Chapter Five #3
and now here he was, sprawled on the floor, nose bleeding, words babbling out of him. “No, please, I didn’t mean to get it
wrong,” he said.
But Hargreaves only watched as impassively as a person waiting for a bus, when the wrong one goes by. It made her heart pound
to see that face—more than the hairy hand did, more than the way it was grabbing him, more than the sound of him screaming,
more than everyone around him trying to get out of the way.
Because in the maze, it had been possible to pretend that professors were watching and waiting to step in if things got too
terrible. But here it wasn’t. Here she just had to watch as something bristling with tooth and claw dragged him into the hole
it had come from, one slow agonizing inch at a time.
First his feet went.
Then his legs.
And finally all that was left were his hands, scrabbling at the tufted, torn edges of the seat the monster had burst through.
The last thing Mina saw were the whites of his knuckles, his splintering nails. A single person reaching for him, the way
she wanted to, before fear made them snap their hand back, and shake it as if it were covered in bugs.
For all Mina knew, it was.
Nightmare bugs from the depths of the Underneath.
Brought here by a deranged Q she was sure she could. In fact, the answer was on the tip of her tongue when
she felt it.
Suddenly around her upper arm, tight and cold as an iron cuff created in some icy wasteland, and so forceful she barely made
it an inch from her seat. She didn’t even manage a breath.
He stopped it with his other hand.
Right.
Over.
Her mouth.
“You think if you try to save them, it’ll work? You think this place recognizes things like justice and heroism? She’ll have
you butchered instead, and me with you for having the bad fortune to be sitting at your side,” he hissed, so close to her
ear she felt his wintry breath trail over the side of her face, a cruel caress.
Though that wasn’t what turned her guts to soup.
It was the taste of him. The taste of his skin. He’d shoved his hand over her mouth so fast and firm she hadn’t had a chance to close it. And now her tongue was touching the soft plume of his palm. Sweet as syrup from something overripe, that sense informed her.
And she hated it for that.
She hated all of this.
It didn’t even help that the girl got it right, and no wraith howled its way into the lecture hall. Or that when he finally
let her go, he almost seemed to be trembling, too. As if he’d been afraid, on some level, the same as she had. No, no, the
only thing that she could think of was that she would never get that out of her head now.
He was the worst person in the world.
Her mortal enemy until the day she died.
And now she had to always know that he tasted like sin.