9. Hale
Hale
The door shuts behind me with a soft click that does fuck all to quiet the beast in my chest.
Mine.
The word lands hard and keeps landing.
I stand in the hallway outside her room and stare at the black wood like I can see through it. My cock gives an interested throb at the memory.
Recognition.
Possession.
Trouble.
“Fuck,” I mutter, dragging a hand through my hair.
I know what I did. I know what it means. Hellhounds don’t throw words like soul to soul around because we’re feeling romantic. We don’t say it for fun. We don’t say it unless the bond has already bitten in and locked.
And it has.
I can feel her now. It’s a pressure. Heat. A live wire under my skin that points straight back to the female in the room behind me. The female with lies upon lies. She didn’t know she was a virgin, and yet she quite clearly has done this before. It is an anomaly, and a strange one.
This body.
Still.
It’s starting to make more sense the longer I’m in her presence.
She is in the wrong body. It explains everything. Why she smells so wrong, why her magic is fucked, why she was a virgin when she isn’t.
My pulse kicks harder.
That should be enough to make me back the fuck off.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it makes me want to kick her door in, drag her back onto that bed, and keep her there until she stops pretending this thing between us is optional.
The hellhound in me is pacing, pleased as fuck, all teeth and instinct, while the rest of me is trying to work out how badly I’ve just complicated my life.
Very badly, probably.
“Problem?”
I turn my head. Tobin is standing at the far end of the hallway, one shoulder against the wall, watching me with a look that says he’s been there long enough to be insufferable about it.
“Mind your own business,” I say.
He pushes off the wall and starts walking towards me. “That would be easier if you weren’t standing outside the anomaly’s room looking like you’ve either committed murder or had a theological experience.”
“Could be both.”
His brows lift. “Interesting.”
“No, what’s interesting is why you’re lurking like a creep.”
“I live on this floor, remember.” He stops a few feet away and glances at Asha’s door. His silver eyes flick back to me. “You smell like her.”
“And she smells like me. We fucked. Hard. I now belong to her. Happy?”
“Quite. You’re making more progress than Leith or me.”
“Unsurprising. You two dance around shit. I just take.”
“Take?” he asks menacingly.
“She begged.”
“Right.”
I consider spilling her secrets, but it’s not mine to tell. Besides, it makes no difference now. I popped that cherry in the best possible way.
Tobin stares at me like he’s trying to read my thoughts. “What aren’t you saying?”
Inhaling deeply, I release it a second later and gesture toward my room with my head. We cross the hall, and I shove the door open. I never bother locking it because if anyone ever entered without my permission, I’d smell who it was a mile away. Spell or no spell.
Tobin closes the door and leans against it. “What is it? What did you learn?”
“Nothing concrete,” I say, knowing I have to tell them most of what I know. “Get Leith so I don’t have to repeat myself.”
He nods and closes his eyes, somehow sending a magical telegram to our dead friend.
Moments later, Tobin opens his eyes and steps aside as the door opens and Leith strolls in. “What?”
“Rude.”
“Shut up and talk.”
I drop into the chair by my desk and plant my elbows on my knees, forcing myself to hold still while the bond under my skin keeps pulling my attention back across the hall.
Leith shuts the door behind him and gives me one cold look. “Well?”
I scrub my hand over my jaw. “She’s not what she looks like.”
Tobin snorts. “Groundbreaking.”
“No, shut the fuck up and listen.” I look between them. “She’s in the wrong body.”
That gets silence.
Leith’s expression doesn’t change, but his focus sharpens. Tobin’s eyes narrow.
“What do you mean?” Tobin asks.
“I mean exactly that. She keeps saying this body. Not my body. This body. At first, I thought it was just her being dramatic, but it isn’t. She means it. Her magic is wrong because she’s not a witch.”
Leith goes very still. “You’re sure.”
“As sure as I’ve ever been about anything.” I exhale hard. “And there’s more.”
Tobin’s gaze drops briefly to my throat, to the mark she left, then back to my face. “I can see that.”
“Not that.”
“She talks a good game, but they’re not idle threats.
She said she wanted to see if she could ‘still’ bite through a neck.
” That’s all I’m telling them. The virgin thing is between us.
She probably will flay me alive even without her full or real power if I said anything.
But I’m not that kind of guy. “The way she says things is just off for who she is supposed to be.”
Tobin goes quiet for a beat before he huffs out a breath. “So we’ve got a female with someone else’s memories stuffed into a body that doesn’t fit her, no idea how she got here, and enough temper to level the tower without magic if she finds out we’re talking about her.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Leith moves to the window and looks out at the dark, hands loose at his sides. “The library wouldn’t give me anything useful. Every text I pulled vanished before I got past the second page. When I pushed, it told me to look into her soul.”
“And?” Tobin asks.
“And I already did that. I got death. Blocked, contained and vast.” He turns back to us. “I’ve felt a thousand deaths walk through this academy. Hers isn’t a death. It’s a queue. Like something enormous is waiting behind a door that’s shut too tight to hold it.”
The bond under my skin gives at that, a low pull that has nothing to do with instinct and everything to do with the fact that Leith just described her like a coffin nailed shut over something that shouldn’t fit inside a body that size.
“Vast,” I repeat. “That’s not a word I like hearing about the female I just claimed.”
“You didn’t claim her,” Tobin says. “You fucked her and got sentimental. There’s a difference.”
“There isn’t, and you know it. Ask the bond that has locked into place.”
Leith’s eyes cut to me, sharp enough that I nearly take offence. “Hellhound bonds don’t ask permission before they lock in, and yours has clearly gone and made a decision without consulting the rest of you.”
“And you’re explaining hellhound bonds to the hellhound because…?”
“More, saying it out loud so I can hear how absurd it sounds.”
“Nice.” I sit back and give him the middle finger.
Leith’s mouth curves, not quite a smile. “Absurd,” he says. “Confirmed.”
“Glad we cleared that up.”
Tobin drags a hand through his hair and paces the small stretch of floor between my bed and the window, which is the closest he ever gets to agitated.
“So we’ve got an anomaly wearing a body that doesn’t belong to her, memories that don’t line up with her own reactions, magic that’s choking itself trying to fit through a body built for something smaller, and death sitting behind her like a queue waiting on a door.
” He stops. “Anyone else think Blackridge already knows exactly what she is?”
“He knows something,” Leith says.
“He knows she will flounder amongst the Upperclassmen, and yet put her here anyway simply based on her assumed age.”
“Assumed?” I ask. “What do you know?”
Tobin stops and stares out of the window. “I asked her how old she was. She wanted to know how old I was first. Then she copied it.”
“Copied?” I frown.
“Copied. ‘I guess I’m twenty-one, then.’”
“Hmm,” I murmur. “This is all adding up to…”
“What?” Leith asks.
“Something,” I breathe out. “Fuck knows what? Is she possessed? Or is she possessing that body?”
“A ghost?” Tobin purses his lips. “Not unheard of in SilverGate. Doesn’t explain how her body got here, though.”
“Fell from the sky is hardly an arrival choice.”
“So she was possessed or the possessor before she arrived here,” Leith mutters. “I don’t get ghost from her. That pretty much is the epitome of death.”
“So we are back to square one,” I huff and prop my feet up on the desk.
“We could try asking her outright,” Tobin states.
“We could,” I agree. “And probably end up with our heads up our arses.”
“She doesn’t have that kind of power. This body she is in doesn’t, anyway.”
“That body doesn’t,” Leith says. “I’m not convinced that matters.”
The room goes quiet again.
I hate it when he says shit like that in that calm voice of his. It makes the air feel colder.
Tobin looks at me. “You bonded yourself to an unknown entity.”
“I fucked an irresistible little liar,” I correct. “The bond did the rest.”
“That isn’t better.”
“It’s better for me.”
“Debatable,” Leith mutters.
I rub at the back of my neck and try not to glance at the door keeping me from her. It’s getting harder by the second. The bond keeps brushing against my nerves, testing, settling, finding its place. She’s angry. No shock there. She’s frustrated and about to blow a fuse.
Tobin notices my distraction. “Can you feel her?”
I give him a flat look. “Don’t make that sound creepier than it already is.”
“That’s a no, then.”
“I can feel enough.”
Leith watches me for a beat. “How much?”
“Nothing invasive. She’s angry and frustrated.”
“You don’t need a bond to work that one out,” Tobin says with an eye roll.
“No,” I say. “But it does make me want to go back in there and pin her to the mattress until she stops pretending she can tell me to leave.”
Tobin’s expression goes flat. “That’s possessive even for you.”
“I’m a hellhound. Possessive is baseline.” I pause, then I sigh. “She doesn’t even know what a hellhound is.”
Leith attempts to stifle his snort of pure amusement.
He fails.
“Oh?” he croaks.
“Fuck you. She isn’t familiar with hellhounds, she thinks it’s made up.”
“It’s not totally crazy. Hellhounds are unusual outside of… hell.”
“Still. Most creatures know what one is,” I point out. It’s a stupid thing to fixate on, but it needles at me.
A commotion in the hallway interrupts our conversation. I jump out of my seat and pull the door open.
“Fight!” a fae calls out as students stream towards the stairs.
“Who?” I ask.
“The new girl and Eska.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Tobin snarls and pushes past me, heading down the stairs as Leith and I follow closely.
“If he’s hurt her even a little bit, I’m going to rip his head off,” I snarl and barge my way through the crowds and out into the dark afternoon.