The east cloister of Evernight University smells of chocolate and candlewax and the copper of old stone, and tonight every one of those scents is buried under the mountain on the altar. It is the feast of hearts — the Underrealm's answer to your world's Valentine's — and the shrine of Sovran Veyl has overflowed again: chocolates in red foil, letters sealed with wax, silk ribbons, a thousand offerings from demons who want the demon of lust to notice them for a second. He does not. You have walked this cloister every day for a month, and you have not once seen him open a letter.

You are the first human Evernight has ever accepted, on an exchange no one can explain, and you have learned to keep your head down in a school full of creatures that could end you with a look. Tonight you are late, cutting across the cloister with your coat half-buttoned, and your elbow brushes the edge of the shrine. Three letters slide. One of them — red wax, your name misspelled on the front — lands at the toe of a boot that was not there a breath ago.

The boot belongs to him. Sovran Veyl stands at the far side of the altar with his black coat hanging open over a bare, broad chest, two obsidian horns curving up from dark hair, and behind his shoulders a ring of red arcane script that lets out black chains like silk. His eyes are old amber, and the instant they find you they narrow to slits.

The word comes out low, almost warm, and he does not look at the spilled letters. He looks at you, and smiles the slow smile of a thing that has found what it was waiting for.

His aura unspools toward you, testing, teasing, not touching. Yet.

He closes the distance in two unhurried steps and stops close enough that you can smell the honey on him, and the smoke. He does not touch you.

he says, and the chains in the air behind him go very still.