I didn’t wake up immediately.

  First I registered warmth. Then the fact that something heavy was draped across my legs, vibrating like a washing machine on spin cycle.

  Moorka.

  I cracked one eye open. Limbs accounted for. The demonic armoured feline had not consumed me overnight. Solid start to the morning. And really, what was there to fear? She was purring. Yes, she resembles a medieval weapon. Spiky, plated, demonic — yes. But still a cat.

  Strangely, I felt calm. Not fearless — let’s not exaggerate. But the hysteria had drained away. The panic and that fragile internal fracture that felt ready to split me down the middle.

  I sat up slowly. Moorka leapt off the bed and marched toward the small door in the corner — the one I’d assumed was a cupboard. A few seconds later, I heard the unmistakable sound of running water.

  I went very still.

  “Excuse me?”

  She emerged from the bathroom with the air of someone who had just demonstrated impeccable manners. I scanned the room. No smell. No evidence of feline activity. No horrors beneath the bed.

  She uses the toilet.

  “Right,” I muttered. “So we’re skipping the litter tray.”

  She fixed me with a look that clearly meant: Feed me, inferior biped. Administrative matters concluded.

  I sighed.

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  “Yes, yes. Coming.”

  Breakfast was a joint venture. Bread, cheese and porridge with berries for me. Steak chunks for her — let them think I’m bulking. Moorka ate quickly, without fuss, but thoroughly. As if she understood: the day was ahead.

  And the day did, indeed, unfold in its usual exhausting fashion.

  Lectures stretched into eternity. Magical diagrams crawled across pages like ink spiders. I wrote everything down with determined stubbornness, despite understanding roughly half of it. If I’m stranded in a magical death academy, at least I won’t be the dumbest person in the room.

  After dinner we met Finn and Elvira. Official reason: assess the abandoned wing as potential feline accommodation. Unofficially, none of us could resist.

  They had curiosity. I had unfinished business with fear. I remembered the whisper. The dread. That sense of being watched… Mum used to say fear should be faced head-on, otherwise it follows you home.

  This time I wasn’t alone.

  “Well then,” I murmured, “let’s see who’s scared of whom.”

  Strangely, the abandoned wing looked almost… manageable. In company, even nightmare corridors downgrade themselves to mildly threatening architecture. The air was heavy. The gargoyles looked homicidal. The scent of damp and antiquity lingered.

  But I wasn’t paralysed.

  Moorka — carried because madam had decided walking herself was beneath her dignity — showed not the slightest concern — lay in my arms. Eyes half-lidded. Tail dangling lazily. So perhaps last time it really was my imagination?

  “Charming,” I muttered, deliberately not locking eyes with any stone sentinels.

  Finn leaned toward a gargoyle and I nearly seized him by the collar.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “Testing,” he said cheerfully. “Elvira said they’re just stone under petrification, didn’t she?”

  “She did,” Elvira said darkly. “But if the spell hasn’t been renewed and you accidentally wake up one, let me remind you — those aren’t undead we can lay to rest, and we’re not elemental mages who can blast monsters to pieces.”

  Finn rolled his eyes. We walked on.

  Then Moorka began squirming. Ah yes. The entire point of this expedition — to give her some freedom. She dropped gracefully to the floor, strutted down the corridor like she owned the building, sniffed a gargoyle… then quite deliberately turned her back to it.

  “Stop, Moorka!” I hissed. Naturally, she did not. “No— no, no, no—”

  I lunged forward. Too late.

  The cat did her business.