Chapter 20 #2
"Good," he says, quietly.
I open my mouth.
The bond with Ryder detonates.
That's the only word for it. It doesn't flare or spike or run hot.
It detonates, a full-body impact of fury and ice and an almost violent possessiveness that hits me so hard I take a step backward and my shoulders connect with the wall.
My hand goes to my chest automatically. The bond is blazing, feeding me jealousy so intense it's indistinguishable from rage, and then. ..
"Fairmont."
Ryder is at the corridor junction. He's thirty feet away and he's standing very still, like he's working hard at not doing other things, and his eyes are on me first and then on Thane and then on the wall beside my head where Thane's handprint has left a scorch mark in the stone that neither of us noticed happening.
The silence runs for exactly three seconds.
Thane turns around.
"Ashford," he says, and manages to make it sound like a greeting and a warning simultaneously.
"Valorix." Ryder walks toward us. His stride is measured and even, and the death magic I associate with him is running high. I can feel it through the bond, cold and controlled and very close to not controlled at all. "The response team has been looking for you. Both of you. There's a debrief."
"We were just heading there," I say.
"Were you." His eyes move to the scorch mark on the wall. Back to Thane. "Long route."
"We ran into a complication," Thane says.
"I can see that."
The temperature in the corridor has dropped on one side and risen on the other, Ryder's death magic pressing cold against Thane's residual heat, and I am standing between them in the literal sense of the word, and this will be a problem in ten seconds if I don't intervene.
"The complication was a near-bond formation," I say, because I've decided that brutal honesty works here. "My null current pulled on Thane's fire during the fight. I stopped it. We were discussing it."
Ryder looks at me. The bond is still blazing and I can feel every degree of what he's not saying, the controlled fury of it, the thing underneath the fury that I'm not examining right now because this is not the moment.
"You stopped it," he says.
"Yes."
"You stopped a bond formation on your own."
"I've had practice," I say, and the look he gives me tells me he knows I mean the first bond, the one between us, the one I tried to stop and failed. His jaw tightens.
"We should discuss this," he says. "Properly. Not in a hallway."
"Agreed," Thane says. "Once I've spoken with the debrief team."
"I wasn't talking to you."
"I gathered." Thane's voice is very even. "I'm talking to you. Whatever is happening with Angelic's null current involves all three Houses at this point, Ashford. You don't have exclusive jurisdiction over it."
"I'm her professor."
"You're her bonded," Thane says, and the word is flat, clinical, stripped of anything inflammatory. "That's different. And you know it."
Ryder takes two steps forward.
I step sideways, putting myself between them, which is not a good strategy against a reaper and a dragon but it's the one I have. "Stop."
Neither of them stops. They've both stilled in the specific way of people calculating range and angles.
"I said stop." I don't raise my volume. I've learned that volume doesn't work on either of them.
"Ryder. The debrief team is waiting. Thane needs a healer for his ribs.
I need both of you to be functional adults for the next forty-five minutes and then you can go back to whatever territorial nonsense this is. "
A beat.
"His ribs," Ryder says.
"The possessed professor had him off the floor. Two or three bruised, not broken. He refused to let me look properly."
Ryder's eyes move to Thane's torso. His face flickers, too fast to read, and then it's gone. "Healer's station is on the second level. You know where it is."
"I've been here longer than you've had a reason to care about my injuries," Thane says.
"That's not a denial."
Thane's mouth tightens. He looks at me for a moment.
Not the gold-eyed combat intensity from earlier, not the open unguarded thing from thirty seconds ago, but between them, a look that lands and holds briefly and then moves off.
"Debrief," he says. "Then we revisit the tracking seal.
There's a pattern in the placement and I want it charted before the faculty team decides to file it and move on. "
"Agreed," I say.
He walks. Straight down the corridor, past both of us, unhurried, the slightly uneven breathing the only indication his ribs are making their opinions known. He doesn't look back at Ryder. He doesn't look back at me either.
Then it's just me and Ryder in the corridor, and the scorch mark on the wall, and the bond running between us like a current that doesn't know how to be quiet.
"You're angry," I say.
"I'm aware of what I am." He's still watching the junction where Thane turned, and his profile is sharp, controlled, the expression he wears when he's locked things down behind several layers of deliberate composure. "How close did it get? The bond formation."
"Close enough that I felt it trying to anchor. Not close enough that it completed."
"You pushed it back yourself."
"I did."
He turns, finally, and meets my eyes. The death magic has pulled back somewhat. The fury underneath it hasn't, but it's sitting differently now, less like an outward target and more like private management.
"If it had completed..." he starts.
"It didn't."
"If it had." He takes a breath. "It would have changed things."
"I know." I study his face. The bond gives me access to too much of what he's feeling right now, and I'm not sure he knows how much bleeds through. "That's why I stopped it."
"Because you don't want it, or because you wanted control over when."
The question is direct and quiet and costs him to ask. I can feel that too.
"Both," I tell him, honest, because he asked honestly and he deserves the same. "I'm not going to form bonds I didn't choose. Not again. Not with anyone."
He holds that. Doesn't argue with it, doesn't flinch away from it. Just holds it.
"The debrief," he says finally.
"Right."
We walk. The corridor opens up ahead into the main academic wing, the ceilings rising, the lighting returning to normal intensity now that the response teams have finished pulling power from the upper levels.
The academy is still under lockdown but the locked-down quality has changed.
Less emergency, more aftermath. The stillness of a building that has been through events and is now waiting to find out what it means.
Ryder walks beside me, and the bond runs between us steady and unresolved, and I don't reach for it and he doesn't comment on the fact that I don't.
Behind us, somewhere in the east corridor, there's a scorch mark in the stone in the shape of a hand.
I don't look back at it.
Neither does he.