Chapter 29 – — Professor Cane, Fracture and Form #2
“The first night when you walked toward it, you felt something in your chest, did you not? A humming. A pull.”
I don’t know how he knows that. I never told him.
He looks up at me, his eyes narrow like he’s skeptical.
“Most people do not feel anything when they stand near a fissure. They feel the cold but not the seam itself. The seam does not call to them. It called to you.”
My mouth has gone dry.
“That doesn’t mean anything, does it? Dozens of things could explain what I felt.” Though none come to mind, I’m sure there is an explanation.
“It means something.”
“Seamkeeper—”
“Your hands are not shaking this morning.”
I look down at them. How does he know about my hands?
“I noticed them when you arrived. Bone year students with shaking hands don’t usually walk back out of Holloweir. I am glad to be wrong about that, in your case.”
He picks up his pen again.
“Witness well, Miss Rose.”
He turns back to his ledger.
I stand there for a moment. This man lives such a peculiar and lonely life. I still don’t understand what the “witness well” nonsense is about, and honestly I’ll be glad to put this creepy village behind me. I don’t say anything else as I step out and descend the staircase.
The first hour is fine.
The second hour is also fine. I tell myself that, even when my ankle starts pulsing in a way that travels up the bone and into my hip.
The path out of Holloweir winds up through the pines, switching back and forth across the slope, and the snow has been packed down enough by the wind that it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.
Draven is ten feet ahead of me. He hasn’t looked back since we left the village.
I’m focusing on his cloak whipping in the wind to keep my mind off my ankle when my boot catches on a buried root, and I groan through my teeth before I can stop myself.
Draven stops walking.
“How long has it been hurting?”
“It’s not.”
“Rose.”
“It’s fine.”
“How long?”
I shift my weight off it, and the relief is embarrassing. “Maybe an hour. It’s the cold making it worse. It’s not that bad.”
“Sit down.”
“Draven—”
“Sit down or I am going to make you sit down, and you will not enjoy how I do it.”
I roll my eyes.
There’s a fallen log by the path, mostly clear of snow, and I drop onto it with as much dignity as I can manage, which is none. He turns and crosses to me in three long strides, and he’s already crouching in front of me by the time I’ve gotten my pant leg up over my boot.
He doesn’t speak as he unwraps the binding. The swelling has come back. My ankle has gone the color it was yesterday before he wrapped it, dusky and angry where the bone meets the joint, and he runs a thumb along it with that same careful efficiency he had when he wrapped it.
I look at the trees instead of at him.
“You should have said something an hour ago.”
“It wasn’t bad an hour ago.”
“You were limping forty minutes ago.”
“You were watching me limp for forty minutes. Do you have vampire eyes in the back of your head now?”
“I was listening to you limp.” He glances up at me, unamused. “Your stride changed. I am not deaf.”
I can feel my face getting warm and tell myself it’s the wind.
He finishes rewrapping, sits back on his heels, and looks up at the sky for the first time since we left the chapel.
I follow his gaze. The clouds I noticed before we left have thickened and turned ominous.
The light has gone flat in a way I don’t like, and the wind has picked up enough that the tops of the pines are bending in long, slow arcs.
“What is that?” I ask.
“That’s a storm.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
He looks back at me, serious in a way that has nothing to do with my ankle.
“How bad, Draven?”
“Storms in the Frostlands build out at the edge of the ice fields and then they come down all at once. We have an hour, maybe less. I’ve been watching it since we left the village, and it’s moving faster than I thought it would.
” He looks at my ankle. “You’re not going to make it back to Ashwell tonight. ”
“I can make it.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Alucard—”
“Rose, I’m not asking. We are not making it back tonight. You are not going to limp through a Frostlands blizzard on a sprain that has already gone bad once today, and I’m not going to carry you for six hours through a whiteout to prove a point.”
I open my mouth then close it. He’s right.
“Can’t you fly us there faster?” I ask, and he gives me an exasperated look.
“I can’t fly us that far in this kind of wind.
” He stands and looks around, like he’s calculating distances.
“There is a hunting blind not far from here. I saw it on the map this morning when I was checking the route at the chapel. Trappers used to run a line through this stretch in the warmer months. Most of the blinds are abandoned now.”
“How not far?”
“Twenty minutes. Fifteen if I carry you.”
“Draven—”
“Rose, do not start with me.”
“I am not starting with you. I am asking you not to carry me. I will walk.”
“You will hobble slowly, and the storm will be on us before we get there.” He looks at the sky again, and his jaw tightens. “Faster than I thought. Come here.”
I stand up and limp the two steps over to him, and I expect him to turn so I can climb on his back. Instead, he bends and hooks one arm under my knees and the other behind my shoulders and lifts me against his chest.
“Hold on.”
I slide my arms around him because the alternative is dangling, and I lock my fingers together at the back of his neck, and his hair is loose where it has come out of his bun. It grazes against my fingers.
He starts walking.
He travels faster than he did when I was walking behind him.
I hadn’t realized how much he was slowing down for me.
The wind has picked up another notch since we stopped, and the snow has started coming down again, sideways, and I press my face into the side of his neck, because the cold is biting at my cheeks, and there is nowhere else to put my face that isn’t his shoulder or his throat.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
Neither do I.
“Doesn’t vampire blood have healing qualities? Couldn’t you just give me a taste and my ankle will be good enough for us to make it back?”
I realize how it sounds the moment it leaves my mouth.
His lips quirk. “You want to taste me, Rose?”
Heat climbs up my neck. I open my mouth, close it, open it again, and produce a sound I would rather die than describe.
He chuckles. “I don’t know how your body would react to my blood. It’s not something vampires go around doing lightly.”
Noctis appears, and I see him disappear in the distance.
We make it maybe five minutes before the storm breaks.
“Noctis found the blind. We’re close,” he says, and I nod into his neck, thankful he didn’t say anything else about me tasting him.
One moment the snow is coming down hard, and the next the wind nearly knocks us over.
The trees go from bending to whipping, and the snow turns from falling to flying, and I can’t see the path anymore, because there is no path, only white moving sideways at an impossible speed, and Draven curses under his breath and stops walking.
“Hold tight to me, Rose.”
“What?”
His wings come out.
They unfurl behind him in a single fluid motion, a span wider than he is tall, dark and leathery and impossibly fast, and the wind catches them, and he braces against it and they curve forward.
He isn’t flying us.
He’s using his wings as a shield.
The right wing folds around me at his shoulder, the membrane curving along my back, and the left wing comes up at his other side, and the wind that was in my face a second ago is suddenly cut off, redirected around the wings, and the snow goes from sideways to spilling off the edges of the membrane in soft drifts that don’t touch us.
It is dramatically warmer inside the wings.
I hadn’t understood until now that they were body heat. Whatever blood is in them is his warm blood, and the air inside the curve of them is the first warm air I have felt since we left the chapel. I always thought vampires ran cold, but Draven is always warm.
I tilt my head back to look up at him. His face is six inches from mine, and his hair is loose around his jaw, and his eyes are bright in the dim filtered through the wings.
“We are almost there.”
“How do you know?”
“I can see what Noctis sees,” he says, and I almost fall out of his arms when I look back at him.
“You can see through your eidolon’s eyes? Is that normal? Will I see through Poppy’s someday?”
“You really want to talk about this now while I carry you through a fucking storm?” he yells over the wind, and I narrow my eyes.
“Yes, I do.”
“Gifts are always different. You’re human and shouldn’t even have an eidolon. I can’t begin to imagine what may develop as your bond grows.”
I can’t wait to bring this up in class.
The trees thin ahead of us into a small clearing, and I see a wood structure built up against the trunk of a massive pine, partially elevated with a slanted roof that has held against the snow on top of it.
It looks more like a shed than a shelter.
The walls are old and dark with weather.
There is a single door, latched, with no window beside it.
“That’s the blind?”
“That’s the blind.”
“It looks like it might collapse if I sneeze.”
“Then don’t sneeze.”
He carries me the last twenty feet, and his wings stay forward around us until we are almost at the door, and only then do they retract, folding back into him in the same fluid motion they came out in. The wind hits me again, the second they are gone, and I tuck my face harder against his neck.
He sets me down gently in front of the door, and I lean against the wood with my weight on my good leg while he tries the latch. It sticks for a second and then gives, and the door swings inward into a dark space that smells like old wood and dry pine needles and nothing alive.
He goes in first.
I hear him moving around inside, scraping his boot on a plank floor, and a moment later he comes back to the door and holds out his hand.