Chapter Fourteen
She knew from various books and talk about the school that balls were always held in a place called the arboretum. Though
it wasn’t really an arboretum at all. It was just a building, a little way past the lake, with a huge domed glass ceiling
that you could see before you made out a single other thing. It gleamed in the dying light, like a diamond.
Anaya squeezed her arm on glimpsing it.
“I’ll never understand how a place can be so rotten and so glorious, all at the same time,” she said, as they made their way
up the winding, cobbled path to the building. Though Mina thought her friend did understand, only too well. Money and power
made things pretty. It surrounded them on all sides—in the hovering lights that bloomed as darkness sank over them, in the
sound of flight above their heads, in the ripples on the lake as iridescent things stirred beneath the depths.
But it couldn’t mask the looks they got from the students around them.
The ones who were dressed in ethereal gauzy wisps, or black-tie dinner jackets types of things, and saw Mina and Anaya for what they were.
Imposters, dressed in clothes that didn’t go with some theme they hadn’t even known.
That they could never have known, because he hadn’t said.
He had given her a dress that fit like a glove and shoes that felt like walking on air.
All of it beautiful enough to convince her that this would be okay.
But of course, it was the wrong kind of beauty.
It was lush and gothic, instead of fine and elegant.
“Maybe we should go back,” she said, just before they got to the great glass doors that led in. Close enough that she could
hear music—that thin, high, haunting melody she sometimes heard around the dorms—and smell food even more mouthwatering than
anything the dining hall came up with. Clouds of sugar, fruits that weren’t from this earth, meat from creatures she couldn’t
imagine.
But still so removed from it all that it felt impossible.
“Oh, let them stare. The only reason they’re doing it is because you look incredible. They’re used to seeing you in brown
sacks, and now you’re swanning in like a vampire’s bride,” Anaya said. Well meant, of course. But it just made Mina’s stomach
sink even further than it already had.
She thought of his hand on her cheek.
The gleam of his razor-sharp teeth.
“Don’t say that,” she said.
Much to Anaya’s puzzlement.
“But it’s true. Francis Ford Coppola could have directed you.”
“Anaya, I think I should tell you something. Something really important.”
“You don’t have to. I know you and the king of this place have something going on.
I know that you’re scared of it. I know it doesn’t feel real.
But I’m pretty sure it is. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s obsessed with you,” her friend said, so full of surety that it cracked Mina’s heart to hear it.
She turned her head and looked into Anaya’s soft eyes, so sweetly accepting. Maybe even happy for her.
And didn’t know how to say the way things really were.
“What makes you think that?” she asked instead.
But Anaya just looked past her, into the ballroom.
She nodded her head, in the direction of it.
“Because he’s coming toward you right now,” she said, and as soon as she did, the world seemed to slow down. It took forever
for Mina to turn her head and take in the sight of him, walking up the steps toward her. And even longer than that to let
everything about him sink in.
Because he wasn’t wearing a black suit, like the rest.
He wore a kind of long coat, as soft and gauzy as a cloud, yet somehow sharp at the same time. The collar of it went high
on one side, and came to a point along the line of his jaw, fine enough that she could imagine it slitting his throat if he
turned too clumsily.
Though, of course, she knew he never would.
On any ordinary day, he moved like water.
Here he practically floated.
He looked like something out of a fairy tale. All the ones she’d read as a child—the ones that were secondhand and cobbled
together, but more true than anyone beyond walls like this knew. Creatures like him did wear moonlight and dance in shadows. And if they ever held out a hand to you, you were supposed to refuse.
All the good girls in those stories made sure to.
She really didn’t know why she took his, the moment he offered.
She only knew that it happened. Her fingers slipped between his, and his closed around hers, and that was that.
He led her into a room like the insides of a snowflake, glittering and glowing.
And then he spun her over a floor made entirely of glass.
Incredible looking.
But even more so when she caught a glimpse of what was beyond it, as the room whirled. Not the foundations of the place, or
something pretty, or even another floor.
No, god, no—it was the Underneath. It was a whole other world, right beneath their feet.
Somehow, they had made an enormous window to it, and god, the things she could see through to.
A second sky, like a skein of gray velvet, sewn through with stars like droplets of
dew. Beings you barely see, beneath it, upside down on the other side of the glass.
She could see the soles of their feet.
Or at least, what passed for that on them.
Sometimes they didn’t seem to have bodies, in any way she understood. She could only make out a shape because of the clothes
they wore—moonlight fine, like his. Glittery, like his. Magpies, some of the books called them. And it seemed there was some truth to that.
But it was a mean sort of truth.
They were so much more than any human words could make them. It was the reason she blurted out, “Oh god, so lovely,” in a
far too gushing sort of voice to use, in company like his. But to her surprise, he agreed. “There isn’t a thing in existence
that is lovelier,” he said, and she looked up to see his eyes on her face.
Sad, but completely sincere.
Because of course, of course.
“You miss it,” she said, and he hesitated. He held her gaze.
But in the end, he went ahead.
“Honestly, I can barely stand how much I do. It makes a fool of me.”
“There’s nothing foolish about longing for home. If that was your home.”
“Nothing has ever been more so. I belonged where that loveliness was.”
He looked away then. But not before she saw the sudden sheen over his eyes. Tears, quite obviously. Though she tried not to
let that knowledge sink in too deep. The last time she’d let herself feel sorry for him, he’d mocked her for it and pinned
her to a stone table.
This dance was enough.
The dress was enough, too.
He had been right: Sympathy was a step too far.
“Perhaps if you stopped tormenting people for five seconds, you’d have time to find a way back. I read in something by some
witch the other day—the boundaries and rule breaks are never as set as they seem,” she said, far more kindly than he deserved.
Because somehow, the words just made him harden.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Well, why not?”
“I told you. Because it will get you into trouble.”
“And you care about that, in between all the suffocating.”
“I didn’t suffocate you. It was just a trick, not a serious threat,” he said, and as he did, he leaned down. His hand shifted
on her back, until it felt like more of an arm around her than a thing to guide her into the right moves. And just as she
went to push him away, she saw all the other girls with their dance partners. Lifted up and twirled like ballerinas in a music
box, as the music hit a certain note.
Then felt the air beneath her own feet.
Saw the room spin, all around her.
Before he set her back down, and retook her hand and her waist, and went into whatever the next move was. Because these were moves, in some kind of set pattern. Everybody was doing the same thing. But what struck her about this was not the fact that
he had done this with her.
It was that she had been doing it, without thinking.
She hadn’t stumbled once. She hadn’t been clumsy.
She swayed when he swayed and spun when he spun, and somehow it all just seemed to fall into place. And of course, some of
that was him guiding her, she could see that. His hand was firm on her back. He led her smoothly into certain gaps between
other couples.
But she couldn’t deny that this didn’t cover all of it.
“Are you making me understand this dance?” she asked.
Then looked up at him, in time to see his irritated expression.
“If you’re asking whether I’ve thralled you, the answer is no.”
“You say that like it’s weird for me to wonder, when it would explain so much. Why I came to you for lessons. Why I keep coming
even though you’re cruel. Why I came tonight, after all the ways you tortured me. And then the other thing, the other stuff
that happened, the—” she fumbled out, every part of her trying to say without saying. Acknowledge what she had felt, without
acknowledging it.
But he just slipped in first, before she could manage.
“So that’s how you’re explaining desire to yourself.”
“It makes more sense than actually feeling it for you.”
“Maybe you just felt it for the situation. For the sudden touch.”
“That hardly seems like enough to cover what it did to—”
She cut herself off before the last words. Mostly because she realized how those last words sounded. Like she been overwhelmed with pleasure, or something similarly ridiculous. But it was too late. His expression was all smug amusement.
“Glad to hear it was good for you. I had no idea I was so talented.”
“Talented at fucking with my mind maybe.”
“If I had really fucked with your mind, you would know.”
“And how do you figure that, when the whole point is to make it impossible?”
“Because it feels like this,” he said, the last word so low and dark she knew what was going to happen. She even braced for him to say something that
would turn her brain to soup. But what she didn’t expect was everything else, around the words he spoke. Hear me; hear me and do not fear what I am, she thought she heard him say, soft as syrup, and now even lower and deeper and darker than before.