Chapter Two #4
just the smallest little fraction of a second, she thought she saw a light. There, in the hands she had reached up to him.
It gleamed between their bodies, clear enough that it seemed like he saw it, too.
He glanced down, something like surprise on his face.
And he acted fast. He shifted so he could use his wand.
To defend himself, she thought, or attack her maybe.
However, just as she braced for him turning her guts inside out, she saw him aim at the stone, at the side of her.
He drew a swift line, between his arm, and his leg, and her head, and her body.
Puzzling, at first.
Harmless seeming almost, despite the brightness of that line, the heat of it. And then he slashed another one above her head,
and she got what was happening all in a rush of horror. He was drawing a rectangular hole. He was drawing a rectangular hole
for her to fall into. In a second, the stone was going to give way beneath her and dump her god knows where.
The Underneath, she thought automatically.
Then she didn’t even stop to think. She just tried to shove past the bar of his arms, his legs. She scrunched up and pushed
herself into that gap between both, fighting to get through. But just as she got hold of the edge of the stone plinth, just
as she started to haul herself to freedom, half of her body just fucking dropped.
Suddenly her legs were dangling, instead of laying flat on something solid. They flailed behind her, like a puppet with half
its strings cut. And that tenuous grip on the stone simply wasn’t enough to keep her stable.
So she did the only thing she could.
She grabbed a fistful of his sweater with her free hand. And when she lost her grip on the stone, she held on tight to him.
Bizarrely tight, she thought—until she saw what her clenched fist looked like. There was that light all around it. That little spark still
there. It meant he couldn’t get free, when he tried to grab her hand and shove it away. Like she’d glued herself to him somehow,
strongly enough that there was no real escape.
She was shocked to hear him gasp. To see the look on his face as she tumbled all the way through—a flash of outrage, followed by scalding hot fury, clear enough that she knew exactly what it meant even before it happened.
She’d dragged him with her.
He was following her down, down, down, into whatever nightmare he’d condemned her to. Flailing as he went, as if he were no
more graceful than her. And all the while, she held on. She didn’t know why, but she did. When they landed, she still had
a fistful of his sweater.
So of course he did it on top of her.
She got that enormous shoulder jamming right into her left breast. His heavy thigh smacked her hard enough across the stomach
that she knew she’d have bruises tomorrow. And his face landed so close to hers she could have called it a kiss. She felt
the burr of his stubble, the hint of something softer than bone and muscle.
Lips, she thought, as she tried to get away.
She shoved and squirmed frantically, every part of her so horrified and disgusted she didn’t even care that she was probably
plunging deeper into some godforsaken part of the Underneath. Let the monsters down there eat her—it was a better fate than
being close to him. Or letting him see how burning red her face suddenly was.
Only once she had made it a safe distance, she could see there weren’t any monsters at all. She wasn’t hemmed in on all sides
by the weirdness she had both feared and longed for all her life. They were still surrounded by hedges. They could have been
a foot from where they’d started out, if it hadn’t been for one minor detail.
There was a set of gates here. Big gates flanked by the same sorts of people who’d taken her name, at the start.
And then it sank in.
“You sent me to the beginning?” she gasped, too furious and flabbergasted to even think of holding her tongue. “What did I do to you to deserve being expelled?”
But he just laughed. He laughed in this bitter sort of way, as he slowly started to climb to his feet. Shook his head, like
he couldn’t believe she was such a fool. Then finally, he met her gaze, as the sound of a clock striking midnight rang out
over the maze. “The punishment for barely making it beyond the gates isn’t expulsion, you annoying creature,” he said in this
weary way. “Though you might wish it was, once you attend your first boring basics for beginners lecture and realize what
you have dragged there with you.”
A monster, she thought automatically.
Pulled from the depths somehow, when she wasn’t looking.
And of course, in one way she was absolutely right. Because he looked human, he looked ordinary, he could have passed for
a person in all the ways that mattered. But as she looked up at him—head full of the words he’d just said and what they most
likely meant, what they told her about how much closer he would now be than he would have ever as some advance class–attending
champion—she understood completely: He was as monstrous as anything with fur and fangs and fifteen arms, in almost every single
possible way.