Chapter Nine #3
He said the words so lightly she thought she had misinterpreted, at first. She even went to say something else, some comeback
that had nothing to do with his actual meaning. Then she took in the strange, steady way he was staring at her, and the tilt
of his head, and the way the air between them suddenly felt—like it was full and fat with a sort of tense expectation.
And she knew.
It burst through her, hard enough that she got to her feet. She took a step toward him, so she could hit him with her answer
harder. “You cannot be seriously suggesting that you teach me,” she said, half laughter and half scorn.
But he didn’t even have the decency to act like he had been joking.
He lifted one shoulder in a kind of shrug—as if two was too much effort. “I mean going on everything you’ve just told me,
I’m the only logical choice,” he said, as breezy about it as she was incensed. Or at least, breezy on the surface.
She could see something else there, just below.
A kind of waiting. A tension—like he knew he had to do this carefully, if he wanted to reel her in. Even though he had to
also know she could never be fooled like that. “There is nothing logical about my potential murderer somehow volunteering
to help me stop him murdering. Unless, of course, he wants to lure me in, and then find a way to make me hurl myself into oblivion.”
“That would be awfully risky to try, when she’s smart enough to know that.”
“You don’t really think it’s risky or that I’m smart. You think I’m a fool.”
“A fool who loves to look all the important facts up,” he said, and just as she was about to respond, he carried on, in the
same faux conversational manner. “Like, for example, the way they go about beheading any creature who breaks the accords. Did you know they do it with a blunt instrument? I don’t even
think it has any particular benefit, process-wise. It doesn’t curse your soul to never return or anything like that. They
just like to.”
Then he leaned back against the hallway wall, hands in his pockets.
The perfect image of casualness. An obvious ploy to sell his gambit harder—and yet she had to admit, it hit her hard anyway.
She took the words blunt and like to like a blow to the stomach.
And her mind immediately went to every undercurrent of that human viciousness toward the uncanny
that she had ever picked up on.
Yates calling them lower beings, Derrickson talking about tumors. We are the tumors, she had thought, when she read that one. We are the ones feasting on their magic, like parasites. Take, take, take while giving absolutely nothing in return, not even
admiration or love. Just like always, whenever those on top think they can exploit anyone else.
But of course he knew she felt like that.
Somehow, he knew.
Maybe he’d seen her wincing over Professor Hargreaves’s similar-seeming sentiments in class. Perhaps he’d overheard her and
Anaya talking about the old white men who had shaped half the world, in the image of their ideas about how things should be.
Everything powerful should be suppressed. Everything beautiful should be seized. Everything they don’t understand must be
ruled over.
It was possible. They weren’t subtle.
And she knew now that he was always around.
So it was important to not let him use that against her. “That’s a good try, but I’m not going to believe you’re actually
scared of me, or scared of killing me, and then drop my guard enough to say yes to this deranged scheme,” she said finally.
Voice firm, with a healthy dose of withering disdain running through it.
He didn’t seem fazed, however. “Good. Because guard dropping would definitely be a mistake around something like me. And especially when you’re going to be spending a lot more time in my company,” he said, with so much conviction she had to laugh.
A little hysterically, truth be told. A little rattled sounding.
But she got it out.
“You actually think I will agree to this.”
“I don’t think, little bookworm. I know.”
“Oh, really? And where did you get this great knowledge?”
“From you. From that hunger that flashed in your eyes the moment I suggested it. From the way you stalked forward, without
even being aware you were doing it. A predator knows a predator when it sees one. You might not seek a bared throat, but you
are ravenous nonetheless. Desperate for words, for understanding, for all the things I can give you,” he said, every sentence
so silky, so perfectly poised in that molten metal voice. Then on the end, he reached into his pocket. He took out a little
silver case and slid out a cigarette. Set his teeth around it, delicately, and lit it using a blue flame sparked from his
fingertips.
The smoke smelled as strange and sweet as it had that night, in her room.
That night when he could have killed her very easily. But somehow hadn’t.
I don’t know what game you’re after, she thought.
But she knew the end of that sentence was: yet somehow, I want to play it.
It was there, even before he added the final note, to this warped symphony.
“All you have to do is let me,” he said around a coil of smoke.
And what else could she do, in the face of that?
The only possible answer was this:
“Then I suppose I will.”