Chapter Nine #2
“So now you can see. If I actually wanted to murder you, Mina, I would have done it by now,” he said. Then just as she was trying to find a way out of that, he continued.
Almost casually. “Do you know how many times and in how many ways I could have killed you before today? You took a wrong turn
the first time you set foot in this place—and down the deadliest hallway in the building, no less. Anyone who felt like murder
was a great idea would barely have had to lift a finger. Then there was the maze and all the mistakes you made in there. Telling
the competition things you could keep to yourself, letting yourself get caught out by a maze shift, not staying hidden when
you should. And then just in case any of that wasn’t bad enough: You went and slept outside your bed. You knew not to, you had the guide that told you not to, and you did it anyway. Anything at all can get to you when you do something as foolish as that.”
He shook his head over that last idea.
As if her ability to throw away her every chance truly amazed him.
But she couldn’t fight back. She couldn’t defend her decisions. She was too busy thinking of what all this meant. What him
knowing about the sleep thing suggested. Oh god, it wasn’t a dream at all, she thought in a great rush. Hardly able to believe it, but forced to admit it all the same. “That was you,” she gasped.
And he didn’t even try to deny it.
“Of course it was me.”
“But that’s unhinged.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Because you just left me. Why did you just leave me? Why didn’t you end it? Why haven’t you ended it? If you want to get rid of me, just get it over with. Stop dancing around it, or settling for trying to drive
me away with threats and schemes. Drink me dry and then dump me somewhere,” she managed to say. And was amazed at herself
for doing it, with her mind still reeling from the memory of that thing stepping up onto her bed. Of it reaching down, with
clawed hands.
But he just shrugged.
“Do you have any idea what a mess a human body makes?” he asked, as if he was talking about a minor inconvenience. And one
he felt she should just automatically understand. He didn’t even elaborate further—he just attended to another problem, as
he waited for her agreement:
His broken nose.
It had stopped bleeding, but it was out of shape. So as she was still trying to digest the first thing, he reached up and just snapped it back into place. One-handed, not even a flinch about it—despite how disgusting it sounded. It crunched, like someone stepping on bird bones.
But she couldn’t deny it looked better once he had.
You’d barely have known it had been broken, if it were not for the hint of blood he left behind, when he swiped at it with
his sleeve. Then he licked over that space between his upper lip and his nose, and even that was gone.
She had to try not to sound stunned in reply. To be as blasé as him about something that made her sick and shaky. “Ah. Then
it’s not just that you don’t want to. It’s that garbage disposal is hard.”
“I wouldn’t say hard. Just likely to expose me to attention I cannot endure.”
“Yeah. What is the price for trespassing here again?”
“They behead and then burn you.”
He said the words so matter-of-factly, she knew they had to be true. But for some reason, she had the strongest urge to say
he was wrong. That this could not be the case. The books had made the price sound like barely anything at all—just a slap
on the wrist.
And instead, it was something that made her want to clutch at herself.
She had to really fight her own horror over the way things were, to use it against him. “Well, you better be careful, then.
And not just when it comes to hiding corpses. I mean who knows what someone might say, if they were given enough reason to,”
she said.
And tried to take some satisfaction from the way his face dropped.
“Are you actually trying to threaten me?”
“It’s not as if you’ve left me with any choice, if I want to live here in peace.”
“There will never be any peace here for you. Three third years are plotting to strand you in the forest, as we speak. They
think it’ll be funny to watch someone so helpless trying to fight off those trees. You know—the ones that exposure to the
Underneath has turned into things that need to feed.”
“If they do, they will be disappointed. I read how to avoid getting eaten by them, in Barrett’s paper on thinned spots and
their effects on flora and fauna. You have to draw a circle around yourself,” she said, one hand reaching into the pocket
of her nightgown as she did. For the stick of chalk she always carried now, just in case.
His eyes dropped to it, and for a second she thought she saw a hint of begrudging admiration there. But it passed pretty fast.
“That won’t work on me, though, bookworm. And even if you somehow manage to keep my conscious parts at bay with threats of
tattling, there are other parts that no longer listen quite as intently to anything like reason,” he said; then just in case
the meaning wasn’t clear, he let his gaze drop to her throat.
And that gaze turned black fast.
She actually got to see it go from a deep brown to something darker. Something that swallowed his pupils and spread to the
whites. After a moment, there was nothing but inky black there. Though still, she couldn’t quite believe it.
“You cannot possibly be saying what I think you are.”
“And what is it that you think that I am saying, Mina?”
“That you don’t want to kill me. But oh no, oh dear me, addiction to that one taste of my blood might make you . . . So I better leave here before you snap and sink your teeth in again,” she said in a singsong sort of voice.
It had no effect on him, however.
“If what I’m saying wasn’t true, I could have just stuck with finding you annoying and wanting you to leave. I don’t need
to invent other reasons that I want rid of you.”
“Yeah, but this way you don’t look too weak to act, stalling all this time and fearful of repercussions you had to at least
imagine I knew about. You look like you’re just valiantly trying to resist the siren song of my blood, and any second you
might actually snap, against all sense and reason. So I better still be afraid.”
There, she thought. That wraps up everything in a neat bow. Though he didn’t seem to think so. “This is not a ruse, you little fool, designed just to get rid of you the easy way. And
telling yourself it is will only put you in more danger.”
“If you really cared about the danger I was in, you would go.”
“I think you know we cannot usually leave the boundaries of places like this.”
“So then return to Calabaraia. Go out through a door there to some other country, where they don’t have all the rules and
treaties and regulations we do.”
“Believe me, I would if I could.”
He slapped that invisible barrier as he spat out those words. Genuinely frustrated, it looked like to her. And she knew what
that meant, even if she wasn’t sure she could fully believe it. “If you’re trying to say you stayed in the real world too
long—” she started to say, but he cut in before she got to the end of her eye roll.
“I did stay too long. And now I cannot go back. I am stuck here, in the grounds of this horrid place, and I will always be. But
you aren’t. You can escape any time you like, and I highly recommend you do. You are simply not equipped to survive me, or any
of the things here that are already out to get you. Hell, you’re barely equipped for practical lessons. You almost died trying
to save some fool. You can’t gather. What are you going to do when it gets to the next term? They’re not going to wait for
you to read a book. They’ll push you out of a window and expect you to fly.”
“And did it ever occur to you that I don’t care?”
“It’s madness to not. Complete and utter madness.”
“Not if magic is worth more to me than my life.”
She said the words before she could think them. Too fiercely too, too full of feeling. Like in the library, over the books.
Only this time, she had to face his scornful expression in the aftermath. She had to look at him, as he mocked her.
Though it was a strange sort of mocking, she had to say.
His eyes flared wide. He went to speak, then stopped. And when he did, she got one of those flashes. Strong, this time, so
strong it made her feel sick. She tried to bat the image away immediately, just to keep the nausea down.
But it lingered. She could still see it behind her eyes, as he replied: the man with the same dimple as him, grabbing her
by the back of her dress over some sort of precipice. The edge of a building maybe. She heard him say something—laugh, it sounded like. Laugh, you have to laugh. And then it was gone.
And he suddenly looked as smug as ever. “Well, then. You had better start really thinking about how you’re going to survive,”
he said. Arms folded over his chest. Expression almost bored, and certainly infuriating.
It made it very easy to argue back.
“I’ll use everything I’m doing now. It seems to be working just fine.”
“Tricks like that won’t hold me forever, Mina. You have to know that.”
“So I’ll find magic that will.”
“Not fast enough to fight me off.”
“I don’t know—I’m a quick study. And the library is right there.”
“Books won’t be enough. You need someone to show you. Someone to teach you everything you need to know. A tutor who can guide
you through all the practical elements, all the ways in which to draw magic to you,” he said, like a patient schoolteacher,
just trying to help a particularly foolish child.
Even though she knew what he was really doing.
“Give me a break. This is just you, trying to convince me my plan is impossible—I mean, nobody is going to want to do that,
and you know it. There isn’t a powerful person here who has any incentive to help someone like me, with not a thing in the
world to recommend them. No connections, no power they can use, personality plain as paper, and face as forgettable as a pane
of glass.”
“That’s true enough. They have no reason to do it.”
“They really don’t.”
“Right. But I do.”