33. Hale
Hale
Igive her four minutes and thirty seconds anyway, because I’m not an animal, whatever she thinks. I dress in my own room, drag a towel through my hair hard enough to hurt, and pace the length of it twice before I give up and head back to hers.
She’s got the door unlocked. Predictable little disaster.
“I said five minutes,” she says without turning round, still stabbing pins into her damp hair.
“And I said four. Technically, I’m late.”
She rolls her eyes, and I move further into the room as Tobin and Leith join us.
“Ready?” Tobin asks. “I’m starving.”
“Same,” I say. “All that adventurous bullshit has made me ravenous.”
“Let’s go. Then I sleep. Alone,” she reiterates.
“Alone in the bed, not alone in the room,” I say again, but she doesn’t seem to get it.
Asha turns from the mirror with a look that says she understands perfectly and intends to ignore me anyway. “Your protective instincts are becoming very irritating.”
“They saved your arse twice today.”
“Three times,” Tobin says.
I glare at him. “Nobody asked you to count.”
“I count everything.”
“Of course you do,” Asha mutters.
Leith stands by the door, looking restored enough to scare people properly. “The dining hall will be busy. We should avoid discussing gates, dead bodies, magical drownings, or Blackridge.”
“That removes all our interesting topics,” Tobin says.
Asha shoulders past me. “Then you three can sit quietly and practise acting normal.”
I follow her into the corridor before she gets more than a few steps away. Tobin takes the other side. Leith walks behind us.
It is completely unnecessary.
It also feels right.
The residence tower is full of students moving towards dinner, and the second they see the four of us together, the noise changes. Nobody says anything directly. They don’t need to. I catch enough fragments as we pass.
Asha hears them too. Her shoulders tighten beneath her dark shirt.
I let a thread of fire spark over my knuckles.
Tobin catches it and brings his magic to his fingertips.
The whispers stop instantly.
“Better,” I growl. “Keep your mouths shut around her if you don’t want to end up in the infirmary.”
Everyone backs away and averts their eyes.
“This is getting real old, real fast,” Asha mutters.
“You can annihilate them all when you’ve got your magic back,” I point out.
“No, I need my body back first, and that is behind a gate that is going to kill this one.” Her misery is real, and I hate that I can’t fix it. The look on her face when she says it cuts right through me.
I want to tell her we’ll rip the realm apart until we find another way and tell her nothing gets to decide she dies while I’m standing here. Instead, I shove open the dining hall doors and let the noise hit us.
Warm light spills over packed tables, floating candles, clattering cutlery, too many bodies, too many curious eyes.
The second we walk in together, the room notices.
Not all at once. It spreads. Heads turn.
Voices drop. News always moves fast here, and after what happened on the stairs earlier, half the academy is already primed to watch us.
Watch her.
My hackles rise.
Leith scans the hall once. “Corner table. Wall at our backs.”
We take it. I pull Asha’s chair out before anyone else can, which earns me an unreadable look from her. “What do you want?” I ask as she sits.
“Food,” she replies. “Anything worth eating.”
“My kind of girl,” I murmur and stride towards the buffet section, dodging around a vamp waiting at the blood dispenser.
I load a tray with anything hot, dense, and likely to keep her upright.
Roast chicken, potatoes, bread, some green veg and two desserts because she nearly died and that feels like a dessert situation.
I add enough for the rest of us on another tray and head back.
Half the room is still looking at our table.
I stare one male down on the way past until he remembers he has a plate in front of him and should probably look at that instead of my girl.
My girl.
When I get back, Asha is sitting rigid in her chair, one hand under the table, the other braced on the edge. Tobin is talking about something in a low voice. Leith isn’t speaking at all, which usually means trouble is close.
I put her plate down in front of her first. “Eat.”
Her eyes lift to mine. For one second, the misery is gone and something softer almost gets through. “Thanks. Looks good.”
“Good,” I say and sit beside her.
Tobin and Leith grab the extra plates I brought and start tucking in.
Asha picks up her fork and starts eating like she means business. That helps. I don’t realise how wound up I am until I see her take three proper bites and some of the edge comes off me.
“Any sign of Straz?” I ask.
Leith tears a piece off his bread roll and glances towards the staff table. “No.”
“Blackridge?” Asha asks around a mouthful of potato.
“No,” Tobin says. “Which is more concerning.”
I cut into my chicken. “We’re not discussing that here.”
“I know,” she says. “But I want to keep my eyes open.”
I eat fast, because I’m hungry and because sitting in a room full of creatures staring at her is pissing me off. Every few seconds, I catch someone looking over. Witches, wolves, a pair of vampires, a few fae, keep stealing looks at our table and pretending they aren’t.
I put my fork down with a sharp clack.
A blond witch two tables over jerks her stare away so fast she nearly chokes on her drink.
Asha huffs a laugh under her breath. “Subtle.”
“They’re lucky I’m eating,” I mutter.
Asha keeps eating, but I can still feel the tension in her. It sits under her skin, as she holds herself too straight.
I tear off a piece of bread and shove it into my mouth before I start setting things on fire.
We finish the meal in silence, and then Asha sits up even straighter as Leith mutters, “Blackridge is coming.”
I glance towards the hall entrance.
Blackridge moves through the packed room with Professor Dain on one side and that silver-rod witch on the other.
He doesn’t hurry. He never looks like he needs to.
People clear a path for him without being told.
The room drops into a strained hush around the clatter of cutlery and low conversation that hasn’t fully died yet.
Asha goes very still beside me.
I hate that more than anything.
“Keep eating.”
Her head turns a fraction. “Now?”
“Now.”
She cuts off a piece of chicken and puts it in her mouth while Blackridge keeps walking.
Blackridge stops at our table.
I push my chair back half an inch and look up at him.
“Problem?”
Blackridge’s eyes move over the table, over Asha, over the four of us together, and settle on me for one cold second before he says, “With me, Miss Asha.”
“No,” I say.
Dain’s jaw tightens. The silver-rod witch lifts the rod a fraction, as if she expects that to impress me.
Asha sets down her fork with deliberate care. “Am I in trouble, or are you about to waste my evening?”
Blackridge ignores me and answers her. “I have questions.”
“So do I,” she says. “Funny how life works.”
A few nearby students stop pretending not to listen.
Leith rises to his feet beside the table with the kind of calm that makes corpses nervous. “If she goes, we go.”
Tobin stays seated, but his silver eyes have gone sharp and bright.
The silver-rod witch steps forward. “This is not a group discussion.”
I stand.
“Sit down, Mr Hale, Mr Leith,” Blackridge says in a tone that belies his weariness with this entire situation. “And if you say ‘make me’, I will do precisely that, and you won’t get back up for quite some time.”
It’s a threat we both take seriously. But a threat to a hellhound is still a threat. “Not sure my parents would be fond of that outcome,” I point out.
“Then sit down, Mr Hale.”
Fair enough.
I sit. He isn’t fucking about, and I’m not about to actually drag my parents into this. They have enough to deal with in their hell dimension without having to come here to deal with Blackridge and me.
Asha raises her eyebrow, and I smile. She will understand one day who my parents are. Part of me wants her to be impressed; the other half says she won’t be.
“Okay, then,” she says, standing. “I guess I’m on my own.”
“She comes back the same way she left,” I say. “That part is non-negotiable.”
“Of course,” Blackridge states. “What do you think this is?”
I want to tell Blackridge to get fucked.
I also want to avoid getting blasted through three walls in front of the entire dining hall and have my parents arrive with that look they get.
“Five minutes,” I say.
Blackridge’s expression doesn’t shift. “Unlikely.”
“Ten, then.”
“A generous offer from someone with no authority in this conversation.”
Leith’s voice cuts in, cold and precise. “You keep saying that as if it changes the situation.”
The silver-rod witch turns towards him. “Do not test the Headmaster.”
Tobin finally rises, graceful as ever, plate abandoned. “I think all of us are well past that.”
Blackridge looks at him as if Tobin is a mildly interesting problem set. “Then I suggest you all discover restraint before I discover the limit of mine.”
The hall goes quieter.
Asha glances between us and gives us a look that tells us to shut it. It annoys me that I understand it immediately.
Dain steps aside, making space for her to leave the table. The silver-rod witch stays too close for my liking. I rise again before I can stop myself.
Blackridge’s stare cuts to me. “You don’t quit, do you?”
“I’m walking with her to the door,” I say. “If that offends the academy, it can file a complaint.”
For one second, I think he might actually drop me where I stand.
Instead, he says, “The door, Mr Hale.”
Good enough.
I move with Asha as she steps away from the table, and at the door, I’m forced to let her go.
She doesn’t look back.
That’s my girl.