on the table, glancing around at the surroundings with the same judgmental gaze he used when double-checking Matthew’s room-cleaning abilities.

“Fletcher,” Adam said, “would you let the line know that we’re done for the night?”

The other student pushed out of a chair and, waving his own phone, said, “Of course. You should know Gillian’s still going on about break. That’ll be the topic of debate.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

They were left discreetly alone.

“Aglionby would be so proud to see you using all your talents here at Harvard,” Declan said. He turned over the top card of the deck. The writing on the bottom read Seven of Swords, but the art was too wiggly and complicated for Matthew to focus on.

“Aglionby would be proud to see two of its students here at Harvard at the same time,” Adam replied evenly.

“I see you lost your accent.”

“I see you lost your jacket.”

This all felt like a conversation in another language, one that Matthew would never speak. He couldn’t give too much thought to that, however, because suddenly he felt really weird.

His head went weird first, then his legs. His head felt sluggish, but his legs felt the opposite. That walky feeling usually meant he was about to forget what he was doing and end up someplace entirely different.

Nope, he told his legs. Be like a normal person.