Chapter One #2
Eyes the color of spilled ink, wide set enough to almost be unsettling, turned down at the corners like something from a painting by Rossetti.
Then there were those brows, thick and dark and just a little untidy, toward the middle, stark against that pale skin.
The bone structure hinted at before but so clear to her now.
That jaw like something carved from stone, those cheekbones broad and high.
Almost everything heavy, heavy, heavy.
Until you got to that dimple. The one that looked as if a ghost had pressed a finger over his lips and left a faint imprint
behind. Part of it above his mean mouth, just underneath his firm nose. Part of it below, down the middle of that strong chin.
And every bit of that image so oddly familiar she got a little flash of something.
Like a memory, of being laid down in long grass. Sunlight making patterns on tanned skin. For some reason, her nails were
painted blue—they looked dark against the pink of someone’s lips, as she hovered one finger over an indentation very like
his. Almost exactly like his.
Though she couldn’t remember who it could have possibly belonged to. She didn’t know any handsome men, didn’t like them, didn’t
trust them. And even if she had, she couldn’t recall doing anything of the kind.
She was an indoor girl. A lover of evening, midnight, the witching hour. Of curling up in wintertime with a mug of something
dark and sweet, a book open in her lap. She would have never laid out like that, in heat so fierce she could almost feel it
now. She could almost taste it, almost smell it.
And it was this that helped her finally wrench away.
It was just too real, too weird. Like he was doing something to her mind somehow. Here that’s completely possible, she told herself, then stumbled through a sudden break in the crowd, without thinking. She pushed against the seething river
of bodies, intent on nothing but getting away. No thought of where she was going, just escape, escape, escape. There was one
of the passageways—she took it gladly. She kept going until she was far from his cruel gaze.
Too far, really.
She looked back the way she had come, but somehow that Grand Central Station mess was no longer there. There was just a pinprick
of darkness at the end of an endless hall. And the hall itself was no less disturbing. Portraits lined the wall in front of
her and the wall at her back. Heavy, dark portraits of men with pale, somber faces and steely disapproving eyes.
Like older versions of the boy who thought she didn’t belong.
Which explained a lot. He was probably a legacy, who’d never had to crest that hill and pray. Most likely he lived in one
of those gated magical communities and policed those boundaries like a wolf. Always lying in wait for trespassers, always
ready to pounce when they set foot where they didn’t belong.
They turn a corner, and there he would be.
Though, god, it was a shock when that exact thing happened. She got to the end of the hall and tried to turn in a direction
she hoped would bring her back to the entrance, and there he was. Somehow, there he was.
“That’s not possible, you were just—” she started to say and pointed back toward the entrance.
But his expression told her the mistake she’d made immediately.
His lip curled, his eyes suddenly lit with a kind of amused contempt.
Like he couldn’t believe she was thinking something that preposterous.
How could she not understand that this wasn’t an ordinary place, with pedestrian things like passageways that went in normal directions?
You may find that the laws of physics are not strictly obeyed at Harrowhall, the welcome guide had said.
And here was the proof.
Or was it more like proof of the kind of magic he could do? She saw what he had at his hip. Attached to his belt with a loop
of leather. Simple looking, for someone like him—just plain, dark wood tapering down to an almost sharp-seeming point. But
unmistakable all the same.
A wand. He had a whole actual wand.
One that he could just use anytime he liked.
She even thought he might, right then and there, on her. His hand hung very close to it, open and just a little tense. Like a gunslinger, she thought, waiting to draw and shoot her dead.
And it would shoot her dead, too.
She had absolutely nothing to defend herself with. No wand of her own—students didn’t even get one until they had mastered the basic forms. And she
was nowhere near mastering anything at all. Sometimes she had strange dreams, and when she woke things had shifted around.
But nothing concrete. Certainly, nothing that could hurt him. And he plainly knew it. It was all over his smug face. It was
in the way he stood there, blocking her path. “Are you going to let me past?” she stuttered out finally.
Then watched his lips peel back over those unsettlingly large teeth.
Like some approximation of a smile.
“Maybe you should just try,” he said, accent exactly as she could have predicted. Every word seemingly dragged from low down in his throat, and so clear and clean it made her think of cut glass, the good crystal, crisp air.
Old money, she thought automatically.
And it made her bristle. Her face heated; she went to go around him in a blundering rush. But he stepped to his left when
she stepped to her right, and she almost ran right into him. She got a wave of his scent, like winter air when you open a
window. Something seemed to brush the back of her hand, the flat of her thigh.
However, when she looked, she could see she had never actually gotten close enough to touch him. It was just the space between
them, so strangely heavy it rubbed against her. It left her wanting to scratch, to shake it off. She thought of spiders running
across her skin and dropped a bag.
Then two more followed when she went to pick it up.
She scrambled for them, on her hands and knees now, and was sure she heard him laughing. But when she glanced up, red-faced
and sweaty and full of things she wanted to spit at him, the look on his face stopped her dead. His eyes had darkened to the
deepest black she could imagine, entirely lightless and empty. And there was a kind of strain about his features, a tension—as
if he was trying to force himself not to do something.
And she suspected this something was very wicked indeed.
It made her heart jump in her chest, just seeing a hint of it. Every angry word fell back down her throat so abruptly she
had to swallow to stop them choking her. Then somehow, she found herself scrambling back across the floor. Heels digging into
what was probably marble, hands behind her, frantically sliding.
While he stood there, calm and still and cruel-eyed.
Almost impassive in a way that somehow felt more terrifying. She could only stand ten seconds of it before she turned, and stumbled to her feet, and ran back the way she came. And she only stopped when she realized:
She had left her suitcases behind.