We’ve come all this way to get stopped by a door.

I recheck the runes I scrawled in chalk around the frame. I accounted for any fail-safe we might trigger, and even padded in unnecessarily complex runes for any fail-safe fail-safe; I would not put it past these assholes to have traps on traps just to fuck with me.

But Seb, Orok had said, isn’t it egotistical to think the Conjuration Department beefed up their security to spite you and not to, say, protect the thousands of dollars’ worth of spell components in their lab?

To which I’d responded with a deadpan stare. The protection ward currently keeping me out of the second-floor Conjuration Lab might as well have To Sebastian Walsh, With Love woven into the fabric of the barrier that glimmers an ethereal blue every time I try to break it.

I roll my shoulders, shake out my hands, and start the incantation. Again.

“You get one more shot,” Orok interrupts from where he leans against the wall behind me, “then I’m climbing the side of the building.”

“They’ll have wards on the windows, too.”

“Not ones this intense. They expect thieves to come through this way—”

“Thieves.” I snort derisively.

I can feel Orok’s eye roll as strongly as I can feel his next words coming, and I mouth along with him—

“And puny evocation wizards.”

Only I don’t add that descriptor, and I flip a glare back at him. “Puny?”

Orok eyes me head to toe, then holds his arms out in an unspoken comparison.

He’s got the height and bulk from his half-giant lineage, which has made him broader and taller than I am at every stage of our lives. My family had been thrilled when we glommed on to each other in grade school, exclaiming what a good influence he’d be on me—right up until he opted into academia, and it turned out Orok Monroe wasn’t a good influence on me; I was a bad influence on him.

Lock up your kids, Sebastian Walsh might come along and tempt them to fall upon the sacrificial altar of student debt.