Chapter Nine
She was tempted, very tempted, to take the professor up on her offer. It was even easy to picture: a most likely austere little
office, with mean chairs and a view out of the window of a wall. Hargreaves stood ramrod straight, face getting sourer and
sourer as Mina spilled the beans. He is attempting to sully you, and I shall not have it, she imagined the professor saying, before she took her wand from between the folds of her black skirts.
Mina had seen her do just that in fact, the other day.
In the halls, over a student using his flying tool—a bespelled hockey stick, it had looked like—to fly up to the second floor.
She’d made him drop like a stone with a flick of her wrist, then left him crying in a heap. I think my leg is broken, he had sobbed. And Hargreaves had replied, Well, you should have thought of that before you did something you know you shouldn’t.
Plus there was the quiz. The rap of that book being shut.
It was clear she brooked no nonsense.
And had the power to back up that stern disapproval.
Yet somehow, when she came to the turn that would take her to Hargreaves’s office, she kept on going. She stepped out into
the dying daylight. And she hadn’t the faintest idea why. Because he was Harker St. James, boy wonder? Because it wasn’t supposed
to be something that happened?
Maybe, maybe.
But there was something else there, too. Something about the way Professor Hargreaves had spoken—like she might blame more
than the creature that had attached itself to some hapless human. That she might think someone like her had encouraged such
attentions. And even if she didn’t, there was every chance the magic authorities might feel differently.
She had read the other day about them banishing people from the community for doing things they weren’t supposed to. Being shunted, it was called. And it didn’t just involve going back to where you came from.
It meant memory erasure.
So yes, true, it was risky to deal with this alone.
Sure, there was every chance she was very wrong about certain things.
But she had to take it. Truthfully, some part of her wanted to take it. As if she was starting to shed some fundamental part of herself, some small, sad part, that always tried to say
she couldn’t. And in its place was a girl who got to her room, and sat on the edge of her bed, and waited for the boy who
thought she didn’t belong.
She stared at the door, willing him to cross that last line.
To cut that tension and end whatever this was.
Still—it jolted her, when the doorknob stirred. Just a little, almost like someone had brushed against it by accident. But
as she watched, it moved a tiny bit more. It started to turn, slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. She knew she wouldn’t have seen
it if she hadn’t been paying attention. If she’d just been brushing her hair and getting ready for bed, oblivious, she might
have had her back to the door when it began to open.
It was possible he even thought she might be asleep. She knew her breathing was slow and calm enough. That she was still enough.
She made herself be, just to get that satisfaction.
And it was satisfying, too, to see him revealed. He simply stood there, in the open doorway, once he’d finished his careful attempt
to enter unnoticed. Face a picture of surprise, and something else. Something like exasperation, it seemed.
Though it was his clothes that really struck her. How casual they were for someone about to commit murder. He had on a V-necked
sweater, in deep burgundy. A pair of jeans, some sloppy sneakers. He looked like he was going to play Frisbee somewhere on
the grounds. He looked like an advertisement for summer, if a season needed something like a marketing campaign.
No one would ever know that twilight turned beneath his skin.
That he had taken some real boy’s place, or maybe just learned to hide his true face—or something else, something she didn’t
really understand. But she did have some idea how to fight it. Their eyes met for a moment. And then his gaze flicked to the
crucifix in her hand. The one she’d made herself out of pencils and string.
“So you do remember, then,” he said simply.
Mask dropped. Almost amused about it really.
“It’s sort of hard to forget when someone tries to kill you,” she replied, and the ghost of a smile on his lips faltered.
Those black as pitch eyes darkened even further. Like they had in the hall of headmasters, she remembered and wondered again
how long he’d thought of biting her.
“I didn’t try to kill you, bookworm.”
“In the same way you’ve not come to kill me now, you mean.”
“That isn’t what I’m here to do. I’m just here to talk. To explain.”
“Is that why you opened the door like a thief, hoping to steal in before I saw?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He simply stared at her, in a way that made her think of that shadowy place he came from. Those
endless gray hallways, that upside-down sky, the glittering emptiness. And that sound some explorer had described. It is as if there is a constant desolate wind blowing, somewhere just beyond whatever walls surround you, he had said.
He’d never been the same after hearing it.
She was sure she would never be the same after seeing it in his eyes.
“I knew you wouldn’t let me in if I knocked,” he said finally. But he had dropped some of the pretense now. His voice was
flat and dark, as if he was no longer interested in convincing her.
He was just waiting for an opening.
“You make it sound so unreasonable that I might not want to.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was dying.”
“No you weren’t. Areifen can’t be killed like that.”
Hollister’s Complete History of Vampirism had told her that one. And all the other texts had agreed. A creature like that could be dismembered and drained of all blood,
and after a while they would be back to their old self again. It was the reason her own wound had healed—vampiric saliva was
apparently wonderful at knitting a wound back together.
It just took time.
Though not a lot of it, if he was anything to go by.
God, she thought. You would never know his face was a ruin a week ago.
“So you’ve learned a few terms and a few facts, and you think you’re safe,” he said. Not quite jeering at her. But certainly there was something withering in there.
As if he had any real right to be.
“Safer than I was, at least. Safe enough that you’re staying where you are.”
“Yes, but you really have to consider why I’m staying here.”
“The thing I have in my hand, obviously.”
“Yes, well, about that,” he said in so pointed a way she knew what he was going to do, before he finished the rest. She even
braced, as he spoke the words: “It was never a deity we don’t believe in that repels us.”
Then sure enough—he went for her. He practically lunged, and so violently she almost jerked back. She had a split second of
fear, thinking she had gotten it as badly wrong as he assumed. But just as she went to, it happened. The thing she’d planned
for, the trick she’d set up.
It worked.
He got to the point of actually getting past the doorframe, and his whole body seemed to just slap to a stop. More than that,
really, worse than that—it was as if he’d rammed into something. Like a bird against glass, her mind gasped, as she watched his thighs seem to flatten, and his arm bang off absolutely nothing at all, and his head
snap all the way back, so violently it was as if he’d been punched.
When he righted it again, his nose was bleeding.
It was bleeding, and it was crooked.
The impact had broken it.
Holy fuck, she almost whispered. “I know,” she said, as he touched his nose and then looked at the blood on his hand, stunned. “It was never articles of faith that stopped a vampire. It was the material they made the articles of faith out of.”
And on the last word, she tossed away the pencils and string. Her cobbled-together little thing that she had only pretended
to believe in. Because now it was clear that she had gambled on something else entirely—and she had won.
But even better:
He knew it.
He looked at where that barrier was wonderingly.
Then he looked at her, with something that wasn’t withering disdain anymore. “You rubbed fucking iron filings into your doorframe,”
he said, and for the first time since she’d met him, she let herself grin.
“Oh, you bet I did, motherfucker.”
“But Hollister’s Guide doesn’t even mention it.”
“The most popular text is notoriously not often the best.”
“So you dug up what? Some obscure witch’s account of warding off vampires?”
She spread her hands, as smug about it as he had been from second one. “She seemed to know what she was talking about. Though
even if she hadn’t, I would have erred on the side of caution. Better to collate evidence from several sources than rely on
just one,” she said, as if that was just so obvious.
And it maddened him as much as she had hoped it would.
“So I have a broken nose because you’re a conscientious bookworm.”
“You have a broken nose because you just tried to kill me, Harker.”
“I told you. I’m not trying to kill you. That was just me proving a point.”
“By lunging at me, fangs bared?”
“Don’t be dramatic, my fangs weren’t bared,” he said and rolled his eyes. Then he paused, before adding almost casually: “This is baring.” And god, she couldn’t help the sound of shock that came out of her when he followed through. He snarled, hard
enough that it seemed to change his whole face. Creases appeared where they shouldn’t be; things shifted in ways that looked
unnatural.
And those teeth.
It wasn’t just two neat little incisors.
His mouth bristled with razor blades. It was like seeing into the maw of a shark—only so much more unsettling than that. Because
once he was done showing off, he drew back. And somehow the teeth did, too. They seemed to melt down into something more ordinary,
all at once. As if that flash of fang had just been a kind of optical illusion.
Though, of course, she knew it hadn’t been.
Her trembling attested to that.
As did his satisfaction on seeing it.